Last week I went to see Room for Cream, a lesbian serial staged in New York and set in Sappho, Massachusetts. It's a play with little lighting and no discernible set. The plot was convoluted, the actors under-rehearsed and the furnishings cheap and friable. One actor couldn't deliver a line because her mouth was too full of prop scone. When she did speak, she sprayed crumbs over the audience. It was bad, but it was brilliant. As the financial crisis deepens, could lo-fi be the way forward for theatre?
The magazines I've perused lately in the gym or the doctor's waiting room offer lots of advice about making and mending, cooking food rather than getting takeaways, and shopping in one's own wardrobe (yes, the ambience is dusty and the sales staff strangely absent, but at least it's all in your size). Perhaps it's time for theatre to embrace similar principles. Indeed, as cuts to production budgets and rehearsal periods are likely, a lo-fi, DIY aesthetic could be essential.
Anyone who has recently sat through an evening of amateur dramatics may already be cringing, wondering why I would advocate replacing professionalism with ineptitude, nuance with blatancy. Well, for several reasons. First, as Plato had it, necessity breeds invention. There's nothing like a minimal budget to make you find all sorts of extraordinary uses for tea cloths, flashlights and the occasional wig. Second, there's often a great giddiness to this sort of production – a desperate, madcap, let's-put-on-a-show air that tends to infect not only actors but also the audience. Third, it worked well enough for the Elizabethans.
It's worth remembering that while the golden age of drama did sport some rather splendid costumes, theatre was performed in natural light with a paucity of set pieces. Rehearsals were absurdly nominal and as the repertory system demanded that actors keep many roles in their heads, lines were frequently forgotten and required the use of prompters.
Mark Rylance's Measure for Measure and Peter Brook's Hamlet argued for the continuing relevance and joy of this spartan aesthetic. But it doesn't only apply to Shakespeare – many a screwball comedy could benefit from more insouciant staging. We find the Greek tragedies most affecting when they are performed in a more contemporary, low-key style.
There are two plays currently on the New York stage that could certainly profit from a radical make-under. In the justly vilified Hedda Gabler, starring Mary Louise Parker, the sumptuous gowns and Biedermeier furniture only highlight the vacuity of the stage action. And a revival of Virginia Woolf's gentle farce Freshwater is performed in such an agitated and mannered style that the comedy goes stale. Proof then, that bigger isn't always better.
Which plays do you think might benefit from a bit of minimalism? And which require all the trappings they can afford?
