A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire...

I remember reading the 1976 Caryl Churchill play, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, which is set in the period just before and just after the English Civil War, while I was at college. I thought it was a brilliant piece of theatre that explored so many diverse ideas about politics, sovereignty, state, ownership, government, religion, freedom and privilege. 

I also loved the construction of the narrative and the quality of the writing.

Some 27 years on, I've finally seen my first production of the play, at the National Theatre, and it was a less memorable experience than that first read. The staging is inventive and very impressive, with a lord's banqueting table becoming a debating chamber, a soaked field complete with earth and various other locations. 

But the National have used this production and its quite demanding script to experiment with a community company, which essentially means amateur actors working alongside a professional cast. 

This works in one way because it allows for the production to have a much bigger cast than the budget probably allows. But the difference in standard between the professional cast and many of the amateurs is quite big, and that damages the production, particularly in the scenes where there are lengthy debates about political ideas and religious theories, which need incredibly skilled performers to breath life and vitality into them.

The idea of the community company is a noble one. As somebody who worked on large-scale community plays and grass-roots community arts projects in the 1990s, though, it genuinely sickened me to see lots of major theatres suddenly claiming ownership of the term 'community' if it meant they could soak up some new pot of funding in that period… and often take it away from long-established grass-roots projects who needed the funding and weren't just doing 'community' work to tick some box on a funding aplication.

It would worry me if the National was going down this route, even though politically I support the idea of a community company and the development of any real community project.

The play could have been better. The jury's out on the rest of it at the moment. I hope it succeeds, though. It's a brave idea. We shall see...