Audience needs to lift its performance

(This is an article by Timothy Daly in SMH. Timothy Daly's last play, The Private Visions of Gottfried Kellner, won the 2000 Awgie for Best Play. He is dramaturg (script adviser) in residence at the Australian National Playwrights' Centre. )


Theatre isn't just entertainment and coffee, says Timothy Daly.

There's a lot of mediocre theatre going on in Australia. Recent debate has centred on its possible causes, but none has mentioned what, to me, is the principal response: the Australian audience.

Former American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt once claimed to have been depressed by Thornton Wilder's masterpiece, Our Town. But the critic Alexander Woolcott wrote to her, remarking that in her role as audience member, "you didn't give a good performance".

In these days of audience flattery and sponsor hugging, such a criticism is unheard of.

As a writer whose plays have sometimes pleased, and sometimes haven't, I've come to a few views about Australian audiences. The saddest judgment I can make is that our audiences don't care a lot about theatre. The reasons are complex, but boil down to the fact that theatre, as culturally constructed in this country, is only an entertainment.

In other countries and in other periods, it's been much more - a type of national bonding, a social purging, a religious ritual, a laboratory for rapid and astonishing innovation, a place where the community's sense of itself is examined, challenged and ultimately affirmed. If audiences still believe that theatre's job is to do all these things, they're not telling the theatre companies.

It may be time for a lot of people - writers, directors and actors - to say that theatre can no longer be held hostage by the preferences of an audience that thinks it knows what it likes, but in truth hardly has a clue.

Let's be brutally frank: in the main, our theatre audiences are pleasant, well-mannered, not very knowledgeable, intellectually undemanding, slightly imaginative, and with a very strong comfort zone. A former artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company once complained that his subscribers "only care about having comfortable seats and good coffee".

At a performance of my play Kafka Dances, I saw a woman in the audience behaving very strangely. She leaned forward. Her eyes followed the actors' movements keenly. Watching her, I assumed she was either drunk or unwell. Meeting the woman afterwards, I found out she was a tourist who loved the play and was simply giving it her whole attention. I realised that what I had found bizarre was her passionate and close attention to the theatre she was seeing. It's such an unusual response in Australia.

I was reminded of the British visitor to Moscow listening to a Shostakovich string quartet written during World War II. As the music played, a Russian woman told the man: "You think you understand this music. We lived through this."

Perhaps that is the real problem: Australia has never lived through a period where any art form, let alone theatre, has been the medium that expressed the nation's innermost fears, hopes and ideals about itself. That we have chosen, by default, the empty and commercialised rituals of sport only makes our predicament worse. Sport simply isn't up to the job.

So what's to be done? First, everyone involved in professional theatre needs to recover their nerve and remember why they went into theatre in the first place.

Second, artistic directors of companies, big and small, need to implement strategies with a time frame a bit longer than "What will we put in next year's season?" Our artistic direction is in danger of having the short-sightedness of our current Prime Minister, who appears to be looking no further than the next election (perhaps with good reason.)

Third, our theatre writers need to have the guts to write the big plays and scream and shout till the theatre companies get behind them. Great theatre is a product of long-term planning allied to immense creative ambition.

It's about channelling the passion to tell very big stories that tell this nation who the hell it is. That takes time. The definitive American tribal story, Angels in America, took 10 years. West Side Story took seven. Is there a single theatre company in Australia developing work on anything like this time scale?

The American critic, Charles Frohman, once said: "Sometimes it is not the play that fails, but the public." Examples of truly extraordinary theatre and great productions are so rare in this country that the public has little idea of what it means when it thinks, "This is fabulous theatre", or "This is bad theatre". But all that can be changed. True respect for an audience must involve giving them plays and performances that are heart-stopping, mind-filling, passionate and bold. It's time for the comfort zone of plush seats and good coffee to be vigorously challenged.