The mission. After our recent tour of 'Harlequin Goes to the Moon' I had feedback about the show from someone at Arts Council England's London office who had seen it. I won't give her name. She said we were a 'proper little travelling theatre outfit'. Is that a touch patronising? Some of out Board thought so. But I took it more as an exclamation of surprise. Something like: "Good lord! They're not bad. Where are they from? Eastbourne! They're quite good, in fact. And not even from Brighton or London? Well!" And maybe with the 'travelling theatre' bit she was letting slip a genuine bit of nostalgia for a certain kind of theatre which used to exist?
She went on to say, "I thought it was really well done, with great design, lovely performances (really talented musicians). Very true to its commedia dell’arte form and the audience loved it.” Well, you can’t argue with that. But…she also said it was “very safe for a very targeted homogenous audience. They didn’t break any barriers or update it in anyway” and it was “not really set up to attract new audiences”. But then she added: “though maybe that is not a big deal as they do what they do very well, and they are charming. I might go again if my parents were in town, they would love it!” So she's going to bring her mum and dad!
I was not offended by her assessment of what she perceived as ‘limitations’, didn’t really think it was patronising and, in fact, found it very thought provoking (and therefore constructive). And she gave us a string of real compliments! It has flung up a number of questions in my mind, however. For example, what is ‘safe’ theatre? Does she imply that ‘adventurous’ is by definition better? She has accepted that the skills involved are good, so that is given; she is talking about the content, therefore. Something can be highly skilled, she implies, but maybe that’s not enough. We have targeted our ‘homogenous’ audience (that is, all the same types: presumably she means mainly white, middle class and reasonably comfortable financially?) and we didn’t ‘break any barriers’, nor ‘update in any way’ (so stayed safely within their cultural parameters). Well, the last point is easy. She hasn’t seen us before, so couldn’t know that 'Harlequin' was the first (and probably last) time we have chosen to do a show set as closely as possible in the original cultural context of commedia dell’arte, our first love and inspiration. We just wanted to for once!
But ‘barriers’? Is this what defines the very best contemporary theatre, a high level of skill (of course, given) and the breaking of barriers? What are these barriers which we should be breaking? And apparently we are not ‘set up to attract new audiences’. Well, as she says herself, we target our audience and, in fact, have made a big effort over the last sixteen years to identify an audience to work with and have got to know them very well – and our shows are tailor-made for them. That’s how we have survived. You get one wrong and people won’t come back – and they have kept coming back. Is that such a bad thing? Of course not, and she admits that it is ‘no big deal’ – and we do it with charm! But it does raise questions about responsibility, if you like, to our audience. Is there a case for just making them feel safe in a very scary world, or do we have a responsibility to make them culturally more adventurous? You could argue that by making them culturally more adventurous that enables them to feel safer in a scary world.
She raises questions also about whether it is the role of a cutting edge contemporary theatre company (and therefore one to be funded by the Arts Council) to be ‘set up to attract new audiences’. It takes a lot of time and effort to really get to know an audience, that is, develop a common mental landscape (which is necessary for theatre to work. I’ll tell you why below), so it isn’t reasonable to expect a company to take on that many new audiences. If she means attracting new individuals to become members of our audience, that is a different matter.
Bear with me in giving you an image to hold in your heads. Here is an island (and safety). Around it is the open sea (and adventure). Pleasure in cultural activity is at the boundary between the two. We want to be safe (It is a genetically driven obligation, in fact), but not too safe or it becomes boring – and equally too much adventure can become confusing and frightening. Theatre (in fact all art) works when the performers and the audience are in, or brought into by the piece, ‘a common mental landscape’, as I have said, on the cusp between the safe and the adventurous, and involves the fresh and stimulating manipulation of what is familiar, and the testing and teasing of the boundary between the familiar and the new, or if you like the safe and the dangerous.
As Melville put it in ‘Moby Dick’ (my favourite book for the record), we can adopt the island as our own. It will give us all we want and keep us safe – and for some people safety is enough - or we can commit ourselves to the open sea. Our problem as a company is that everyone is different with varying thresholds. The use of ‘audience’ as implied by our Arts Council visitor is a coming together of similar cultural thresholds, although even then they will not be entirely homogenous. They are not Smarties varying only in colour. Our job is to find the cusp, the exact threshold between the safe and the dangerous (and hopefully that of as many of them as possible as individuals), lure them out in our boats and into the open sea – without scaring the heebee jeebees out of them. And the degree of adventure is going to vary, must vary, between one audience and another.
My mission at the moment, therefore, is to make myself a part of as many audiences as possible at performances by companies who are ‘allegedly’ – I’ll make my own mind up! – breaking the barriers successfully. I want to see what it is like to be 'cutting edge' and 'breaking barriers'. I will report back.
In the next few weeks I will be seeing Forced Entertainment’s ‘Tomorrow’s Party’ at the Battersea Arts Centre, Kate Tempest’s ‘Brand New Ancients’ at The Royal Court, and Propellor’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the Yvonne Arnaud. Next Monday night I will blog again about two plays I’ve seen recently, ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ (in which I saw one of the best individual performances in my life, no less) and ‘Chimerica’, of which Michael Billington in The Guardian said, "If we see a better new play this year we will be lucky." Will I agree? (And do you care?)
