I LOVE PLAYS
an artform that forces us to focus and challenge that complacency ought to be valued, not dismissed out of hand
| 15 Jul 2006
I'm not sure whether it was the incongruity of having a column called I Hate Plays on the theatre pages of an arts magazine, or just that theatre itself seems far too easy a target, but last month's column provoked me to respond. The central charge was that theatre isn't evolving at a rate that a telly-web-cine-literate audience require. The evidence was... well, I'm not entirely sure.
Film and TV are fixed-form media. We understand and make exception for their conventions – the most groundbreaking Channel 4 drama comes in easy-chew fifteen minute segments and form-defying indies are chopped into 90 minute windows. Every Media Studies student knows that the presence of the camera and the need for at least one edit creates a grammar that we're conditioned to respond to. Cut to a close up of a face. Cue your emotional response. No? Well, it's probably bad telly. There'll be something better on E4. Oh look. Nikki's having another tantrum about cornflakes.
Theatre is unique amongst these three storytelling media because it doesn't have to take any one formal structure as a starting point. Theatre is a performance and an audience. The audience isn't necessarily sitting down; the performance doesn't necessarily happen hammily on a stage, hemmed in by a proscenium arch. That's increasingly true in Scotland right now. Young companies like Highway Diner experiment and push form about. The new National Theatre has invested in site-specific companies like Poorboy and Grid Iron, and began its own season on ferries and down tower blocks. Where cinema and TV are limited by financial demands, there's freedom to play and room to fail and try something new in theatre.
Over the last year, at the theatre, I've sat at a pub table, face to face with a gentle-voiced man who told me proudly how his mother refused to die until she was ready. I've dug my fingernails into my hands as the psychopath whose living room I was sitting in snuck up behind his friend wielding a golf club. I've been chased up back streets by a pack of hoodies on BMXs and witnessed a spontaneous dance number at Buchanan Street station. A stripper begged me for money in the middle of a Swimmer One gig; I sobbed my face raw as a man realised his wife had betrayed him. Those were just Arches productions, too (and that was the obligatory plug). Dodging a shit-filled incontinence pad flung your way by the foul-mouthed inmates of an old folks home after watching them have an orgy ('Ubu', Tron/Dundee Rep) is a pretty difficult experience to recreate in two dimensions. You don't need your passport to go and see 'Brokeback Mountain', but you did for Grid Iron's 'Roam through Edinburgh Airport'; and at Tramway last month, the Builders Association manufactured a vast CGI set that made their live actors seem all the more vulnerable to the invasions of the digital information age. There's no comparable sensory experience to any of this immediacy, not even in cinema's widescreen surround-sound environment.
No, theatre isn't our primary method of entertainment anymore. We ingest bitesized entertainment, never really having to engage with anything that might challenge us when we can just flick on. Suggesting that the information age makes us lazy and complacent is hardly groundbreaking stuff; surely, though, an artform that forces us to focus and challenge that complacency ought to be valued, not dismissed out of hand.
Film and TV are fixed-form media. We understand and make exception for their conventions – the most groundbreaking Channel 4 drama comes in easy-chew fifteen minute segments and form-defying indies are chopped into 90 minute windows. Every Media Studies student knows that the presence of the camera and the need for at least one edit creates a grammar that we're conditioned to respond to. Cut to a close up of a face. Cue your emotional response. No? Well, it's probably bad telly. There'll be something better on E4. Oh look. Nikki's having another tantrum about cornflakes.
Theatre is unique amongst these three storytelling media because it doesn't have to take any one formal structure as a starting point. Theatre is a performance and an audience. The audience isn't necessarily sitting down; the performance doesn't necessarily happen hammily on a stage, hemmed in by a proscenium arch. That's increasingly true in Scotland right now. Young companies like Highway Diner experiment and push form about. The new National Theatre has invested in site-specific companies like Poorboy and Grid Iron, and began its own season on ferries and down tower blocks. Where cinema and TV are limited by financial demands, there's freedom to play and room to fail and try something new in theatre.
Over the last year, at the theatre, I've sat at a pub table, face to face with a gentle-voiced man who told me proudly how his mother refused to die until she was ready. I've dug my fingernails into my hands as the psychopath whose living room I was sitting in snuck up behind his friend wielding a golf club. I've been chased up back streets by a pack of hoodies on BMXs and witnessed a spontaneous dance number at Buchanan Street station. A stripper begged me for money in the middle of a Swimmer One gig; I sobbed my face raw as a man realised his wife had betrayed him. Those were just Arches productions, too (and that was the obligatory plug). Dodging a shit-filled incontinence pad flung your way by the foul-mouthed inmates of an old folks home after watching them have an orgy ('Ubu', Tron/Dundee Rep) is a pretty difficult experience to recreate in two dimensions. You don't need your passport to go and see 'Brokeback Mountain', but you did for Grid Iron's 'Roam through Edinburgh Airport'; and at Tramway last month, the Builders Association manufactured a vast CGI set that made their live actors seem all the more vulnerable to the invasions of the digital information age. There's no comparable sensory experience to any of this immediacy, not even in cinema's widescreen surround-sound environment.
No, theatre isn't our primary method of entertainment anymore. We ingest bitesized entertainment, never really having to engage with anything that might challenge us when we can just flick on. Suggesting that the information age makes us lazy and complacent is hardly groundbreaking stuff; surely, though, an artform that forces us to focus and challenge that complacency ought to be valued, not dismissed out of hand.