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:: Saturday, July 22, 2006 :: The Play's Not The Thing
Comments:
It seems I can. What an elegant and provoking piece. I think it goes too far in attempting to draw general conclusions from the unusual specific of "The Play's the Thing", which I thought did at least make interesting television. That it didn't make good theatre is no surprise. If I may briefly drag you down the lanes of memory, in 1956 the Observer held a new play competition, of which the first prize was to be a production at the Royal Court. Very like "The Play's the Thing", this production, for all the vast prestige of The Observer in those days, had little success and played (I bet) to a lot fewer people than saw "On the Third Day" did. Competitions never produce good plays. I don't know why, it's just one of those things, The Royal Exchange's annual Mobile competition is another example. (Does it still exist? Is it still called that? Too late at night to Google.)
The questions you ask are so interesting that your answer - nasty theatres - is doubly disappointing. Would that it were true, but it just isn't. There is literally no West End Theatre, however awful in terms of comfort and appeal, that I haven't seen packed out with a mixed and unaccustomed audience at some time or another. It depends on the show. What building could be more dismal than the Lyceum, where "The Lion King" is full every night? What could be more tacky and naff than that theatre in Hammersmith ... Labatt's Apollo?? - that sells out for rock concerts. Kids go to concerts where the mud is knee-deep and where they end up hitching lifts on motorways at dawn. Comfort, appeal and a sympathetic environment are nothing to do with it. I say this with some regret, since it makes all our lives so much more difficult, but it really is only the show that counts. Best wishes to you all anyway.
Having (like all retaliatory bloggers) re-read what I was blasting about and realising that I'd missed half of it out. You vastly under-rate the delightful effect of creaky plotting and conventional forms. What could be more joyously old-fashioned than "See How They Run", which went like a bomb the night I saw it, and deservedly so. (As you, or perhaps a more liberally-minded post-modernist, concede in a different piece).
from a different anonymous - three separate points, in response to anon and encore...
i'm not sure that competitions throw up a worse bunch of plays than the deeply flawed literary management system. i remember the third placed play in the final mobil competition was actually a rather good piece by phyllis nagy. let's see what happens with the successor to the mobil competition (defunct for at least ten years, i think), the (wonderfully, anonymous) bruntwood. i think it's perhaps over-stating the case to say this generation finds character clumsy and theatrical stories laborious. there are ways of writing character that might be clumsy, and ways of telling stories that might feel laborious. but one thing that isn't sufficiently recognized is that there are as many ways of writing characters as there are of sketching a human figure, as many ways of telling a story on stage as there are of painting water. new writing theatres sometimes seem to give the impression that there's only one way, and this is false (and quite a dangerous idea, in fact, because it can end in some powerful individuals propagating aesthetic preferences under the guise of matters of good or bad technique) it's good that we have the new writing theatres because they give a space for work that would never have found a home in the old purely commercial world. it's bad, because there's now a kind of career path for writers that means that one has to be able to train oneself to write a little studio play before being permitted to put work on bigger stages. and for some people, writing that kind of play isn't easy (whereas bolder work might be). the result can be that the new stoppards, and ayckbourns, and cowards (and even pinters and frayns) see their work excluded from the theatre entirely, because they've never managed to write the intimate, naturalistic, not overtly theatrical piece that's going to get them their first production in the theatre upstairs..
Very interesting responses. I agree that we shouldn't overstate the shabbiness of the buildings - but (a) we didn't, really, it was listed alongside a lot of other aspects of the West End experience that is offputting (even to regular theatregoers like us), (b) yes of course all West End theatres have sometimes had one-off successes, but the fact that they can't build on these to get a regular youngish audience may be because the one-off experience is marred by the various discomforts they have experienced, and (c) it's horses for courses; yes, young people (and some older people too) are happy to put up with all kinds of indignities to see bands (being bruised to a pulp in the mosh-pit, queueing for hours, seeing a band in rain and mud, sleeping in a tent and shitting in an overflowing portaloo, etc etc.) this is part of the mystique of rock and pop - it's not part of theatre (unless we see the Glasto theatre tent as the future of theatre which we at Encore really don't). It's horses for courses. It would be great to imagine a piece of theatre for which hundreds of 19-year-olds would willingly hitch home, but it seems too unlikely. But: you're right, it's not about swanky bars and groovy seating. Much more important is the crappy amateurishness of what's on stage.
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As to the second response about the plotting and playmaking, we weren't trying to say that all character and all narrative are out of step. And in any case, the theatre shouldn't be slavish in its quest for young audiences - often you end up trashing the very thing you are trying to defend (cf. Barker's A Hard Heart for a beautiful dramatisation of this principle). But doesn't a certain kind of ennui strike you when you see what David Eldridge once called 'that clunky what-around-the-corner plotting'? I do genuinely think a lightness of plotting and character feels more engaged with the present, somehow more current. These things are notoriously hard to judge though. Pinter. Yes, this is a great counter-example. The writer who was a hit in the West End before he got properly taken up by the subsidized sector. (Though several of his pre-Caretaker plays were supported by public money: The Room at a university, some BBC radio plays.) But would Pinter get discovered by the West End now? And would he have to be discovered by the West End now? The Mobil competition is indeed long gone. If my memory serves me well, the latest incarnation is now exclusively for young writers. Sign of the times. And of desperation?
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