22.

If I’m arguing for a return to the notion that theatre is not just an experience you have but a place you go to congregate with others and share that experience, we had better for a moment consider the site-specific. This is a category of work that like so many others is regrettably hidebound by our continuing failure to distinguish form from content. Which is to say that our excited focus has been on the site. Partly this is media-driven – do me a Titus Andronicus in a bus station and you can have a photo across three columns. A previously unused site will seem to equal novelty, even if what’s placed there is no more than an arrangement of reupholstered deckchairs on the same old Titanic. What’s deep and culturally urgent about the site-specific is not the site but the specific, which theatre has always struggled with. Prefabricated theatre is always conceived in a blur of generalities. To be specific is to be responsive not just to the site of the work but to its audience, to its social context, to its cultural moment, to the weather. Theatre is made here and now specifically between us, and whatever is not is not worthy of the name.

21.
On the whole I haven’t wanted, in considering the future, to pay much attention to the kind of trends that trendspotters spot: but in the light of these thoughts about the structuring of theatre, I’m interested to recall that after Web 2.0, the flowering of user-generated content, we’re promised, by some, the return of expertise, of those who can reliably help us navigate the multiplicities. To minimise the power differential between actor and audience, to rethink the job of the director, to disperse authority, is not to downplay the importance of skill, craft, elegance and rigour in all of those roles; on the contrary, it’s to lean harder on those qualities. To be an actor, to be a maker, should be an extraordinary way of life, one that we shouldn’t be afraid to call a vocation. It’s because I care so much about the experience of the audience and the potential of theatre to incite radical change that I want to say: Fuck your feedback forms; fuck your Twitter reviews; fuck your snarky comments on the Guardian blog. I’m working in theatre pretty much every waking minute, I work hard and I want excellence and we are specialists and this is not trivial.

20.

24-hour rolling theatre is not a new idea, but as far as I know it’s not been tried for any sustained period. The closest conceptual relation in recent years has probably been Brian Eno’s Civic Recovery Centre, which anyway has only been fleetingly realised, but the presence of actors in the model I’m describing seems to me crucial. Practical obstacles abound so if we have to treat this merely as a thought experiment then, OK, fine, whatever. But see what this does? Everything is improvised, or prepared in the same space that it’s shown and in the same full view. The freighted prestige of the actor within the apparatus of the theatre production is destroyed; the role of the director changes, the role of the writer, the designer, the musician, is folded into the live unit. Nobody mistakes this theatre for a kind of literature. Our current marketing apparatus becomes sublimely redundant. The relationship of the person in the street is not with the individual show, but with theatre itself as a special register of activity, one which simply involves an attentive encounter with others, in a place that’s designed specifically to nurture it.

19.

In this dream there is a building to which you have free, unticketed access, day and night. At the heart of this building is a room, where you can sit, or stand, or lie, for as long as you want, in the company of others, or sometimes, it might so happen, on your own. This room also contains one or more actors. That’s the word we use to describe them. They’re not there to perform. They’re there simply to act, to act on behalf of the others who are gathered there, to make actions, to commit themselves to various kinds of activity. You might pop in for ten minutes on your lunchbreak and watch two men in blindfolds slowdancing. You might pop in for an hour after work instead of going to the gym, and watch five people build a model of Mumbai out of donated car parts. On the evening after your cat dies you might stay up all night with a woman you’ve never met before listening as she tells you a seemingly endless story about an old man who steals a motorbike and rides across the desert. You might spend twenty-one minutes thirty seconds watching a stranger stand naked in the light, and stop worrying about your unpayable gas bill.

18.

Two quotations that circle around my head. Aaron Sorkin gives President Bartlet in The West Wing a sort of catchphrase that should be written in the window of every theatre in town. He says: “Decisions are made by those who show up.” Audiences need to know this. Going to the theatre should feel like voting, only not useless in 97% of locations. And then there’s a song by Kate Bush called ‘Love and Anger’ where she sings: “We’re building the house of the future together / What would we do without you?” // I know not everyone feels, perhaps not everyone ever could feel, as I do, that theatre has saved my life: which is to say, it has made it possible for me to inhabit, intermittently but for real, a life infinitely more fit for living than the parallel one that propels me through the out-of-order automatic doors at Morrisons on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps not everyone can feel that. But couldn’t going to the theatre become a more vibrantly elective act? A more affirmative kind of commitment? An act of deeply, urgently wanting, desiring, the thing behind the thing?

17.

BAC has of late been using a nicely bracing strapline. It is, it says, “inventing the future of theatre”. This implies that by showing up there, perhaps for a Scratch performance, and giving some feedback on what you see, you can play a role in that process of invention: and that’s a good thing for audiences to feel. My construction of that sentiment is somewhat differently wired. As I said in my tiny contribution to Programme Notes a couple of years ago, “theatre is the place where people gather together to invent their future”. Not the future of theatre, but their future. The implication, which I stand by but won’t in this format try to justify, is that theatre is uniquely well placed to be the medium in which we re-engineer our social relationships and our way of being together communally as well as culturally. Faced with the inevitable but excruciatingly slow death of capitalism and a looming environmental crisis some of the consequences of which we might be quietly looking forward to, theatre could be the most productive technology at our disposal for thinking together about what comes next; about who we want to be to each other.

I'm aware I've been letting the dust bunnies accumulate.  This isn't the full spring clean / feather-dust, more two decisive jabs with a spring chicken, to alert you to:

Royal & Derngate Northampton present a Signal to Noise production, Henry and Elizabeth. New theatre piece for home performance, written & directed by Chris Goode; with Philip Bosworth as Henry and Claire Burlington as Elizabeth.

25 June – 4 July, London: contact henryandelizabeth AT chrisgoodeonline DOT com.
5-10 & 12-17 July, Oxford Playhouse, 01865 305305, http://www.oxfordplayhouse.com/.
19-24 July, Royal & Derngate, Northampton (as above).
27-31 July, Theatre Royal Plymouth, 01752 230440, http://www.theatreroyal.com/.

& also to:

SoundEye Festival, Cork, Ireland. Chris Goode reads among many others including John Hall, Geoffrey Squires, Maurice Scully, Randolph Healey, Derek Beaulieu, Rachel Blau duPlessis, Medbh McGuckian, Nat Raha, Sara Crangle. 14-18 July. See the SoundEye web site for details.
 
Next, um, stanza of House of the Future is 99% ready & will be up TOMORROW!