Redemptive power ... The Winter's Tale. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
At the Spill symposium earlier this year, Lois Weaver went around the audience asking people why they went to the theatre. "Because it always seems to be just for me," said one young woman, raising a laugh. I think she voiced something that is often true for many regular theatregoers, and might be part of the reason that we keep on going back. I'm constantly amazed by how many times I find myself sitting in a crowd and feeling that what is happening on stage is somehow speaking directly to me. It's as if exactly the right play always seems to pop up at just the right moment in my life.
Part of this, of course, is that we don't enter the theatre as blank slates: we all take our own emotional baggage into the theatre with us (yes, critics too). At different times in life, plays will chime with the state of your mind and the state of your heart. Perhaps the best art is always sufficiently open that it does indeed have the mysterious power to offer what we crave, but perhaps we see in art the things we want to see or the things that we urgently need to see that night.
Certainly, the redemptive power of The Winter's Tale once gave me great succour at a moment of personal anguish. I recall a friend telling me how, feeling raw following the death of her mother, it was only when sitting in the dark hearing the stories told in Dominic Cooke's version of Arabian Nights that she felt able to embrace her own grief.
Around 10 years ago, I took a girlfriend who was undergoing a major break-up to a preview of Patrick Marber's Closer at the National. As the play edged towards the end of the first half, I was aware of audible tears beside me. By the interval, my friend's sobs had grown embarrassingly loud. I suggested that we leave as the play was clearly upsetting her. "Certainly not," came her indignant replay. "I love this play. It's all about me." Presumably part of the success of the brittle Closer was that an entire generation felt it was all about them too, just as Jimmy Porter spoke for another generation.
These personal, quiet but revelatory moments in the theatre have an intriguing impact: when Happy Days makes you realise it's time to step away from a dying marriage, for example, or Stephen Poliakoff's Coming into Land makes you decide to become an immigration lawyer (yes, somebody I know really did after seeing that play).
I sometimes have these "just for me" moments when reading a novel or watching a movie too, but most often they occur in the theatre - possibly because I spend a good deal of time there. But I wonder if there is another reason why it happens more in the theatre than the cinema. Theatre is more immediate, allowing you to be both intensely private yet also part of a shared collective experience. I wonder if this means your responses are heightened and you become more keenly in touch with your own emotions. Which productions have struck a chord for you?
