Fur - this season's theatre trend, as modelled by Edith Tankus and co-star in Kneehigh's Rapunzel. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Last year everyone's favourite theatre accessory was the ukulele; this year it's rabbits and other animals. You can hardly enter a theatre without tripping over something soft and furry or feathered, and if things carry on like this then the human actors are soon going to be outnumbered by animals. Maybe a rabbit will win this year's Critics' Circle award for best performance in a Chekhov revival? Perhaps Brian the Goose from the utterly delightful Giffords Circus will be signed up by the RSC to give his Hamlet? That will certainly give Jonathan Miller something to complain about. Yes, animals are everywhere.
At the beginning of the year there was Kneehigh's Rapunzel which boasted the biggest bunny I've ever seen, and since then there has been Old People, Children and Animals (rabbits and a parrot), Fevered Sleep's An Infinite Line (a horse) and Chris Goode's Sisters at the Gate (more rabbits). Oh and don't forget Pluto the cat in Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death.
In fact I don't think that this sudden interest by theatre-makers in having menageries in their performances is mere gimmickry. Indeed Shakespeare himself offered a dog, Crabbe, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, and there has been many a production of that play when the dog has been the only thing worth watching. But I suspect that the current interest in having animals on stage has nothing to do with adding furry eye candy to a dull production and everything to do with introducing an element of surprise for both actors and audience. This serves to underline the liveness of theatre at a time when in traditional set-ups, the design is fixed months before a production happens, performances are nailed long before the first preview, and night after night, at precisely the same time, exactly the same thing happens on a stage in exactly the same way.
A great deal of British theatre is disturbingly close to film in the way it merely reproduces something previously fixed, and pretends that the audience isn't there and can't bring anything to the performance. The increasing interest in game and game-playing in theatre, and the growing number of improvised or semi-improvised productions, is very much a backlash against that, and the rabbits are too. Chris Goode has called this the cat test, raising the possibility of what might happen if a cat was suddenly let loose on stage during a play at the Royal Court.
Even the best trained animal on stage can do the unexpected. And an animal can never act - it can only be itself and explore the environment in which it finds itself. The horse in An Infinite Line was both a metaphorical presence (standing in for nature itself) but it was also just a bored horse standing in a basement. Its sheer horsiness was overwhelming. Inevitably, all animals on stage are so much themselves, so always totally in the moment, that they threaten to make the human actors look a bit rubbish.
Perhaps we should think what a cat might teach us in the theatre? A rabbit or two might make everyone up their game because they know that if they don't, the audience will watch the animal and not the actor. These shows involving animals suggest that the most interesting work is sufficiently alert, robust and responsive enough to encompass their presence. I would like to assure you that no animals were harmed in the writing of this blog.
