Why the Theatre

In Personal Essays, College Teachers, Actors, Directors, and Playwrights Tell Why the Theatre Is So Vital to Them

Sidney Homan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000317817
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Drama

Why the Theatre is a collection of 26 personal essays by college teachers, actors, directors, and playwrights about the magnetic pull of the theatre and its changing place in society.

The book is divided into four parts, examining the creative role of the audience, the life of the actor, director, and playwright in performance, ways the theatre moves beyond the playhouse and into the real world, and theories and thoughts on what the theatre can do when given form onstage. Based on concrete, highly personal examples, experiences, and memories, this collection offers unique perspectives on the meaning of the theatre and the beauty of weaving the world of the play into the fabric of our lives.

Covering a range of practices and plays, from the Greeks to Japanese Butoh theatre, from Shakespeare to modern experiments, this book is written by and for the theatre instructor and theatre appreciation student.

PART I

The Creative Role of the Audience

1
VOUCHSAFE ME AUDIENCE

Nick Hutchison

It is spring, 1976, and I am on a school trip, my first to the hallowed ground that is Stratford-on-Avon, to see Measure for Measure, which we were studying in class. However, on arrival we discover that an administrative slip-up meant we had tickets for the wrong show: instead of that rather gloomy problem play, we were treated, by some theatrical serendipity, to Trevor Nunn’s production of The Comedy of Errors, jazzed up into a modern-day Greek farce, with a stellar cast including Judi Dench, Nick Grace, and Francesca Annis, and complete with added musical numbers. It was wonderful: hilarious, outrageous, and life-affirming. But the key moment for me came at the very end. In what I now recognize as a typical Trevor moment, the cast sang the curtain call to a rousing version of Dromio’s last lines, “like brother and brother,” and at the very end they ran in a line to the front of the stage—and they kept going. They leapt into the auditorium and danced with the audience in the aisles, shook hands with those who wouldn’t dance, hugged, embraced those who were willing, and as the house lights came up everyone in that old, tired building came alive in the sheer joy of what we had seen and shared. As the broken shards of the fourth wall crashed around my eyes, I knew this was where I wanted to be, that theatre was a world to which I had to dedicate my life, that I wanted to make an audience feel that same joy and wonder.

I cannot in all honesty boast that I have achieved that ambition, but I do firmly believe the reason theatre survives, despite centuries of doom-mongers predicting its imminent demise, is this covenant with a live and present audience: that it is the fact that we are there, watching, that makes theatre special; that it is our awareness of the artifice of drama that makes it exciting, and that the more theatre acknowledges its reliance on, and dialogue with the audience, the more that audience will keep on coming back.

Of course, it is a given that the theatre needs an audience on the most basic level: without tickets sales no show or company can survive, especially in these days of diminishing government subsidy. Every actor will tell you the stories of playing to two people and a dog in a dingy room above a pub in an unfashionable part of town. From Shakespeare’s time on, the theatre has been driven by financial considerations. Show business is first and foremost a business, and the history of theatre is littered with the burnt-out carcasses of shows that didn’t make it, their names whispered among theatre folk more nervously than naming the Scottish Play and leaving behind them broken reputations and livelihoods: in my lifetime, Bernadette, Fields of Ambrosia (“where everybody knows ya”), and The Hunting of the Snark.

Similarly, theatre needs an audience not just to pay its way, but to justify its very existence; there is simply no point in mounting a play if there is no-one there to see it, a point brilliantly made by Tom Stoppard in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, where the players gradually realize that they are performing to no one:

You don’t understand the humiliation of it—to be tricked out of the single assumption which makes our existence viable—that somebody is watching… . No one came forward, no-one shouted at us. The silence was unbreakable, it imposed itself upon us; it was obscene. We took off our crowns and swords and cloth of gold and moved silent on the road to Elsinore.

You can see this existential need for an audience in all those Shakespearean epilogues where a character/actor asks for our approval to release them from their theatricality: Puck, Rosalind, Pandarus, the King in All’s Well, and, of course, Prospero. They all need our applause; they need us to finish the play for them, to offer completion.

And there is no question that one slightly less high-brow reason we keep going to the theatre is the sense of danger, the vicarious thrill at the possibility it could all go horribly wrong. I’m sure the reason Shakespeare and Co charged more for the first night of a new play was not just the frisson of being there at the start, but also the added possibility it could all fall apart. Audiences love to share these moments: I was there when the door wouldn’t open, when the set collapsed, when the actor was drunk, when the hydraulics didn’t work and Idina Menzel had to sing “Defying Gravity” while remaining prosaically earthbound. Hence all the stories of the hell-raiser actors of the golden age: “You think I’m drunk; wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham.” The plethora of anthologies of theatrical disasters; hence, too, the success of Mischief Theatre’s The Play That Goes Wrong, and its numerous offspring. It may not be laudable, but we do love to watch a train wreck on stage.

But I believe the relationship between performer and audience is much more potent, more symbiotic, than mere financial or existential necessity, or the potential for disaster. It is in the communality of the storytelling, the “shared experience,” as Mike Alfreds so notably coined it in the name of his company, formed in 1975 and still going strong today, that theatre is most compelling, most essential to our cultural life. I further believe that in the UK, at least, with the proliferation of social media and streaming services (Netflix, Amazon, iPlayer), theatre is moving more and more toward a recognition that its unique contact with a live audience is what sets it apart. From its very origin, telling tales round a campfire, through the community theatre that was the Miracle and Mystery plays of the Middle Ages, via the Globe, Rose, and Blackfriars theatres of the early modern period, through to our twenty-first century, theatre thrives best, achieves most, when it includes the audience in the experience, acknowledges their existence and their contribution to the performance.

I am fortunate to have grown up through my professional life, as an actor and now director in theatre, with the development of the Globe Theatre on Bankside, and now the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse there, and I have been privileged to be part of the early life of the Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton Virginia, home of the American Shakespeare Centre. These theatres, lit by daylight, candlelight, or an equivalent thereof, reproduce the playing conditions of Shakespeare’s time, where the audience are lit the same as the actors, where it is impossible to ignore from the stage the throng of people watching, listening, and reacting to the performance, where there is no fourth wall—nor third or second, for that matter. The excitement before a show in these venues is palpable: the audience know they are going to be a part of the performance, not merely passive spectators, and that their reactions to the play will inform their understanding of it, and indeed, the way the players perform it. (The only time I have felt such excitement before a performance in a conventional proscenium theatre was before a performance of Hamilton: the buzz of knowing that you are about to experience something totally out of the ordinary—and have had to re-mortgage your home to do so.)

I can recall so many moments in these playhouses where our involvement was integral: Tim McInnerny as Iago in Othello at the Globe in 2007, frighteningly hilarious, with the audience wrapped round his fingers, and then the extraordinary moment when he asked us directly, “And what’s he then that says I play the villain?,” daring us to answer, and in the silence that followed making us all complicit in his lethal intent. Mark Rylance, audience-manipulator extraordinaire, using a heckler in Hamlet to transform the “To be or not to be speech” into something entirely spontaneous, not the most famous lines in dramatic lit, but something immediate and from the heart. As the oh-so-hilarious groundling yelled out “that is the question” just before Mark could speak it, he paused, considered, and finally agreed: “Yes! That is the question … whether tis nobler in the mind” etc., etc. It was such an electrifying moment that there were apparently people in the audience who thought the interloper must be a plant.

One of the most horrifying and awkward moments I have ever spent in a theatre was Out of Joint’s production of Macbeth, which I saw at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2005. Set in an African republic civil war, the murder of Lady MacDuff and her family was carried out off stage with machetes and a brutal soundscape; then the director threw up the house lights and we were offered the opportunity, for a pound I think, to go into the next room to see the carnage. I’ve never felt an audience so shocked to be put on the spot so much: who wants to witness butchery, but it’s only theatre and are you missing out if you don’t? A few souls, braver than me, went, those of us who stayed rooted to our seats, relieved, morally smug and left to wonder what we had missed. Sixteen years later, the moment haunts me still.

This shared experience is by no means confined to those reproductions of a bygone playing space, but is increasingly potent in modern theatre. We expect that in Brecht we are going to be talked to, lectured even, and that the alienation we will feel is essential for our political education, but what we tend to forget is how good a writer he is at arousing those emotions he wants us to objectively examine. I have directed several of the lehrstucke, learning plays, and while I was nervous at first, I was delighted to discover how funny, how moving, how superbly written and structured they are, and how the audience response to the verfremdungseffekt is one of delight and excitement, rather than the sense of being at a rather worthy political rally. This metatheatricality, the reminding of an audience that what they are seeing is theatre, is obviously not new; it dates back to Shakespeare (“our wooing doth not end like an old play”; “If this were played upon a stage now I could condemn it as an improbable fiction”) and further still to the Greek theatre with its satyr dances after tragedy to distance the audience from the horror of what has gone before. Still, whatever fancy name you give it, it is ultimately just reminding the audience that it’s not real, that you are watching something artificial that needs your input to work.

Many of my most memorable recent theatre trips have been where this inclusivity is at its most obvious. Tom Morris directed Swallows and Amazons at the Bristol Old Vic in 2010, and not only did we pelt the villain with (woolen) snowballs handed out to the audience during the show, but at the end of the play the cast handed the front row two exquisite models of the eponymous sailing boats, and we handed them back, delicately, carefully, row to row, to the back of the auditorium, watching the salad days of the children of the play, and of our own childhoods, retreating further and further into the past. A wonderful moment of shared loss and wonder, audience and performance both merging into something rich and strange.

Sally Cookson’s production of Jacqueline Wilson’s Hetty Feather in 2014/5 had the same bravura approach to the audience, opening with the line “My name is Hetty Feather, and this is my story,” and never allowing its circus design to distance us from the poignant story of our orphaned heroine. Emma Rice’s work with Kneehigh; Frantic Assembly’s physicality, especially in the sensational Black Watch for the National Theatre of Scotland from 2008 onwards; the physical longing of much of Geko’s work on tour—these all take the audience with them on a journey into storytelling. They include us, celebrate us, rather than pretend we don’t exist.

Indeed, in the last decade I think the arc of theatre is toward more inclusivity, probably as a result of the plethora of media mentioned above. The trend toward immersive theatre is becoming pronounced. You Me Bum Bum Train, devised by Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd in 2004, was one of the first immersive pieces to really garner both critical appreciation and audience success, but it has been followed by many others determined to put the audience at the center of the action. Even the rival medium of film has muscled in on the theatre’s territory, with Secret Cinema turning movie screenings into an interactive, theatrical event. Back on the boards, both The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street have been successes in offbeat venues in London, and former NT head Nick Hytner’s productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and most notably Julius Caesar at the new Bridge Theatre in London introduced mainstream audiences to the delights of the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Why?
• Part I The Creative Role of the Audience
• Part II The Life of the Actor, Director, and Playwright in Performance
• Part III When the Theatre Moves Beyond the Stage Into the Real World
• Part IV Theories and Thoughts About What the Theatre Can Do When Given Form Onstage
• Epilogue: “Yeh, Boss”
• About the Authors
• Index