“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.

More on free tickets

September 25th, 2008 • production process, theatre

With perfect timing, the Chicago theatrosphere is also talking about free theatre tickets. And - unlike the UK’s top-down, centralising, money-to-venues-already-getting-money approach - this scheme depends on companies opting in.

Here’s Kris Vire:

Theater companies, in my understanding, choose to opt in and choose how many tickets at which performances they want to give away. Audiences get a free sample, giving up nothing more than their email addresses and anonymous demographic information. And, if TCG’s numbers from other cities can be trusted, that exchange results in a significant return: one-third of Free Night patrons return to the same theater to buy tickets or subscriptions within the year.Even better is this: TCG, and particularly its executive director Teresa Eyring and its house magazine, American Theatre, have been criticized in many corners of the theatrosphere in recent months for only representing the interests and outlooks of its members, our country’s big-box regional institutions—the Goodmans, Guthries, Intimans and South Coast Reps of the world—and not reflecting the realities of the smaller theaters that make up the vast majorities, in offerings if not in budgets, of most of our cities’ theater scenes.

So, because there’s an open door policy, it’s equally open to companies of all sizes and flavours. In contrast, the UK scheme reflects existing hierarchies of money and approval: financial support to venues - not companies or productions - which already have the tacit support of state funding.

And there’s the major difference: the companies involved in the Free Night of Theater are choosing to make blocks of free tickets available for their October shows, rather than being subsidised (or persuaded, or bribed) by a funding body. Read more »

On free tickets

September 24th, 2008 • theatre

So, free theatre tickets. Thoughts in no particular order:

1) More people seeing theatre is good, not least for people who make theatre. At the very least, it will subsidise Monday night takings, when even people who like theatre prefer to stay at home.

2) The logic is presumably this: if they like it, they might come back with their wallets. One problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that good (thoughtful, informed, responsive) decisions have already been made about the kind of theatre being staged.

3) Underpinning that is the realisation that a handful of free tickets on a Monday is going to have near-to-zero impact on the artistic direction of any venue (and it’s “major subsidised venues,” not companies or productions that get the money.)

The eligible venues all have - for better and worse - their own taste in the work that they commission, produce or book, taste that has implicitly or explicitly been given the seal of approval by the bodies that fund them.

4) In other words, when you offer free tickets at established bricks-and-mortar venues (who already have local or Arts Council funding) you are not promoting theatre in general, but a particular kind of theatre. Not necessarily good or bad theatre, but a very definite subset of British performance.

5) The reason that some people think theatre is uninteresting, elitist or otherwise irrelevant might have something to do with the perception of that subset. And I use the term “perception” advisedly because we’re also dealing with an overall cultural picture of theatre, as much as any work in any given venue.

6) How many smaller companies (who have no interest in or appeal to the eligible venues) or theatre works could you support for the same amount of money?

7) Sure, the scheme might encourage people to take a low-cost or no-cost risk on a particular production, and/or on the whole experience of going to see live performance. Provided they do so on a Monday when no-one else wants to go.

8 ) Should we be subsidising transport to theatre across the UK, as in the London area? Or child-care for families who want to go? If we assume that most people aren’t violently opposed to the idea of going to the theatre, what apart from the cost of tickets are the impediments to a good night out?

Chicago Theatre season 08-09

September 18th, 2008 • theatre

Dan Granata’s seasonal state of the theatrical mini-nation is up over at Performink, as he introduces the 2008-09 Chicago theatre season. A brief taste:

Shakespeare once again tops the list of most-produced playwright with 20 productions or adaptations of his work. Including the suburban theatres, there will be two Tempests, three Midsummer’s (including CSC’s Short Shakespeare), three Twelfth Nights and five Macbeths (including Radio Macbeth at the Court).

Setting aside Eugene O’Neill’s domination at the Goodman, we have five Tennessee Williams plays (including two Glass Menageries), five Ibsens, three Chekhovs, three Pinters, three Shanleys and three Stoppards. And, thankfully, three plays by Tanya Saracho.

Old Europe takes the New World with a clear point advantage, I think. As Dan points out, many of the smaller companies are unable to plan as far ahead as next Spring, so the current survey count reflects the plans of the larger, established (more financially secure) companies. It’s always interesting to see whether the relative insecurity of smaller companies breeds the need to stage known texts, or seeds bloody-minded adventurousness.

More importantly, here’s Dan’s editorial moment on one of our favourite subjects:

But there are even bigger opportunities for collaboration. As I said before, half the companies in Chicago operate on less than $50,000 a year, yet this season they’ll only produce around a third of the shows in and around Chicago. Producing theatre is expensive and time-consuming.

Creative partnering could take some of the burden off. Sets, for instance, often constitute a huge part of a production budget, yet all throughout the season, companies with no storage space throw out piles of wood after closing a show. All it takes is a centralized list of strike dates and a list of contact people to put some of that scrap wood to use. And that’s just one example.

Indeed.

Staging “The Bird”

August 12th, 2008 • festival, production process, theatre

I’ve caught up with Al Smith - who I’ve known since studying in Edinburgh - a few times since the start of the fringe, during the week when he opened The Bird and The Bee. During the week when he opened his half of the pair of plays twice.

After uncomfortable previews in London and a single performance in Edinburgh, Al took the step of pulling two performances of his play, The Bird, to rapidly rework the script and production. The play just wasn’t working.

It was a step that he couldn’t have taken if he hadn’t had direct control over the whole process as executive producer - and if Matt Hartley (authoring the partner play, The Bee) and James Yeatman (directing The Bird) hadn’t supported the move, or if several years of work with Tom Ferguson and other cast members hadn’t built up a reserve of trust.

Pragmatically (in other words, financially) it’s perhaps hard to think of a better place in a Fringe run to deliberately cancel performances - falling over cheap preview ticket dates and before any major reviews had appeared. Even so, it’s a pretty bold, even crazy move: to not only re-write substantial portions of a play that has already been rehearsed and previewed, but to significantly alter the staging.

The transformation of the sound and lighting design was so radical that Neil Hobbs (also working as the technical director for the Penny Dreadfuls, which I co-produce) was able to tell the Underbelly team that they wouldn’t be using any of the lights on the rig which the production had previously spent time plotting and focussing. Not a single one. Consequently, it’s a design that’s adventurous not merely by contrast, but in its own right.

And the new staging - which exposes the processes of sound, light and characterisation to the audience far more explicitly than before - works well enough that it appears a natural solution to the problem of staging the text, as if it would have been near unthinkable to stage it in any other way.

Of course, you don’t need to know any of this to watch the play; this off-stage narrative of production process has an explicit but still weirdly tangential relationship to the experience of the play as it appears before an audience.

Enough now: go and buy some tickets for the pair.

The Bird and The Bee

August 11th, 2008 • festival, theatre

Al Smith’s pair of plays - writing one, exec producing the pair - have picked up a pair of strong reviews in The Scotsman.

IT’S inevitable that people will want to compare Matt Hartley and Al Smith’s two new interconnecting plays. Smith, the writer of The Bird, has had an illustrious career at the Fringe with company Kandinsky, while Hartley won the prestigious Royal Exchange Bruntwood Competition for new writing last year. Both met and decided to create separate pieces, drawing inspiration from the Bridgend teenage suicides and a bizarre condition called “colony collapse disorder” – where honey bees willingly leave a colony to die, seemingly without reason.

It’s really pleasing to see both works reviewed as part of a whole, proving that kind of experiment in writing can find a critical home. Pragmatically, a pair of four star reviews should sell also tickets through to the end of the festival, and puts both in the running for a Fringe first. Fingers crossed.