"Texts should serve to empower actors to offer themselves up and to communicate truthfully with one another quite as much as with their audience. I think the images should be, (even as those notorious ink blots) open to wide interpretations, with any message as subtle as it is inevitable, woven into the subtext so that, in the end, audiences can feel they had arrived at it themselves.
With luck, those images should haunt them for a long time.
Otherwise I most enjoy working with texts that speak directly to the actor and not directly to the audience. If you need to address an audience, then why not write a tract or a short story, become a preacher or, better still, a politician?
I enjoy live theatre, I do not enjoy a play that wishes it were television, attempting to jump from one brief scene in one setting to another brief scene in another setting or with leaps of time that are at variance with the time our bums are on our seats.
I suppose, what I’m saying is that I do not warm to the efforts of playwrights who know too little about live theatre – the art and the craft. Theatre should not be a cheap means of getting something off one’s chest!
I do enjoy good television, but because of its essential properties (close-ups and indeed the way those cuts can be used) but these seldom do more than slightly overlap those of theatre. |
I appreciate the work of playwrights who have read the works of their peers and who can situate themselves in the cannon of contemporary drama and who would, presumably, shut up when they have nothing new to contribute.
I like the work of (and like working with) playwrights who are more like composers, occupied with the arduous task of ordering meaningful little black ciphers on the white page that will move the performer to produce feats of astounding artistic achievement for audiences to delight in. As opposed to the maker of piano rolls who has interpreted it all for you and all you have to do is to pedal away.
A fine play, for me, is one that sends rich messages to the actors and buries the playwright’s own messages to the audience in the sub-text – that can take the form of lasting images, capable of all manner of interpretations by audiences. Chekhov rather than Ibsen or Shaw. And I like Mamet’s work as I do Barker, Labute and Shakespeare of course, but that’s another dimension.
So much for my personal preferences, there are many other reasons why a play may find itself included in a season chez Tropic Sun. But those are to be found in the socio-politico-economic realm and that is too long to go into here.”
J-P.V. |
