What's in a list? Two critics on theater's special relationship

At 78, he retains the air of the enthusiastic Oxford student he must have been more than half a century ago. He arrived bearing notes — taken during research he had conducted in anticipation of our meeting — and a gift, a paperback edition of his 2015 book, “The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present.”

The subject of greatness, in absolute terms, was what we were there to discuss (coolly, rationally). Billington had come at my invitation to share sparkling water (too warm for tea) and a gentleman’s debate about theatrical excellence, the arbitrariness of lists and the differences between the British and American drama.

Both of our publications had recently offered compilations of the best in contemporary theater that their respective homelands had to offer, each numbering 25.

The New York Times list, which was published at the beginning of June, appeared under the headline “The Great Work Continues: The 25 Best American Plays Since ‘Angels in America.’” The Guardian responded, at the end of that month, with Billington’s, “Knockouts, Nobles and Nukes: The 25 Best British Plays Since ‘Jerusalem.’”

The number of years covered by these assessments is different: “Angels in America,” by Tony Kushner, appeared on Broadway in 1993, while Jez Butterworth’s “Jerusalem” was first staged at London’s Royal Court Theater in 2008. Since each list was restricted to its country of origin, there is no overlap between them.

And while it took a village of critics — Jesse Green, Laura Collins-Hughes, Alexis Soloski, Elisabeth Vincentelli and me, along with The Times’ theater editor, Scott Heller — to assemble our collection, Billington was the sole arbiter for The Guardian.

Another difference was organizational — and qualitative. We listed our choices in order of “greatness,” beginning with “Topdog/Underdog” by Suzan-Lori Parks. Billington arranged his alphabetically. (Works on that list that New York audiences might be familiar with include Mike Bartlett’s “King Charles III,” Lucy Prebble’s “Enron,” Lucy Kirkwood’s “The Children” and the Broadway-bound “The Ferryman” by Butterworth.)

Nonetheless, we found our lists had much in common. And not only because each was both a sop and a deliberate provocation, playing to this era’s hunger for quantification of all things yet intended to spark dissent and debate.

We also agreed that whether the period under consideration was a decade or a quarter-century, 25 didn’t begin to accommodate the range and depth of first-rate new work. While there may have been qualms of conscience on our parts about omissions (and inclusions), this abundance seemed an encouraging sign regarding the state of the English-language play.

So was the variety of the playwrights, and the reach of their subjects. Half of the dramatists on The Guardian’s list, and more than a third on The Times’, were women, with members of ethnic minority groups making up more than a fifth (The Guardian) and a fourth (The Times) of those chosen.

In neither case had there been anything resembling a conscious quota. “It didn’t require any special pleading,” Billington said. “It was just instinctive and spontaneous.”

We also found that in both lists, none of the plays had originated — nor been specifically conceived — as large-scale commercial theater projects. And we were of one mind in thinking that Broadway and its London equivalent, the West End, had become all but irrelevant as breeding grounds for original work.

In both cases, a majority of the chosen plays addressed issues of race, gender and, in the unfailing case of the British, class, often in combination. Perhaps the biggest surprise to both of us was the ways in which they did so, suggesting a shift in the traditional balance between the classically domestic American drama and the British state-of-the-nation play.

I observed to Billington that I hadn’t thought of the American theater as being as topical as the British theater, in regularly engaging in conversation with the daily headlines. But when I looked back, I began to revise my opinion.

Billington agreed: “The received notion was that American theater dealt very well with private issues and British theater with public and political issues. But it strikes me that there’s been some sort of role reversal, British dramatists having learned from Americans that you can write plays set in one room that still engage with public and political issues.”

It’s a point of view confirmed even by the two works we used as anchors for our lists: Kushner’s “Angels in America” is, after all, subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes,” and travels not only through history but also the cosmos; Butterworth’s “Jerusalem,” though resonant with implicit questions about national identity, takes place in and around a drug dealer’s trailer in a forest.

Both works, for the record, have been seen and acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. This year’s Tony-laden revival of “Angels” originated at London’s National Theater. In general, the flow of theatrical traffic between London and New York has never been so thick or so fluid.

Billington saw both gains and losses in this. “Is there a danger of our cultures becoming too similar?” he asked. “In these exchanges, are London theater and New York theater becoming almost too parallel? Because if I go to New York, I don’t want to see British plays, I want to see American plays.”

Not, he added quickly, that he hasn’t been delighted by the chance to see American playwrights like Annie Baker on his own turf. “She sets her own rules, doesn’t she?” he said. “She creates her own tempo and makes you surrender to it.”

Billington wondered if the age of the titans was over in the English-speaking theater and felt that in Britain there was no longer a dominating pantheon, no younger-generation equivalents of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. “We don’t have identifiable Big Beasts, as it were,” he said. “But we have a much richer plurality of talent.”

And he lamented the lack of classical repertory theaters that abounded through the Britain he knew when he was growing up in Warwickshire. “We’re plugged into the present in a very exciting way,” he said. “But I think we’re losing sight not just of our past but of the theater’s past.”

Billington’s “101 Greatest Plays” begins with Aeschylus’ “The Persians” and ends with Bartlett’s “King Charles III.” There was one signal omission on that list that continues to generate blowback.

“As we both know, the moment you do a list, you open yourself to every challenge in the world,” he said. “And there’s one topic that came up at every single talk I did about the book: Where is ‘King Lear’?”

He is still defending that choice. It must be said that he makes a good case. It must also be said that I would probably disagree with him, depending on the day and my mood and what productions of “King Lear” I have seen most recently.

That’s what lists are made of.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.