Critical Comment for Mar 06
Is the straight play dying out? Are we seeing the demise of the solo author? I normally avoid such cosmic questions. They remind me of those absurd pieces on “the death of fiction” invariably accompanied by reviews of another bulging batch of new novels. But a recent week on the critical beat led me to wonder if the theatrical ground wasn’t beginning to shift under my feet. Let me explain.
One night I went to see Amato Saltone at Shunt Vaults. This was a weird experience in which the audience was led on a journey through the cellars beneath London Bridge station and confronted by unsettling Hitchcockian images; because we were split into groups, we all had different stories to tell. Next night it was off to Hammersmith for Kneehigh’s Nights at the Circus, a gaudily enjoyable re-creation of Angela Carter’s novel about an angelic aerialiste. Although Tom Morris and Emma Rice are credited with the adaptation, this is basically a company-devised show.
What came next? Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project, which proved to be a visually sophisticated trip into the Montreal wizard’s pysche. After that, I was at the Old Vic for The Soldier’s Tale, a laborious Anglo-Iraqi show in which Stravinsky’s Faustian fable was rendered in both English and Arabic. I also nipped down to The Pit to catch Metamorphoses and Electra, two pieces exuberantly performed by an experimental troupe from Poland’s Gardzienice who have had a big influence on British directors like Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice.
After all this, it was something of a relief to catch the magnificent revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the name of the writer, Edward Albee, shines out of the programme.
By now I’m sure you get my drift. It is perfectly possible to go to the theatre in London for five nights in succession and see pieces that are company-devised, site-specific, formally experimental or image-driven – sometimes a combination of all four. And I wasn’t exactly going off the beaten track. I saw all these shows with sizeable audiences, many of them encouragingly young, who have a generously inclusive view of what theatre can be.
My one question is whether this new definition of “theatre” isn’t beginning to exclude plays. Looking round at the slightly Sloaney, party-going group with whom I did the tour of Shunt Vaults, I wondered how many of them had checked out Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community at the National.
I am not, I promise, launching into a fogeyish rant on devised or experimental theatre. Like everything else, it can be good, bad or indifferent. I also welcome a theatre that can embrace the thrilling physical excitement of Nights at the Circus, the visual ingenuity of Lepage or the folkloristic frenzy of the group from Gardzienice. But I also have a hunger for plays in which characters speak carefully-crafted dialogue that expresses the vision of a solo author. And I am beginning to wonder if this is a taste shared by the rising generation.
I made another discovery in my week of what is now fashionably called “experiential” theatre: that a traditional play is often more subversive and life-changing than a group-devised piece. Admittedly, I was lucky in that my week was followed by exposure to Albee’s masterpiece. But, after spending three hours watching Virginia Woolf’s George and Martha hacking themselves and their guests to pieces, I was forced, as we all are, to confront a big issue: can one really live out one’s life sustained by comforting illusions or, in the end, does one have to face facts?
I know it’s an old question. Intriguingly, it’s the same one posed by Ibsen in The Wild Duck, lately at the Donmar. Ibsen’s conclusion is also radically different from Albee’s. He warns us against missionary truth-tellers; Albee argues that we have to confront reality. But both are master-dramatists who draw you into a fictive world and – here’s the real point – leave you changed at the end of the experience. You come out of a cracking production, like Michael Grandage’s of Wild Duck or Anthony Page’s of Virginia Woolf, re-examining your own life, a different person from the one who went in.
It’s a truism to say that all theatre takes you on a journey. But I find the metaphorical journey you go on with a great play infinitely more unsettling and disturbing than the physical journey you go on with a show like Amato Saltone. Obviously, there’s room for both. I just feel we are in danger of sliding into a situation where it’s considered much cooler to share some kind of devised experience than to sit in formal ranks watching a play.
People are right to question the form theatre takes. But I want to raise my voice loudly on behalf of the solo dramatist, living or dead. I’d also argue that the much-mocked theatre of illusion, in which you imaginatively enter into another world, still has legs. Is the straight play dying out? Possibly. But, judging by tumultuous audience reactions over the past year to dramatists like Schiller, Ibsen and Albee, I’d say not for a long while yet.