A Manifesto for Good Theatre

About a year ago I went to one of London’s more fashionable theatres to review the premiere of a play with impeccable credentials. It was the first translation of the work of a hip young German playwright: both production and direction were trendily minimalist, the weighty setting (Dresden during and after the War) was married to an intricately organised time scheme, the older characters all swore or flashed, the younger ones came with heroine pallor and pouts, the packed audience swam with jewellery and hemp. Unfortunately the play was morally evasive, emotionally insipid and crushingly dull.

Theatres are rarely short of well meaning but strangely anaemic productions and though I’m always tempted towards the grand hatchet-job (‘further evidence of an enervated culture’ the magisterially pompous line I long to sign each review off with) there are a few good new plays each year that put the lie to such critical miserabilism. In the main however―especially in what should be serious theatre―something seems to be going wrong. As such, I’m tempted to suggest, if not a manifesto, a clarification of what constitutes good theatre.

Actually there isn’t really all that much to say. The error most poor productions make is in misunderstanding theatre’s advantages over other art forms.

So first what theatre is not: theatre is not about spectacle. During Zorro the Musical caped men leapt between high luminescent scaffolding, swung out on ropes over the audience and frequently hit each other with plastic swords. The activity was frenetic, the lead soon became a gurning puddle of sweat and yet for the most part the stunts looked silly, even when genuinely dangerous. The night I went you could hear restless schoolchildren in the audience. Theatre can’t compete with Peter Jackson, 30 takes, 20 camera angles and a month in a CGI editing suite. Then again it couldn’t compete against the circus trapeze artist or even with watching the local football team, and yet bizarrely some directors go on trying.

Nor is theatre about storytelling. And it’s certainly not about ‘characters’. Try reading ‘Death of Salesman’ or ‘Pygmalion’ without considering the social critique and you’re soon trapped in a world of nauseating sentimentality. Bernard Shaw knew this, which is why he added the sour epilogue to later published editions.

Not that theatre can do social critique any longer either. Philip Roth pretty much had it right in the 60’s when he described “American reality” as a thing that “stupefies… sickens… infuriates and finally… is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meagre imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents…”. Rolling news killed the social novel on both sides of the water; and killed social theatre with it.

So what’s left? Well, it may be too cute to claim ‘the medium is the message’ but in effective theatre reality, imitation and fantasy slop into one another constantly. It’s disorientating, but unlike with books or film, the audience have no real power of veto (you can’t walk out of a play without becoming part of the drama, nor you can sit there without being a kind of voyeur, instead you’re both trapped and implicated).

So far as I can tell the resulting maxim should announce that theatre is principally about confrontation; about the immediate clash of embodied ideas (or better still ideologies) ―and that it’s about taking sides. Entertaining drama is more politics than art. Forget this coping stone and your play will crumble.