When is a theatrical response not a gimmick?

When is a theatrical response not a gimmick?

14 September, 2011
by: CatherineSpoonfed

As theatre takes inspiration from current events, what constitutes an effective theatrical response?

At the beginning of this year, Simon Stephens delivered a theatrical call to arms. Speaking at the launch of the annual Bruntwood Prize for playwriting, Stephens described the award as “a clarion call to all playwrights” and hoped that 2011 would see a change in the way theatre addresses current events. As the arts faced the challenge of impending cuts, Stephens added that he was looking forward to seeing “how playwrights respond to these shifting conditions and this shifting country”. But what exactly constitutes an effective theatrical response?

Several months on, two projects in particular have produced rapid responses to current affairs. The most recent of these is Hacked, Theatre503's response to the phone-hacking scandal, which breaks into the voicemail of six volunteers to create short plays around the theme of invasion of privacy. Avoiding a direct approach, project curator Lisa Cagnacci explains that Hacked aims to explore “some of the less obvious things, all the ramifications of what's going on that might not hit you immediately”.

In contrast, Theatre Uncut, the second of these responses, is an explicitly political initiative led by artistic director Hannah Price. The project, founded by Price in the immediate wake of the government's Spending Review, brought together a collection of playwrights to create pieces  protesting against the cuts, with the resulting plays performed across the country. “The plays address both specific spending decisions and over-arching themes about what is happening to a society that seems to be headed by a more selfish government,” explains Price.

While Cagnacci and Price have different approaches to topical issues, they share a desire for theatre to address these questions in a unique way. “If I could write an article for a newspaper explaining what I wanted to say then I wouldn't need to make a piece of theatre about it,” Cagnacci points out. “I'm looking at the issues that you can't explore directly.” As Cagnacci suggests, while written responses may be able to address the immediate implications, theatre can delve into the human side of the phone-hacking scandal and its psychological causes in a way that other mediums would struggle to express.

Unlike Hacked, Theatre Uncut set out aiming to confront the cuts issue head-on; even the title makes it clear what these plays are protesting. Price emphasises that the protest plays “create an empathy for their characters and present political issues in an empathetic way”. Here she is in agreement with Cagnacci, as both note that if theatre decides to pick up on current events then it needs to do something new and different with them and use the art form to explore otherwise inaccessible avenues. This could be a smaller scale, individual reaction that gets left out of the wider discourse or a potent way of communicating an event's far-reaching impact.

As well as expressing something new, a key requirement of a theatrical response is that it must be, by definition, responsive. This comes into question when looking at Hacked. Through its choice of provocative subject matter and potentially gimmicky creative process, could it be merely jumping on the sensationalist bandwagon, addressing phone-hacking simply because it is at the forefront of the nation's consciousness? And is this a bad thing?

I put this question to Price and ask her whether theatre exploits current events to create compelling drama. Price surprises me by replying “of course it does. Why should we be afraid of that?” There is a creative disdain attached to the word 'gimmick', but perhaps, as Price suggests, we need not be so wary of what might be branded gimmicky theatre. Many plays in the past, such as Neil LaBute's The Mercy Seat, have used topical events as a creative springboard. Focusing on one couple's selfish reaction to the World Trade Centre attacks, LaBute's play may not be addressing the wider causes and ramifications of 9/11, but he is asking important questions about both human nature and, by extension, the global emotional response to such disasters.

Plays such as The Mercy Seat and Hacked could be seen as opportunistically manipulating world events, but if this prompts stimulating theatre then does it matter? As with The Mercy Seat, Hacked does not make a direct comment on the phone-hacking scandal, but it has the potential to make equally fascinating observations about the human compulsion to pry into the lives of others; or, as Cagnacci puts it, to explore the “cultural and psychological undercurrents” of the issue at hand.

As Stephens insisted earlier in the year, theatre can and should address what is going on in the world around us. The different approaches of Hacked and Theatre Uncut, however, illustrate that there is more than one way to do this. Theatre which responds indirectly can be just as valid and indeed as valuable as that which takes a blunt stance. In the words of Cagnacci, “a good response is a thoughtful response”.

Hacked runs at Theatre503 from 27 September - 4 October.



Image by Surian Soosay

 

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