So it occurred to me tonight that something that I thought was pretty well understood might in fact not be, and this seemed to need some addressing.
Artists have styles. They have things they like to go back to, elements that repeat themselves, themes that recur within their breadth of work, and so on. And that is fine.
However, at the same time, one can usually find variations on the theme from work to work. If the style is the same, perhaps the subject is different. If the subject is similar, maybe its presented in a different way. This is what keeps the work, even if it contains repetition, fresh and engaging, especially to an audience that becomes familiar with their work.
It may be said that it is disappointing and somewhat painful when one finds an artist not only telling the same essential story that they previously told, but in the same way, minus a different world setting. Changing the world of a piece is set in does not do enough to create variation so that the product feels new. It will still feel recycled as long as the message, structure, relationships, and shtick are exactly the same. And, to address the familiar audience issue, an audience that sees a new work years after the first work, and is met with a duller near-copy of the original that is passed off for new, is destined to be alienated. Change the subject, change the story-telling elements, even just change the shtick - CHANGE SOMETHING!
People can tell a Mamet play from a mile away. People can spot Pinter, Stoppard, Churchill, McDonagh, Beckett in a moment. These writers are recognizable because of elements that reappear, but are reinvented significantly enough or used in a new enough context as to make them feel like an anchor, a point of familiarity from which one can more comfortably explore the truly new parts of a work. This is the real skill - to make that which is in fact recycled feel good, feel fresh, feel engaging. As soon as the recycled feels recycled, you are most likely in trouble, and should probably take a closer and more critical look at all of your work, so you can see what keeps popping up again and again.
If you create a new show that is essentially exactly the same as an earlier show, but in a different setting, you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to really and truly create, and you make yourself into a one-trick pony. At that point, an audience can just see the first one, the original, the one that started it all, and then has absolutely no reason to see what comes after - THEY HAVE ALREADY SEEN IT!
Please don't do this. It just makes people sad.
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I don't know if it's as black and white as you make it here. While I think that your ideas have truth - the theatre audiences love difference in places, there is also the compulsion to see 'the greats'. No one wants to see a Winter's Tale where Hermione is suspended above stage rather than being a statue on it. People come to see theatre because they want to see the greats, the ones that people talk about, and so the number of approved representations gets lowered dramatically (easiest shown by Hamlet: there is angry, thoughtful, lustful, and uncaring).
ReplyDeletePerhaps instead of going full force at the actors and directors, an answer is to cajole the audience. I saw a production of Julius Caesar where the 'Friends, Romans, Countrymen' speech was unheard because of the crowd's shouting. The audience hated it because the speech they came to hear was ruined, and I don't think that's an unfair way of putting it. People go to the theatre to see 'speeches'. In Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, people want to see the last act, where Martha breaks. They'll sit through the first two contentedly, but then they'll perk up for the bit they like.
Perhaps this is what needs to be changed? Cut plays a bit differently, have a Hamlet without the 'to be or not to be' speech, or do Mother Courage without the cart? As our culture is insisting on replaying theatre from the past half century, let's shake it up a bit that way, rather than insisting on just interpretative difference?