Dear Theatre Bods,

I wont be writing in this blog for a while (it's already been a while!), due to personal commitments. However, I will still receive and read your mail, so if you wish to send me any comments, questions or requests, I will still be here to read and reply to them! In the meantime, please enjoy the content on my blog, and I hope it helps you with your studies and theatrical ideas!

Until further notice,

Swollen Foot Theatre Blog
xxxxx

Cinema vs. Theatre

I want people to want to go to the theatre as much as they want to go to the cinema; in a nutshell, I want the theatre to be as accessible as the cinema. It’s certainly more versatile, because with the cinema, no matter how impressive the content on the screen it is still, and will always be, behind a screen. Of course, with the rise of 3D and even 4D cinema, the film industry is making impressive steps forward, which is great. But what a lot of people don’t realise is that theatre has been doing this for many, many years.

I’m not talking about the scary audience participation you get in some plays, where the actors come down from the stage and pick on some terrified audience member, drag them onstage and make them answer embarrassing questions and so on. I am talking about the unconventional promenade staging, for example, where the action is not confined to the stage – not even to one room, most of the time, but occurs in several locations, with the audience encouraged to either follow the actors or go ‘exploring’ it themselves (as with Punchdrunk’s 2006 production of Faust, which was performed in an abandoned warehouse in London). This style of theatre gives customers what the cinema cannot: a truly intimate, interactive experience.

Battersea Arts Centre, dedicated advocators of new and innovative theatre, held the One on One Festival last Summer (of which I was lucky enough to have been involved with), which consisted of a series of one-to-one performances in which the roles of actor and audience were blurred. Buy a ticket and you could do anything: submit yourself to a “nurse’s” treatment, get kidnapped by a group of beat boxing teenagers, or become an accomplice in a murder mystery. It is what Susanna Clapp of The Observer called a cross between a “ghost train and treasure hunt”, and I agree with her. And who doesn’t love ghost trains and treasure hunts?


Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, once commented that, "It will be a long time before cinema can capture anything more than a pale reflection of [theatre] … it is potentially exciting but I don't think anyone has cracked it yet."

Perhaps the reason that cinema is a 'pale reflection' of theatre is because it lacks the electricity of a live performance, which has a more profound effect upon the emotions and reactions of the average audience than cinema does. Nudity on the big screen, for example, gets little to no reaction these days. It’s practically normal to see a sex scene in a film, too. Nudity on the stage, however, is received with gasps, nervous laughter, woops from teenagers on school trips – for some reason, nudity has a greater effect on theatre audiences than it does on film ones. Why is that? Perhaps it is due to the greater intensity of live performance; the characters and the action in a play feel so much closer to you as an audience member than they are on the big screen, and that alone seems to bring on heightened emotion. So if you see a funny play, you'll laugh your head off. If you see a scary play, you'll be terrified.

When I saw The Woman in Black at The Fortune Theatre, London, it was wonderful to see how the audience looked over their shoulders every two minutes with worried expressions covering their faces. Once they had realised that the actors were not confining themselves to the stage, but that the action covered the auditorium itself, it was as if their fear intensified: What if the woman in black is standing behind me? What if she touches me? What if she screams in my ear? - I will admit that these were all thoughts that crossed MY mind as I watched the play. It was a truly uncomfortable, terrifying experience, and all because the actors weren't sealed behind an invisible wall but were live, present, and invading 'our' space in the aisles. You simply can't get that watching a horror movie in a cinema!

So I hope you can see, now, why I get excited about the theatre. It's not that I hate the cinema, or think it has no value, not at all! It's just that I often get annoyed, considering what it can offer, that there aren’t more people choosing the theatre on a night out. The immediate comment I’d expect to hear at this point would be, “but the cinema’s way cheaper!”, and I’d agree with you. The theatre is, on the most part, too expensive. So this begs the question, if theatre were cheaper, would more people go?

Last week I was offered £3 theatre tickets for a guest list of my choice. I asked around some friends. A few were interested, but couldn’t make it, and the others didn’t so much as reply. In the end, no one took me up on my offer for my £3 tickets.

Is price really the only issue when people choose between the cinema or the theatre, then, or is there some other factor at play?

I would like to hear your opinions!

The play was good, but ... WHAT DOES IT MEAN??

Last week I read Laura Barnett’s article, ‘Can you understand theatre when you don’t speak the language?’, concluding, as she did, that it need not necessarily hinder the enjoyment of a play if the language it is spoken in is not your own. Rather it can be beneficial to the theatregoer, giving us the opportunity to experience a play from an exciting new angle; via every element except the spoken narrative.

This article reminded me of a question I’d asked myself whilst at uni:

Is it vital to understand a play in order to appreciate it?

Let me elaborate. If you watch a play, enjoy it, but have no clue what’s going on in it, does it matter? Do we need to understand everything that happens on stage in order to enjoy it, appreciate it, or criticise it?

Do we have any right making comments like, “That was so good. I dunno why… I didn’t really get it. It was just… good.”? Or, “That was the biggest pile of shit I’ve ever watched. I can’t explain it. I just didn’t like it.”?

Why, it seems, must there always be some form of intelligent justification for our feelings when we leave the theatre? Sometimes a play is just good. Sometimes it’s just bad. Isn’t the way a play made us feel, enough?

This is why I liked Laura Barnett’s article. She has watched some plays which she really didn’t understand (due to the language barrier), and yet this didn’t interfere with her enjoyment and appreciation of them. She didn’t stress herself trying to figure out the narrative, she just sat back, and watched from a new perspective.

I will sum up my own thoughts on this with an anecdote. I watched an Italian production of Verdi’s opera Aida last Summer (you can read my post about it by clicking here). I only loosely knew the plot before I went, and I didn’t bother to look it up. And, not being an Italian speaker, I didn’t understand a thing that was being sung. Yet I had a wonderful, sensory experience, the feelings of which will stay with me for a long time. In comparison, there was a horribly annoying couple sitting next to me, who I presume were also not Italian and didn’t know the story of Aida, as they spent the majority of the time shining a flashlight onto a book containing the story, trying to catch up with what was happening. They spent more time looking at their book than they did the stage. Perhaps they had a better grip of the story, but who had the better theatrical experience, do you think?

Theatre is whatever you take from it- it doesn’t matter whether you understand a play inside out or whether you are clueless but fascinated until the final curtain falls. If it reaches you in some way or another, then I think it’s done its job.

The Play You're Not Allowed to Hate

I was reading Robert Brustein's book of essays, Who needs theatre?, recently, and this paragraph caught my attention:

'The other built-in success factor is that the species is really a subgenre of a time-tested Broadway artefact - the Play You're Not Allowed to Hate. In the past, this used to be a political drama- people resisting a corrupt political system or fighting for the Loyalist cause during the Spanish Civil War. More recently, it has almost exclusively featured ethnic minority groups, thus increasing the quota of moral extortion. To fail to respond to plays about blacks or women or homosexuals, for example, is to stand accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, or getting up on the wrong side of the bed. Now that the handicapped have organized themselves into another minority pressure group, they have access to the same kind of blackmail. Meanwhile, theatre becomes an agency for consciousness raising, with audiences alternately being tutored and entertained for considerably less money than a modest contribution to an effective rehabilitation program.'

I was struck by this paragraph because not too long ago I had similar thoughts about a play I watched by a 'disabled theatre company', as they called themselves. Having thoroughly enjoyed it, my overly-analytical mind questioned whether I would have enjoyed it as much if the performers were not disabled. Did I read too much into the performance because of it? Did I only enjoy it because, on some level, I thought there was no way I could criticise it without seeming cruel, misinformed, ignorant? I thought it’d be interesting to bring the topic up for discussion.

Would you agree that there are plays that fall under the category of the Play You’re Not Allowed to Hate? If so, which ones?

I’ve had people say to me that they don’t like or understand Shakespeare, or see the big fuss about his work, but they don’t like admitting it because people assume they are stupid if they say this. Does Shakespeare fall into this category? Is Hamlet a Play You’re Not Allowed to Hate?

Shakespeare invented Drag?

As a loyal follower of all things theatre, you may already know that Shakespeare invented a lot of words which are now part of our every day vocabulary (eyeball, bloody and critic, to name a few). Here's an interesting little tale of how one particular term came to be.

David Walliams drag

Have you ever wondered what the word 'drag' means? As in, 'drag queen', 'drag act', 'dressed in drag', etc, and referring to a man dressed as a woman?

Several of Shakespeare's plays featured the theme of deception and disguise. Often (as in Twelfth Night, for example), the bard's work would feature a woman who dressed as a boy. When this was the case he would put a little note in the stage directions that 'so-and-so enters drag.'

drag was an abbreviation for DRESSED AS GIRL.

Perhaps Shakespeare did not mean to invent a word when he wrote this abbreviation, but he certainly did!

How To Die On Stage

As I was helping my sister with her revision, we got onto the topic of how the ancient Greek dramatists did not show dying/death on stage. Rather this action was done ‘offstage’ and reported to the other characters (and audience) by way of a messenger or chorus. The dead body was often revealed later on an ekkyklema (something like a trolley, literally ‘a wheeled-out thing’).

I mentioned that this was the total opposite in ancient Rome, where not only did they love bloodthirsty displays of death/murder/etc., but if a play called for a character to die, a condemned man or lowly slave was replaced with the actor and actually killed.

It is said that the ancient Romans believed there was no truthful way to show dying on stage, as no living person has ever experienced death. So killing someone for real was the only way to show this truthfully.

Wow.

This had me thinking, though. Didn’t the Romans sort of have a point? Not about the bloodthirsty killing, obviously, but about not being able to portray death truthfully. Unable to commit murder onstage, how do we act ‘death’ or ‘dying’ truthfully nowadays?

1. Just copy what other actors are doing in films/plays/TV (But where did THEY learn?)
2. Look up the physiological effects that being shot/stabbed/poisoned etc. would have on your body and try to recreate them.
3. Run out into the motorway and try to get yourself killed, but without actually dying, so that you can experience near-death, if not death itself.
4. Just imagine what it would be like.

I’m very interested in this, especially since I’ve never had to do it myself.
How do you, or have you, prepared for a scene in which your character dies on the stage?

Swollen Foot and Oedipus... eh?

Happy Thursday! Here's a fun little fact for you.

The reason I named my blog Swollen Foot is because this is the English translation of the name Oedipus. And I really love my Greek theatre (in case you hadn't noticed)!

Everyone knows that Oedipus was the bloke who killed his father, married his mother and then stabbed his own eyes out when he found out the truth. Here is a lesser known fact about the tragic legend: The reason he didn't know his mother and father is because he was given up at birth. When I say 'given up', what I really mean is that his dear biological parents left him hanging from a tree by his feet. Nice. When he was found by his future adoptive (I suppose) parents, his feet were swollen from the pressure. So his adoptive parents named him Oedipus - 'Swollen Foot'.

When I first learnt this I was so charmed by the story it has stayed with me ever since. I always thought that if I started anything theatrical I would call it Swollen Foot. So I did.

:)