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Articles
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Theatre and the Other Performing ArtsWith due deference to dance buffs and opera freaks, both art forms have less subtlety than the drama, and are less wide-ranging in their expressiveness. I know that opera-lovers everywhere will scream that opera is the most expressive of the arts as it combines the visual arts (costumes, setting, lighting), music and the verbal arts, and that music reaches the emotions directly in a way that no other art form can. Take a slice of bread, spread peanut butter on one third, Marmite on the second and raspberry jam on the third. Now eat it by taking a nibble at a time from each third. That's opera as described above. Boy, am I being contentious today! Seriously, what we have in that third paragraph is what rhetoricians describe as a reductio ad absurdum, exaggerating something to the extent that it becomes absurd or ridiculous. But it has an element of truth. What actually happens in opera is that one thing dominates, the music. We can quite happily listen to a recording of an opera, merely - if we are that way inclined - imagining the visual, or not, if we are not visually-orientated. And we also listen to operas in languages that we do not understand: how many opera-lovers speak Italian, French, German and (supposing we're listening to Janacek) Czech? We may have an English translation in front of us, but we all know that even the best translations - and we don't get the best on record sleeves (sorry, in CD booklets!) - miss the subtleties of language and expression. Dance, of course, utilises all the expressive qualities of movement and gesture to communicate. It has to be said, however, that, as an art form, it is something of an acquired taste, more so than either music or drama. Drama or theatre? You'll notice that I have been using the word "drama" rather than "theatre" on this page, and there is a good reason for that. Theatre is drama, but drama is not just theatre. There is, for instance, radio drama. There is also TV drama, which is different again, and film drama, which, although akin to TV drama, also differs from it. We tend to lump all thse forms of drama together, but we shouldn't really. I do it: this site is for British theatre, but I do refer to TV, film and radio quite frequently, just as stage actors appear in the other media. "Drama" covers them all, but each is quite distinct. Let's see how. In March of last year a survey of kids' attitudes to theatre was carried out. The (entirely predictable) conclusion was that kids do not find theatre "cool" because it isn't real - as one said, "How can it be real when someone who is killed gets up to take a bow at the end of the play?" The degree of "reality" (whatever we may take that to mean!) depends on the visual. In a theatre we are always conscious of the unreality of what we are watching. Even in the traditional box set, with its attempts to reproduce the reality of a room, we are always conscious of the "missing" fourth wall, and we only have to raise our eyes slightly to see the top of the pros arch and, usually, the lighting or the masks put there to conceal the lanterns. With film or TV, however, our visual sophistication allows us to see the edges of the screen without that interfering with our perception that what we are seeing within those edges is real. Strangely enough, we can also accept what we hear on radio as being more "real" than what we see on a stage, for the medium does not stand between us and the message. What is it, then, that distinguishes theatre from these other dramatic art forms? They all (including opera) have a lot in common (words, the visuals, movement, lighting) and so the differences must be in the emphasis:
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