The 101 Greatest Plays

Michael Billington, The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present (Guardian books/Faber and Faber 2016)

I resolved just before Christmas to take advantage of not being able to go to the theatre to learn more about the history of theatre and perhaps even read some plays.  The two books I’ve read so far (Sierz and Ghilardi’s The Time Traveller’s Guid to British Theatre and Billington’s State of the Nation) have both focused primarily on the history of theatre.  While Billington’s The 101 Greatest Plays adopts a chronological approach and is still rooted firmly in the wider historical context, it moves the focus onto the plays themselves at the same time as providing some information about the playwrights. 

The book starts with four Greek playwrights (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes) and one Roman playwright (Plautus).  Early Greek plays like Aeschylus’ The Persians and Sophocles Oedipus the King set many of the conventions for western drama, despite the long break until play writing and performances started again in earnest in the C.16^th.  Unlike Sierz and Ghilardi, Billingdon thinks the mystery plays of medieval Britain are worthy of inclusion, although he focuses on a modern adaption by Tony Harrison.  Then begins the great age of Shakespeare, Marlowe etc., which has its equivalent in continental Europe with the C.17^th ‘golden age’ work of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca in Spain, and Pierre Corneille, Moliere, and Jean Racine in France. 

Just over half the plays discussed by Billington after from before the twentieth century, the rest have a more contemporary feel.  He pays some attention to important European (Ibsen, Chekov, Brecht), and American playwrights (Williams, Miller, Albee), but most of the focus is, understandably for an English theatre critic, on British and Irish plays.  There is a playfulness to the book, which occasionally gets a little tedious (and deliberately problematic) when he adopts an imaginary dialogue with Helen, a young female theatre critic.  But the tone generally works well and encourages readers to ask what makes a great play.  Billington’s criteria, set out in the introduction is that ‘the very best plays are rooted in their historical moment and yet have a sustainable afterlife [13].’  He prefers realist plays to more abstract works such as the post second world war ‘theatre of the absurd’ (Becket, Ionesco), and he’s keen to note that Becket’s Waiting for Godot doesn’t make it onto his list.