In appointing David Byrne as its new artistic director, the Royal Court has embraced the true spirit of experimentalism. Byrne has turned London’s New Diorama theatre, which he founded, into a Goliath of new writing.
The New Diorama was born in 2010 as an 80-seater run by eight staff. It is never an easy job to put a new fringe venue on the radar of audiences and its location, tucked away in the leafy surroundings of Regent’s Park, only added to the challenge.
Instead, it has become the place to go for edgy, exciting shows, often by young playwrights showing signs of raw talent. Byrne seems to sow the seed and water it. The theatre has picked up a clutch of awards under his leadership and numerous works have gone on to become mega-hits, the biggest of which is Operation Mincemeat, by SpitLip, originally commissioned and produced by Byrne, which transferred to the West End where it is currently doing a booming trade.
There has also been Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, programmed in 2021, which transferred to the West End, via the Royal Court, and was nominated for two Olivier awards. Both prove he has a canny eye for commercialism as well as an ear attuned to promising writing. It helps, I think, that he is a playwright himself.
Politically, Byrne has shown a commitment to campaigning work around race, class, sexuality and gender but with no sense of ticking boxes. A radically reconfigured Antigone, staged at the New Diorama in 2020, which focused on sisterly relationships rather than patriarchal power, remains one of the most powerful interpretations I have seen of that Sophoclean tragedy. More recently, there was the musical After the Act, revolving around the homophobic Section 28 law, which was scrappily brilliant and timely in its more tacit reflections on institutionalised homophobia.
Byrne’s work is a fine fit for the Royal Court, which has publicly declared its commitment to addressing structural inequalities around issues such as race. How will his maverick sensibility translate to a larger venue, with a far bigger main stage (and a second space upstairs)? Unlike the Royal Court, the New Diorama is not one of Arts Council England’s National Portfolio Organisations. Byrne is certainly resourceful in finding funding, but now may need to adhere to different criteria.
A small fringe venue can also, more easily, be a testing ground for new writing without incurring harsh judgment around its misfires. But these misses should not always be counted as failures: I have admitted before now that I regarded Black Boys … as a failure when I saw it at the New Diorama. On its second staging at the Royal Court, it took my breath away. This is what more time and greater resources can do – and Byrne has more of them now. He saw the play’s rough-hewn brilliance where some of us did not.
I hope he brings an unexpected edge to the Royal Court and that he does not temper his radical, dynamic, fringe sensibility, or grow more commercially conservative. He must take the spirit of the New Diorama with him.
