from Anthony Neilson's March 21, 2007 article in The Guardian
[Our irrelevance has] been boring audiences for decades now, and they've responded by slowly withdrawing their patronage. They're not the ones who broke the contract. They paid their money and expected entertainment; we sent them back into the night feeling bored, bullied and baffled. So what are we doing wrong?
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5 comments:
Couple observations. One is that we're saturated by stories, usually variations on a handful of premises, told over and over in film, television, novels, and theatre is not immune because it's difficult to tell stories in ways that make them fresh. A famous canard has it that all stories have been told. Maybe. But even a familiar story can be engaging if the characters feel new, and one way to make them feel new is to make them feel real--give them the unpredictabilty of actual, interesting human beings. That doesn't mean you have to identify with them or even like them, but it does mean spending two hours in their company doesn't make you look at your watch.
Where that gets tricky is that the people I might find interesting might bore the tears out of you, or you might find that sort of person pretentious or irritating or morally reprehensible or be marked by some other character trait that would make you excuse yourself from the conversation, insisting you have to get home to wash the cat. And the people you like might make me itch. Which is why we get into these delightful discussions 40 posts long which end badly.
I think we also have a split in those of us who make theatre between, for lack of a better term, the traditionalists and experimenters. The experimenters tend to think the traditionalists are dull because they're too rigid or frightened to try something new, and the traditionalists tend to think the experimenters are interested in drawing attention to themselves at the expense of the play, the audience, coherence. Both sides are probably right when the execution fails.
Finally, as a personal preference, I think there's too much theatre out there that insists on easy truths, tidy endings, and happy outcomes when such conditions are so difficult to find in life outside the box office. Sadly, we're not all noble, beautiful, and brave.
For me, theater is equal parts language and spectacle (if a more intimate and demanding kind of spectacle than any other media), but insofar as other media seem to provide more thrilling spectacle (i.e., the movies) then theater has to deliver on language, in order to compete against other media. But, insofar as we are so much more a visual culture than a verbal one, both audiences and performers have lost the knack of being engaged by language. Theater artists fail to deliver it often enough--either because performers aren't equiped for it or the writers aren't providing it--and audiences increasingly don't know or expect to hear it....
Well, I say "increasingly," but we have been complaining about theater dying for a long time now, yah? Who called it a "marvelous invalid?
Couldn't you just as easily say that novels and poems offer more thrilling use of language than theatre?
What I find exciting about theatre is that it is not a purebred artform. It can incorporate just about anything, as long as the audience finds it interesting.
What drives me crazy is this purist, static attitude towards theatre. So many of my friends roll their eyes when I try to get them to go see theatre, because they associate it with things they ought to do, not something they want to do. And yet so many Portlanders go to live strip clubs. Why is that? Why don't they just rent porn? Because of the unique excitement of live performance.
I'm not saying theatre should use naked women to lure audiences (though it wouldn't hurt), just that live performance can be exciting in this day and age. We need to embrace & embody the concept that ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN.
Which is exactly why Anonymous Theatre is such an awesome concept.
la de da,
I agree that one of the great advantages that theatre has over most other art forms is this possibility that "anything can happen." I also agree with Mr. Neilson in that the problem seems to be that more often than not "anything" winds up being "boring", "self-indulgent", or "mediocre". And if any single moment of a production tips into one of these three descriptions, then, sorry to say, the production is a failure. That why it's so hard to produce good theatre, becaus it's HARD TO DO. Good intentions are not a guarantee of good results. So, that being the case, 98% of the time when I go the theatre in this town, by the end of the night, I wish I HAD just grabbed a book instead.
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