How the British theatre lost its way

The last time playwrights Edward Bond and Peter Nichols came into my life simultaneously was when, last year, I was on a panel at the National Theatre discussing censorship. Bond had refused to appear, and Nichols gamely stepped in to share his memories of the Lord Chamberlain, whose blue pencil defaced playscripts in the years before his abolition in 1968.

The last time playwrights Edward Bond and Peter Nichols came into my life simultaneously was when, last year, I was on a panel at the National Theatre discussing censorship. Bond had refused to appear, and Nichols gamely stepped in to share his memories of the Lord Chamberlain, whose blue pencil defaced playscripts in the years before his abolition in 1968.

When Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was first put on in 1967, the censor refused to let the wheelchair-bound "vegetable" child remain on stage while her parents talked about sex. So, each night, she had to be wheeled off for a scene and then wheeled back on. As an example of the petty-fogging inconvenience of censorship, it's hard to beat, although it was nothing compared to the banning of Bond's Saved in 1965, with its notorious baby-stoning scene.

Since then, both men have become very different theatrical landmarks. Bond's later work - Lear, The Woman and The War Plays - established him as a theatrical giant, albeit one more honoured abroad. Nichols, by contrast, has developed a particularly English humour with work such as The National Health and Privates on Parade. His recently revived Passion Play showed how potent his mix of laughter and tears could be.

The Hidden Plot, Bond's collection of 1990s poems and essays, is a curious mix of personal grudge and poetical politics. Its first page carries his letter forbidding that National panel to use excerpts from Saved, because they had refused to stage more recent works. Although the National's critics may agree with his view that it is "a place which damages" drama, the letter smells of sour grapes.

Apart from advice on how to stage his work, the book is tediously theoretical, full of gnomic statements about drama and its place in the world. Bond emerges as a kind of Holy Fool, offering mere mortals the grim consolation of eternal truths about the human capacity for violence.

It's a pity his style is so abstract, because the core of his argument is right. British theatre has become increasingly commercialised and, with the laws of the market ruling even subsidised institutions, high culture has often been replaced by low entertainment. But, in a soundbite age, Bond's high seriousness and poetic images - prisons are "eating houses" where capitalism "consumes its enemies", politicians are "crows pecking at cobblestones" - feel quaint and old-fashioned.

By contrast, Nichols has worn well. His diaries cover the years between the filming of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and 1977, when they peter out during love-making in a summer thunderstorm. "Did the earth move? Diary doesn't say."

A kind of sequel to his 1984 autobiography Feeling Your Behind, the diaries are written with Nichols' flair for the foibles of family life. His lightness of touch and benign ruefulness are only lost when someone -managements, directors or actors - messes up his work. Mostly, this is a soap opera of famous friends - including Michael Frayn, Tom Stoppard and Michael Blackmore - and obscure family.

Anyone with aunts and uncles may be reluctant to shoulder the trivia of Nichols' daily life, although moments of gossip - Laurence Olivier drunkenly knocking over bottles - are of more general interest. And the passages where Nichols talks frankly about the short life of Abigail, his disabled daughter, and wishes the suffering child were dead, are a powerful reminder of the emotional origins of his characteristic tone of tragi-comedy.

The reviewer's 'In-Yer-Face Theatre' is published by Faber next March