You know I love theatre. Well, there's a section in The Inner Level about high culture. Uh-oh, I thought, they're going to condemn me for my elitist tastes. But they didn't: they said, rather in the Murdoch line, that great art matters for all the reasons that I feel it matters. Not just about heritage and tradition, but about challenge and creativity, widening horizons and broadening outlooks. An way of straining toward an ideal. A way of valuing. Enhancing perception. Creating space. Their criticism was with cultural institutions not opening their product to a wider audience but playing to the 'badge of status' market.
Now, I know theatres with a strong social outreach programme - the Young Vic and the Almeida, for example. The National has done its bit by making recordings of plays free to all on YouTube during the pandemic. I get tickets for £10, £15, £20 at times - not much difference from going to the cinema and a lot cheaper than Premier League football. I had a standing place at the National for £5 once - and saw Bryan Cranston directed by Ivo van Hove in Network which remains one of the most incredible performances I have seen.
The galleries in London, museums too, are free to enter, though special exhibitions may elicit a charge. Many galleries, museums, theatres and institutions (like the Wellcome Institution and the Royal Society) have talks and discussions which are priced at only £5 or £10. Some are free. You see school groups at performances of texts being used for national exams. There are commendable attempts to open up art (as well as science) for everyone, which is as it should be.
Yet I have found that when I mention my passion for theatre, on occasion I have been met with the accusation of elitism. And I can well believe that there are many who feel excluded, who would or could feel awkward, looked down upon, undeserving. And many others who might not even consider that it could be interesting - and if they did would or could assume it's irrelevant or too high-brow or self-indulgent.
Ballet, classical music concerts (apart from the Proms) and opera certainly struggle to avoid this kind of categorisation. Wilkinson and Pickett, in the book, suggest that classical music, by catering exclusively to an existing, older and more conservative clientele, have limited the range and scope of creativity within the domain. It's certainly true that, in contrast, contemporary dance and the Young Vic theatre very noticeably have generated great creative vivacity by their commitment to inclusion, without 'dumbing down' or diluting quality.
For this reason I was very disappointed that when the Old Vic theatre decided to 'live stream, a series of 'real' performances of their two-person play Lungs, they opted to do it in a rather exclusive format: ticket lines opened at 12 midday and you queued for tickets. I was in line for four hours and had left the damn computer running and lost my slot by not realising when I got to the front. I don't even know how much they were charging. It seemed like they had an opportunity to 'open up' but instead made the tickets a prestige purchase.
I was talking about this to a friend when we were discussing the language that is allowed in working for our employers covering sport. I work on football for a production company whose programmes go to international broadcasters where English may be a second language or where the commentary is translated into another language with a rapid turnover. I have to keep my scripts very simple and the vocabulary limited. He commentates on cricket for UK radio. He can weave in references to culture (high and low) and literature as well as current events and so on. Yet one young producer will criticise him on occasion for going 'over the heads' of young audience members that the station is trying to attract. But the BBC's Charter read that it aims to inform, educate, engage and entertain.
Educate. Here's the thing: media should challenge, it should offer aspiration and inspiration as well as comfort and familiarity. It should raise questions not just give answers that we already know.
Instead, as broadcasters seek the widest possible audience, they cater to the lowest possible denominator much of the time. It's as if they are telling their audiences, 'This is all you can understand. So we're keeping it simple for you. Nothing here will make you anxious or curious. You'll not need to worry.' How patronising and limiting.
It wasn't always like this. My friend reminded me of long-form drama series in the past that reeled in the viewers. I, Claudius. based on Robert Graves' novels about the Roman Emperor. An audience of eight million. The Prisoner - which was as complex and demanding as they come - had, for the final episode, 18 million. Monty Python used to refer to philosophy and poetry. Of course, all this was when we had just three or four channels. People couldn't switch over or stream. But they didn't seem to want to. They were granted the right to sit 'at the grown ups table'. They were deemed capable of complex thought. And they were. They are. But now we say, 'This reality TV show is good enough for you.' Well done, broadcasters.
So, how are we to imagine that people will flock to theatre when their tastes have turned from complex drama to soap, reality and violence as a rule not an occasional offering?
I'm being unfair. There are still great and challenging dramas. The Wire. Ummm... OK, there are great dramas, well-produced and superbly acted with wonderful, complex storylines. Killing Eve and True Detective. Homeland and Chernobyl. More, probably, coming out of the USA. There are good period dramas - Dickens and Austen adaptations especially. Some challenge simple moral stereotyping; some offer insight and question presumptions. And we have history, travel and archeology series as well as wildlife ones, which tend to be very well done.
So, what are people missing if they don't go to the theatre? I suppose the same distinction as going to a football match versus watching it on TV; going to a gig or concert rather than watching a production of it.; seeing art in a museum or gallery not on wonderful series like Civilisation. Not quite the same distinctions, but there is always a distinction.
Being there, actually being there, gives the event a communal feel. It is shared. When feeling and responding are public rather than private something changes. An intensification as well as an awareness that many experience things as you do and some see things differently. There is a kind of unselfing in that. You are reflected in the reactions alike and differently, coming to feel connection as well as the spread of variety within a community. The physicality of emotion, in the faces and bodies of actors, makes the experience more human,more visceral - though film and TV attain an effective simulacrum by editing, showing close-ups. But theatre allows you to sense the responses of the witnesses, to choose your focus, to practice your perception by opening to the responses of others - on stage and in the audience. As Murdoch points out, perception is a moral act - while film 'does it for you'; theatre allows you to choose for yourself.
The aesthetic appreciation - and this would be analogous to those of film buffs who notice production and direction, CGI and so on - incorporates the skill of the set designer and the producer, the director and, in the case of a play you know, the script editing. All this becomes part of a whole, but also offers an intriguing variety of aesthetic, evaluative, moral choices that you can experience and consider.
The emotional response to drama that edges toward tragedy - I am thinking here of Chekhov and Ibsen, but also the likes of The Doctor and Mary Stuart - offers the scope for the intense moral deliberation that I have explored while considering Simon Critchley's book on tragedy. It's not just the catharsis, there's more... an enlivening and testing of one's ethical insights. On the emotional front, I think that's also important: theatre says to you, 'Feel! Exercise your compassion for the flawed and the compromised! Enlarge your sense of empathy! Recognise injustice, but also share the awareness of the way that sin and weakness are in us all! Refrain from simple solutions! Feel the complexity and the uncertainty, the contingency and the frail, loving, hating, fearing, desiring completeness of humanity!'
The Wire, I feel, achieves this - and yet witnessing it, face to face, with a crowd of others, silent, breathless, in darkness, together and yet separate, over the course of a couple of hours makes the experience seed into your soul.
Comments