Does theatre, as the Greeks believed, help you achieve catharsis? Do comic dramas lift the spirits and tragedies depress them? Last month, while feeling pretty depressed, I had theatre tickets for a hit comedy and a classic tragedy within a 24-hour period. Having rejected the option of simply staying in bed – which sufferers will know is always a temptation at such times – it struck me that this offered the chance of an accidental experiment in the impact of a viewer’s mood on the reception of a play.
Helping the investigation was the fact that the funny play - Rules for Living, at the National Theatre – and the troubling one – the Almeida’s production of the Oresteia – were at the extreme ends of the spectrums of light and shade.
Three hours and 45 minutes of the Aeschylus trilogy, which starts with the ritual sacrifice of a child and then gets darker, was probably not what psychologists would recommend for someone who had scarcely slept the previous night. So, like a cricketer constructing a long innings, I set out with the ambition of simply getting through to the first drinks break. (Robert Icke’s production has two short intervals and an even shorter “pause”, counted down on red digital clocks on stage and in the foyer.)
It’s a tribute to the clarity and pace of Icke’s production of his own energetic adaptation – and the acting of a cast led by Angus Wright as Agamemnon and Lia Williams as Klytemnestra – that, from 7pm to 10.45pm, my attention and stamina never faltered. The ancient stories of piety and revenge were plausibly transferred to a geographically indeterminate modern world of TV interviews and press conferences. The production achieved the paradox – also common to the best productions of King Lear - of making terrible things exhilarating and uplifting. The plays, as Aeschylus had calculated, revealed and healed real situations through the depiction of imagined ones.
After a better night’s sleep (coincidentally or not), the second half of the theatrical mood-swing test was a matinee of Rules for Living. The performance was close to the end of the current run of Sam Holcroft’s domestic comedy – which treats a disastrous family Christmas Day as a sort of psychological gameshow, with participants winning points for strategies and personality traits – but this production will surely be seen again, either at the NT or commercially, close to the season it depicts.
The form of theatre that traditionally achieves the greatest comic release for the audience is farce: sequences in Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests, Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors leave theatregoers breathless and helpless with laughter.
Marianne Elliott’s spectacularly physical staging of Holcroft’s play features many such moments, including arias of sarcasm from a failed sports star played by Stephen Mangan, Deborah Findlay’s portrayal of an upper-middle-class woman attempting to deny the social mayhem breaking out around her, and a climactic food fight that puts pressure on both the stage management budget and the clothes of the front rows. It’s a tremendously funny play, although paradoxically it was, by a narrow margin, the Oresteia that cheered me up most.
My example involves the effect of personal mood on the reception of a play but the collective spirit of actors or theatre-goers can also have a significant impact on how a show goes. Experienced theatre professionals and critics who re-review a production often comment on how two performances of the same play may vary in intensity, response of the audience, or even length. On any given afternoon or evening, the way in which a play works results from a complex synthesis between the energy and health of performers and audience, the weather, time of week or year and the state of the world.
The writer David Lodge, in his recent memoirs, describes a comedy revue at the Birmingham Repertory theatre on 22 November 1963, that was overwhelmed by breaking news of the assassination of John F Kennedy; and I remember the tangible tension during an opera that was going on while Princess Diana’s sensational Panorama interview was being broadcast on BBC1 in 1995.
These are extreme examples but smaller circumstances can dangerously unbalance a play, such as when the company has just been told that their run is to be cut short, or when people are dashing in from a traffic jam or an Andy Murray fifth-set cliff-hanger. Conversely, other occurrences – a pre-Christmas audience just sufficiently pissed, a cast recently given confidence by reviews or awards – can be beneficial to the performance.
In my private crisis, I was surprised by the extent to which Rules for Living and Oresteia, in their different ways, distracted me from my distractions and left me feeling significantly better. Just before going into the Almeida, I had texted a friend that I must be the only person ever to have gone to almost four hours of Greek tragedy to be cheered up; but this proved to be no joke.
More research clearly needs to be done before either Aeschylus or post-Ayckbournian comedy are prescribed by the NHS but, if these shows can give such a high to someone who was feeling low, imagine what they might do for someone who isn’t.
