Michael Billington's new book looks at post-war Britain from a theatrical perspective. It examines the constant interplay between theatre and society from the resurgent optimism of the Attlee years to the satire boom of the Sixties and the growth of political theatre under Tony Blair in the post-Iraq period. Written by Britain's longest-serving theatre critic, the book also offers a passionate defence of the dramatist as the medium's key creative figure. Controversial, witty and informed, "State of the Nation" offers a fresh and challenging look at the vast upheavals that have taken place in Britain and its theatre in the course of sixty turbulent years.
Michael Billington has been theatre critic of the
Guardian since 1971 and of
Country Life since 1986. He is the author of biographies of Harold Pinter and Peggy Ashcroft, critical studies of Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn, of a celebration of Ken Dodd, a collection of reviews,
One Night Stands,
State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, which won the Theatre Book Prize 2008, and
The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present. He has also edited
Directors' Shakespeare: Twelfth Night and
Stage and Screen Lives selected from the
Dictionary of National Biography.
He frequently lectures and broadcasts on the arts, teaches drama for the University of Pennsylvania and is a Visiting Professor at King's College, London and an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Oxford.
