Not quite sure what to make of Andrew Haydon’s mildly tongue-in-cheek list of cliches of visual theatre that should be banned: some items on the list are specific images or props – battered suitcases, falling feathers, umbrellas-as-birds, people climbing out of furniture1 – but elsewhere there’s the demand that we get rid of entire forms of media: no microphones, no video feeds or projection. Is the medium really the problem, or the way in which it is used?
I also particularly enjoyed the dual prohibition on blackouts and movement sequences instead of blackouts. Is this a call for performance without any scene breaks, a bid for the punctuation of the empty stage or just bloody-minded awkwardness? The failure of visual theatre or performance work to develop its own vocabulary can be tiresome, but it strikes me as a little unfair to mark out those forms alone for a failure of imagination. The “off-the-shelf” approach to direction and design (hello, box-set) isn’t exactly unknown in mainstream theatre. As ever, there’s more than enough blame to go around.
Perhaps we can arrange some kind of artistic trade: visual theatre gives up the bowler hats and shredded-paper-as-snow, and naturalistic drama stops pretending those doors at the back of the set lead out into the garden.
- This might be shorthand for “anything that resembles Theatre de Complicite, circa 1992.” [↩]
