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Theatre is Better than FilmA Soapbox Debate at the Menier Chocolate FactoryDateline: 29th October, 2006In the latest Soapbox debate at the Menier Chocolate Factory, the audience decisively concluded that theatre is a superior art form to film. Many might wonder that a debate was even necessary to reach such an obvious conclusion. In some part, this result may have been a reflection of the views put forward in three minutes each and a minute of summary by four experts in their respective fields. Under the vigorous chairmanship of Patrick Marmion, proposing the motion were the Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, alongside Rupert Goold, Artistic Director of Headlong Theatre Company (formerly the Oxford Stage Company). Supporting film were Nik Powell, executive producer of films including The Crying Game and Director of The National Film & Television School, alongside Ekow Eshun, Artistic Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Opening the batting was Michael Billington who confessed that he had spent twenty years as a film critic in addition to twice that time writing about theatre. He was happy to concede the pleasures of film but made three significant points in favour of theatre. Theatre allows its audiences to enjoy the pleasure of language, which is an endless verbal pleasure wheras he described the vocabulary of film as "banal". He believes that theatre is more responsive to the times in which we live and the politics of the day and cited the treatment of the war in Iraq to support his thesis. Most significantly, Billington believes that theatre has the capacity for transcendence or, to put it another way, ecstasy. "You lean forward to watch a play because you are actively engaged with what is happening on the stage, you lean back in a cinema". Finally, and most controversially, he concluded with the bold statement that "the crap factor is much higher in cinema than theatre". Nik Powell could not compete and, while clearly having a great sense of humour, he struggled to support his opening gambit that "cinema is the only true art form of our age". Similarly, when he said that "boring old British cinema is more responsive than any theatre", all that he really proved was his own later comment that "cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world". Perhaps his best moment was when, as he was talking during this live performance a Blackberry started ringing and it was his own. Had that happened during a stage show, he might well have been sworn at by one of the actors or chased from the theatre. As was pointed out later on, in a cinema it might well be another audience member calling to ask him what he thought of the movie. Rupert Goold seconding the motion, was more laid-back than his proposer but made some convincing points, opening with his view that the key to theatre is that it is participatory and expanding this to describe it as a poetic art-form. He then moved on to discuss acting contrasting the two media. He acknowledged that there is much fantastic film acting but he believes that a significant factor in making theatre superior was that "a great stage performance is richer than a great screen performance thanks to the pressure of performing in front of a live audience". This led to a considerable amount of discussion with the audience. Maybe his killer blow was delivered in the context of society today. Goold reminded the live audience that theatre has to be a social activity, whereas he felt that the act of cinema-going will die out and watching film will become private and solitary. To summarise this point he said, "If you believe in society you have to favour theatre over film". Ekow Eshun was an excellent and very passionate speaker on behalf of cinema. He had no doubt at all that "film is the predominant art form. It is the cultural language of our time". This was on the basis that the man in the street or the office will talk about film more often than any other art form. As a consequence, he made a bold statement that theatre is now irrelevant since "cinema is about our dreams and fantasies while theatre is limited in its aspirations and is prosaic and parochial by comparison". He concluded provocatively that "theatre aspires to be cinema". The floor was then thrown open to the audience which contained a number of professionals supporting each side. The Evening Standard's Fiona Mountford explained that she spends much time watching movies but prefers theatre and had no doubt that "people take theatre more seriously than cinema". In response to a question from your critic as to whether Ekow Eshun would accept that in reality, since they are more talked about even than film, EastEnders and Coronation Street are the cultural language of our time, he thought that "TV apes the scale and ambition of cinema" which provoked the obvious rejoinder from Michael Billington that "cinema apes the scale and ambition of theatre". An interesting debate developed after Rupert Goold claimed that "theatre is more interested in its audience than cinema" when two younger members of the audience explained that they felt excluded from the theatre because they could not afford it. Other speakers contributed contrasting views such as "performance in film can be very intense" and "theatre is a unique, shared, live experience". Before the final round up, Michael Billington turned up the heat with the challenging opinion that "cinema would barely exist without theatre", since that is where its writers, directors and actors come from. He led off the final round ups praising theatre on the back of the intensity of the experience and the fact that it can change your life. Nik Powell had little more to add though he was saddened that up to this point, nobody had pointed out the contribution that cinema had made a pornography, or possibly that pornography had made to cinema? Rupert Goold was adamant that an art form should be measured by its peak and theatre has higher peaks. Finally, Ekow Eshun taking Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death as the supreme example said that cinema touches our lives and helped him at least, to look at the world anew. This debate proved to be a real success for the Soapbox team of Patrick Marmion and Rachel Halliburton. It got both audience and speakers really excited in their support of their favoured art-form and whetted the appetite for their December debate on the merits (if any) of critics. Philip Fisher
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