Still looks back in anger
Sir: Why is poor old Milton Shulman, the King Canute of theatre criticism, still trying to belittle the changes he opposed during his working lifetime (`Look back at myths', 3 August)?
He may not like it — who cares, frankly? — but of course John Osborne's Look Back In Anger, for all its structural faults — if faults they be — changed the temperature and aspiration of the British theatre.
It founded and bank-rolled the imperish- able Royal Court, for a start; a theatre that still thrives, and is applauded worldwide, thanks to Osborne's early and enduring successes in Sloane Square.
It also — thanks in no small measure to the reviews of genuinely important critics like John Barber, Philip Hope-Wallace and Kenneth Tynan, in the Express, the Guardian and the Observer — shifted the horizons of actors, schoolchildren and
newspaper-readers from a lower-middle- class and working-class background of the sort entirely unknown to a colonial, 'estab- lishment' commentator like the blustery, Canadian Shulman.
He quotes incompletely from his own patronising notice, which ran in part: 'Look Back In Anger . . . sets up a wailing wall for the latest post-war generation of under- thirties. It aims at being a despairing cry but achieves only the stature of a self-pity- ing snivel.' How galling it must be, even 40 years later, to have been so wrong, and so unwitty, at the same time.
In a series of ill-argued leaps, Shulman ends with a statement about the British the- atre that is palpably untrue. Young play- wrights may be more `de-politicised' than they were — a development surely welcome to someone like Shulman who always sniffed lefty incompetence at the sound of a voice contradictory to his self-satisfied own — but they are more active, urgent and widely produced than they have been for a decade.
The fact is that, nationwide, the new ener- gy in our globally admired theatre is now coming not only from our wonderful actors but also from a buzzing new generation of writers throughout Britain and Ireland. Shulman is correct — for the wrong rea- sons, as usual — in saying that Coward, Rattigan, Priestley and Wilde have been rediscovered; they have been renovated and reappropriated in post-modernist pro- ductions of which old Milt himself, on the whole, would be angrily disapproving. Michael Coveney
11 Shirlock Road, London NW3
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