For many academics, libraries and laboratories are the main sites of primary research. But to contemporary theatre scholars, theatres and performances are the places for investigation—sites of
incalculable value.
Any scholar in any field is bound to spend long periods in the presence of the unspectacular or unremarkable. But in theatre valuable discoveries often emerge precisely from close-up examinations of trends in the humdrum, workaday activities of one’s field. One has to be across the breadth and minutiae before one can see the big picture, the changes in fashion and style. It’s the notable deviation from the norm—the spectacular exception to the day-to-day routine—that is likely to trigger closer re-examination of the field and, in turn, feed the deep personal satisfaction that comes from knowing one’s theatre.
This is as true for the performing arts critic and scholar as it is for the genuine theatregoer. Night after night in the subsidised and in the fringe theatre we are presented with formulaic essays in naturalistic spoken-word drama, Australian and foreign—the equivalents of television and literature on stage. We also routinely get so-called radical interpretations of the classics alternating with attempts to preserve the cultural authenticity of our heritage repertoire. Then there are postmodern projects conceived to forge ‘a new theatrical vocabulary’ based on the drama of our past (often little more than exercises in reinventing the wheel). More mundanely, the commercial music theatre, which wins our reflex standing ovations, too often oscillates between facsimile versions of the latest overseas revivals of shows from the past and facsimile versions of new overseas shows.
So, unless we are professional theatregoers of one kind or another, why do we keep going back night after night, year in and year out?
Three reasons. Every now and then something genuinely new and exciting comes along or something old comes back and it’s so freshly re-thought that it’s new again, like a startling Hamlet or a Romeo and Juliet done in mime like a Buster Keaton silent movie.
Second, we love a good story (whether from here or abroad, old or new) provided it’s a very good story very well told—and belongs in the theatre rather than in the pages of a library book. Ronnie Burkett’s
Tinka’s New Dress, a one-man marionette play seen at last year’s Melbourne Festival, was a classic example.
Third, what’s undisputably defining about the experience of theatre is that it’s live, in real time and essentially mutable: it’s