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Tim Etchells's Art Flavours
Tasty populism ... a still from Tim Etchells's video Art Flavours (2008).
Tasty populism ... a still from Tim Etchells's video Art Flavours (2008).

Noises off: Is theatre elitist?

This article is more than 14 years old
Theatre blogs are anxiously debating whether 'experimental' theatre turns off 'regular' people

If you're a playwright, who should you be writing for – yourself or other people? This debate began when Scott Walters noticed this post on the Poor Player blog, in which Tom Loughlin laments the fact that he has hit a period of artistic ennu: the theatre and art he sees around him have lost their appeal. The only thing that still holds his interest are "the people I meet who have absolutely nothing to do with theatre or academia," he writes. "The man doing my bathroom is a great guy and wonderful to talk to… I ate lunch yesterday with a complete stranger at a local diner and had an interesting conversation about next to nothing." He concludes: "I wish I knew how to create theatre for these people. I'm depressed that I don't. They deserve better."

For Walters, this sentiment goes to the core of what he thinks theatre should aim to do. We should, he says, be "trying to create theatre that has something to say to people who are just living life day to day. Not high-flying intellectuals, not artists, but just the folks who work the cash registers of our lives." He expands on this idea in another post where he analyses Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, set during the Great Depression. This play, he says, engages in a kind of formal experimentation that can be hugely alienating to many people. He describes how one elderly couple who saw it "were left desperately trying to figure out what the hell happened. Instead of trusting the power of her story and the humanity of her characters, Wallace had turned her play into an elaborate puzzle." He goes on: "Wallace's play took the working class experience seriously, the small town experience seriously, but she couldn't write for them – she had to signal that, while she was on their side, she is still a member of the intelligentsia, the artist-specialist class."

This question of social class in theatre is a fraught one. After all, the average theatre audience in both the UK and US is overwhelmingly middle-class, thus raising all sorts of ethical and aesthetic questions about how one presents the lives of people on a different rung of the social ladder. As J Holtham asks in a guest post on the Parabasis blog: "Is there a difference between writing TO an audience, writing FOR an audience and writing ABOUT an audience?" It can be very tempting to agree with John McGrath, who suggests in his remarkable book A Good Night Out that if we are to dramatise the lives of working people on stage, then we should seek out theatrical forms with which those working people will most easily be able to connect.

Yet do we ever have the right to tell writers how they should or should not be writing? Matthew Freeman argues that we do not. His response to the arguments of Walters is simple: "Write your own plays." "There's no use scolding artists when their experiments don't connect with you," he writes. "They're going to experiment anyway. Those same experiments do connect with someone, I'll bet. Maybe not you all the time. Luckily, there are lots and lots of plays. Go read a different one." Walters, in a follow up post, acknowledges that the best solution is not to persuade existing writers to change, but to encourage those who have never written before to put pen to paper for the first time.

Of course, the experimental and the popular don't always have to be opposed. I leave you with this fascinating interview with Tim Etchells, the artistic director of Forced Entertainment and occasional diarist on this site, on the Art Review website, which marks Etchells's current exhibition at the Gasworks Gallery in London. Etchells's discussion of his project, Art Flavours, where he sought to forge a collaboration between the Italian academic and critic Roberto Pinto and the ice-cream maker Osvaldo Castellari is an excellent example of how high-brow experimentalism can be brought together with a quite literally tasty populism. Buon appetito.

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