I guess that the impact on the arts will result in a marked decrease in the number of virtue signalling celebs. Every cloud, as they say…
Andrew Best
3 years ago
£35 to be lectured to about whiteness! Sounds absolutely riveting. It’s to expensive, what working class person is going to spend the equivalent of a week’s single person shopping on watching a play? It’s for the middles classes and old people. Lived in London all my life, 30 minutes walk from the west end and I know no one who goes or cares in any way about your theater
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
I was a very keen theatre goer in my late teens and early twenties, always at the sodding Royal Court and various other places including opera and ballet. I enjoyed it at the time and saw some memorable plays, but I stopped subsidising the luvvies a long time ago outside of am dram to support people I know. Actually, the amateurs can be very good. A production of Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy Of The People’ last year was excellent, with fine staging and performances).
Over time I came to realise that a lot of these theatres etc are tax funded, so if you attend you are, effectively, paying twice! And boy are you paying – the prices have gone crazy over the last 20 years. I certainly will not be returning if I have to wear one of these ridiculous masks, which I believe do more harm than good.
The best play I ever went to was at the Judy Dench theatrical school in Crouch End- all young actors in training. Utterly memorable.
Matthew Powell
3 years ago
I was a regular at the theatre but hadn’t been in over two years before coronavirus shut the theatres down.
90% of plays are little more than far left propaganda now. I’ve withdrawn my business and I hope the government will soon withdraw my taxes as well and spend them on something more worthwhile.
Frederik van Beek
3 years ago
Of course theatre and cultural live alltogether will not bounce back, never again. The people who still have some common sense left are hiding, watching, waiting and waiting and waiting…… afraid to loose their jobs, to loose their friends. Meanwhile a new, still nameless ideology is unfolding. An ideology of total control. As with every new ideology, cultural life, which stands for our freedom of expression, will be destroyed. The definition of freedom will be rebuild. Freedom as we know it will be replaced by safety. Taking risk is like a terrorist act. (English is not my native language, as one can probably read, never mind….:))
Freedom will be replaced by safety. (Taking risk is like a terrorist act.) Brilliant! I’ll drink to that!
Mike Spoors
3 years ago
I think it is obvious that the Arts are now obsessed with widening the audience into groups that they feel are under represented without ever wondering whether they are actually in the least bit interested. As someone who came to culture late, after 50 years of gallery going, theatre, opera and dance attendance I can’t ever really say that the majority of the audience has got younger, rather we have grown old together. although Dance has been more successful than other forms.
My local theatre has set out to embrace ‘diversity’. They have colour and gender blind casting and it is clear that they are actively encouraging a more diverse and younger audience. The problem is that the audience, attending because the plays are part of the exam curriculum appear not to be that interested, rather as it was when I attended schools classical concerts decades ago. I appreciate that if you don’t try then you will never attract a wider audience but I, and I suspect many like me, are put off going to things where the objective is not to celebrate the thing as the creator intended but to dissect it, traduce it if necessary, and ultimately diminish it to make it ‘meaningful’ to an audience that just might not exist or indeed care about it in any form. Easier to blame the existing audience of the old, white, and middle class who of course are actively stopping the rest from crossing the portals of High Culture.
As you may surmise I no longer go to the subsidised theatre, feeling that it is no longer aimed at me and the feeling I get that my very presence is somehow a provocation.
Nick Whitehouse
3 years ago
Tut, tut, – creative destruction,; the celebs will have a fainting fit over such a capitalistic term! Are their any interesting modern plays at all these days? They all seem to be dire left wing plays, guaranteed to leaving one depressed.
occam2436
3 years ago
The author of the article shows why the “theater” lost its proper purpose a long time ago. She wants the “theater” to return so she can have more nightmares. Most people pay for entertainment that provides a RELIEF from the nightmares of reality, not EXTRA nightmares.
Your point is well taken that entertainment provides relief. However, theater is not, and has never been. solely to entertain. It is also to “enlighten” which is one of the reasons the left has found it so useful, because they are constantly seeking to “enlighten” the dull masses. To aver that theater–which can be a serious and perhaps the most profound of all art forms–is merely entertainment is to misunderstand its purpose and history. But, you are right, it should ALSO entertain; and the far left seems to be filled with unhappy, angst-ridden dark souls who use it for their own personal catharsis rather than the catharsis of the audience. At least when catharsis is intended. At any rate, the result inevitably is boring blather.
Michael Dawson
3 years ago
As with many businesses, the discussion of the impact of the pandemic often seems to be rather simplistic. Yes, some businesses will go bust or close because the owners run out of money or decide it’s just not worth carrying on. But unless the pandemic has led to some more fundamental changes, it’s highly likely that other will take over the failed businesses, or set up their own, so the sector as a whole will not be much smaller in, say, three or four years time. Theatres, cinemas, pubs, hotels – they all come in this category. Office accommodation may be different if the move to homeworking during the pandemic leads to structural changes in the pattern of home/office working.
Jonathan da Silva
3 years ago
“Perhaps a wave of creative destruction is exactly what’s needed.”
Poor Schumpeter rolls in his grave.
Don Holden
3 years ago
I used to live a stone’s throw from the Theatre Royal East fifty-odd years ago, and that theatre was based in the community, with Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles at the helm. Although both of them were undoubtedly lefties the entertainment ( it was not solely dramas ) was not one long lecture. The actors walked down Angel Lane, mixed with the theatregoers when the show was over, and what’s more there wasn’t a theatrical scarf to be seen !
Dean Barwell
3 years ago
Pre Covid I enjoyed theater but was rather picky about what I would attend. The cost even in the smaller local venues (very good where I live) let alone London prices is only one reason. Hofesh Shechter – Political Mother, Jennifer Haley’s – The Nether were masterful in all aspects and well worth the money. Closer to home and so cheaper, great productions of The Woman In Black and guess who’s Coming to Dinner were also superb, the great Gatsby, not so. Most notably the political and ethical aspects of the plays stated were done in that brilliant way that classic theater has always done. Sadly a lot of up and coming plays and company’s are far more interested in ramming an agenda down an audiences throat rather than leading them on a journey, or just good old fashioned entertainment. Having said that compared to comedy, well, enough said.
Andrew Lale
3 years ago
I have had some fantastic experiences in theatres. But I have stopped going, as casting against type, with butch lesbians and black women playing all the men’s roles, has ruined everything.
Peter Scott
3 years ago
The single change MOST needed in theatre is for directors to stop being lunatics. Some productions of the classics seem nowadays almost designed to ruin magnificent plays and torment the audience. (They have even started to change some of Shakespeare’s endings.) There is no real intelligence in presenting (say)”As You Like It” as a festival of transgender palavers. That sort of thing is just UNinventive people with loads of pretension to artistic sensibility putting their own smudgy thumbprint on somebody else’s great achievement in order to tell themselves that they are creative too.
They are incapable of producing great works of their own; and lack the humility to serve well the cause of rendering others’ great works faithfully in the spirit of the scripts.
I guess that the impact on the arts will result in a marked decrease in the number of virtue signalling celebs. Every cloud, as they say…
£35 to be lectured to about whiteness!
Sounds absolutely riveting.
It’s to expensive, what working class person is going to spend the equivalent of a week’s single person shopping on watching a play?
It’s for the middles classes and old people.
Lived in London all my life, 30 minutes walk from the west end and I know no one who goes or cares in any way about your theater
I was a very keen theatre goer in my late teens and early twenties, always at the sodding Royal Court and various other places including opera and ballet. I enjoyed it at the time and saw some memorable plays, but I stopped subsidising the luvvies a long time ago outside of am dram to support people I know. Actually, the amateurs can be very good. A production of Ibsen’s ‘An Enemy Of The People’ last year was excellent, with fine staging and performances).
Over time I came to realise that a lot of these theatres etc are tax funded, so if you attend you are, effectively, paying twice! And boy are you paying – the prices have gone crazy over the last 20 years. I certainly will not be returning if I have to wear one of these ridiculous masks, which I believe do more harm than good.
The best play I ever went to was at the Judy Dench theatrical school in Crouch End- all young actors in training. Utterly memorable.
I was a regular at the theatre but hadn’t been in over two years before coronavirus shut the theatres down.
90% of plays are little more than far left propaganda now. I’ve withdrawn my business and I hope the government will soon withdraw my taxes as well and spend them on something more worthwhile.
Of course theatre and cultural live alltogether will not bounce back, never again. The people who still have some common sense left are hiding, watching, waiting and waiting and waiting…… afraid to loose their jobs, to loose their friends. Meanwhile a new, still nameless ideology is unfolding. An ideology of total control. As with every new ideology, cultural life, which stands for our freedom of expression, will be destroyed. The definition of freedom will be rebuild. Freedom as we know it will be replaced by safety. Taking risk is like a terrorist act. (English is not my native language, as one can probably read, never mind….:))
Freedom will be replaced by safety. (Taking risk is like a terrorist act.) Brilliant! I’ll drink to that!
I think it is obvious that the Arts are now obsessed with widening the audience into groups that they feel are under represented without ever wondering whether they are actually in the least bit interested. As someone who came to culture late, after 50 years of gallery going, theatre, opera and dance attendance I can’t ever really say that the majority of the audience has got younger, rather we have grown old together. although Dance has been more successful than other forms.
My local theatre has set out to embrace ‘diversity’. They have colour and gender blind casting and it is clear that they are actively encouraging a more diverse and younger audience. The problem is that the audience, attending because the plays are part of the exam curriculum appear not to be that interested, rather as it was when I attended schools classical concerts decades ago. I appreciate that if you don’t try then you will never attract a wider audience but I, and I suspect many like me, are put off going to things where the objective is not to celebrate the thing as the creator intended but to dissect it, traduce it if necessary, and ultimately diminish it to make it ‘meaningful’ to an audience that just might not exist or indeed care about it in any form. Easier to blame the existing audience of the old, white, and middle class who of course are actively stopping the rest from crossing the portals of High Culture.
As you may surmise I no longer go to the subsidised theatre, feeling that it is no longer aimed at me and the feeling I get that my very presence is somehow a provocation.
Tut, tut, – creative destruction,; the celebs will have a fainting fit over such a capitalistic term!
Are their any interesting modern plays at all these days? They all seem to be dire left wing plays, guaranteed to leaving one depressed.
The author of the article shows why the “theater” lost its proper purpose a long time ago. She wants the “theater” to return so she can have more nightmares. Most people pay for entertainment that provides a RELIEF from the nightmares of reality, not EXTRA nightmares.
Your point is well taken that entertainment provides relief. However, theater is not, and has never been. solely to entertain. It is also to “enlighten” which is one of the reasons the left has found it so useful, because they are constantly seeking to “enlighten” the dull masses. To aver that theater–which can be a serious and perhaps the most profound of all art forms–is merely entertainment is to misunderstand its purpose and history. But, you are right, it should ALSO entertain; and the far left seems to be filled with unhappy, angst-ridden dark souls who use it for their own personal catharsis rather than the catharsis of the audience. At least when catharsis is intended. At any rate, the result inevitably is boring blather.
As with many businesses, the discussion of the impact of the pandemic often seems to be rather simplistic. Yes, some businesses will go bust or close because the owners run out of money or decide it’s just not worth carrying on. But unless the pandemic has led to some more fundamental changes, it’s highly likely that other will take over the failed businesses, or set up their own, so the sector as a whole will not be much smaller in, say, three or four years time. Theatres, cinemas, pubs, hotels – they all come in this category. Office accommodation may be different if the move to homeworking during the pandemic leads to structural changes in the pattern of home/office working.
“Perhaps a wave of creative destruction is exactly what’s needed.”
Poor Schumpeter rolls in his grave.
I used to live a stone’s throw from the Theatre Royal East fifty-odd years ago, and that theatre was based in the community, with Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles at the helm. Although both of them were undoubtedly lefties the entertainment ( it was not solely dramas ) was not one long lecture. The actors walked down Angel Lane, mixed with the theatregoers when the show was over, and what’s more there wasn’t a theatrical scarf to be seen !
Pre Covid I enjoyed theater but was rather picky about what I would attend. The cost even in the smaller local venues (very good where I live) let alone London prices is only one reason. Hofesh Shechter – Political Mother, Jennifer Haley’s – The Nether were masterful in all aspects and well worth the money. Closer to home and so cheaper, great productions of The Woman In Black and guess who’s Coming to Dinner were also superb, the great Gatsby, not so.
Most notably the political and ethical aspects of the plays stated were done in that brilliant way that classic theater has always done.
Sadly a lot of up and coming plays and company’s are far more interested in ramming an agenda down an audiences throat rather than leading them on a journey, or just good old fashioned entertainment.
Having said that compared to comedy, well, enough said.
I have had some fantastic experiences in theatres. But I have stopped going, as casting against type, with butch lesbians and black women playing all the men’s roles, has ruined everything.
The single change MOST needed in theatre is for directors to stop being lunatics. Some productions of the classics seem nowadays almost designed to ruin magnificent plays and torment the audience.
(They have even started to change some of Shakespeare’s endings.)
There is no real intelligence in presenting (say)”As You Like It” as a festival of transgender palavers.
That sort of thing is just UNinventive people with loads of pretension to artistic sensibility putting their own smudgy thumbprint on somebody else’s great achievement in order to tell themselves that they are creative too.
They are incapable of producing great works of their own; and lack the humility to serve well the cause of rendering others’ great works faithfully in the spirit of the scripts.