Theatre.
Hello,
I went to the theatre.
I don't go much, and I should possibly go more, but in Hobart there is not all that much I'm attracted to seeing, which likely says more about me than anything. Also, though, this is important:
I went once and saw a Shakespeare, in Hobart. It was, you know, okay. Competent, large amateur cast, all playing to a friendly audience of peers who do productions as a hobby. An old mate of mine - a woman - was in it and she had a distinctive part, and did a good job. There was a sort of party in the theatre afterwards and I hung around, and caught up with this old pal, and it was nice to see her and we chatted. Whilst catching up on life, a person I didn't know came up and interrupted with an enthusiastic gush: "Oh she was brilliant! Wasn't she brilliant!"
I said "yeah, she was really good" (she was)
"She was brilliant"
"yeah I thought she did a great job there"
The woman's face changed at she stared at me with an odd hardness.
"No, she was brilliant. Say she was brilliant!"
I was confused by this and said "ah, she's an old friend of mine?"
The woman said "Oh you're a dickhead" and walked off.
It was weird and embarrassing. But it's sort of why I don't go to theatre much: I feel like I don't know the code of conduct.
I went and saw SHIT.
This is a short and very difficult play by Patricia Cornelius, who is an excellent Australian playwrite who makes harsh theatre. The thing I dislike most about theatre is that it can seem to exist to simply entertain a particular social strata, that it is largely defanged as a critical art form. This is not really the case though, and evidence is provided by the existence of Cornelius as a writer. She goes to complicated places as a matter of course and her plays are problematic.
I like my art problematic, which some of the people who regularly read this may have picked up on. Good artists steal, appropriate, and show things they are ethically uncomfortable with. Patricia Cornelius, with SHIT, has made a play we could see as ethically uncomfortable, and that was the risk she took, and it was important she did so. . This is where I had a problem in the deepest sense, and I do not have answer.
Loud Mouth put this play on.
There are subjective choices anyone makes when mounting a theatre show, and they're subjective; there's also something important to note, and that theatre is a real bastard of a form because of the time it takes and the amount of people it takes and the money it requires. I'll be clear on one thing though "we worked really hard" is not a get out jail free card. I work in the arts and everyone works hard. It doesn't mean an audience is thusly required to be critically lenient. I appreciate that you worked hard a lot, but, uhm, you're supposed to if you're attempting to be professional.
There are subjective choices, and they're open for debate, and they are interesting, but let's cut to the chase here: SHIT, the play is about three women, who are clearly younger people, who have done something bad on some level, and who are confined as a result.
The play examines who they are and why they are were they are, and it's trying to cram a lot in. It's talking about a couple of things, and what anyone reads from this play is going to differ, but I read it as being about the class and economic strata that exists in Australia right now. I thought the play managed to be very current in it's focus on people who have been abandoned and broken by an uncaring government and a culture that increasingly dumps people in a hole then blames them for being there.
When you get to the economic underclass, it's hard going and people are abusive and whoever is around cops it. This is usually women and children. Sometimes it's the elderly or people who live with disability. Sometimes it's gay people. Different people. Sometimes it's a mixture of all these things, and sometimes it's whoever happens to be near by when a human detonates. The women who ae the characters in this play have been abused, and they've been abused on every level until they have little left but anger. There are absolutely people who are in situations very like this on for real, and it is relentless and it doesn't stop.
This is my first problem with this play: it stops. It has to, and it can't really show you what a relentless barrage life is at the bottom of Australian society, how every day must be a terrifying challenge and often, very often, someone in the depths of this is not looking any further than that day, and that getting through it is an almighty and exhausting struggle on every level. This is something of an unanswerable question, and it's a failing of any art form, but it's there. It leads into the next problem: what is SHIT trying to do, and who is it for? It's certainly for women, and there's an extent that it's for all women, but it's also not: it's for women who are homeless, who have serious substance abuse issues and who have severe literary dysfunction. It's for people who have been totally failed on every level since birth by this society we're existing living in Australia right now, who have never had secure housing, who rarely eat properly, who do not have any way of cleaning their clothes easily, who have never been to the dentist at all.
So the play is probably not really for those people. What an awful phrase: those people.
The play is for people who get to plays, and it's not the economic underclass. I'm not trying to say theatre is too expensive (this production was cheap in terms of ticket price in fact), I'm noting that the theatre audience is primarily middle class.
That's the core of my question.
It doesn't mean SHIT shouldn't happen or anything like that. What I couldn't answer was what an audience is supposed to do with this play, because it's not an end point. It's possibly a starting point, and what it does really well, is note and expose the structure of a society that creates a strata that abandons people, that leaves them at the bottom, that calls them bogans, that sends them on an endless loop of incarceration and rehabilitation, in and out of supported accomodation, until something just breaks and we can ignore them and demonise them.
Them.
I hate the word them.
Is it a bad play? No, it's really good. I think Loud Mouth had a good go at it, but I don't care if they 'got it right' - it's not a test.
I think, for whatever it's worth, that the play needed to be seen. There's subjective stuff, but now, it's not important.
It's just, well, what happens next?
What do we do with this information?
What do we do with this insight? Because SHIT is not an answer. It's the opposite.
I was going to not send this out at all, the time having passed too long, but then I thought "the time?" - and SHIT is more relevant with each passing day.
Here's another bit of writing about the play. It's more concise than this, but I think too much. I think.
Loud Mouth will do more theatre this year. It'll be interesting and I'll probably go look at it. Might see you there.
Have a nice evening.