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Theatre in the New MilleniumDateline: 7th February, 1999 In an article in The Stage of 4th February, Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting and You'll Have Had Your Hole, explains why he hates theatre. A few quotations might prove instructive: Theatre is seen as boring, pompous and second-rate by most practitioners and appreciators of other art forms. Here's another quotation: I do not accept ... that the audience for theatre is an idealised white, middle-class, etc., person and that all theatre should be dominated by the tastes and values of such a person.That was John McGrath, speaking in 1979, as recorded in his book A Good Night Out - Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, first published in 1981. If we accept what Irvine Welsh says, it would appear that nothing has changed in the past twenty years. Theatre's Audience I always look at the audience when I go to the theatre. Sounds strange, I know, but anyone who is concerned for theatre must have some qualms about its health, and the audience is a good health indicator, to use the current jargon. What worries me is that the bulk of the audience seem to be of my generation or older, i.e. over-fifties. There are younger people, but they are very much in the minority, and the so-called "younger generation" - the teens and the twenties - are the smallest minority of all. Of course, theatre is expensive, and it is the wrinklies who tend to have the money to afford theatre prices, but that can't be the only reason. After all, young people can and do pay large sums to go to rock and pop concerts, and they are regular cinema-goers. I would say that 75% of the kids in my school had seen Titanic before even the pirate videos were available! Has theatre lost touch with young people? I think it has. Has theatre lost touch with most people? I'm afraid it has. Why was Baz Lurhman's Romeo and Juliet such a success with young people that they saw it in the cinema in droves and then went out and bought the video? Do the same people go to a production of the same play by the RSC, ESC, National, or anyone else? Only if they're taken to see it by, for instance, their school. Has theatre lost its way? Let's go back to Irvine Welsh: Shakespeare would have empathised with the lager brigade, staggering in to see "Trainspotting". His audience were not just old and bourgeois: they were critical, clued-up punters who would stand around drinking, and give the actors a bit of verbal if they were bored with the action. In A Good Night Out McGrath attacks Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and its full symphony orchestra onstage as a piece of right-wing propaganda and as almost an icon of middle-class culture. In the last few months we've been treated to The Invention of Love by the same author in which a knowledge of Latin is needed to get the full meaning of the piece. Nothing's changed. In the sixties and seventies the only way McGrath could break the mould of theatre was to tour around Working Men's Clubs, village halls and even barns. In the nineties the only way Welsh can get his You'll Have Had Your Hole - which packed them in in Leeds to universal critical excoriation - to play in London is at a theatre known primarily as a rock venue. In the meantime theatres and companies are closing or relying more and more heavily on subsidy. Even that great cultural icon, the Royal Shakespeare Company, has had to be rescued this week by a one-off grant of £600,000 from the Arts Council. What's going to happen in the new millenium? Is it going to be more of the same? or will there be a new theatre to attract a new, younger, more (in Welsh's words) hip audience? This is a topic to which we will be returning not infrequently in the coming year. I'm hoping that there'll be guest writers who will put forward their views of how theatre will - or should - be. Your ideas are more than welcome. Let's take the opportunity offered by the new millenium to look at British theatre in depth: where is it going? and where should it be going? Articles Indices: |
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