THEATRE IS DEAD
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As I set down that path, the query was often put to me: Why don’t you write a play? A reasonable thing to ask, steeped as I was in the tradition of Wilde, O’Neill and Pinter. Why not a play, indeed. Frankly, the prospect couldn’t have been more terrifying. Sketch comedy was more my speed. Maybe, down the line, if I took to this whole writing thing, I’d try my hand at a sitcom. The grandness and mystique of the theatre was something I could not envision myself living up to.
At the time, big things were afoot on the stage. The RSC (excuse me while I acronym drop) came to town with, if memory serves, a 27-and-a-half hour adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Kenneth Branagh went on tour with the Henries, Shakespeare’s Henry IV, parts one and two, and Henry V. South African apartheid politics were creeping into our consciousness as Toronto Workshop Productions imported incendiary plays from Johannesburg’s Market Theater. No. The bar seemed impossibly high. Unlike my playwright brethren, I would remain an interested spectator, typing away at my wee piffles while harbouring an ever-increasing sense of professional disappointment at never penning anything of substance.
Then something happened. We had a falling out. Like a relationship that slowly sours due to simple neglect and idle distraction, theatre and I stopped seeing one another. It was nobody’s fault. We just grew apart.
Actually, that’s not true. It was almost entirely her fault. I didn’t wake up one morning and decide we were through. Nobody can accuse me of not trying to make this work. How many sweaty afternoons did I spend, trying to uncover that one rough Fringe festival gem? How long am I expected to put up with interminable evenings, full of self-confessional, youthful angst or dreary, pedantic, undergrad polemics? And I’m sorry. Didn’t I just spend a beautiful summer evening, like, last year in the park watching an umpteenth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Yeah, that’s right. I think Shakespeare may be a bit over-rated. There. I said it.
I am no anti-Shakespeare absolutist but spare me the blind idolatry. The man (whichever man you think that is) wrote 50+ plays, many of which haven’t really passed the test of time. Sure, I’ll drop in occasionally to see Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth. I’ll even give you the history plays, his version of the War of the Roses, because I’ve got a weakness for that kind of thing. The comedies? Pure delusion to think humour can fully travel four centuries. If I have to see one more actor haul on their private parts while uttering an Elizabethan double entendre, I’ll stick a knife in my heart, suicide right on the stage.
A definition of the term ‘insane’ goes something like, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome. Iago gets inside Othello’s head and nothing Desdemona says to her husband will keep him from jealousy-fueled homicide. Friar Laurence never makes it to the crypt in time to bring Romeo up to speed with the plan that’s been hatched with Juliet. Yes, Bottom will end up in a jack-ass head.
Can we move on please?
Maybe if I lived within a stone’s throw of somewhere I could easily see the latest from Tom Stoppard or Howard Brenton or John Patrick Shanley, I’d think more kindly toward theatre. (And maybe I’d actually know the names of some up-and-coming playwrights that have emerged to reinvigorate the stage. Maybe I wouldn’t have become that type of person I detested when I was a theatre student.) I don’t. So, for me theatre seems to have hit a wall, driven into a rut.
Certainly, it’s been eclipsed in the public’s imagination by moving pictures. In terms of cultural relevance, it barely registers a blip. Sure, when Sir Ian McKellen announces he’s going back to the stage to perform King Lear, there’s an outburst of enthusiasm, a crazed clamour for tickets, prices soaring into the thousands. But, come on. Who doesn’t want to see Gandalf, in person on stage? Undoubtedly, he’s fabulous. I still have the Coriolanus poster with McKellen’s mug on it from a production I saw over 20 years ago. These days, however, the draw is simply stunt casting. If that’s what it takes to get people into the theatre, I’ve got a great gimmick. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, with the Gyllenhaals as the separated-at-birth twins, Antipholus of Syracuse and Antipholus of Ephesus, and.. wait for it.. wait for it.. Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen as twin servants, the Dromios. Who’s not going to drop big bucks to see that?
Nope, theatre is dead. We are so over, and I really, really mean it this time. It is but a living museum. Let’s not shed too many tears, however. It hasn’t had a bad run of it. Not counting prehistoric tymes where our ancestors performed shadow plays over the newly discovered fire, we’re looking at 2,500 years, dating back to the works of Aeschylus. We all should be so lucky. Film -- which wounded theatre -- and TV -- delivering the final blow -- both, already under threat from the advent of newer technology, can only engage in wishful thinking to ponder such a long and, at times, illustrious reign.
My only hope is that when the curtain comes down it isn’t before I get a chance to go and see Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story on Stage.
