The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present

by Michael Billington

Having surveyed post-war British drama in State of the Nation, Michael Billington now looks at the global picture. In this provocative and challenging new book, he offers his highly personal selection of the 100 greatest plays ranging from the Greeks to the present-day.

But his book is no mere list. Billington justifies his choices in extended essays- and even occasional dialogues- that put the plays in context, explain their significance and trace their performance history. In the end, it's a book that poses an infinite number of questions. What makes a great play? Does the definition change with time and circumstance? Or are certain common factors visible down the ages? It's safe to say that it's a book that, in revising the accepted canon, is bound to stimulate passionate argument and debate.

Everyone will have strong views on Billington's chosen hundred and will be inspired to make their own selections. But, coming from Britain's longest-serving theatre critic, these essays are the product of a lifetime spent watching and reading plays and record the adventures of a soul amongst masterpieces.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Literary Criticism

464 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2015

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I paused for a moment before giving this book five stars but only because it is Michael Billington's 101 Greatest Plays rather than a coldly objective and super-critical 101. However, there are many reasons to appreciate his approach and his choices. My pause was a short one.

Billington is an experienced theatre critic of longstanding. Each play is given almost exactly the same amount of space and nearly all are treated to the same format with surprising economy - experience of performance is set alongside context for the drama and why it is important.

The author does not hide his own prejudices and personality. This is all to the good. Very occasionally, he switches gear (not too often), where there might be a generational difference of opinion, by introducing a dialogue with an imaginary young female critic.

The book can be dipped into for opinion on particular plays but, if you do this, you will be missing the best of the book which is in the whole rather than in its parts. We are given a history of drama that is also a history of our changing sensibility over time as well as our universality.

If I have a doubt it is only that occasionally Billington seems to try too hard (perhaps) to fit the history of drama into the flow of culture, reading back what is universally important from what is important today to the liberal-minded middle brow reader of newspapers.

In this sense, the book is part of the cultural bending of the knee of post-Enlightenment critics to what ought to be important as well as to what is important - but this is a quibble since he manages this populist intent lightly and well.

Theatre is not at the top of my list of arts (as one who cannot sit still and watch easily) but I am reasonably well educated in it so it was useful to have a book to hand that was well written and filled in some important gaps in my knowledge, reminding me of past pleasures.

One of his achievements is to restore the actor and the director, the actual performance, to equality in relation to the text. There is no play in here that does not refer back to something seen and experienced by him, and which, sadly, will be lost when the participants die.

Trawling through YouTube afterwards to seek out some theatrical background, I was struck by just how little material there is beyond mostly American student productions (some painful to watch) and old British TV material.

The back catalogue of historic performances in European languages - including Greek - seems vastly richer than anything to be found in English which suggests that the Anglo-Saxons have shunted drama off their popular media and allowed it to become the ephemera of the bourgeoisie.

I note that some theatrical, operatic and even concert productions are beginning to appear on the big cinema screens in the provinces. By all acounts, these productions are far from 'flat' so perhaps, in their usual commercial way, our arts are keeping material close to their chest.

But one wonders if this is going to be an own goal in the long run of history if an effort is not made to educate the general public about theatre and why it is different from film even if we occasionally see hybrids like Ben Wheatley's remarkable simultaneously theatrical and filmic High Rise.

Perhaps the last 10-20 plays might be wisely reserved from the internet for copyright reasons (though I would argue that these seminal works might equally trigger interest in other plays by their authors) but there is good reason to have productions of the other 80 on the net in English.

Even the Persians of Aeschylus has only one French language version. There is no decent professional production of the bulk of the drama. Why no public access to one of my favourite masterpieces Calderon's Life is a Dream which I discovered as a teenager thanks to the BBC?

If the collapsing arts budget could do one thing of value, it would be to finance new productions of these plays, recoup the cost in part through ticket sales and cinema transmissions and then ensure they were available on the internet free of charge within five years.

An imaginative entrepreneur could use 80 plays to build a back-log that was an entry point for pay-to-view of new productions of other plays - the Persians might be free, the Oresteia might not be. The whole could be integrated into our education system and so re-humanise us somewhat.

Until then, theatre will be a big city middle class business or a struggling small theatre phenomenon for just a small segment of the population. The danger is that the free riding of the theatre by the mass media might end when the theatre can no longer sustain itself.

The middle classes will probably ensure that the show continues on the road (certainly it does this for opera which has much less justification) but there is another risk - that the preconceptions of that class dominate our culture and the feelings of the mass get ignored or even disrespected.

The alienation of the elite from the mass is the crisis of our time, a crisis coming for some time about which the urban litterati have been complacent. The humanistic element in our culture has been shrinking and now stands stupidly shocked by the accident waiting to happen of populism.

If there is one thing that Billington's book teaches us, it is that drama may have no direct political effects but it does introduce attitudinal change and raise questions about the world that act as the leading edge intellectually for changes that, much later, do have effects on our power relations.

The question is whether contemporary drama is in danger of skirting some of the changes going on in society and starting to follow rather than lead and to express anxiety and ambiguity of feeling about change rather than anticipating possibility, positive changes to come.

And even if it is doing this, who is actually noticing? It may be that the theatre, as it has done in the past, continues to warn the elites who can afford its tickets but only in a way that cathartically allows the customer to go home feeling the problem, if there is one, has been 'sorted' through talk.

The literary and artistic middle classes are addicted to their talking cures, the precisions of language that take no account of the fact that theatre is not only about saying but also about doing. Billington is good on this - how stage directions and silences are as much the point as texts.

Anyway, having had a moan about the culture ghetto, we can return to a book which is highly recommended to the generalist and will entertain as much as it informs - and may lead some, those with few resources miles away from London, to a frustrating search for performance online.

[Ita · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is an interesting read for a person who is not too familiar with the drama scene. Since the vast majority of the plays were not familiar to me, I caught myself sometimes drifting away in my thoughts. However, I did get a valuable insight into the genre and opened my eyes to that type of literature.

[Ad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very stimulating book, inspired me to start reading plays. Different from Billington, who worked for many years as theater critic of The Guardian, I am not able to see many plays here in Japan, so I enjoy plays as quiet reading at home.

Only negative point of the book: non-Western plays have been excluded, which is especially regrettable for China (Yuan zaju, Ming plays, modern plays) and Japan (Noh drama, Joruri, Kabuki, modern plays including those by Mishima Yukio). Also India's Kalidasa is left out. Here are some plays that definitely belong to the greatest in the world and should have been included:

India:
Shakuntala by Kalidasa (4th c. CE)

Chinese plays:
(Plays from the Yuan dynasty):
The Injustice to Dou E by Guan Hanqing (13th c.)
Rain on the Wutong Tree by Bai Pu
Romance of the Western Chamber by Wang Shifu
The Story of the Lute by Gao Ming (1356-70)

Plays from the Ming & Qing dynasties:
Peony Pavillion by Tang Xianzu (1598)
The Palace of Lasting Life by Hong Sheng (1679-84)
The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren (1699)

Japanese plays:
Noh plays:
Sotoba Komachi (Lady on a Stupa) by Kannami
Matsukaze by Kannami/Zeami (14th c.)
Komachi at Sekidera by Zeami (15th c.)
Lady Aoi by Zeami
Izutsu (The Well Head) by Zeami
Yokihi by Konparu Zenchiku
Sumidagawa (The River Sumida) by Kanze Jūrō Motomasa
Dojoji (Dojoji Temple) by Kanze Kojirō Nobumitsu
Kurozuka (Black Mound) by Konparu Zenchiku or Zeami

Joruri/Kabuki:
The Love Suicides at Amijima by Chikamatsu (1721)
Chushingura (1748)
Yotsuya Kaidan (1825)

Modern Japanese Plays:
Abe Kobo, Friends (1959)
Mishima Yukio, Madame de Sade (1965)
Mishima Yukio, Lady Aoi and Sotoba Komachi (Modern Noh Plays)

[Kris Hallett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Billington is the doyen of modern British theatre criticism and one expects to see most of the plays he talks about here getting revivals up and down the country as his book gets passed around the planning meetings of this countries theatres. Pre-publicity has already revealed the surprises (no Lear, no Godot!) and though one can quibble the list itself is pretty safe, there aren't going to be too many surprises on that list outside those two omissions. Each play is given 3-4 pages of analysis and Billington is good at conveying the stage life as well as the textual life, having spent a lifetime in the stalls. He makes a fatal misstep though with his made up conversations with a 'young female critic', supposed to be a counterpoint to his own viewpoints but coming across as excruciating. Still its a book that will make you pull out the scripts and long to see each in production.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic, insightful commentary on a wealth of plays. For anyone interested in theatre.