{"id":627,"date":"2019-12-08T10:57:53","date_gmt":"2019-12-08T10:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/?p=627"},"modified":"2022-02-05T13:26:55","modified_gmt":"2022-02-05T13:26:55","slug":"with-age-i-get-more-tolerant-of-failure-interview-with-michael-billington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/20\/with-age-i-get-more-tolerant-of-failure-interview-with-michael-billington\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWith age, I get more tolerant of failure\u201d: Interview with Michael Billington"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Mark Fisher<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He had a front-row seat for the political theatre of the 1970s, the musicals of the 1980s, the in-yer-face generation of the 1990s and the cross-cultural developments of the twenty-first century. Now, at the age of 80, and after 48 years as lead drama critic on the Guardian<\/em>, Michael Billington is stepping off the critical merry-go-round. He began his life as a critic while a student at Oxford University. After graduating in 1961, he wrote reviews for the Liverpool Echo<\/em> before a stint working at the Lincoln Theatre Company. He wrote about television, film and theatre for the Times<\/em>, Birmingham Post<\/em> and Illustrated London News<\/em>, and joined the Guardian<\/em> in 1971. He has also written for the New York Times<\/em> and Country Life<\/em>, and presented BBC radio arts programmes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Michael Billington at the Guardian<\/em> leaving party (2019)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

As well as maintaining a five-show-a-week habit, Billington is the author of books including The Modern Actor<\/em> (1973, Hamish Hamilton), The Life and Work of Harold Pinter<\/em> (1996, Faber), One Night Stands<\/em> (1993, Nick Hern Books), State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 <\/em>(2007, Faber) and The 101 Greatest Plays<\/em> (2017, Faber). After stepping down from the Guardian<\/em> at the end of 2019, he will continue to write features for the newspaper on a monthly basis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He looks back across his career with critic Mark\nFisher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In your tribute to the late Jonathan Miller last week, you opened with what a classic Michael Billington sentence: “My first sighting of <\/strong>Jonathan Miller <\/strong><\/a>was at the Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh in August 1960.” It reminded me that people often praise you for the amount of experience you bring to your reviews. I have a contrary reaction, which is to wonder what you were like in 1960 as a tyro critic. You had no experience, so were you any good?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh,\nmy goodness! I was probably better in 1960 than I am today. I was appointed\ntheatre critic of Cherwell<\/em>, the\nOxford University newspaper, by Peter Preston (who 11 years later appointed me\nthe drama critic of the Guardian<\/em>). He\nobjected to my clotted prose and taught me a good lesson, which is clarity and\nsimplicity in writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think it was clotted?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\nwas clotted, absolutely. Clotted is the word. I was writing reviews at Oxford,\nand I thought I would take myself off to an Edinburgh Festival and spend three\nweeks there. This was 1960. It was my first trip to Edinburgh and the Festival,\nand I saw everything, plays, opera, ballet . . . I went to the Fringe, which,\nin those days, had about 35 shows, and you could see the bulk of them over a\nthree-week span. I went to football\u2014I had a fantastic time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On\nmy first night in Edinburgh, I went to see a production of The Seagull<\/em> at 7 p.m., with a young actor called Tom Courtenay\nmaking his professional debut; then, at 10.30 p.m., on came this ramshackle\nrevue, Beyond the Fringe<\/em>, with a couple of people, Alan Bennett and\nDudley Moore, I knew by reputation. Like everyone else, I was bedazzled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So,\nwas I any good? I think I was quite earnest as a young critic. But I tried\neverything at Oxford; I tried directing and acting, and I wasn’t very good at\neither. But, when I was reviewing, I was sitting behind a desk in my room, in\nfront of a portable Olivetti Lettera 22, and I felt at ease. I suddenly felt,\n“Gosh! I’m comfortable doing this. When I walk into a rehearsal room, I’m\npensive, nervous\u2014will I be able to choreograph the production? But when I’m at\nmy desk, I feel a sense of personal equilibrium. Maybe that’s telling me\nsomething.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nwas quite single-minded and dedicated to the idea in my final year at Oxford. I\nfound there was an optional paper in drama in the English degree course. Not a\nsingle other person took it! I sat alone in the vast examination room one hot\nday, the only person taking this paper. The other joke was they couldn’t find\nanyone to tutor me. They had to scour the university to find a don who was\nsufficiently up in theatre to guide me through this course. But, by the time I\ngot to the end of Oxford, I thought, “This is what I want to do.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

People who have come through an English literature course have a tendency to talk about theatre as if they were studying a text, so it’s interesting that you studied drama.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nimmersed myself in drama in my late teens. At Oxford, I was seeing plays and\ntaking part in plays whenever I could. My theatrical education, though, began\nearlier than that, and it was to do with living near Stratford-upon-Avon,\nBirmingham and Coventry. Birmingham had a famous rep theatre, which, in those\ndays, did the whole of world drama. Coventry, you saw showbiz spectaculars\u2014and\nI loved comedians, music hall and variety. At Stratford, when I was 15, there\nwas one of those golden seasons, when Laurence Olivier played Macbeth, Titus\nAndronicus and Malvolio. That was the single event that made me think I wanted\nto be somehow part of this theatrical world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing popular theatre as well as serious stuff reminds me about what you wrote about Jonathan Miller, which is that Beyond the Fringe<\/em> “had a more lasting impact on the culture than anything in post-war theatre.” That seems an astonishing claim from someone who wrote a book about Harold Pinter.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nseriously believe this. As well as the performance there was an LP, which I’ve\nstill got, and, for my generation, it was like Monty Python was for a later\ngeneration; we could go around quoting large chunks of it. Beyond the Fringe<\/em>\nentered our vocabulary, but it also helped to shift attitudes. It fostered a\nmood of irreverence and disrespect for authority. One of the most famous items\nwas a parody of Harold Macmillan by Peter Cook; we had not seen a living prime\nminister lampooned as directly as that. After Beyond the Fringe<\/em>,\neveryone was doing it. It saturated British culture and was seized on by\ntelevision, radio and magazines like Private\nEye<\/em>, whereas even the great plays, like Look\nBack in Anger<\/em> and Waiting for Godot<\/em>,\ndidn’t permeate the culture in the same way. I’ve never encountered people\ngoing around quoting Look Back in Anger<\/em>\nto each other in a way that I can still quote most of the script of Beyond\nthe Fringe<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Video 1<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
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