David Hare: London’s National Theatre’s Retreat From Repertory Is Diminishing Culture

The National Theatre risks “eroding the culture” by shifting away from its founding principles and putting on “semi-commercial” plays “angling for the West End”, the playwright David Hare has said.

The two-time Olivier award winner described the playhouse’s shift from repertory theatre – a system where a resident acting company performs a rotation of plays – as standing in spite of George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker’s vision.

In 1904, Granville-Barker called for a repertory theatre with a “resident company of 42 actors and 24 actresses” in his ‘Blue Book’, still considered the foundational text for the theatre. He got his wish posthumously when the theatre was founded in 1963 under the director Laurence Olivier.

Funding cuts and the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic have pushed the venue towards fewer plays with extended runs, often featuring a high-profile name in order to fill seats – a move which Hare decried as “terrible impoverishment”.

“Once the National Theatre drops repertory, which it appears to have done, you really are eroding the culture in a profound way,” Hare told BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life.

He said: “The National Theatre is meant to present the world’s drama, and it doesn’t at the moment. It does semi-commercial runs, angling for the West End, one play after another. That’s not repertory theatre. That’s not art theatre.

“Shaw and Granville-Barker created the idea of the National Theatre for art theatre. The National now generates so few plays and all in runs and no repertory. So the days in which you could go and see six plays in a week have gone and I think that’s terrible impoverishment.”

Hare referred to himself as “a creature of postwar repertory” and recalled how the former artistic director Sir Peter Hall committed to putting on his play, Plenty, in 1978 despite unimpressive reviews and being instructed by the board to close it. The play was later adapted into a 1985 film starring Meryl Streep.

He said: “By the end [of the run], it was full to standing ovations because he allowed the audience to get at it. Who curates plays like that now? Who is able to have the money to curate plays?”

On the same show, he said similarly cautious regional theatres were at risk of missing the next Harold Pinter.

He said it was “very hard” for artistic directors in the regions “to risk failure”, adding that subsidy to the regions would go some way to addressing this.

“If they believe that a particular writer was the writer who that region should be hearing, or the whole of the country should be hearing, it’s very, very hard for them to back that single writer to the degree which we once backed John Osborne or Edward Bond or Harold Pinter as the voices of their time. That kind of backing is what’s missing at the moment.”

Granville-Barker was an acolyte of Shaw, and performed in many of the latter’s productions before turning to writing and direction himself. He wrote the Blue Book with critic William Archer in 1904.

Shaw once said: “Do the English people want a national theatre? Of course they do not. They never want anything. They got the British Museum, the National Gallery, and Westminster Abbey, but they never wanted them.

“But once these things stood as mysterious phenomena that had come to them, they were quite proud of them, and felt that the place would be incomplete without them.”

The National Theatre said it now “stages more new plays and new adaptations than at any point in its history, written by a larger and broader pool of playwrights than ever before, across all three theatres”.

“The move to ‘straight runs’ rather than playing in repertory has been a necessary change in the post-Covid financial climate but this has not changed the number of productions staged each year – which has stayed the same,” it said. “The National Theatre’s commitment to writers and new writing is steadfast.”