Photo by Peter Lewicki on Unsplash
Last weekend I went to see 7 Ans de Réflexion, a French adaptation of The Seven Year Itch, at Les Bouffes Parisiens. While I was able to book my ticket and buy a pre-show glass of wine in French, an entire play performed at classic screwball comedy pace was beyond the reaches of my rusty French. I deliberately chose a play that I already knew the plot of so that even if I was only catching one sentence in every four, I would still be able to follow the piece. However, as I watched the piece I realised that even if I wasn’t familiar with George Axelrod’s play (via Billy Wilder’s 1955 adaptation with Marylin Monroe and Tom Ewell), I would have been able to follow it.
As I laughed, ohh-ed, ahh-ed and ooh-ed with the rest of the audience, I was reminded of why I love theatre ahead of other art-forms. I could have picked up a book in a Parisian bookshop and, while I might have gotten the gist of it, a general idea of what the author was saying, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy it as a story. It would just be a decoding exercise played out at puzzle pace rather than at the pace a plot should be enjoyed at. A play, on the other hand, has the advantage of liveness. When it’s brought to life on stage, a play is no longer just a text, it is infused with myriad other means of communicating its ideas. The movements of an actor, the tone of their voice, the details of a set, the lighting design and so many other elements come together to convey the story.
It is the communality of theatre that wins my heart. I am a complete bookworm, but my favourite way to enjoy a story or poem is read aloud. Similarly, I will happily listen to an album at home, but I will always choose live music over a recording, even if it is a choice between an album I love and someone performing songs that I am not as mad about. In sharing art together the way we do in theatre, we tap into a different vein of communication, into a collective understanding that brings us closer together and enlivens whatever work we are enjoying.
This is, in part, why I have always railed against the narrow parameters of our definition of “theatre.” Since beginning to work with a dance company I have been asked more than once what made me move from theatre to dance. My answer is, I haven’t. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that I have moved from drama to dance. In the same way that I consider performing poetry a form of theatre, dance is just another art-form within the theatre.
At the moment on Take Your Seats, there are a wide variety of events from a “radio-play-within-a-play” to a restaurant critic’s comedy show, and an evening of spoken word to a Depeche Mode tribute gig, and I would argue that all of these are theatre. They all have the essential ingredients that make theatre what it is, and make it my favourite artistic dish; performers present on stage telling a story, various artists working together to create a live, physical representation of a story, and an audience.
Antonin Artaud once wrote, "The theatre, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre." As we open the doors of the New Year at the end of this month, let’s resolve to draw back the curtains and welcome in theatre in all of its forms.
