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Audiences: Friends or strangers

Mon, 30 July 2001, 06:24 pm
Gambler9 posts in thread
It seems to me these days that the majority of theatre audiences are either fellow actors, friends or Pensioners (or a combination of them). Does this mean that Stage performances are a dying phase? Before television, computers, game machines and movie cinemas the theatre was the place to be. Now it is only for a minority of society. Any thoughts?

RE: Audiences: Friends or strangers

Mon, 30 July 2001, 09:30 pm
Walter Plinge
Adapt or die! You're right, live theatre in its purest form is well and truly dead as a mainstream form of public entertainment. But that doesn't mean we have to pack up and go home. The answer is to either aim our wares at a niche market and be happy with that, or redesign the live-theatre concept to suit the mainstream audience. The former would involve presenting theatre as a nostalgic, stylised "revisit" to a past fad, and the latter would involve adopting a commercialised and user-friendly attitude, making the audience a part of the performance.

What we've known in the past as theatre is dead, but that just makes room for the next evolution of this artform.

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