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What about plays?Dateline: 31st January, 1999 If the proverbial visitor from outer space were to take time out from tying poor old Fox Mulder into knots of confusion, conquering the earth, or showering upon us gifts of advanced technology and medicine, to check out British Theatre on the Web, he/she/it/they would be convinced that British Theatre consists of a few musicals and loads and loads and loads of actors! If he really got out his microscope and investigated carefully, he would believe that we have actually produced a few plays, but most of them are a few centuries old and were written by a guy who was either the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon or William Shakespeare (or someone else of the same name)! This week I found a site about a play. That's only the second this year! I've already lost count of the number of sites devoted to actors that I've found since 1st January, but it certainly runs into three figures. Checking over the Plays Library, I find that we have listed 21 plays (one with two sites), of which three are foreign (French, German and American), and four 400 or more years old. That means I have found 14 sites for modern British plays, one of which has two sites devoted to it! Oh no! I'm wrong! The one that has two sites is Art by Yasmina Reza, who is French. So that should read "13 modern British plays ". However, if we restrict our consideration to plays which have had what you might call a "national" airing - that is, they have toured the UK or played in the West End - we are left with a grand total of six! The Magnificent Six First on our list is Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, which played at the Lyttleton and is now on tour. It's a look at the relationships within the Carry On team and the page is actually on the Carry On site, not a site devoted to theatre. Second comes Patrick Marber's Closer, a site produced by theatre advertising and publicity specialists Dewynters. It's a very good site, and does give an insight into the play. Since Closer does feature the Internet, then it would have been very remiss of its producers not to put a site online! Third on the list is Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards!, adapted by Geoffrey Cash. Basically it's an ad for the touring version of the play. No one could call it great theatre: like Cleo..., it depends for its appeal on another art form, in this case Science Fiction/Fantasy, and the vast majrity of thsoe who will go to see it are Pratchett afficionados. Two Stoppard plays have their own sites: The Invention of Love (the one I found this week) and Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead, which is an academic site - and makes a lot of reference to the film with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. Finally there is the site devoted to the Kind Hearts and Coronets tour. And where's the appeal of this? From the film, of course! The Magnificent Three Hundred and Thiry Six That's how many sites there are listed in the Actors (A-L) Library (Please note: this was written in 1999 & there have been many changes since) . There are 29 beginning with A! That does rather tend to put into some sort of perspective what the Internet community feels is important about British Theatre. Or rather, I should say "what is important to them", for, of course, people create sites for things which are of importance to them. But what about producers? Why don't they produce sites about plays? The producers of musicals do: there's an official site for Mamma Mia! and it hasn't even gone into rehearsal yet! The same happened for Saturday Night Fever, and, of course, all the big musicals have big sites: Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Chicago, Les Mis and Miss Saigon. And of course there's a site for every one of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals under the very large Really Useful Group umbrella. No Glamour The problem is, plays just aren't glamorous. They haven't the sexiness of the actors/actresses nor glitz and the glitter and the wide-ranging appeal of the musicals, and they don't produce loadsamoney. Cameron Mackintosh and the Really Useful Group can afford to spend big bucks on highly professionally designed websites with all the latest bells and whistles because the shows are going to make huge profits (or, at least, have the potential to do so: sometimes it doesn't work - witness The Slow Drag), whereas plays are doing well if they cover their costs. Plays have to rely on theatres or producing companies being willing to include them on their sites. Usually the plays themselves are relegated to a listing or, in the best-case scenario, to a single page linked to a listing, and usually what you find there is a synopsis of a few lines, a cast list and ticket prices. Yes, we have some of the best actors in the world. And yes too, we have produced some of the best musicals of recent times (regardless of what Clive Barnes says!). However the real glory of British theatre is the magnificent body of dramatic work that has been produced over the centuries, but, except for Shakespeare, there is very little recognition of this fact on the Web. Individual theatres and companies are beginning to take up the challenge of the Internet, but the concentration, inevitably, is on the corporate: the pages for the theatre or the company stay forever (well, you know what I mean!), but the pages for the plays pass with the productions themselves, or else are buried in the archive. There ain't no money in it! So it's going to be left to the amateur, to the fan, or to the academic to create the sites for the plays. So, come on all you theatre-lovers out there! Rather than produce the 3,493rd site devoted to Ken Branagh or Helen Mirren, rather than repeating ad nauseam the same biographical details, filmographies and pictures of your favourite British actor, why not do it for your favourite play? Your site won't get as many hits: there are far fewer people out there keen on A Man for All Seasons or Equus than on Ewan McGregor or Hayley Mills, but you'll be making a bigger contribution to the Net as a wide-ranging information source than if you put up the umpteenth site devoted to Sean Bean! Articles Indices: |
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