The best musicals are the equal of great plays, so why the snobbery? | David Benedict

The song'n'dance genre is everywhere, David Hare has bemoaned. He needs to watch more of these joyous shows

Snobbery is back. After the catastrophic, industry-savaging closures of Covid, just when you thought it was safe to go back into the theatre along comes playwright David Hare to tell us what we should and, most particularly, shouldn't be seeing.

Writing last week in the Spectator, he bemoaned the state of, in every sense, play. He recalled a walk last summer past London's Royal Court, traditionally seen as the country's leading home for new plays, and where, at the beginning of the 1970s, Hare made his name. Indeed, until The Vertical Hour in 2008, it produced several of his plays.

Continue reading...