A few days ago on here I was nice about the National Theatre. Yesterday I was nice about Yes Minister.
I've a fundrasing drive going on at the moment in a desperate attempt to compensate for an ACE-shaped hole in my budget for Man Across the way, and as part of it my beautiful wife sent letters to 250 theatre celebrities. Yesterday I got a cheque from Nicholas Hytner, today I got one from Derek Fowlds. It is the policy of this blog, in a spirit of fitting optimism, to be nice about everyone with a chequebook.
Which in a roundabout way includes James Purnell, our new culture secretary, who everyone seems to think is so far doing a good job. What a nice man. I bet he's great with children and animals.
Oh alright, I admit it. I remain to be convinced. Just because a man likes the theatre doesn't necessarily mean he'll do a great job running the whole national cultural infrastructure. I know loads of season ticket holders at Middlesbrough, for example, who'd do a ghastly job of managing the team.
But Purnell has now given a new speech, which might help readers of this blog to forget the one to the IPPR I so cruelly dismantled a week ago. It's much better, almost as happy clappy as Blair's earlier this year, but in this case with something to say. I've had no luck in unearthing the full text, so we'll have to take Charlotte Higgins' word for it and assume she's read the whole thing and not just the press release. It's moderately encouraging.
Excellence, he says, is going to be the main criterion from now on. I'd like so see how he plans on measuring it: peer review seems the only sensible strategy, and there are obvious difficulties even with that. But still. The chances a piece of art has of being good art seems like a very good place to start when formulating an arts funding strategy. He's wrong to say that the access battle has been won, but one of the best ways of widening access is to make really terrific work that people want to see. His example, Punchdrunk's Faust, is a good one.
This brings me to the most surprising news story of the week: Michael Billington in "not talking total arse" shocker. Billington argues fairly persuasively that we do in fact have to continue considering access in the arts world. There's no point in making great work if no more than the same seven people come to see it every time.
This means creating work that will appeal to demographics other theatres can't reach, with all of the attendant problems that brings. Because of course we can't create work in bad faith; that will only lead to bad work. We just have to hope that our beliefs about what is good are shared by the people we manage to get through the door. The root problem then, is not a lack of diversity in the audiences, but a lack of diversity in the directors and theatre managers. There have been massive strides on this in the last ten years or so, but the vast majority of us are still white, middle class and university-educated. In having been working class for about the first fourteen years of my life, I'm mildly divergent from the norm, but not all that much.
So how do we get a real reflection in our profession of the society to whom we profess to speak? I have to come back to youth and community work. As I've said before, this stuff is not a waste of time or money. It's about the future.
But there's an awful lot of bad, tokenist box-tickery going on in this sector, I hear you cry. So there is. And the solution is simple. Put the emphasis on excellence. Inclusion is not a de facto good if what you're included in is rubbish. There's no merit in having been in the Leeds United squad; youth and community work can and should be encouraged to excel. I'm not a believer in entering kids into drama competitions and whatnot; I'm a great believer in doing good work with them and some of my best work is done there. If I ever hear about this bloody job in York (the board meeting to discuss whether they can afford to pay my wages was on Thursday and I'm waiting for the phone to ring: predictions welcome) I hope to continue doing more.
So Purnell may be onto a good thing in putting the emphasis on excellence. But one can't help but feel he's pouring honey into one ear and poison into the other. He's guarded where it most counts: he admits that he doesn't hold the purse strings on this one, and admits it's going to be a tough round. And of course he's right. He can sing the praises of the arts all he likes, but it will only really count when he convinces not us, who are well-known to already have a high enough opinion of our value, but the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It's all very well telling your child he's a good boy. What he wants to know is: are you going to give him a sweetie?
Showing posts with label Michael Billington. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Billington. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 July 2007
Friday, 25 May 2007
Fascism
All manner of tangential factors can affect one's enjoyment of a piece of theatre. The more honest critics every so often admit that having a headache or having had to run for the bus (or rather, their expenses-paid cab), does have an impact. Although most of them continue pretending it doesn't.
As a director there's nothing one can really do about Michael Billington's hangover short of cutting off his head, but there are plenty of environmental factors of which one can take an almost fascistic level of control. That's exactly what I'm about to advocate.
At the start of the show, the audience need to be in a receptive mood, and theatregoers, by and large, are. (This is one of the many unexamined ways in which critics's experiences are separate from ordinary theatregoers. I'm not talking about the free wine, but the fact that they generally arrive alone and spend an awful lot of time with their own thoughts. This makes it very easy to resent something that pulls you out of your reverie.) But how do we ensure they're receptive?
The event starts when people enter the space in which it's going to take place, and the pre-state should be used as unscrupulously as possible in order to render the audience receptive. Jaunty, energetic music is the first port of call. It should preferably have some sort of link with the show, but most important is that it's jaunty, energetic, and pretty loud. Loud enough for the audience to have to make a very slight effort to talk to one another, jaunty enough for them to take from it a sense of fun. If there are any laughs in the first few minutes of your show (and there really ought to be, if you ask me, but more on that some other time), they'll be louder as a result of the audience talking over the music for a couple of minutes.
And the lighting is important too, although I haven't quite figured out the optimum yet. Too bright is no good because that completely loses the sense of event, of entering a different space. There should be something exciting about entering a theatre and if everything is brightly lit it's rather harder to effect that. But too dark is no good because it overeggs that sense.
This is of course all very different if you're trying to create an atmosphere. You often see shows that have a churchy feel upon entering the auditorium, seemingly designed to provoke reverence. For me, what this does is make the audience feel awkward, feel as though they don't know how to behave. I want an audience to feel welcome in my theatre, like this is a party to which they're invited.
And despite taking very careful control of the mood of the room before the show has even started, things can still go wrong. Last night I allowed the show to start five minutes late while we waited for VIP audience members to turn up. In the meantime the rest of the audience were in their seats patiently waiting for kickoff. John and I valiantly entertained them with our loud jaunty music, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we were now nothing more than filler. Before long there was a strong sense of "so what the hell are we waiting for?" pervading the room. When the geriatric VIPs finally turned up they stumbled and fell at some length to their seats, prolonging the agony yet further.
The opening sequence of the show relies quite heavily on the high energy pre-state because it is slow and sombre and its effect comes in large part by contrast. The pre-state having palled, the opening dragged and it was uphill from there to get the audience on board. They managed it, but by god it was a struggle. (Incidentally this is in direct parallel with the bit in yesterday's post about the sequence before the dragon-fight in HP4.) The lesson: don't allow anyone else to control how your show starts. First impressions count.
And don't let in any fucking latecomers. I was once in a production of Howard Barker's Claw in which I opened the second half with a ten-minute monologue. As I started it I could see that audience numbers were considerably down on the first half. Two minutes in, the doors opened and fifty or so people traipsed back in from the bar. This is an extreme example, but if you let one in, you let them all in. The exception to this, as always, comes from Can of Worms. If you're doing clown, latecomers, like every other fuckup, police siren and sudden blast of music from the next auditorium along, are a gift and part of the pleasure comes from seeing the performers take control of things that plainly originated beyond that sphere of control.
This all sounds terribly cynical. "You're trying to manipulate your audience." Yes, I am. It's my job to have an effect on my audience, and the more I'm in control of that effect, the better I'm doing my job. It's no good making a great show and then pissing it away because everyone's in the wrong mood when it starts: one critic with a headache is tolerable, a roomfull of headaches is a problem. To take control is also to take responsbility.
As a director there's nothing one can really do about Michael Billington's hangover short of cutting off his head, but there are plenty of environmental factors of which one can take an almost fascistic level of control. That's exactly what I'm about to advocate.
At the start of the show, the audience need to be in a receptive mood, and theatregoers, by and large, are. (This is one of the many unexamined ways in which critics's experiences are separate from ordinary theatregoers. I'm not talking about the free wine, but the fact that they generally arrive alone and spend an awful lot of time with their own thoughts. This makes it very easy to resent something that pulls you out of your reverie.) But how do we ensure they're receptive?
The event starts when people enter the space in which it's going to take place, and the pre-state should be used as unscrupulously as possible in order to render the audience receptive. Jaunty, energetic music is the first port of call. It should preferably have some sort of link with the show, but most important is that it's jaunty, energetic, and pretty loud. Loud enough for the audience to have to make a very slight effort to talk to one another, jaunty enough for them to take from it a sense of fun. If there are any laughs in the first few minutes of your show (and there really ought to be, if you ask me, but more on that some other time), they'll be louder as a result of the audience talking over the music for a couple of minutes.
And the lighting is important too, although I haven't quite figured out the optimum yet. Too bright is no good because that completely loses the sense of event, of entering a different space. There should be something exciting about entering a theatre and if everything is brightly lit it's rather harder to effect that. But too dark is no good because it overeggs that sense.
This is of course all very different if you're trying to create an atmosphere. You often see shows that have a churchy feel upon entering the auditorium, seemingly designed to provoke reverence. For me, what this does is make the audience feel awkward, feel as though they don't know how to behave. I want an audience to feel welcome in my theatre, like this is a party to which they're invited.
And despite taking very careful control of the mood of the room before the show has even started, things can still go wrong. Last night I allowed the show to start five minutes late while we waited for VIP audience members to turn up. In the meantime the rest of the audience were in their seats patiently waiting for kickoff. John and I valiantly entertained them with our loud jaunty music, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we were now nothing more than filler. Before long there was a strong sense of "so what the hell are we waiting for?" pervading the room. When the geriatric VIPs finally turned up they stumbled and fell at some length to their seats, prolonging the agony yet further.
The opening sequence of the show relies quite heavily on the high energy pre-state because it is slow and sombre and its effect comes in large part by contrast. The pre-state having palled, the opening dragged and it was uphill from there to get the audience on board. They managed it, but by god it was a struggle. (Incidentally this is in direct parallel with the bit in yesterday's post about the sequence before the dragon-fight in HP4.) The lesson: don't allow anyone else to control how your show starts. First impressions count.
And don't let in any fucking latecomers. I was once in a production of Howard Barker's Claw in which I opened the second half with a ten-minute monologue. As I started it I could see that audience numbers were considerably down on the first half. Two minutes in, the doors opened and fifty or so people traipsed back in from the bar. This is an extreme example, but if you let one in, you let them all in. The exception to this, as always, comes from Can of Worms. If you're doing clown, latecomers, like every other fuckup, police siren and sudden blast of music from the next auditorium along, are a gift and part of the pleasure comes from seeing the performers take control of things that plainly originated beyond that sphere of control.
This all sounds terribly cynical. "You're trying to manipulate your audience." Yes, I am. It's my job to have an effect on my audience, and the more I'm in control of that effect, the better I'm doing my job. It's no good making a great show and then pissing it away because everyone's in the wrong mood when it starts: one critic with a headache is tolerable, a roomfull of headaches is a problem. To take control is also to take responsbility.
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