A life in the theatre can be tough. Sure, it's not as bad as fighting a war or cleaning toilets for a living, but nonetheless, the daily grind of having to scrabble together enough work in order to pay the bills, and the insecurity of not knowing where the next job is coming from, can be enough to get even the most motivated of artists down.
These worries have, of late, been playing on the mind of blogger and director Chris Goode. Goode is, in the words of this very newspaper, "one of the most exciting talents working in Britain today". Yet despite this, he is currently questioning whether his work is ever going to be truly sustainable. He lucidly articulates the bind that many artists find themselves in, but what is most interesting in his post is how he links this personal sense of hopelessness to the much wider discussion surrounding the nature of hope in the theatre. He argues that those who see "the possibility of using theatre as a broadly anti-capitalist locus are (as leftists always are) split down the middle, between those for whom everything – including theatre – is basically hopeless, but who suppose theatre is a good place to describe that hopelessness; and those, like me, for whom that hopelessness has not yet been conclusively and terminally proved."
If there is still a narrow sliver of hope remaining in the picture that Goode paints here, then one can only hope he holds on tightly to it. David Jays recently attended Lean Upstream – the month-long residency that Goode is currently engaged in at Artsadmin – where he saw him perform his monologue show, The Hippo World Guest Book. Jays describes this as "the sweetest, saddest performance I've seen in ages – and also the first that, in barely more than an hour, tells the story of the web's utopia turning to dystopia". Ironically, it was this very show that earned Goode some extremely harsh (and quite stupid), reviews in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. Let's hope that the survival of Hippo World will bode well for the survival of Goode the artist.
In other news, Matt Trueman is continuing his struggle with the notion of "liveness" – this time in relation to the difference between what we see on the stage as opposed to on the screen. In film, he argues "On stage, or rather, live, one cannot think so singularly in terms of image. Image multiplies depending on audience perspective – and by that, of course, I mean not only the angle of perspective, but in terms of distractions and attractions. The eye roams and finds its own frame." In this sense then, theatre's strength lies in the fact that because it is "live" it is literally better able to present "life" in all its ambiguous, multiplicitous glory.
Finally, Noises off would like to welcome another new website to the theatrosphere: Theatricalia. This site, created by Matthew Somerville, is a kind of IMDB for theatre. It aims to be a comprehensive database of theatre productions in this country and is updated and maintained by its readers – ie you and me. Currently it claims to know "about 53,072 people being cast and crew in 272,671 roles, in 18,739 productions of 9,065 plays at 776 places". That is an impressive amount of info, but it is by no means exhaustive, so get over there and start filling it in.
