From National Theatre to Netflix: how theatre created some of our biggest TV stars

Television has been a great help during the pandemic. It’s been a companion when we’ve been alone and a distraction when the news has been too much, offering vital escapism thanks to the array of groundbreaking drama released each week – but some of our favourite shows may never have been made without the vital starting ground of theatre. As telly has thrived, the theatre world has stayed shuttered and suffering – threatening a vital talent pipeline that has helped nurture some of our brightest stars onto the world stage.

“When you think of the biggest shows of the last couple of years, Fleabag and The Crown, those both started on stage,” says the playwright James Graham. “Fleabag was performed by a young unknown writer and director Phoebe Waller-Bridge in a tiny little basement under a pub in Edinburgh, with a leak dripping on her head every other line. The Crown slightly more glamorously was in the West End and then on Broadway with Helen Mirren, but it's still a stage show.”

They are far from the only ones. Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum Dreams, which was performed at The Yard Theatre in Hackney, went on to become a BAFTA-award winning show. Her next television project, I May Destroy You, was featured on many critics lists as one of the best television shows of 2020. Another show on those lists? Quiz, written by Graham, exploring the Who Wants To Be a Millionaire coughing scandal. It too started out as a play, first at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester, before moving to the West End. Debuting on ITV shortly after the first national lockdown, the series was watched by more than 10 million viewers. 

“The British theatre is an absolutely unique and essential part of the television industry,” says Left Bank Pictures chief executive Andy Harries, the production company behind Quiz and The Crown. “Everyone has theatre, but no one has theatre quite like us, and no one has the depth of writing talent, acting talent proportion per population in the world. It’s a massive cultural jewel.”

The interdependent creative ecosystem of television and theatre is a distinctively British phenomenon. You might assume that talent just heads in one direction, but it’s actually a loop. Just look at the work of Jack Thorne, Lucy Kirkwood and Abi Morgan, who move seamlessly between writing for theatre, film and TV.

“[In the UK], you come back through TV, back into theatre, back into TV, back into the theatre,” says Graham. “The US is completely coastal and culturally - geographically - you have to make a choice. Am I going to live on the East Coast and do plays? Or am I going to live on the West Coast and do TV and work for a studio?”

“[In America] if people want to be a writer, they move to LA,” says Harries. “They get into a writers room, they start as a junior writer, then they become a senior writer. They go up a ladder and they work through show after show. We don't have that industrialised process in the UK, we rely on the symbiotic relationship in theatre and television, and to some extent novelists as well. That’s where our pool of writers come from.”

Some writers work on television and theatre at the same time, says Graham. “I always say to American friends or American television writers who are really struggling. If you want to make it big in American television in Hollywood, come to f***ing London and start writing plays. Ten years later, you will go in, back to Hollywood at a weirdly much higher level.”

So why are channels and streaming giants so keen to adapt theatre into television? Part of it is down to track record. Television is incredibly expensive to make. With competition continuing to heat up globally, broadcasters are looking for originality to make themselves look distinctive. “They will also go and see plays a couple times a week, when theatres were open,” says Graham. “The name shouting out at them, from the poster or from the programme, or from the conversation around the play, is the writer.”

Some dramas also feel perfectly suited to television too. Fleabag and Chewing Gum reflect a recent trend in theatre of monologues, directly addressed to the audience, brimming with originality and rawness. “There’s a whole host of these plays which are so pure and raw and a real cry from the heart”, says David Luff, Creative Director of Soho Theatre. “A TV executive can go, ‘I can really work with this and draw out loads of different things.’”

“I think what happens, more often in television, is that a voice is something that catches everyone's attention,” says Manda Levin, Senior Commissioning Editor of drama at the BBC. “Somebody who's got something really brilliant to say about the world and a really unique perspective, that then grows and matures and [the writer] learns the craft of episodic storytelling, which is really different… The Fleabags are like lightning strikes.” 

For Harries, a theatre writer suggests "an originality". “Theatre writers tend to be instinctively more original with their ideas and their writing. I think that feeds into television,” he says. Peter Morgan’s The Audience, for example, explores the relationship between the Queen and her Prime Ministers. In The Crown this relationship remains one of the central themes, most recently explored by Gillian Anderson as Margaret Thatcher opposite Olivia Colman's Elizabeth II. “It was a very clever construction, and obviously very successful, and it was part of the fermenting process for Peter to get to what The Crown became,” Harries says.

But this loop between theatre and television can only be kept going when theatres have their doors open. “If you're not going to the theatre in the early part of your career, then you're not going to find those amazing new voices that are going to be the authors of the future,” says Levin. She said that visiting the theatre can help commissioners to develop long-lasting relationships with creatives, which can have an impact on their entire careers.

With our theatres closed for the foreseeable, causing a devastating loss to London’s cultural scene and the livelihoods that rely on it, this precious ecology is at risk. Television production has been able to continue through the last two lockdowns, but the impact of closed theatres could threaten future talent and stories. Its impact may not be immediately visible either, with sometimes a year or more from an idea being approved to it debuting on television. “If we lose 25 or 30 per cent of our theatre buildings or theatre companies, you are going to notice that ten years later, on stage and on screen,” says Graham. “Because that is the place where a lot of talent comes from. It’s both the talent and sometimes the literal content.”

“It’s absolutely critical,” says Harries. “Any diminishing of the theatre or any reduction of the theatre  in the long term will affect television and will affect our ability to continue to create really original, fresh shows, and keep producing the writers that feed these shows.”  

Yet, one positive remains. “There’s a real, real awakening in the last 12 months of the need to protect distinct, diverse, eclectic voices,” says Luff. “And that, with the recovery over the next 12 to 24 months, we can't retreat into some form of safe, seemingly commercial mindset. There's a realisation that we need to do even more work in order to protect a diverse range of voices in theatre, and hopefully that will then feed into TV as well.”

This is a view shared by broadcasters. “This is a time when we need to make access better than it has been, not worse,” says Levin. “We've got to build bridges where we can, and not be dismantling them.

"The idea that we'd sort of pull those bridges away by losing our amazing theatrical heritage across our nation – it just doesn't bear thinking about.”  

The Evening Standard Future Theatre Fund, in association with TikTok and in partnership with the National Youth Theatre, supports emerging talent in British theatre. Find out more at standard.co.uk/futuretheatrefund  #FutureTheatreFund #TikTokBreakoutStar