If you go down to the woods today ... you might see some great theatre
The entrance to the Forest of Dean iron-ore mine said "welcome to Hades". A hundred or so of us followed a pied piper - OK, a clarinet-playing actor - along the old cart-tracks into the belly of the nine-cavern complex for a series of evocative vignettes that just couldn't have been done as effectively anywhere else.
In contrast to the often vapid performances that go by the fashionable name of site-specific theatre, our surroundings and the elemental power of ochre and iron-stained craggy rock was essential to Pentabus and Kindle Theatre's Underland, a one-off show last weekend, where we were guests of the king and queen of the underworld's wedding.
The atmospheric thrills were visceral and unexpected at every turn as we descended further underground - a lesson in pomegranate-winemaking from an alcove here, a maiden zinging a harp on a rock in a blue-lit water-filled cavern there - rather than the oh-so-familiar experience of entering the same theatre auditoria after a pre-play or interval drink at featureless theatre bars.
Despite seeing the traditional theatre space used ingeniously in Bristol Old Vic's Twelfth Night (which involved an on-stage pool of water), and glass tanks that doubled as chambers of death in Kaos Theatre's touring Titus Andronicus, the suspension of disbelief required for much drama is that much harder to achieve when you're faced with the same walls and same rows of seats.
Just as the 18th-century preacher John Wesley managed to convert the masses into religious non-conformists for invigorating worship outside the walls of churches, my own road to Damascus in theatre was seeing a dramatisation of the oldest-known British poem in an engine shop of a disused Rover car factory in Cardiff. Brith Gof in association with "skinhead gamelan" percussionists Test Department, invented site-specific theatre with Gododdin in 1988, incorporating the factory's giant clock, mounds of sand, concrete and rusty oil drums in their expansive set.
A few years later, in a former Cardiff cake factory, I was again blown away by Dalier Sylw's version of The Bacchai. I may have found the Welsh-language translation hard to follow literally, but I can concur with one reviewer, who said: "I left the 'theatre' quaking, I've never been so intensely shaken." Never will I forget either, "the blood-smeared, bare-breasted Bacchae women wielding chainsaws" steaming over a mountain created in the empty, colossal warehouse.
Although Kneehigh's more recent Bacchae show, a more comedic affair, featured men in tutus swinging through the air, and Kaos's Volpone climbed the walls and ceiling, there was no getting away from the staid architectural confines. It's a shame, because Kneehigh is all for elemental practice - commonly rehearsing on a Cornish cliff edge, and taking its shows to the incredible open-air Minack Theatre.
Underland conflicted with another, larger-scale piece performed 10 miles up the road. The ruin of Goodrich Castle was the site of a dance-theatre re-interpretation called Forbidden, about the doomed love affair between a couple from either side of the Civil War, who fled the siege at the same castle on horseback during a heavy storm, only to be drowned in the swollen River Wye. I didn't witness the show, but there couldn't have been a more appropriate place to bring the story to life.
Every summer, just as in Shakespeare's day, theatre takes to the open air in the grounds of castles and historic sites, and one of the prolific practitioners, Rain or Shine namely makes a virtue of the unpredictable elements it's prepared to perform in. Here, though, view-blocking umbrellas, picnic hampers and other bourgeois trappings often detract from being enveloped in the action.
While every effort needs to be made to encourage new audiences into theatres to prevent their decline, the more compelling theatre that happens outside theatres the better. It breathes new life into that old adage, all the world's a stage.
