“Oh well, you know better than me, but I thought…” is a response that I often get when I’ve just asked someone what they thought of a piece of theatre or performance that they’ve recently seen. I assume that people adopt that caveat because they are under the false impression that I might somehow understand theatre ‘better’ than them because I work in it. Here’s the thing, I don’t, at all.
A quote from Jumpers For Goalposts by Tom Wells, recently showing at the Bush Theatre, might help me out here (a brilliant piece of new writing in my opinion, but that’s only my opinion). Geoff is looking for a song that he can perform at an audition for Pride Festival. He explains that if you:
‘Want to do it properly, got to ask yourself, you know: the big questions […] what is the song these people, in front of me, not connected, what is the song that will make their day better? Reach out, grab them, lift them up a bit.’
The audience response that Geoff describes here can and, I think, should, be applied to all good theatre, all good art for that matter- it connects with you as a person, grabs you and won’t give you the option to let go (check your e-mails, worry about your tax return). It might make you feel a bit more connected, a bit more educated, a bit more validated. Whatever it does to you, it’s entirely personal. It might be that a lot of people are simultaneously experiencing the same thing, in which case you’ve hit on a real human truth, but no matter how many people it’s happening to, no matter how much the experience is shared, it’s always individual too. Art always meets its audience at the level of their own individual experience, and we carry a lot of stuff with us, so I don’t think that it will ever smack two people around the face in exactly the same way.
Therefore, no, I don’t know better than you. I’m asking your opinion because I’ve not seen it and I want to know if it’s worth buying/begging for a ticket, or I’ve seen it and I want to know what you thought in order to help put my own thoughts into context. Any which way, you know how it affected you best. No caveats necessary.
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