Did you miss it? I certainly did.
Reading Karen Fricker’s round-up of “theatre’s special day” on the Guardian theatre blog yesterday, it struck me that something crucial had been missing from this celebration.
It was not Dame Judi Dench’s official address, no, that had been delivered with her usual stateswomanship. Nor was it the alternative version, the cyber-hi-five issued to Obamaesque political idealism by American playwright Lynn Nottage, whose message was accompanied by a leisurely theatre montage, and a soundtrack which makes as if someone just died. And it was not the baroque ode to theatre proffered by London Theatre Blog’s Andrew Eglinton in quasi-versified aphorisms and enigmatic film clipettes.
The Guardian came close when someone decided to give Fricker’s article the headline: What’s your World Theatre Day fantasy? This seemed too good a question to allow the Guardian subs to answer, especially when you see what they wrote, mistaking the word fantasy for the word favourite: ‘Whether it’s a night in the West End or tackling a Howard Barker epic…’ You can’t help but think they could have thought up a better dilemma.
Judi Dench’s suggestion that ‘in many ways every day should be considered a theatre day’ certainly makes sense coming from a jobbing actress, but for the rest of the world this must be considered a damaging consequence of the culture industry’s inexorable (execrable?) momentum. In London, where Lord-knows-how-many plays can be seen each night we are many worlds away from the festival of Dionysius, and the theatres of other ancient civilizations, in which the cultural significance of the experiece was reflected by its occasional position in the community. Is it barbarian to suggest that seeing theatre too often (every week? every month?) reduces it from the extra-special to the ultra-mundane?
It is exactly this distinction that is missing from the virtual birthday party, the irruption of that which makes theatre worth celebrating, I don’t know: imagination? hopefulness? disappointment? the pure joy and real sorrow of fantasy.
If this is theatre’s special day, you fully hope and expect she’ll get stroppy, throw a tantrum, scream until she turns blue, demand a larger and more calorific cake, more numerous and costly presents, throw someone out, invite too many unsuitable guests, get drunk on supermarket vodka, puke over an elderly relative, wreck her parent’s house, go missing and return after a not-inconsiderable emergency services search operation, and sob fat tears of contrition into a forgiving parent’s jersey.
Last week I went to the opening of the International Istanbul Theatre Festival and was struck (or, rather, bored) by the lack of evidence that the organisers recognised what it was that theatre is good at: a breaking with the everyday, creating a sense of occasion. A woman whose oratorial skills were nothing short of disastrous stood up in front of a screen with the logos of the festival’s sponsors printed on it and read out the entire listings of the festival, the details of which we all had on printed handouts. The mere fact of ostentatiously giving a significant sum of money to a worthy arts cause does not in itself enough, there needs to be a sense that theatre is not just a poor cousin, but an important part of the family. In the same way, it doesn’t seem too much to expect that the UNESCO-sponsored World Theatre Day do something more than simply broadcast a indirect call for world-piece under the guise of a vaguely-worded appreciation of theatre.
We need to stop using the same old words and start saying things which make it clear we mean them. Unsurprisingly, Samuel Beckett knew this: ‘to speak of happiness one hesitates those awful syllables first asparagus burst abscess’. Which syllables for us now?
MY YR WORLD THEATRE FANTASY DAY OF A LIFETIME
It all takes place, of course, in the smoldering ruins of The Globe – restored once more to the archeologists of the future in an all-too-historically-faithful revival of ALL IS TRUE.
The rivers of the world have been dredged, Kurt Schwitters has been exhumed for one last merzbau, Sir Nicholas Serota is pasting the walls with luggage labels and cigarette cartons and free newspapers. Shocked dolphins, the figureheads of shipwrecks, decommissioned nuclear warheads and rare whales all orbit in a cosmological mechanic aquarium, and it drips brine on your sister’s hair.
The audience are all suspended from the ceiling on swings of blue and orange rope and driftwood, which rise and fall and catapault someone into the nightsky: you hear them enter the Thames, and you see their occasional beaming betowelled reentrances, waving to you, waving to their family and friends.
It’s all in a language you cannot speak but do understand: it is spoken in phrases repeated in refrains, and written in the movements of one hundred bodies: the actors are all dancers and the musicians are all dancers and the dancers are all your past lovers and you find it is the story of your life you’ve always lived in your head, heard and seen for the first time.
Scarab beetles crawl in the embers, owls are nesting in the balconies, and the chef from an Ethiopian restaurant throws spices into the fire, spices which send your mother to sleep, and bring her long-forgotten bittersweet dreams until she falls off her swing and Kevin Spacey kindly leads her out of the auditorium.
The South Bank’s human statues have quietly followed you in and now run along the charred roofs their naked bodies daubed in thick paint all the colours of the world flags, juggling candles, scattering coppers, handfuls of almonds, raining playing cards flutter past your head.
The girls who followed you along the riverside and disappeared when you gave them coins now parade through the ashes, their ashen skin, the dots incised in their high cheeks, their wrackish rhythms, their infant rhythms, their shrieking gypsy song.
Some hungry Community Support have followed the girls in, but they have laid down their batons, and are being taught to dance, their radios echo angrily unanswered across the arena.
A tribe of children from the local school ride in on animals liberated from the local zoo, dismount and execute a dozen proud foxtrots on the splintered stage.
A troupe of deaf choreographers carry placards which say THUS I PARTICIPATE IN LIFE and other, cleverer things and someone has told them to scream, in beautiful disunion: I love you, I love you, you can never disappoint me.
A thousand men and women are queueing up outside with TVs under their arms – it has been bring your TV to work day but they are all redundant – and break ranks to surge inside and haul their TVs onto the dying fire and the mutinying crew of Doctor Who have dragged a stolen Tardis from the BBC studios, strip it to kindling and feed the fire, which now grows greedy with renewed intent.
Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen perform an increasingly frantic fire safety drill, piggybacking thrilled air stewardesses whose hopping scalded feet scratch their august autographs into the glowing cinders.
Someone from the BBC crew is giving the schoolchildren a lesson in elementary electronics dissecting the Community Support radios.
A sewage pipe bursts beneath the stage and riverwater is sucked back and sent high into the air, dousing your feet, fish falling flipping on the embers. Seagulls circle. The fire seethes.
The girls and the Community Support, the chef and the statues and the children and the BBC crew, Sir Nicholas Serta and Kurt Schwitters and Kevin Spacey, the actors and dancers and musicians gather and reach out their arms to receive the water, wash themselves and each other.
You don't know any of your neighbors, infact you've never seen anyone like them, but in the constant intervals you just get chatting, you love the way they’ve dyed their hair, the pieces of jewellery they wear, and when dawn breaks you go for dinner in a little place nearby that makes faraway food taste homemade and someone plays the accordion improbably well and you’re all like What a fantastic day it’s been and We should do this again and though you don't live anywhere near one another you share a cab home and the driver discourses prettily on the national deficit and the fare comes to less than you thought because you realise you share an childhood obsession in John Hughes movies and one of you invites the other on some unrehearsed pretext back to a small but welcoming flat, with posters of great art works on the wall, and you fall exhausted onto a single bed where one of you cries and is held in the other’s arms. You promise you’ll see each other soon, though you both know that you won’t, and you promise never, ever to forget.
