#michaelblakemore

Like any resort the town of Biarritz, of which my shiny little house was part, promised many things, most of which were frivolous and quite a few false. But the sea and the mountains, as I returned to them year after year, promised nothing whatsoever. All you could say about them was that they were there, they were beautiful and whatever it was they were waiting for, it had precious little to do with you. To someone working in the theatre, with its short-lived victories and bitter defeats, its busy self-importance, the sight of them each year was a kind of rebuke which, like an eloquent but cautionary sermon, I gradually came to welcome as once again I put the theatre to one side and occupied myself with counting the days of summer.

Perhaps my own laziness and lack of public spirit contributed to this, but I had a clear and very simple view of what I thought theatre was for. It was to bring to the stage productions of such accomplishment and concentrated intent that anyone who saw them would remember them for the rest of their lives. It was their impact rather than the categories to which they happened to belong that mattered. They could be anything - tragedies or comedies, musicals or one-man shows. Not surprisingly such occasions are a rarity. But they do happen and are perhaps the one good reason why people who should know better persist in such a clumsy, compromised and often disappointing medium. It's impossible to legislate for this kind of excellence; all you can do is get the work done as best you can, keep your fingers crossed and trust that once in a while in the life of an institution or an individual, against the odds, it happens. This hardly constitutes a policy and is certainly not a programme, nor is it much use in the daily and arduous demands of running a theatre, but as a thought on hold at the back of one's mind, a sleeping aspiration, it can warn against wrong turnings and highlight misjudgments.