What is Theatre?

An Introduction and Exploration

John Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136083891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

This major introductory textbook is from one of the leading educators working in theatre today. What Is Theatre? will make its reader a better playgoer, responding more fully to performance, with a keener appreciation of all the resources of theatre-acting, design, direction, organization, theatre buildings, and audiences. By focusing on the best professional practice and the most helpful learning processes, Dr. Brown shows how to read a play-text and to see and hear its potential for performance. Throughout this book, suggestions are given for student essays and class discussions, to help both instructor and reader to clarify their thoughts on all aspects of theatre-going. While the main focus is on present-day theatre in North America, history is used to illuminate current practice. Theatres in Europe and Asia also feature in the discussion. A view is given of all contributors to performance, with special emphasis placed on actors and the plays they perform. This textbook is not tied to a few specific play-texts, but designed to be effective regardless of which play a student sees or reads. In Part Two, leading practitioners of different generations and cultural backgrounds describe their own work, providing a variety of perspectives on the contemporary theatre. All this is supplemented by nearly 100 black and white and color illustrations from productions, working drawings, and plans. This new text engages its readers in the realities of the theatre; it is up-to-date, comprehensive, and packed with practical advice for understanding how theatre works and how plays come alive in performance. John Russell Brown is professor of Theatre at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has taught at a variety of colleges including New York and Stanford Universities. For 15 years he was an associate director of the National Theatre in London, and he has directed plays in many other theatres including Cincinnati Playhouse, the Empty Space in Seattle, and the Clurman Theatre in New York. Professor Brown has written extensively about theatre, especially about Shakespeare and contemporary theatre. He is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre.

I What Is Theatre?

1 The Power of the Theatre

DOI: 10.4324/9780080520995-1

Plays on Offer: A selection of theatre programs.

Before looking at the different parts that together make up a performance in the theatre, we will take a much wider view and ask what theatre does for an audience, what it achieves when it functions fully. Each part has to be viewed in this larger context because here will be found its justification and the measure for success. At the same time beginning with a larger view helps to define theatre over against other arts and entertainments. We will examine five aspects of the power of theatre.

Theatre Creates a Social Occasion

The next time you go to a theatre, arrive early and stand in the main lobby for five or ten minutes watching the people come in. Each of them has paid money and given his or her time to come and see the same play, but each one brings his or her own concerns along with them, thoughts that no one else will experience in exactly the same way. You can see that in their faces and in how they walk and stand around. They look at different things: toward the door, as if waiting for someone else to arrive; at pictures or posters on the walls, as if they had nothing better to do; at someone else’s clothes. Some stare into the distance. They speak in very different voices, and about many different things. Some people talk a lot and others are silent, but in most people you will see a slight relaxation as they enter from outside: they have arrived, with time to spare and at the right place.

When the bell rings announcing five minutes before the play begins, you sense a change; you can hear a new sound and feel a new rhythm. People settle into their seats and, when the auditorium lights begin to dim and go out, silence and stillness herald the moment for which everyone is waiting, when the curtain will rise or an actor will walk into view. Even after I have seen a production several times, having worked on it for many weeks in rehearsal, this moment never fails to sharpen my attention. I forget the audience, their concerns and my own concerns, and wait for what is about to happen onstage, and everyone else responds in much the same way.

The difference between the intermingling individuals in the foyer and the concentrated and sometimes excited audience as the play begins is some measure of the hold theatre can have on us and of its power to create a shared experience. At Epidaurus late on a summer afternoon, in a grand and solemn landscape some hours’ journey by sea or road from Athens, an audience of eighteen thousand will sit waiting for a performance to begin in a vast open-air theatre. During the day they have journeyed through the countryside by motor coach, car, cart, or bicycle, or on foot. Some have camped on the hillside within sight of the theatre and then filed slowly along dusty paths and climbed steep banks of seats to find places high up, perhaps a hundred feet from the stage. On such occasions the silence before the play begins is profoundly impressive. One feels that the performance could become a great corporate act of affirmation and a release feelings never recognized before.

In our own far smaller theatres, the attention that each member of an audience shares can be more intense, more sharp or nervous. It can be intimate and warm, perhaps even cozy. The size of the theatre, where it is in town or in the country, its design and furnishings, the music playing before the curtain rises, the expectations of the audience—all are factors that control the kind of response that is shared in the first moment of concentration. What happens afterward the play will control: as it submits to the power of the theatre, the audience is in the hands of the actors and of everyone else who has worked on the production. Perhaps only one thing is certain about what happens next: it will be unlike anything one has experienced when one is alone.

When watching a theatrical performance, many individuals share the same experience within the same period of time, in close contact with each other, and afterward some of them may talk together about the experience. In this, theatre differs from literature or painting where one reads or sees for oneself and with few or no companions; theatre is more like music or film. One person cannot easily protest outloud against the performance of a play, or say anything at all in more than a whisper or an instinctive cry. Although some theatres encourage audiences to respond vocally and actively, when a production is good and grips attention, no one coughs or fidgets because everyone is sharing in the play. We can all be held captive by a play in performance, and, as a member of a crowd, an individual may behave in unusual ways. Without reserve or embarrassment, one person may weep at something said or done onstage, something that is not given a passing thought outside the theatre. On the other hand, an entire audience may become helpless with infectious laughter or relax together in simple happiness. Long ago St. Augustine said that theatre was like the plague: it could be caught so easily.

A reader of a novel or a poem is always able to disengage from the printed sequence of narrative or description and so escape into his or her own thoughts, but theatre is not private or “intellectual” in that way. An audience’s attention is drawn forward all the time by what is happening onstage; if something is missed, there is no turning back to look it up on the printed page. This means that, unlike prose narrative, a good play can state the obvious without losing the attention of the audience, and can call upon common and basic responses without fear that they will be refused. It speaks to individuals who sit among other individuals and whose thoughts and feelings are strengthened by being shared. The difference is like that between listening to a recording in the privacy of your own room and listening to what are basically the same sounds by the same band when you are part of an enthusiastic crowd taking pleasure in the music almost as if it has taken possession of you.

A dramatist once told me that he had written a final line for his play that he had always thought very funny, right up to when the play was performed. In rehearsals its effect was a little uncertain, sometimes eliciting laughs from the few people who were watching. Then, to everyone’s surprise, when it was played to a full and paying audience, the line was received in chilling silence as those very same words seemed to cut deep into the hearers’ minds. Working alone on the script and sitting in at rehearsals, the author did not take into account the cumulative effects of performance and of a large number of people hearing those words together for the first time. More often the opposite is true, and at previews and first nights actors find that they have to fight against the audience’s laughter, which they had in no way expected and which they now find to be destructive of the principal effects they are trying to achieve. Performance gives rise to a shared experience that goes beyond what any one person onstage or in the audience could have imagined or experienced alone.

Going to the theatre on opening night is rather like going to a party, or like giving one. The host may have little idea beforehand of how the guests will enjoy themselves, who will get along with whom, or what mood anyone is in. The guests know even less, because they have little idea of who will be there or what has been arranged for them to eat and drink, to hear, and to watch. They may have some general expectations about all these things, but no one can know beforehand exactly how host and guests will play their different parts. One of the signs of a good party is that afterward everyone wonders how it all happened and spends a good deal of time talking about it. Good theatre is very much like that.

Comparisons with other entertainments can help us to understand what happens in a theatre and nowhere else. At first it may seem to theatre’s disadvantage that a play cannot be seen anywhere and at any time as a film can. But a theatre audience won’t be looking at just one copy of the production sent from far afield and distributed in exactly the same form to millions of people around the world. A theatre production is never “fixed” once and for all but will be made all over again at every performance and will be slightly different each time a new audience enters the theatre and shares what is happening onstage. Unlike a film, a stage production will not be exactly the same for every audience. Often it will have been made in the town in which it is performed and within the last very few weeks, so it is able to reflect its audience’s particular mind-sets and concerns. Instinctively it will change overnight if some national disaster or celebration has occurred. Theatre is more local and topical, and more responsive to its audiences, than the cinema can ever be: it provides a meeting between play and spectators, a lively public occasion.

Even very old plays can be made immediately relevant to their audience. A production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet was performed for ten years in Moscow from 1971 to 1980, as if it had been written to depict that very time in Russia’s history. In the title role of the production by Yuri Lyubimov at the Taganka Theatre was Vladimir Vysotsky, an actor who was also a singer and lyricist. His alienation from the repressive government of the day had made him a popular icon and symbol of political protest, so as Shakespeare’s prince he was able to show very clearly to his audiences, in terms they immediately recognized, that an honest death was a better choice than a tortured life under oppression.

Theatre can be a social art form, a lively and powerful means of sharing ideas with thousands of people, and as a result it has been subjected to severe political censorship in certain places and at certain times. In Shakespeare’s day several playwrights, including Ben Jonson (1572-1637) and George Chapman (ca. 1560-1634), were put in prison for writing a play that had gotten past the official censor only to be judged unacceptable in performance. Even though it was a comedy, it still got its authors and acting company into trouble. From well before that day right down to the present time, plays have been written that have never been allowed to be performed. At the end of the twentieth century, state censorship, which was once the rule in Europe and elsewhere, is much less common, but it still exists, notably in some parts of Africa and in China. In Britain, theatre censorship was in operation until 1968; in South Korea until 1988.

Because theatre provides an occasion for a social gathering, performances that demonstrate unpalatable truths in the flesh can awaken common responses among large numbers of people. For example, Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty (1935), about a strike of New York taxi drivers, had members of its audience calling out in support of union solidarity. For some governments and other vested interests, theatre spells trouble and needs to be controlled.

Today in the United States and other European nations, the political intentions of many theatres are limited to what is called “raising consciousness” about certain issues, rather than active campaigning for political action. Some companies make a point of claiming that they have no political agenda so that they can attract public funding, yet few of these groups are unaware of their social role as educators and their opportunity to instigate debate about the needs and future of a rapidly changing society. In the United States every major city has at least one small theatre dedicated to African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American traditions. Similarly there are gay and lesbian theatres, theatres for children, senior citizens, or the deaf or blind, and for many other groups of people whose conditions of life are not shared by everyone else. These theatres either speak to special audiences about matters of mutual concern or make special causes and special pleasures more evident than before to audiences drawn from all parts of society.

On every side we can see evidence of the theatre’s power to create a social occasion and speak directly to many people. To sit in the invariably crowded theatres of Russia under Stalin, or of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other Eastern European states under the Russian occupation, was an amazing experience. Despite censorship and the presence of the secret police, the theatre had a sense of common commitment that was contagious, giving the people more hope of freedom from oppression than any other public medium on the far side of the Iron Curtain. In East Berlin, just before the Wall was pulled down in 1989, the huge public meetings that turned protest into a new force for change were organized by theatre workers who had taken the lead in exposing the inequities of state control and thus gained credibility as representatives of freedom throughout the city. You can read about this in the Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (Oxford University Press). When the occupying forces left Prague in the same year, the nation chose as its new president Vaclav Havel, a dissident playwright whose work in theatre and whose courage while under arrest had already won for him the nation’s trust and respect.

Theatre has other social roles. It can also reinforce the ideas of the powerful. In the seventeenth century, King Louis XIV of France gave special protection to Molière, the most popular writer of comedies in his time, and in return the playwright provided magnificent spectacles glorifying the wealth and wisdom of the monarch; he also incurred frequent criticism, his work provoking some extraordinary controversies. At all times some plays will flatter privileged audiences by showing how superior they are in lifestyle or intelligence: Nöel Coward’s comedies in the 1930s and Neil Simon’s in the 1960s are examples of this, flattering their well-off audiences by the elegance or wit of the play’s characters, drawn from much the same sections of society. Other plays raise issues without clearly supporting either side of an argument. Such is David Mamet’s Oleanna (1993), which depicts a case of indictable sexual harassment in such a way that both parties have received vociferous support from audiences and equally strong denunciation, according to who was in the audience and the finer points of particular stage performances.

Other plays transport entire audiences away from everyday concerns and into enjoyable and exotic fantasies by using sensational stage spectacle and irresistible music and sound. Productions of The Phantom of the Opera, Cats, and other “mega-musicals” play for year after year in the biggest theatres of London and New York and are duplicated in almost every major city around the world.

Even when not successful in the usual senses of that word, theatrical productions are social occasions. In small theatres a few actors may perform a play that makes impossible demands on themselves and on their audiences, and then, in a nearly empty auditorium, the scattered members of the audience will not be able to lose themselves in the play and will, at best, sense the underlying strain felt ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustration
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I What Is Theatre?
• II Theatre Making
• Glossary
• Index