My impression is that theatre has been stagnating for many years and audiences dwindling or at least failing to attract new, young members.
This painful period of closure might be just what theatre needs to stimulate innovation. I like the idea of more outdoor performances with the audience closer to the players as in Shakespeare’s day, and perhaps a more impromptu element.
I’ve seen so many youtube videos about flashmobs playing Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It looks like so much fun. I wonder if roving groups of players can do the same for short plays: appear suddenly in Hyde Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon and perform something that’s not too serious or challenging.
Idle thoughts from an idle man. I’m sure professional actors, playwrights, etc can come up with better ideas. They should certainly try.
That’s a great idea. I’m not sure how far it will to meeting the costs of bed and board, but it will certainly encourage the players to become responsive to what the audiences might favour
Subsidized theatre will survive for now because it is a job creation scheme for the middle classes .The playwrights and actors who are still doing their bit for theatre are often over 80 and are basically the last generation who were raised without television-when they are gone will there be any appetite for theatre to continue?
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
Perhaps. I don’t know. I gave up on all the leftie-luvviedom years ago, having once been a very regular theatregoer.
However, the leftie-woke types who might still go the theatre seem to be the very people who are most afraid of Covid. So there’s a good chance they won’t be attending any public events for the rest of their lives.
Tim Pool observed a few months ago that he couldn’t get lefties into his studio for interviews because they were so terrified of Covid. Conservatives, however, were happy to leave the house and go to his studio.
Yep. My daughter took me to Stratford in Summer 2019 and it has exactly the left-luvvie approach that the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon has.
Shakespeare, of course, was a Commoner, son of a glover, darling. But he went to Stratford’s grammar school — where the pupils came to school with up to 8 pints of small beer every day — and learned Latin and made up plays on classical themes. What you might call an education.
Johann Strauss
3 years ago
The fundamental problem/dichotomy for the theater, the ballet and opera is that tickets are extraordinarily expensive. It’s one thing to pay a lot of money for a once in a lifetime experience, but quite another to pay for a “blah” experience. Even movie tickets are way overpriced and people will migrate, if they haven’t already, to looking entirely at home, even though many movies really do benefit from the big screen.
Jerry Smith
3 years ago
There’s Theatre, and then there’s theatre. So much of the discussion around the performing arts and the pandemic equates theatre with the west end etc. It is so much more than that. Personally I’m more interested in seeing the Edinburgh Festival re-established and small to medium scale local arts venues reopen and don’t give that much of a toss about the West End.
So much professional theatre is so cringingly awful. I grew up in a “theatre family”, which means I was involuntarily subjected to enough bad theatre before the age of 20 to last more than several lifetimes. I don’t just mean bad productions; poor action, direction etc. can be forgiven as long as the play itself it good, but bad plays. These days – pre-lockdown I mean – I mostly attend only community theatre productions of comedies (am partial to Oscar Wilde) or musicals, or the odd Shakespearean comedy.
Margaret Tudeau-Clayton
3 years ago
Just to fill in on Shakespeare: it was because he was out of theatre work in 1592-3 that he wrote two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His output in the Jacobean period may have been significantly impacted by sporadic outbreaks of the plague. His bleakest tragedy King Lear was possibly written during a thetare lockdown in 1606.
Interesting, isn’t it, that even plague lockdowns and business closures in Shakespeare’s time – over a horrific bacterial disease that killed almost everyone it infected – lasted a shorter time than lockdowns in our time over a flulike viral disease with an over 99 percent survival rate. But I wrote a novel (my first; possibly also my last!) during the lockdown back in the spring of 2020 after I was temporarily laid off from my job, so I feel a certain sense of kinship with Shakespeare now.
Sean MacSweeney
3 years ago
Not forgetting Cromwells puritan shutdown of Theatres as well, till the “Merry Monarch” Charles II reopened them all, which also led to the bigoted puritans sailing off in a huff on the Mayflower to the new world as they didn’t like the new religious freedom in England and preferred only their dogma groupthink
My impression is that theatre has been stagnating for many years and audiences dwindling or at least failing to attract new, young members.
This painful period of closure might be just what theatre needs to stimulate innovation. I like the idea of more outdoor performances with the audience closer to the players as in Shakespeare’s day, and perhaps a more impromptu element.
I’ve seen so many youtube videos about flashmobs playing Beethoven, Mozart, etc. It looks like so much fun. I wonder if roving groups of players can do the same for short plays: appear suddenly in Hyde Park on a sunny Saturday afternoon and perform something that’s not too serious or challenging.
Idle thoughts from an idle man. I’m sure professional actors, playwrights, etc can come up with better ideas. They should certainly try.
Everything needs new ideas and they come from young people. Old people see new ideas as threats to their comfortable existences.
That’s a great idea. I’m not sure how far it will to meeting the costs of bed and board, but it will certainly encourage the players to become responsive to what the audiences might favour
Subsidized theatre will survive for now because it is a job creation scheme for the middle classes .The playwrights and actors who are still doing their bit for theatre are often over 80 and are basically the last generation who were raised without television-when they are gone will there be any appetite for theatre to continue?
Perhaps. I don’t know. I gave up on all the leftie-luvviedom years ago, having once been a very regular theatregoer.
However, the leftie-woke types who might still go the theatre seem to be the very people who are most afraid of Covid. So there’s a good chance they won’t be attending any public events for the rest of their lives.
….. and have you managed to find a far-right bigot theatre enclave in which you’re happy?
Well I go to amateur performances in which friends take part, and read Brecht at home.
“the leftie-woke types who might still go the theatre seem to be the very people who are most afraid of Covid”
How can you possibly know that?
Simplistic claptrap.
Tim Pool observed a few months ago that he couldn’t get lefties into his studio for interviews because they were so terrified of Covid. Conservatives, however, were happy to leave the house and go to his studio.
Yep. My daughter took me to Stratford in Summer 2019 and it has exactly the left-luvvie approach that the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon has.
Shakespeare, of course, was a Commoner, son of a glover, darling. But he went to Stratford’s grammar school — where the pupils came to school with up to 8 pints of small beer every day — and learned Latin and made up plays on classical themes. What you might call an education.
The fundamental problem/dichotomy for the theater, the ballet and opera is that tickets are extraordinarily expensive. It’s one thing to pay a lot of money for a once in a lifetime experience, but quite another to pay for a “blah” experience. Even movie tickets are way overpriced and people will migrate, if they haven’t already, to looking entirely at home, even though many movies really do benefit from the big screen.
There’s Theatre, and then there’s theatre. So much of the discussion around the performing arts and the pandemic equates theatre with the west end etc. It is so much more than that. Personally I’m more interested in seeing the Edinburgh Festival re-established and small to medium scale local arts venues reopen and don’t give that much of a toss about the West End.
So much professional theatre is so cringingly awful. I grew up in a “theatre family”, which means I was involuntarily subjected to enough bad theatre before the age of 20 to last more than several lifetimes. I don’t just mean bad productions; poor action, direction etc. can be forgiven as long as the play itself it good, but bad plays. These days – pre-lockdown I mean – I mostly attend only community theatre productions of comedies (am partial to Oscar Wilde) or musicals, or the odd Shakespearean comedy.
Just to fill in on Shakespeare: it was because he was out of theatre work in 1592-3 that he wrote two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His output in the Jacobean period may have been significantly impacted by sporadic outbreaks of the plague. His bleakest tragedy King Lear was possibly written during a thetare lockdown in 1606.
Interesting, isn’t it, that even plague lockdowns and business closures in Shakespeare’s time – over a horrific bacterial disease that killed almost everyone it infected – lasted a shorter time than lockdowns in our time over a flulike viral disease with an over 99 percent survival rate. But I wrote a novel (my first; possibly also my last!) during the lockdown back in the spring of 2020 after I was temporarily laid off from my job, so I feel a certain sense of kinship with Shakespeare now.
Not forgetting Cromwells puritan shutdown of Theatres as well, till the “Merry Monarch” Charles II reopened them all, which also led to the bigoted puritans sailing off in a huff on the Mayflower to the new world as they didn’t like the new religious freedom in England and preferred only their dogma groupthink
Where is Basil Chamberlain when we need him?