Michael Billington and the greatest plays ever written

WHAT makes a great play and how do you choose between Hamlet and King Lear?

It’s a question that theatre fans and critics alike have been asking for centuries and one that Michael Billington tackles with typical finesse in his new book The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present.

The acclaimed theatre critic has seen more than 9,000 plays during a career spanning 50 years and his book, written in a series of colourful essays, starts with The Persians, written by the Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, and culminates a hundred plays and some 1,500 years later, with Mike Bartlett’s gripping satire King Charles III.

Billington, theatre critic of the Guardian since 1971, will be discussing his provocative and personal selection when he talks to fellow critic Samantha Marlowe at the Huddersfield Literature Festival on Sunday.

“The list I started with at the beginning is not the same as the one that I finished with. I kept chopping and changing,” Billington admits. “I would probably change it again if I was writing the book now.”

It’s a list that’s dominated as much by what’s been omitted as what’s been included. There are six Shakespeare plays but there’s no room for A Midsummer’s Night Dream or King Lear.

Billington explains his reasoning behind the latter.

“I admire the play but it has structural flaws when you compare it to Hamlet and Macbeth [both of which make the cut] and as I’ve grown older I find it increasingly unwieldy and harder to endure under the weight of all the suffering.”

It’s not the only famous play he left out. There’s no room for John Osborne’s searing kitchen sink drama Look Back in Anger or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. His omission of Beckett’s masterpiece will surprise many people but again Billington has his reasons.

“It was ground-breaking at the time but it’s become a widely accepted play and I think we have learnt its lessons. Instead, I chose another Beckett play, All That Fall, his brilliant memoir of growing up in Dublin which is much more rooted in experience and reality.”

Billington’s book is a kind of choice history of theatre, starting with the Greeks and Romans and moving on to the Restoration period, the Renaissance, as well as European theatre, right up to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and Bartlett’s King Charles III, both of which were written this century.

“I didn’t go out of my way to be controversial but at the same time I wanted to include plays that are less familiar and which I really enjoyed watching,” he says.

It was, he says, great fun to write. “It’s by no means a definitive list and the whole idea is to get people talking about theatre, which is still incredibly vibrant in this country.

“Everyone’s got the right to disagree with me, which they often do, and I’m sure they’ll be no different in Huddersfield.”

Michael Billington is appearing at Syngenta Cellar, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, on Sunday at 1pm. Tickets cost £10. Call 01484 430528.