Plays that want to be Films

Theatre is finally dead. Awesome. After years of watching its slow decline I have finally seen its death. It has ceased to be, passed on and moved up to that big playhouse in the sky. Except its corpse won’t keep still. Oh, no it will not. Like a blank-eyed zombie it still lurches around, empty of its essence, its life-force seeking out not braaaaaaains but boxoffice. What is motivating this shuffling cadaver? What has taken up residence in place of theatricality? Film.

I like film, it’s a beautiful medium used by many great storytellers to great effect. But it is a different medium to theatre, something my generation of writers seems to have forgotten. Film and theatre have always swapped their promiscuous lovers since before the Lumière brothers’ film spectacles – Eisenstein even started his career in the theatre – so there is a lot of common ground between the two. The very nature of each medium, the qualities that create their own special blends of advantages and disadvantages, means that they tell stories in very different ways. The stories differ in ways both dramatic and subtle, the kinds of performances that are given by the actors are worlds apart and the arrangements of narrative elements are especially divergent. All these factors mean that despite interrelated forms, you can not tell a story onstage the way you would on film.

Done London is the latest culprit I’ve seen of writing and directing theatre for film. It is rooted in a film genre – slice-of-life multi-plot – and features naturalistic story, dialogue and acting, ‘montages’ set to genre music for time passing, linear narrative progression and multiple locations. None of which would make this a play in film drag by itself, but taken together they move the play out of play categories. And so audiences get what they’re used to seeing on flat screens in dark rooms.

All of which would be fine if theatre was in fact dead. It’s not. It’s vibrant, exciting and theatrical. Whatever experiment is carried out by the playwrights, directors and performers in theatre, let it not be an experiment in disguising the nature of the form. Audiences may be in love with movies and TV, but that does not mean theatremakers should be giving them what they see in movies and on TV. Ultimately there is really only one way to kill theatre – use it to imitate another medium.