Stage fright: why is theatre afraid of satire?

The British have a relationship with satire that is centuries old. But while Private Eye and The Thick of It show that both literal and televised forms of satire still flourish in Britain, in the theatre the most recent satirical offering in the West End is the nostalgic Yes Minister, a show written in the 1980s.

It hasn't always been this way. From William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, through the heyday of the Restoration, the comedy of manners was used to mock the inadequacies of the status quo with an attempt to gain wisdom through wit. Under the stern eye of Queen Victoria, the scabrous cartoonists of Punch lampooned the political and royal figures of the day, while the delightful Gilbert and Sullivan mercilessly highlighted the upper-class absurdities they perceived with a deadly quip. Oscar Wilde, Noël Coward, the list goes on. So why is there such a paucity of home-grown theatrical satire on a large scale now?

If we look to somewhere with a blooming satirical ecology, such as German cabaret, it seems that an answer could lie in immediacy. In Berlin, these sketches and skits are impossible to understand unless you're fully briefed on current German affairs. People feel that satire needs to be bang up to the minute, with scripts changing daily to reflect the news. While this is not impossible, with productions such as The Prisoner of Windsor turned around in a mere two weeks, and the Edinburgh Fringe being fit to burst with satirical light bites, we appear more constricted on a big stage. West End shows need a long time in preproduction and after a short run they could be irrelevant.

But the immense critical and box office success of Bruce Norris's Clybourne Park flies in the face of this charge. By satirising a racial tension that is sadly an established and long-running social prejudice, it can be both current and universal. We've got plenty of such issues on this side of the Atlantic that are ripe and ready for ridicule, it just seems that we are missing the writers to tackle them.

Perhaps they are afraid of offending the ticket buyer. As Richard Bean's England People Very Nice found to its detriment, there's an increasingly fine line between being perceived as intelligent and mindlessly provocative. And yet, in America, the outrageous The Book of Mormon by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker is going down a storm, despite mocking religion in one of the most religious countries on the planet. Maybe audiences are more robust than producers think.

Are satires on issues as large as racism or class considered too intimidating for new playwrights who are already accused of never thinking big enough? This could be a valid reason, albeit a disappointing one. Perhaps they simply don't feel that comedy is a serious weapon any more. But as it stands, one thing is certain: for a nation so proud of its famed quick wit and irony, the British seem to be continually losing out to the Americans on this one.