Theatre Audiences

Theatre tells a story.  “You go into a space, and some other people use certain devices to tell you a story.  Because they have power over you, in a real sense, while you are there, they make a choice, with political implications, as to which story to tell and how to tell it.”

What about the story?  Can its implications be the same for all people?  “What if we are black, say, and we go to see some splendidly effective, but completely racist theatre show?  What if we are Jewish, and go to see a piece of anti-Semitic drama…Are we quite so exhilarated? Quite so fully human?…The meaning of theatre can clearly change from country to country, group to group, and – significantly – from class to class.”

McGrath argues that as we cannot see a piece of theatre from several frameworks we tend to take the view of a normal person “Usually that of a well-fed, white, middle class, sensitive but sophisticated literary critic: and we universalise the response.  The effect of such a practice is to enshrine certain specific values and qualities of a play above others.”

He goes on to argue that we therefore scoff at the different theatrical values of others if they do not fit in with our accepted norm.  Certain audiences don’t like mystery, they want to know what is happening, does this make them philistines or are they simply asking for a different kind of theatre, one that addresses their culture or understanding of the world? 

McGrath argues that there is a working class audience for the theatre and that their values are no less valid; “no less rich in potential for a thriving theatre-culture, no thinner in ‘traditions’ and subtleties than the current dominant theatre-culture, and that these values and demands contain within them the seeds of a new basis for making theatre that could in many ways be more appropriate to the last quarter of the twentieth century than the stuff that presently goes on at the National Theatre or the  Aldwych.

He states that theatre is a complex social event that theatre is affected by many things including; venue, ticket prices, the kind of publicity, the casting, set, costumes, lighting, director etc.  For example (my example) if you advertise your play in the Guardian, you will get a very different audience from the one you would get if you advertised in the Sun.

He claims that the language of theatre has been simplified to pure studies of the text rather than including the whole nature of the event.  He reasons that any study of theatre cannot be complete without taking the whole experience into consideration.