Ron Athey, a man at the pinnacle of his career.
Like a tiny shoot pushing through the hard ground on a spring day, there are signs of fresh growth in British theatre. Sniff, and you can smell change in the air. At the Chelsea Centre the Sacred season continues this month, with companies and individuals such as Goat Island, Gary Carter and Ron Athey mentoring a new generation of live art creators.
In April the Spill Festival, curated and produced by Robert Pacitti, offers an international programme of live art events taking place at venues across London from the Barbican to Soho and the South Bank. Spill will give Londoners the opportunity to see work created by international artists and homegrown talents that grows from radical new performance practices that owe less to Stanislavsky and more to Artaud.
In May there is the Fierce Festival in the Midlands, and from June Artsadmin will be offering a programme of performance at the newly refurbished Toynbee Studios. Add to that the Barbican's upcoming programme, combined with cultural shifts, to see companies such as Kneehigh and Improbable playing in the heart of the British Theatre establishment (at the National and English National Opera this Spring), Filter collaborating with director Sean Holmes on a NT touring production of Caucasian Chalk Circle and producers Fuel working at the Lyric, and you have a real sense of something new afoot.
What's driving all this activity? It is certainly not we critics because too often we still act in a double role as gate keepers to keep the new out and cheerleaders for a dominant theatre culture that has its roots in 19th century theatre practice. It's not necessarily programmers and funders either, because they frequently shy like startled deer in the face of anything new. So where is the impetus coming from? I'd suggest from two sources: a new generation of creative producers such as Mark Ball, Simon Casson, Jeremy Goldstein, Tom Morris and Kate McGrath to name just a few, but most particularly from audiences themselves. Audiences' increasing hunger for cultural experiences which are different, intimate and authentic means that live art, theatre that takes place outdoors and in found spaces and small scale touring often all deliver what the vast purpose built playhouse and well made play cannot. It is audiences who appear to be in the vanguard of this quiet revolution which could transform the face of British theatre.
New information technologies are clearly helping. It was thousands of images taken by camera phone, not broadsheet reviews, which brought a million people to central London to see The Sultan's Elephant, and cross-postings via email mean that audiences don't have to scan listings magazines to winkle out the kind of theatre they like, they can simply receive information by e-mail or text. The blogosphere has also had the effect of encouraging people to have confidence in their own opinions and not sit around waiting for critics to tell them what's hot and what's not. Instead they are going out and finding it for themselves and when they do, they're alerting others.
There are other reasons too why audiences are ahead of critics, commentators and sometimes venues and programmers. The rise of the Theatre Studies A level has created new audiences and increasingly substantial numbers of young people--some of whom will go on to be the next generation of theatre-makers--who are completely at ease with the work of companies such as Forced Entertainment and the Pacitti Company, unlike many of us critics who find ourselves tussling with the vocabulary of work that doesn't come from the well-made play tradition.
Most of all, I think this revolution is gathering speed because every time audiences have theatre experiences that smash both the fourth wall and their expectations of what theatre is and can be, it makes them braver, bolder and more demanding for the future. Sitting quietly in a (very expensive) West End theatre seat often seems rather tame when you've experienced the walkabout work of companies such as Wilson and Wilson, got up close and personal with Franko B or had an encounter at Home or with The Sultan's Elephant? For the first time since the late 60s when Britain had a plethora of experimental companies such as Pip Simmons, Welfare State and Inter-Action, there is a real possibility of change in British theatre and a feeling that it is theatre and not the play that's the thing. Critics, programmers and venues better wake up fast, otherwise 21st century audiences will leave us far behind and turn away from a theatre that fails to give them what they crave and understand that if audiences change, it must too.
