Net gain: a burgeoning network of writers and theatre makers has emerged. Photograph: Corbis
So this is the New Year. In a breathless flurry of Best of lists and accompanied by an undignified amount of cheap champagne, 2007 shuffled off into posterity and, as dawn rose on the first overcast Tuesday of 2008, the country's theatre critics were already preparing their lists of what to see this year.
Indeed on January 1 Michael Billington's recommendations for the forthcoming year were upon us. And what a list it is - a list carved out of marble, a rich, oaky vintage of a list. There's a play by George Bernard Shaw, and a play that's like a play by George Bernard Shaw; a play by Tom Stoppard and a play translated by Tom Stoppard. There's Ingmar Bergman and Kenneth Branagh and Harold Pinter and Simon Russell Beale. Grand actors and grand directors and grand writers and grand theatres; huge spectacular theatres, drowning in velveteen and bristling with lights. These are shows that get their picture in the paper - these are shows that are important.
Except, I do wonder about important theatre. I'm beginning to think theatre isn't all that good at being important. In an age when film and television are available just about anywhere at just about any time, how can theatre hope to compete in the important stakes, no matter how big the auditorium is, now matter how long the run is? Why, then does theatre still insist on trying to play the big boys' games? Why does it still try to get its name in the paper?
These days a lot of the theatre I treasure is not really important at all. It's positively tiny - local and intimate and never to be repeated. It is one woman in a room. It is a game played with a friend and a pair of headphones. At a lot of the theatre I love these days people don't sit anonymously in the cavernous dark. They look each other in the eye. I don't find myself gazing up at theatrical gods. I find myself in the company of a person. It's theatre that doesn't broadcast what's wrong with the world, but instead is going about its business, quietly trying to change it from the bottom up. This is what I find exciting and important about theatre.
Now of course, Michael Billington may completely agree with me. In his newfound spirit of experimentation, he may want to tumble through a maze in an out-of-control wheelchair, or watch a play unfold in his front room, but these aren't the kind of things that can be written about in a national newspaper. Is it likely that shows that have an audience of three, or that only happen once, will have precious paragraphs lavished upon them when there is so much going on in the world?
Thank God, then, for the internet. In its gloriously infinite boulevards there is ample room for everybody. Critics have space to breathe, to enthuse, to highlight the tiny experiences that tickled them, exhilarated them or changed their lives. All theatre is equal in its manifold eyes.
Through this burgeoning little network of writers and theatre makers, people can start to find the shows, the companies and the performers they might otherwise have missed; secrets that might have remained the domain of those shadowy people referred to as "in the know". People can be connected with those tiny, wonderful experiences that make theatre a place of magical possibilities. And artists can continue to make that work, finding new audiences and new supporters. Indeed, last Edinburgh I did a scrappy little show that happened in the dying embers of a single afternoon in the middle of the busiest festival ever. But thanks in part to a Guardian blog by Lyn Gardner that tiny little show has been able to keep on living and will be reincarnated at the Brighton festival this year.
So in this hopeful spirit, I wanted to let you know about a few things I'm excited about in the next month or so - things you might not otherwise have known about. I'm excited about finally seeing Five in the Morning by a wonderful company called Rotozaza, a staggeringly brave and intriguing show that you'd be a fool to miss when it drops into the Shunt Vaults for two nights in February. I'm excited about Jos Houben's joyous lecture on The Art of Laughter, peeling away the pratfalls and double takes of physical comedy to reveal the delicate rhythms and beats on which it is built. And I'm excited about seeing Chris Goode's hugely underrated Hippo World Guest Book again on tour, a simple idea that is as funny as it is achingly sad and in the end desolately beautiful.
More than any of this, however, I'm excited about the internet. About this place and many others. About everyone who is taking the effort to contribute. About the potential that all this has for the future of theatre.
