for the purpose of drying wet clothing
We performed our 10th Off the Mantle reading at the Attic the other day. We rehearsed this one a little more, a day more, but I always feel like I haven't rehearsed enough the day of the reading. We did Mamet's adaptation of Chekov's The Cherry Orchard and Nick Dear's adaptation of Alexei Arbuzov's The Promise.
I read The Cherry Orchard on holiday and I wasn't pulled into it. I had a little difficulty getting through it because there was barely a finished sentence, and then I was really floundering when I found that there wasn't even the beginning of a sentence, just blank pages with sounds jumping out at you and running away over your shoulder. No, that last bit's a joke, obviously, but after a while I did feel a little assaulted by random words. The mistake I made was reading it in my head. That was silly because I've always thought that plays and poems should be read out loud, because if they don't make an impression on the senses, then they're... um... literary, not dramatic. (Because literature is silent, I know, don't berate me.) Anyway, I didn't read The Cherry Orchard out loud and I couldn't get into it. I saw what Mamet had done with the dialogue with the tightening and the interruptions, but silent, it didn't make much of an impact. When we did our first rehearsal, I saw what it could be, and I saw dramatic sense in it. But I don't like the subject matter, "endless soul-searching in big old country houses". It's not my thing.
But The Promise.
It's an intense play. It comes off the pages and into your head like molasses, pushing you steadily, irresistibly to the end. It's postwar life delivered with a free can-opener. I don't mean that it's violent, but that it's jagged; you pull the top open slowly and it's the secretest tiniest privatest griefs, longings, affections held carefully inside. Does this sound corny? I don't care. I thought if it sounded as good in my head, it would be so much more on a pedestal. And it was. Even reading it out loud at rehearsals was special. I love these moments, when something jumps out of a book and takes charge of the surroundings. First it seems to come from the page and out through you, and then out from you, and that makes me so nervous. I love this feeling so much because of the unpredictability of the moment - you know, of course you know, what's happening next, but it's happening now, and you have no idea how you're going to feel after the next line.
All this doesn't mean that similar things didn't happen with Chekov's play in the performing of it; I just found myself clinging to Arbuzov a whole lot tighter.
But I think what makes the Off the Mantle readings work as well as they seem to is the audience. The audience that comes into the Attic every fortnight brings with it, I hope, expectation. For an audience to expect something from you is very gratifying, and so the impulse is to satisfy that expectation and do even better. I think your art can only be as good as your audience: some people produce art that is 'better' than their audience, and aesthetically speaking (and I'm not an expert) that may be true; that their art is more complex, more developed, more intelligent than their audience, and that's fine by me, as long as it's circumstantial and not designed. Nobody thought Van Gogh was any good until he was dead. It's not his fault that he wasn't popular, people were just ready to appreciate him a little too late. But, to try to be smarter than your audience is just pathetic.
Perform for your audience, goes without saying, but I don't mean just please them. Entertain them, of course, but don't lie to them with abstract fantasy. For example, I watched a badly acted production a few weeks ago and the actors were so distant from their characters, from the world of the play, that a friend asked in all seriousness, "Is this what is called 'Brechtian' acting?" Of course, I said, "No! This is just bad acting!" and someone in front of us turned around to glare at me in the darkness. It was a self-indulgent play which made no effort to connect with the audience or anything related to the audience (except perhaps adultery; we have plenty of that to go around) in an intelligent manner. And the audience didn't exactly complain.
But the audience that comes to the Attic is different. It's my pleasure to perform for them because I know that if I mess up, I'll know from them. I can feel their attention, just as much as I hope they can sense my conviction. I feel like we have a relationship. I won't waste their time indulging in my aspirations for a Meta award, and they won't waste my time being disinterested in my work. And if this relationship is not imagined, then we'll keep each other honest. I won't do anything that I think is worth less than their full attention, and if they trust what I do they'll give me their full attention. And that's what I think the understanding between the Theatre and its audience should be.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and be a little lofty and maybe even emotional.
The beginnings of Theatre are in religion, in ritual, in re-enactments of the hunt, of legends, of stories - and we all sat around together, listened and spoke together, shouted at the right places, and then stood up to dance, to celebrate the stories and our experience together. It was once a sacred thing to go to the Theatre, to look at each other and how we are and who we were and what we do. The world is a bigger place now. There's more to everything. But it shouldn't mean that we look at each other and how we are and what we do less. In fact, we should do that more, because there's so much more to think about. Even if we become a culture of shopping malls and high-security housing enclosures, we should at least look. (Does anybody wonder, looking at Gurgaon, if that's the future?) Unless we'd like to stop altogether.
I read The Cherry Orchard on holiday and I wasn't pulled into it. I had a little difficulty getting through it because there was barely a finished sentence, and then I was really floundering when I found that there wasn't even the beginning of a sentence, just blank pages with sounds jumping out at you and running away over your shoulder. No, that last bit's a joke, obviously, but after a while I did feel a little assaulted by random words. The mistake I made was reading it in my head. That was silly because I've always thought that plays and poems should be read out loud, because if they don't make an impression on the senses, then they're... um... literary, not dramatic. (Because literature is silent, I know, don't berate me.) Anyway, I didn't read The Cherry Orchard out loud and I couldn't get into it. I saw what Mamet had done with the dialogue with the tightening and the interruptions, but silent, it didn't make much of an impact. When we did our first rehearsal, I saw what it could be, and I saw dramatic sense in it. But I don't like the subject matter, "endless soul-searching in big old country houses". It's not my thing.
But The Promise.
It's an intense play. It comes off the pages and into your head like molasses, pushing you steadily, irresistibly to the end. It's postwar life delivered with a free can-opener. I don't mean that it's violent, but that it's jagged; you pull the top open slowly and it's the secretest tiniest privatest griefs, longings, affections held carefully inside. Does this sound corny? I don't care. I thought if it sounded as good in my head, it would be so much more on a pedestal. And it was. Even reading it out loud at rehearsals was special. I love these moments, when something jumps out of a book and takes charge of the surroundings. First it seems to come from the page and out through you, and then out from you, and that makes me so nervous. I love this feeling so much because of the unpredictability of the moment - you know, of course you know, what's happening next, but it's happening now, and you have no idea how you're going to feel after the next line.
All this doesn't mean that similar things didn't happen with Chekov's play in the performing of it; I just found myself clinging to Arbuzov a whole lot tighter.
But I think what makes the Off the Mantle readings work as well as they seem to is the audience. The audience that comes into the Attic every fortnight brings with it, I hope, expectation. For an audience to expect something from you is very gratifying, and so the impulse is to satisfy that expectation and do even better. I think your art can only be as good as your audience: some people produce art that is 'better' than their audience, and aesthetically speaking (and I'm not an expert) that may be true; that their art is more complex, more developed, more intelligent than their audience, and that's fine by me, as long as it's circumstantial and not designed. Nobody thought Van Gogh was any good until he was dead. It's not his fault that he wasn't popular, people were just ready to appreciate him a little too late. But, to try to be smarter than your audience is just pathetic.
Perform for your audience, goes without saying, but I don't mean just please them. Entertain them, of course, but don't lie to them with abstract fantasy. For example, I watched a badly acted production a few weeks ago and the actors were so distant from their characters, from the world of the play, that a friend asked in all seriousness, "Is this what is called 'Brechtian' acting?" Of course, I said, "No! This is just bad acting!" and someone in front of us turned around to glare at me in the darkness. It was a self-indulgent play which made no effort to connect with the audience or anything related to the audience (except perhaps adultery; we have plenty of that to go around) in an intelligent manner. And the audience didn't exactly complain.
But the audience that comes to the Attic is different. It's my pleasure to perform for them because I know that if I mess up, I'll know from them. I can feel their attention, just as much as I hope they can sense my conviction. I feel like we have a relationship. I won't waste their time indulging in my aspirations for a Meta award, and they won't waste my time being disinterested in my work. And if this relationship is not imagined, then we'll keep each other honest. I won't do anything that I think is worth less than their full attention, and if they trust what I do they'll give me their full attention. And that's what I think the understanding between the Theatre and its audience should be.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and be a little lofty and maybe even emotional.
The beginnings of Theatre are in religion, in ritual, in re-enactments of the hunt, of legends, of stories - and we all sat around together, listened and spoke together, shouted at the right places, and then stood up to dance, to celebrate the stories and our experience together. It was once a sacred thing to go to the Theatre, to look at each other and how we are and who we were and what we do. The world is a bigger place now. There's more to everything. But it shouldn't mean that we look at each other and how we are and what we do less. In fact, we should do that more, because there's so much more to think about. Even if we become a culture of shopping malls and high-security housing enclosures, we should at least look. (Does anybody wonder, looking at Gurgaon, if that's the future?) Unless we'd like to stop altogether.
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