The news of James Burrows's death at 85 has landed with the weight of a fallen monarchy. For those of us who have watched the slow, agonising decline of British cultural rigour, his passing is not merely a loss but a verdict. Burrows was not simply a director; he was a guardian of a dying art form, a man who understood that theatre and television were arenas for intellectual combat, not mere amusement.
His productions were dense with meaning, every gesture a calculated assault on the audience's complacency. Compare this to the drivel that now passes for entertainment in our age of moral feebleness. The tributes pouring in are predictable: actors and critics falling over themselves to canonise a man whose work they probably never grasped.
They speak of his 'craft' and 'vision' as if those words still carry weight in a culture that has abandoned aesthetic standards for populist claptrap. Burrows's legacy is a mirror held up to our own decrepitude. We mourn him, but we should mourn ourselves more.
The British stage, once a bastion of wit and danger, is now a museum of mediocrity. Burrows was its last curator. His death is not an end; it is a symptom.
We have become a nation of philistines, and his departure confirms it.
