“in service of the play”
October 23rd, 2008 • teaching, theatre
A post from Lyn Gardner on the Guardian theatre blog that might be useful to my current 1st year students:
Walk into the Royal Court upstairs to see Leo Butler’s Faces in the Crowd and you are in for a bit of a surprise. Back in the 1980s I recall the upstairs space being used with real imagination for the promenade premiere of Jim Cartwright’s Road, long before promenade performances were fashionable in British theatre.
In recent years we’ve become quite used to seeing the Court’s upstairs space configured in many ways or simply used as a bare space, and now it sometimes feels slightly disappointing when you walk through the door to be confronted by rows of seats. But William Fricker and Rae Smith’s design is something else. It turns the acting area into a sunken bear pit and places the audience around the edges looking down from a height as if observing dangerous animals in a zoo. It’s brilliant, but for a play about debts (monetary and emotional) I did wonder how much the whole shebang cost.
It is a hugely effective device that creates a feeling of being a voyeur as you peer down, but is the design of the play more interesting than the play itself? Is it genuinely in service of the play or there to disguise the play’s deficiencies - or make it seem more than it is?
And there’s that recurring question: how do the specific decisions you make in staging service the play? How do they relate to what you want that performance to achieve?
If you like, it’s part of an exercise in broader consciousness raising: realising that conventions of performance are not accidental or incidental, but choices to be made rather than default positions to be assumed.
