The Honest Truth: Oh what a (first) night…Cultural moments that shook the world

From the birth of theatre in 5th Century Athens to the Sex Pistols, performers and artists have the power to shape the story of culture.

Here Dominic Dromgoole, the Globe Theatre’s former artistic director, tells Sally McDonald the Honest Truth about history’s seismic first nights.

Why did you write this book?

Astonish Me was inspired by momentous first nights and a desire to communicate the sense of excitement and possibility contained within them. It is always timely to remind people that art matters, that it has effected change throughout history, and still can today.

What time frame does it cover?

It starts with Nefertiti in Egypt in 1353 BC, and finishes with Beyonce at Coachella in 2018. That’s a spread of 3,371 years. This seems an apposite connection since Beyonce began that concert doing her best impression of a blinged-up Nefertiti.

What was your most surprising or shocking find?

The story of Xiao Lu in Beijing in 1989, and how an act of artistic violence at an avant-garde exhibition grew to be one of the inspirations behind the protests in Tiananmen Square. It is a story both shocking and inspiring.

How can an opening night performance change the world’s perceptions?

Because of the unique pressures on an opening – the adrenalin heightening them, the attention sharpening their focus, the excitement of those watching – they can achieve a catalytic effect. The art within them is amplified by those factors, and they go off like a thunderclap. In an instant, they change people’s understanding of the world around them.

Sometimes, of course, they don’t and the best art has to wait to have its impact. Often the effect is about inclusion, like the first night of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin In The Sun on Broadway in 1959. She introduced to an audience a new reality, the complexity of black domestic life and aspirations, and radically augmented their comprehension of the world around them.

Which performance was the most challenging to the UK’s status quo?

The Sex Pistols in Manchester in 1976 fired a scattergun blunderbuss at all things establishment. Their gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall ignited the punk movement and shifted the world off its axis. Only about 50 folk were there in a scruffy little room, but among them were the seeds of the Smiths, Joy Division, the Buzzcocks and the Fall, so it certainly had an influence. Sarah Kane, the playwright, confronted a lot of conformist expectations in the late 1990s about what theatre and art could and should do. Her five plays are a remarkable legacy of revolt in form and content. The darker incidents of the Ukraine War seem to tumble out of the world of her plays. Perversely, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest – now thought of as the quintessence of pleasant Englishness – subverted hierarchies more giddily than anyone has managed. Which is why the establishment worked so hard to destroy Wilde.

Have any first nights gone terribly wrong?

The Rite Of Spring in Paris in 1913 is a classic tale of a premiere turning out to be a disaster. Bohemians and conservatives turned on each other. The police turned up and it escalated into a full-scale riot. Every modernist master was present – Cocteau, Picasso, Debussy, Gertrude Stein, Proust – which added to the eccentricity of the event. At the end, the occasion’s prime mover, Diaghilev, turned to a friend and said: “Exactly as I wanted it.”

Which opening nights have been notable in Scotland?

The stories that emerge from the early days of the Edinburgh Festival are very moving. There was a sense, across Europe, in the late ’40s of art helping to put the world together again after the fragmentation of the Second World War. The festival began as a reminder of all that was good about European culture, and how hard we should cling to it.

Astonish Me! First Nights That Changed The World by Dominic Dromgoole is out on Friday published by Profile Books