the view from the audience?
June 2nd, 2008 • teaching, theatre
Depressing commentary of the day:
The number of people now applying for a place on a three-year acting degree course has reached unprecedented levels. And yet, according to Geoff Colman, the head of acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama, thanks to audition-based TV shows, finding quality students has never been so difficult.
“This year, we received more than 4,000 applications for a place on our degree course,” Colman says, “and that figure is going up every year. But we’re finding that fewer and fewer of those applicants will have ever set foot in a theatre…”
Ouch.
I’m thinking that this can be read in a few different ways: applicants who don’t see theatre as any kind of route for a career in acting, applicants who don’t have any performance experience but like the idea of acting, or applicants whose experience of drama is solely from watching TV or film. Or a combination of all three.
Still, it raises an interesting question: just how important is the experience of watching live theatre as an audience member to the education of a performer?
