Theatre. This word has a wide variety of meanings. It covers the large, full-scale musicals, with all the bells and whistles of lighting, music, sound effects, colourful costumes, to the monologue delivered on a small stage under one electric light.
You practically have to take out a second mortgage to afford the tickets to a spectacular musical, not to mention the parking, and the prices at professional theatres mean a lot of people who want to go can’t afford to but maybe , there are other ways.
I’ve been talking to a friend recently about theatre in a room – you’d have actors, words, maybe a bit of sound equipment – and a space with chairs for an audience. There are actors and people in houses who already do this of course but not many.
I worked out how many chairs I could get in my sitting room which is relatively small. If I took out the bigger chairs, I could probably get 10 reasonably placed seats and if I crammed them in, maybe 20?
Wouldn’t leave much room for the actors but there’s a certain excitement to the difficulty – actors and directors are ingenious and could make it work.
What this kind of theatre wouldn’t do is provide the money to pay for their time. There would be some, but not a lot.
Maybe there are actors and directors who would see it as an act of kindness to bring a good play into someone’s home and spread its words and story, its subtext, to people who might not otherwise see it? I think of the play, Rita and Douglas – one actor, one pianist.
Plays like Sarah Delahunty’s 2b r nt 2 b six (from memory) actors and some cellphones, which had its first production in the Downstage bar and was so memorable those of us who were there still talk about it.
But actors have to eat and pay a mortgage, provide for their families, find school fees, wear clothes.
And another thing to ponder – are theatre-goers interested in theatre without the expensive bells and whistles, are words and actions delivered by people enough? They are for me – what about you?
