Take money from thy verse Essay Example For Students

Take money from thy verse Essay At the risk of turning my own creeping anecdotage into a shortcut to perceptible truth, Im prepared to share a tale told me in Houston some months ago, a familiar tale, one might say, about a poet confronted by a mob. Seven young acting interns with Houstons Alley Theatre were scheduled to perform a mini-version of Shakespeares Julius Caesar at a local high school. Upon arriving there, they discovered that their performance had been canceled; the school, unable to raise money for their fee, couldnt in good conscience continue to sell $5 tickets to the students who, at any rate, werent buying them. Undaunted, the Alley troupe gave the performance as a benefit, no doubt suffering, as actors do, from the loving, lunatic disease known as The Show Must Go On. But hark, what discord followed: Actors usually know in a flashing instant when theyve lost even a fraction of their audience; in this case, however, they could scarcely hear their own voices, let alone the dialogue of their colleagues, since the teenagers had evidently decided that they had been dropped unwittingly into a giant living-room-kitchen in which the images on that strange, dimensional screen up ahead were meant only to be quaint accompaniment to brawls, catcalls and throwaway junk food. Its easy to round up the usual suspects in such cases TV as our primary educator, transforming public discourse into sound-bites and game shows, to say nothing of the truly lacerating disparities between Christian-Judaic claims on conscience and our national contempt for citizens outside the market economy of arms sales, drug traffic and banking scams. If painful problems can be reduced relentlessly to slogans and barely disguised calls to even more divisiveness, then its no wonder that imagination and all its wondrous uses are never an issue at all, or if they are, only when taxpayers are ready to be offended. Given the suspects, its possible to reserve a sneaking sympathy for that rowdy crowd, not exactly primed for a 16th-century dramatic poet who talks funny and dolls up actors in weird frocks. It may be moderately instructive, however, to consider what they missed by shouting their way through Julius Caesar. For a start, theres the thrilling story with enough inherent mayhem to satisfy anybodys cravings for enacted violence. True, sex is minimalist in the play, but surely JFK-addicts might be stopped cold, if only for the appointed hour, by Shakespeares wholly persuasive and partially accurate account of a genuine conspiracy to kill a popular boss. But what they also missed and the irony shouldnt escape us was an opportunity to turn their instinctive aggression into a more cultivated version: the bias against theatre shared by the best and the wisest, such as Vladimir Nabokov, for whom theatre was a barbaric form having to do with hev-nonny-no and that kind of thing. If its a matter of comparative barbarisms, the Houston kids are in good, even distinguished, company. To be fair to Nabokov, the source for that quotation is Martin Amis, who adds that he doesnt like theatre himself: Once youve seen Chekhov youre scouring the third division of gloomy Scandinavians, he says, as if Ibsen and Strindberg, masters of the barbaric form, should hang their heads in the presence of 20th-century British novelists. Amis, in turn, was responding to questions published last February in Britains Sunday Independent, asked of 20 reasonably well-known Londoners in the words of the interviewer, intelligent people, with no axe to grind. Her suspicion is that the number of people who never read novels, never go to the cinema, never listen to music, or never watch drama, light or otherwise, on television, is much as it ever was; but those who never go to the theatre, and dont feel bad about it, are on the increase. Her informal count is that, with the exception of the novelist Marina Warner, who claims to be seeing 24 plays each year, the average number of visits of the other 19 seems to hover between four and six. More fascinating than the statistics are the comments slipped in by enthusiasts and loathers alike, revealing a division between those who go to plays in order to be amused and those a distinct minority who go to be aroused. Theres the geneticist who finds that TV is a more efficient way of getting entertainment than watching a bunch of actors pissing around. Then Vogues editor weighs in with the observation that people dont necessarily like to be challenged in their evenings, especially, I have to suppose, if theyve been dozing over Vogue all day. Even the editor of Private Eye finds that going to the theatre is a bit too risky, really. One barrister, mercifully, says that too many theatres are playing safe. But more common is the view of Graham Swift, still another novelist harboring doubt, if not hostility, about the theatres capacity to be at the center of experience: That I once went more often is partly a reflection, he says, of my apathy and partly of the state of the theatre. Review of Theatre Performance EssayMy own fantasy is that American theatre artists will one day come together in order to mount a month-long work stoppage, particularly in New York and Los Angeles. Suddenly, theatres would be dark, and so, too, the restaurants, taxis and hotels, better still, the sympathy strikers in film and TV studios, the network anchors, all the technicians, would bring merciful silence to our airwaves. Everybody would soon be reminded that actors, just for one sub-species, have been trained for a theatre that scarcely exists while peddling their wares for auxiliary theatrical forms that have never once returned a dollar to the theatre for the rare gift of their exploited talents. At last, the public would make the connection between the practical presence of theatre as the generative force behind their casual entertainments and in New York at least the thousands of jobs that wouldnt exist without it. But there I go again; true to our condition, musing about money when, instead, I might be dreaming of occasions like the Royal Shakespeares recent performances of Sophocles Electra in Northern Ireland. One woman said of Fiona Shaws Electra: I thought of Mrs. Kelly whose son was killed on Bloody Sunday and how they would find her several years afterwards lying on his grave in the cemetery with earth smeared on her face. Another kept remembering the hunger strikers, and one man, weary of TV images of mothers and widows marching against retaliation, said, You forget what they must be feeling inside. Evidently, public event and intimate drama converge when nobodys talking about money. The readiness is all.