About theatre

I really enjoy going to the theatre. I like my entertainment live. Theatre and concerts bring with them that special relationship between audience and performers, that buzz of living creation in which all present participate. It is a very ancient human function, essential to community and society. Researchers understand it to have grown out of older ritual forms of being together to experience in some way collectively a representation of the mystery of life. Even if in some way I am not satisfied with the show, the experience of having been there compensates for that in a way that I will never get from say seeing an indifferent film at the cinema. I’m sure those who attend large sporting events would argue the same. But that’s not my thing, I like the theatre.
I like to see proper plays. I mean by that works which authors intentionally wrote for the theatre. I don’t care much for adaptations of novels and the like (unless the author himself has made it as in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”). I also think monologues are a bit of a cop out, though they are often put on these days as they are obviously cheaper to perform. They are a version of the tradition of the story-teller, which is fine and there are some good monologues by Dario Fo, for example, where basically the actor has to do several different parts. But for me the soul of theatre is in the interaction between different characters and the tensions that creates.
The lyric is in the first person - the subjective poetry of feelings; the dramatic is in the second person - what two people say to each other on stage; the epic is in the third person - the narrative of the novel. Brecht of course had a concept of “epic theatre” to describe his intended descriptive presentation of socially determined human relationships; but whatever his theories, he is a first rate dramatist in the cut and thrust of his exchanges. The beauty of the dramatic is to transcend the one dimension of the lyric by placing us at the heart of human interaction where we can see two opposing views simultaneously from within, without the distance of the epic. Of course modern narrative technique from point-of-view Flaubert onwards has led to a progressive fragmentation of the discourse seeking to reproduce the same effect, though rarely with the same immediacy.
Theatre is about the spoken word. The text has to be made to live and can by itself bear the weight of the play. That is why you can listen to drama on the radio. Some of the greatest pieces of language in certainly any Western culture can be found in its theatre, most obviously in the case of Shakespeare for English. As a linguist I find one of the most challenging and rewarding comprehension exercises is going to the theatre in a language other than my own and I always try to do it when away in a big city. Films, which are largely about image, aren’t a patch on the theatre for that: frequently there is little dialogue of little merit, and poorly spoken at that, against a lot of background noise. Also in the theatre you’re hearing the language live: it’s direct communication.
But what really makes the theatrical experience of course is, in addition to the spoken word, the acting, the stage business. You can of course have theatre without any text. When I used to be a leader on international youth camps, I used to run a group activity where with the teenagers we would put together a theatrical production telling a story with no text (eg the outline plot of Macbeth) so as to overcome the language barrier. But while such productions can be interesting they rarely achieve the profundity and effect of a play with text (though I hasten to add that I have seen some quite moving mime productions in my time).
In the theatre the results are best when the full resources of gesture, physical expression and movement are placed at the service of the text.
I think you will have understood that after the speaking and the acting, to me the staging, the set, the costumes, the make-up, the lighting, the additional sound effects and music, the technical wizardry of speclal effects are largely secondary, though they can contribute to some memorable moments, “coups de théâtre”. They considerably enhance the experience and give it its flavour but for me they are not its essence. Again, there are exceptions: when in Cluj I saw a wonderful production of Ionesco’s “le Vicomte” in Romanian (not a language I would claim to understand) where as a piece of absurd theatre fully understanding the text was perhaps not necessary and it was a gloriously visual show with some giant puppets shadowing the gestures of the actors and generally lots of colour and mime.
Generally I am an easy audience to please, as I am happy already that someone is going to the trouble of putting on a work. I enjoy the work itself as much as the performance. You would have to do something pretty awful to Shakespeare to prevent me from enjoying it. This is doubtless because I studied literature. To dismiss a play because you don’t like some aspects of the performance, which is often what theatre critics do, suggests to me a rather superficial approach. However, If a performance is so bad that it prevents the text from having any effect on you, then there clearly is a problem. The acid test of any production is whether it grips you, engrosses you, moves you, makes you laugh or cry at the right times, illicits some emotional response, makes you think. If it does, it’s working, even if not everything is perfect.
Recently in Brussels I have seen a few good plays in productions that have worked for me.

Pirandello’s “Six characters in search of an author” (in French) by the Théâtre des Martyres.
As the title says, six characters interrupt the rehearsal of a play because they are looking for someone to put their story on stage. The director does his best but it’s really the characters who unfold their own story. Usually I find art about art (as in novels about authors suffering from writer’s block, or films about directors trying to make a film) a bit too much like navel-gazing. Pirandello’s play, which I had not seen before, manages to transcend that and poses some interesting questions about the nature of theatre and its relationship to life, the relationship between the immortal unchanging characters of literature and the mortal changing actors who attempt to put them on the stage. That sounds potentially abstract, but thanks to the characters’ story, dramatic interest is maintained. It was a thoughtful and well acted production.

Büchner’s “Wozzeck” (in German) by the Monnaie.
Actually this was an opera. The point is that Berg didn’t change Büchner’s text, he just set the play to music. Many in the German speaking world feel that if Büchner hadn’t died in his twenties, he would have gone on to be one of the giants of German literature. The text is very powerful with lines like “He runs through the world like an open razor” and “Man is an abyss, it makes me dizzy to look into him”. Wozzeck is a soldier living in a world of barrack discipline but subject to hallucinatory visions. He hovers on the verge of disorder and despair and is tipped over by jealousy into murdering his lover and later drowning. The story unfolds in a series of fragmentary almost Brechtian slices of life, though it was written in the 1830s. I’ve seen Wozzeck in three theatrical and two operatic versions and this for me was the best one dramatically. Personally I don’t particularly like Berg’s music and I certainly wouldn’t want to listen to Wozzeck in my living room. But I thoroughly enjoyed this production as it was totally effective as musical theatre, which has caused me to reconsider what the nature of opera is. In “Wozzeck” the opera, you basically get the text in a sing-song way with atmospheric musical backing. With the action played here realistically in period costume in a dark minimalist setting, the overall effect was devastating. The drowning of Wozzeck at the climax was actually staged - he was seen to disappear into a pond of water leaving his cap floating on the surface. Great stuff!

Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” (in Icelandic) by the National Theatre of Iceland.
Ibsen is one of my favourite playwrights, but “Peer Gynt” is quite unlike his other plays. It’s more an investigation into the nature of human identity than an exploration of man’s relation to society. Ibsen at first wrote it as an epic poem with no immediate intention to stage it. Therein lie many problems, with the scene ranging across many places (Trolls’ cave, frozen wastes, Sahara, somewhere after life etc) and the whole text running to nearly four hours. There’s a great line in “Educating Rita” where she has been asked the essay question “How would you overcome the problems of staging Peer Gynt?” and she answers “I would put it on the radio”. The National Theatre of Iceland have, however, valliantly put it on the stage. Their option was essentially to have the whole action in the ward of a hospital/lunatic asylum, and to cut some of his exotic adventures. The production was in Icelandic with surtitles in French and Dutch (this is Brussels!) which tended to jerk forward rather erratically not always leaving you enough time to read them. Although this was far from satisfactory it was still possible to follow the action and enjoy the very varied scenes evoking events taking place elsewhere. There were some highly original ideas and it made for an interesting if sometimes challenging evening. The Trolls’ cave scene was suitably scary and the death scenes of Peer’s mother and himself were particularly moving.

Gogol’s “The Government Inspector (Revizor)” (in French) by the Théâtre Varia.
The corrupt officials of a provincial town have been tipped off that a “revizor” is coming incognito from the government to inspect them. They mistake an impoverished young St Petersburg nobleman at the tavern for the revizor and shower him with unexpected liberal hospitality. Gogol exploits the comic situation relentlessly in a political and social satire that has lost none of its relevance today. Especially in the light of his other writings (eg “the Nose”) I think caricature and the grotesque are the best approach to this play. I saw a great, almost Pythonesque production at the National in London in the 1980’s with Rick Mayall. The approach at the Varia was in the same vein and I thought it worked well, it certainly made me laugh. I particulalry enjoyed the scene where the governor, for the benefit of the man he thinks is to inspect him, gives a speech saying how untiringly and selflessly local officials work for the benefit of their citizens: here he stepped up to a microphone like a crooner giving a half spoken half sung sentimental ballad.

Racine’s “Andromaque” (in French) by the Bouffes du Nord.
Oreste loves Hermione who loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromaque who loves Astyanax the son of her dead husband Hector. These frustrated passions engender cruelty in the characters towards each other and this is the mainspring of Racine’s tragedy. It’s all about sex and violence, but only implicitly: that is it’s about the emotions that are thus physically expressed, but they are presented in polished noble verse. I’ve always wanted to see if Racine can work on stage, so I was interested to see what Declan Donnellan would make of him, but I was a little disappointed. Racine, I think has to be done on his own very clearly defined terms and you deviate from them at your peril. That seems to be an incredibly tall order, especially to the modern sensibility: you are meant to do the whole thing dead straight with no humour and no violence on stage for two hours plus. Directors always want to sex Racine up and maybe by making explicit physically what is implied in the text it is easier for a modern audience to follow. Donnellan went so far as to put Astyanax on-stage and give him lines, whereas he is never seen in the original. Quite a big liberty but it does make the plot clearer. A lot of good vocal effort and gesture was put into bringing the text alive, but it didn’t always click. Nick Roche, who directs theatre himself and was watching with me, put his finger on it: performing on a larger stage than usual for them, the actors had spread themselves out too far so the action lost focus, you often couldn’t see both actors in the same glance during their exchanges so you lost the tension between them. Which was a shame. It was nonetheless a fascinating production even if it still hasn’t solved for me the conundrum of how to perform Racine.

These are the plays I have seen most recently at the theatre.
My favourite dramatist though is of course Shakespeare. I’ve managed so far to see 27 of his plays (not all of them in English - but they work fine in translation) and I hope one day to have seen them all. That’s plenty years of theatre-going still ahead of me.