Vincent on the box

Why do the plays that thrill audiences in the theatre never end up on television? Richard Eyre tells David Lister that things are changing – from tonight

Britain may have the best theatre in the world; but you would never know it from watching television. Seminal productions in the West End, the National Theatre, RSC and the regional theatres come and go with no attempt to show them on television. Dramatists such as Pinter, Stoppard and Ayckbourn have remarkably few of their works shown to a mass television audience; multi-award winning stage actors such as Simon Russell Beale remain virtually unknown to television viewers.

Television is also of course depressingly guilty of abandoning slots for new and classic dramas that used to be transmitted in such strands as Play for Today and The Wednesday Play. The appalling loss of those slots is mourned throughout the arts, by directors, actors, writers and viewers. The televising of theatrical productions, by contrast, has not been advocated by theatre practitioners. They have been, and for the most part still are, opposed to it as they feel that simply sticking a camera in a theatre produces a halfway house effect that fails to capture the magic of live performance and produces stilted television.

Tonight, though, could mark the start of a new era. BBC4 has in its brief existence already filmed an occasional live performance of a stage play. But tonight's transmission on the channel of Vincent in Brixton, a hit at the National Theatre, in the West End and on Broadway, is important for bringing a praised piece of new writing (by Nicholas Wright) to television, and for bringing to the small screen the deeply affecting performance of Clare Higgins as the older woman who has a relationship with the young Vincent van Gogh during his stay in London. Higgins is a performer that theatre audiences will go out of their way to see, but one whose name is all but unknown to television audiences.

There is another reason why tonight's transmission is important. Vincent in Brixton is directed by Sir Richard Eyre, the former head of the National Theatre. When I spoke to him this week, he agreed that he used to be in the opposing camp. "I have had views about this, it is true," he said. "My view is that stage plays put on television need to be put in context. You can't just put them out without saying 'this is a theatre play'. You have to give it a context that says 'we're taking you into the theatre'. It is not made for television.

"On TV you miss the poetry of the theatre, In a theatre everything is metaphor. That's part of the joy of being in a theatre. It's a willing suspension of disbelief.

"I've always taken the purist view that you've got to argue what is distinct about theatre, i.e. you've got to be there to experience it. So I've always been propagandist about theatre. If you say there is a substitute, it's missing the point."

Now Sir Richard is among those in favour of filming stage performances for television. It is, he says, "a reversion rather than a conversion". He never went to the theatre until he was 16. Before that his taste of theatre came from the transmission of Brian Rix's stage farces on to TV "via one camera at the back of the auditorium".

Conversion or reversion, it is more significant than it might at first appear. For Sir Richard is a governor of the BBC. Why, I asked him, did he not lobby in governors' meetings in council chamber not just for the filming of stage plays but for more high-quality drama on the BBC?

"I do argue for it," he says, "and I shall continue to do so. I would like to see more of what they call authored drama. I do lament the death of the single play. I used to produce a strand called Play For Today, and that sort of strand seems to have expired. "There is an argument, of course, that the single play did move towards the Channel 4 film. But now you look at the landscape for the future of film making here, and it is bleak."

He stresses that filming a stage play can never be a substitute for television making its own quality drama. He said to me: "You have written about TV viewers, who are taxpayers, being disenfranchised if television does not show great drama. I too feel that. I think that it's a public duty to allow people, who would otherwise be disenfranchised, access to this experience. Why should TV viewers miss out on the wonderful performances of Higgins and Jochum ten Haaf?"

And what of the dismal lack of classic dramas on TV, the absence of Ibsen, Chekhov, Shakespeare? Is that something Sir Richard raises in the Council Chamber? "There's no reason why there shouldn't be Ibsen on television," he says. "But I don't know if there's anyone waving a banner for classic drama. That's slightly too detailed an issue for me to raise as a governor. The management would have a perfect right to say it's their concern."

But tonight is at least a step in the right direction. Vincent In Brixton will give television audiences a masterfully understated work that explores intensity of feeling. When Higgins received her Evening Standard best actress award for her performance she said in her speech that this was a play with no sex or drugs, but "a play about feeling".

Sir Richard seems in part to differ from his leading lady. He thinks sex is present. "This is a play about sex and depression and creativity," he says. Viewers, thankfully, can now make up their own minds.

'Vincent in Brixton' is on BBC4 tonight at 9.30pm