Why Theatre?

By Guy Sprung

Global warming of the soul and spiritual globalization have unleashed societal tropical storms which are eroding our cultural dykes with a flood of individuation. Our artistic landscapes are inundated, the collective social fabric reduced to flotsam and the low rent artistic housing of theatre is being devastated.

Tongue-in-cheek weather metaphors aside, Theatre in both Canada and Québec has hit the proverbial brick wall. (See also Matt Radz’s lovely rant on the ‘state-of-the-art—not’ of theatre today, below). Serious existential soul-searching is going on in theatres across the country: Why theatre? What theatre? Who for?

The flagship Shaw and Stratford Festivals are both being forced to retrench future seasons and expenditures. Large regional reps like Vancouver Playhouse and Canadian Stage are looking for new Artistic Directors amid rumours of identity crises and serious financial troubles. Here in town, judging from the bare-as-bones season programmed by new Artistic Director Roy Surette, even our Anglo cultural icon, Centaur Theatre, has hit tough financial times.

Whereas 30 years ago theatre in Québec and Canada was a necessary, energetic, influential part of the national dialogue—the most popular and arguably the most prestigious of Canadian art forms—today we have to face the reality that it has become increasingly marginal and irrelevant. The Montreal Gazette does not even bother with a theatre critic any more. Poor, overburdened Pat Donnelly, the “Cultural Critic,” has to cover the entire Arts scene in Montréal squished in between the pizza recipes and wire-service downloads.

Attendance is down, ticket prices are ridiculous. At Shaw and Stratford, tickets are $100 a pop for regular performances where the audience is 99% white and average over 60 years of age. If it continues like this, within the next decade all large theatres across the country will have to strip the fixed seating out of the auditorium to make way for wholesale wheelchair access.

Artistic fraud is rampant as far as I am concerned. Theatre professionals are so good at designing sets and seducing the public with mellifluous soundscapes and visual eye-candy. Meaning, words, craft, writers’ intentions, ideas, politics are irrelevant.
Simple case in point: Iwanow, by Anton Chekhov, performed by the Volksbühne theatre company of Berlin, at the Monument-National as part of this year’s FTA. Pat Donnelly was caught genuflecting unthinkingly to this mediocre Euro-Trash. “Buy your ticket now” she wrote in her Blog. “This is an impressive production featuring a dozen German actors with serious skills… It is Chekhov deeply understood, modernized, the wit sharpened, the observations distilled.”

What on earth was Pat thinking? (When is the last time she bothered to put a local show in the Gazette’s ‘Best Bet’ column?) I went to the Volksbühne’s ‘meet the artists’ public encounter. The lead actors proudly declaimed that in their work on Iwanow, “psychology had been banished from the rehearsal hall.” Exactly! So was Chekhov. This is a company and a production that didn’t even bother to spend two fucking seconds trying to understand what Chekhov had written. The actors dressed in clown-esque costumes popped in and out of a wall of fog on the stage like the wooden figures in a mechanical medieval glockenspiel. Cute, sure, but bullshit, unthinking, meretricious, empty pomposity. OK so it is easy to dump on the Germans from out of town. But the recent production of Quixote here by one of our new local Indie companies was equally pretentious and Denis Marleau’s NAC-funded recent adaptation of Chekhov’s Le Moine noir was vacuous and deadly. Or the production of Anthony and Cleopatra at the TNM or… etc. No wonder theatre has become irrelevant. We are getting away with murder to our craft.

Institutions such as The Canada Council Theatre Section and the National Theatre School once had a tradition of being driven by artists. No more. The bureaucrats have taken over. Theatres that were founded by artists are controlled by Boards of Directors composed of failed management consultants and tight-fisted entrepreneurs posing as corporate philanthropists. It is the sacrifices, the poor pay and demanding working conditions of the working artists that have built every theatre in this country. Why can’t Canadian Actor’s Equity—which represents the Actors, Directors and Stage Managers of English Theatre—demand representation on all selection committees choosing new Artistic Directors? Union des artistes here in Québec should do the same for the French artists. Both should lobby the Canada Council and all provincial Arts Councils across the country to require of all theatres receiving financial support from us tax-payers, that they have artistic representation on Boards and selections committees, as a fundamental cultural governance policy. Instead, our cultural institutions have, in effect, been privatized so that the lawyers and business people on the Boards of Directors who donate a fraction of the time and finances that artists and the tax-payers do, unilaterally determine the fate of our theatres. Just as the privatization of the public water-supply system in Walkerton Ontario led in 2000 to the deadly poisoning of the public, so too has the quasi-privatization of the cultural “industry” in Canada led to the deadly poisoning of theatre art.

The grant-giving bureaucracies at all levels of government are loaded down with gutless, unimaginative lifers whose first priority is saving their own jobs. The status quo is never questioned. There are at least 100 smaller, newer theatre companies vying to get long-term funding from the Canada Council. This past jury (March 2008) was able to add only four new companies to the pantheon of those companies lucky enough to get operational funding. (Conflict of interest alert: Infinitheatre was one of the hundred companies vying for this operational financing.)

Was the Canada Council founded to maintain the status quo, or was it founded to promote the creation of new artistic ventures? Serious new policy initiatives have got to be implemented to make sure the next generation—the younger generation of theatre builders—gets their hands on venues and financing so they have the opportunity to create theatre, to exercise their creativity. They will be the ones developing the new writers, exploring new subject matters and most importantly, building new audiences.

Take a look at the demographics of Montréal. Over 30% of the citizens of the Ville de Montréal are visible minorities! (In Toronto, it is over 50%!) Linguistically, over one third of Montréal citizens are Allophones! Not the demographics of today’s Montréal theatre audience. Any wonder theatre is irrelevant? Theatre is a live communication between stage and audience. We have to put subject matter and plays and artists on the stage that represent and reflect the world we live in. We better start doing it soon.