David Hare: Musicals are strangling the West End

Playwright David Hare has criticised musicals for "strangling everything in their path", describing it as a "crushing defeat" to have Wyndham’s Theatre without a play.

Hare was writing in his column in the Spectator, he lamented the lack of new writing in London and questioned whether producers had mislaid "their balls during lockdown".

"This summer I walked past the Royal Court in Sloane Square. Since 1956, the greatest names in British playwriting had shone from its red neon. Now it had a fake-cute message reading ‘BRB WRITERS AT WORK’. (BRB means be right back.) It pierced my heart. Why not just mount a neon saying: ‘We’ve got nothing worth putting on?’," he said.

He added: "I felt the same dismay this week passing Wyndham’s, by far the most perfect playhouse in London for the spoken word. Squatting there was yet another musical, the one the profession nicknames ‘Wokelahoma’. Musicals have become the leylandii of theatre, strangling everything in their path. It’s a crushing defeat to see Wyndham’s without a straight play. Is it our fault? Are dramatists not writing enough good plays that can attract 800 people a night? Will well-known actors not appear in them? Or did producers mislay their balls during lockdown?"

His claim was disputed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, who told the Times Hare was "responsible for one of the greatest musical disasters in history", with The Knife in 1987.

“[He] is probably saying this because he wants to bury his own contribution to musical theatre," he said.