Why see a play? When it’s over, it’s over.

Theatre is no longer the audience grabbing, socialising hub that it used to be, but why is this? Is it too expensive? Is it seen too much to be snobby, a hobby for the middle-classes? Is it purely that theatre just not very good anymore? Or is it simply inconvenient for our modern society?

I am not disputing that in some case the price of seeing a performance can put people off and that due to these prices it is arguably more middle-class people attending the theatre rather than the working-classes but what do you actually get from it? You have to travel to the venue, whether that’s a local hall or a large theatre in a major city. You then might have to sort out parking, accommodation, food before and/after. You may have to queue in cold wet weather to then sit in your wet clothes for anything up to three hours and then go home with nothing but a ticket stub and maybe a program containing more adverts than production information. You could have stayed at home and watched the television or a film, you could have gone online and done some shopping, you might have more to show for it.

“[T]heater does not produce a tangible object” (Lehmann, 2006, 16). Going to the theatre is an experience, it’s not simply a product one can purchase and take home; with the technology people now have at home to keep them entertained, why go to the theatre? Is it really just for the experience? Yes.

Theatre means the collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that space in which the performing and the spectating take place. […] The theatre performance turns the behaviour onstage and in the auditorium into a  joint text, a ‘text’ even if there is no spoken dialogue on stage or between actors and audience.

Lehmann, 2006, 17

By coming to the theatre, you are a part of the theatre, you are a part of that performance that is why you travel and eat and get wet. You don’t do it for the ticket stub and the programme (though they are nice souvenirs) you do it to be part of the text. To add though, with technology constantly changing theatres have in recent years created more ways to make theatre more of a “marketable commodity” (Lehmann, 2006, 16). With live streaming, DVD recordings and online downloads, you can now take the theatre home with you after an event. But then do you really get the same experience if you take it home and watch it again through a mediated camera from angles that have been chosen for you by someone else who has deemed them ‘the best seats in the house’? Well I better stop there, I feel this might be a discussion for another post.

Work Cited

Lehmann, H. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.