Do we in Britain suffer from theatrical xenophobia? I used to think so. As a young critic, I was appalled by how little we saw outside the familiar Anglo-American rep, and our snooty attitude to visiting companies. Now in 2012, as we relish the delights of the Cultural Olympiad and London's World Stages season – to mention only the most high-profile projects – I sometimes wonder if the pendulum hasn't swung rather far in the opposite direction. Do we now have an uncritical acceptance of anything foreign?
That certainly wasn't true when I set out. The French classics, especially Racine and Corneille, were regarded as untranslatable, unplayable and theatrically arid. As for the Germans, no one bothered much with dry-as-dust Schiller, while Goethe's Faust was fit only for the study. We loved Chekhov, largely because we turned his plays into celebrations of the twilit pathos of the English country gentry: we studiously ignored, however, the rest of the Russian heritage and glibly assumed all modern Soviet plays were about tractors. And, while we revived the naturalistic plays of Ibsen and Strindberg, we turned a blind eye to their epic or expressionist works.
I exaggerate only slightly: British theatre was marked by its cosy insularity and its fog-isolates-Europe attitude towards the continental mainland. As for Asia and Africa, they barely registered on the radar. All that changed because of the emergence of a whole new generation of writers and directors, both well-travelled and culturally omnivorous. The poet and playwright Tony Harrison deserves an immense amount of credit for his pioneering versions of The Misanthrope and Phaedra Britannica. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod at the touring company Cheek by Jowl opened a window on the world with their productions of plays by Racine, Corneille, Calderón and Ostrovsky. Stephen Daldry and Laurence Boswell at west London's Gate theatre, Jonathan Kent and Ian McDiarmid at the Almeida and Michael Grandage in his seasons at the Sheffield Crucible and the Donmar were also instrumental in expanding the rep. I remember Grandage saying that he hoped other work at the Crucible would pay for his risky 2004 revival of Don Carlos: instead it turned out to be the Schiller that audiences adored, and which the next year turned into a West End and Broadway hit.
We have shed our xenophobia and our theatre is all the richer for it. But I suspect we now operate a double-standard, especially when it comes to the wilder excesses of directors' theatre: OK if it's foreign, to be rubbished if it's British. I was thinking of two recent productions of Macbeth and King John. The former came from Poland and was seen briefly at Shakespeare's Globe as part of the World Shakespeare festival; the latter is in the RSC's current season at Stratford's Swan. Both productions made extensive use of pop culture. Both were cynical about power. Both were sexually explicit: a transvestite whore went down on Macbeth at the Globe, while Pippa Nixon's female Bastard and Alex Waldman's King John get it together at Stratford. Yet while the Polish Macbeth was greeted with whoops and cheers, Maria Aberg's King John has had a decidedly mixed reception and was dismissed as "stupefyingly dire" in the Independent. Personally, I couldn't see all that much difference between the productions – both, I thought, mixed the innovative and the idiotic. I was just struck by the way a Polish director could get away with things for which a British-based one was gratuitously crucified.
In short, I think we need to be as critically discriminating about visiting theatre as we are about our own and avoid falling into the trap of assuming that anything from abroad possesses some magic elixir denied to our own prosaic playwright-led process. I'm happy as Larry that we have banished our cultural xenophobia. I'm just anxious we don't replace it with a naive acceptance of anything exotically foreign.
Read on: Foreign Shakespeare by Dennis Kennedy.
