BONNIE GREER GIVES THE LOWDOWN ON BRITISH THEATRE...

The director Jonathan Meth, who heads the playwrights' organisation, writernet, says Britian is "training people for a future theatre which doesn't yet exist. This is as it should be." He cites a quotation from the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, inscribed on the side of a building on Edinburgh's Royal Mile: "Work as though you lived in the early days of a better nation."
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The British Nigerian/Irish playwright Gabriel Gbadamosi has another take on the late 1980s: "I decided to write for the fledgling black theatre scene, which at that time was mainly focused on people from the Caribbean. Our concerns were not the same. My efforts were to make a theatre that reflected the society I knew - as opposed to concerning myself with asserting a 'black identity', and securing an opportunity to work that was, in my view, insufficiently critical of mainstream theatre and of the funding policies that subsidised and curated it. By the end of the 1980s, the Arts Council considered that its experiment with black theatre had failed to produce work of quality, and most of those theatres were cut."

He left Britain to work elsewhere in Europe and Africa: "I was convinced that a stagnant ghetto had been created and culled by a policy that had failed to grasp the reality of our diversity. We still do not have a theatre that reflects this. That is as poor as theatre gets."