I'm supposed to be reading Sweatshirt Grotowski (it's a joke, never mind) and writing an outline/summary thang. If anyone's read Towards a Poor Theatre and would like to do it for me, I'm taking names. I am sick and tired of the theatrical theories we've been reading lately. The sad thing is, I think it's the way it's being taught.
We just read the manifestos and the books and then get asked to talk about it. We're not reading about how these people came to make these theories, other than what they say themselves, and we're not seeing what on earth the theatre was that they spend all their time complaining about.
It's all so condescending and "oh, really, that theatre they used to do was SO awful, do this instead, this will be wonderful."
We've been going forty years with these people and we haven't come up with anything new. What we've got isn't working, it hasn't revolutionised theatre. If anything, it's created the pompous, stand-offish, 'theatre is for rich snobs' atmosphere. Like modern art, theatre has become an aquired taste. Why do you think it's hard to get people to go into acting for the theatre? Because they're all going into movies and television where they can do the exact same thing for potentially far more fame and money.
Bernadette Peters is just about the only name in theatre that the average non-theatre person might know. And even then, consider, she's almost 60 now. (Wow, Bernadette Peters is sixty, hold on while I ponder that...)
Getting back to the point, theatre cannot be television on the stage. This is why I think in a lot of ways, well made plays, much as Prof. Gandalf loves them, really don't have a lot of place left in theatre. I think good farce will work onstage, because it's live, and an audience will appreciate live timing more than filmed. All those theatrical jokes, let's do it faster, now let's do it faster, now let's do it in slow motion, and now backwards! Classics can remain, of course, that's different but I think theatre needs to move on and become something else.
Not because anything else was so horrible, but because theatre needs to continue to be an art. It needs to do something that no other art can do, and when you could make it into a movie and only lose the experience of being there, well, I don't think that's what theatre needs to be doing.