Matt Trueman: The unpredictability of the Royal Court is no bad thing

For a while now, the critical vultures have been circling Sloane Square. "What’s wrong at the Royal Court?" asked one Sunday Times diary piece a few months back, citing "too many disappointments" since Vicky Featherstone took over from Dominic Cooke.

The Telegraph‘s Dominic Cavendish was "starting to have [his] doubts" this time last year and has since questioned some of the Court’s programming outright. Even good reviews can come with barbs: Quentin Letts started a recent four-star write-up with the words, "After a run of stinkers…"

It’s almost exactly two years since Featherstone kicked off her tenure with Open Court, a summer festival programmed in partnership with the theatre’s many associated writers. That was partly a pragmatic decision – Cooke stopped commissioning new plays on deciding to leave – and partly ideological. Open Court was non-hierarchical and collaborative, open to experiment and unafraid of failure. The plays on show looked properly pluralistic, stretching from headphone pieces to community soap operas, well-made family dramas to performance lectures. True, the festival’s form confused audiences and attendance figures weren’t strong, but it marked a radical sea change for a theatre that had, by that point, become a bit predictable.

You can’t say that of the Royal Court today. For better or worse, you never know what you’re going to get there. Tallying up the last two years, I’ve liked just as many shows as I disliked and for every Circle Mirror Transformation (swoon), there’s been a Mistress Contract (yawn). Several shows have fallen into both camps. I loved and loathed Birdland, The Twits and How To Hold Your Breath at the very same time.

Those critical naysayers seem to be missing the reliable hit factory that was Cooke’s Court and, to some extent, they have a point. To date, there hasn’t been a thoroughbred headline-grabbing hit under Featherstone: no Jerusalem or Posh, no ENRON or Clybourne Park. Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, which had a decent West End run and an Olivier nom, is as close as you get and even that divided opinion. Personally, I thought its focus on simulated paedophilia suffocated a more delicate, pinpointed play about the safety, escapism and allure of virtual spaces.

However, as I see it, that unpredictability is a good thing. It is the sign of a theatre taking real risks and the Royal Court has become a markedly more interesting place under Featherstone.

For starters, it is celebrating the most distinctive writers’ voices – compare the tumbleturning street-slang of Vivienne Franzmann’s Pests to the wry irony of Rory Mullarkey’s Wolf From the Door with its Cath Kidston revolutionaries – and, at the same time, encouraging those that push the form. Tim Crouch’s Adler & Gibb, so frustrating for the first half, unfurled into an all-out extraordinary piece of theatrical thinking: a scathing examination of art about art about art. Chris Goode’s Men in the Cities – a Royal Court production, don’t forget – is a roving camera monologue that swells to an inaudible and catatonic climax. It’s telling that the shows Upstairs, in the studio space, have tended to fare better than those Downstairs in the main house. Increased flexibility in the way the theatre’s programmed – not longer six weeks downstairs, four upstairs – has greatly enhanced the range of projects given a stage and so shifted what can count as new writing. Kate Tempest and Speech Debelle play the theatre next month.

The theatre has a real conscience too. It aims for moral complexity. Take its current shows: debbie tucker green’s hang and Gary Owen’s Violence and Son. The first lures you into sympathising with a woman determined to hang the man that harmed her and her family. The second nudges you to understand – even to admire – an unreconstructed thug and to very nearly absolve his son’s sexual assault. Written down, that sounds glib and unlikely, but it’s only after these careful plays that you realise how much you’ve been taken in. The Royal Court is genuinely prodding our assumptions and pushing our moral compasses.

There’s a newfound global scope at play as well. Liberian Girl and Fireworks – both UK debuts by Diana Nneka Atuona and Dalia Taha respectively – are up there with the very best plays of this year. One was about an African civil war; the other, a siege town in Palestine. The international department has come into prominence, with migration a recurring focus, and there’s a real diversity of stories being told. Many more female protagonists to boot.

Big shifts off-stage include the advent of regional touring, offsetting the Court’s position in one of the richest spots in London, and of work made for schools. Audiences have become noticeably younger in-house – and not just because of work being made for kids – and the Theatre Local scheme has expanded. Participation has increased too, with crowd-sourced writing projects like Grit tipping into wider-access writing courses.

All this points to a theatre with a sense that its responsibilities run beyond box office grosses and big talking-point hits, but to people, to artists and to ideas. Good thing too.