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| Warhorse - A play |
All I knew going in was how great the puppetry was supposed to be and, to be fair, the horse did move and make noises in the way that a horse would. Yet it was far from verisimilitude. Personally, I could never entirely ignore the three puppeteers directing every movement of the mannequin (horsequin?). And that has always been an issue for me with plays: however much I can admire the technical skill of the performance on the stage, I can never forget that it is just that: a performance.
Perhaps I am too literal a person, although equally I would expect being a creative writer would make me more imaginative and more able to suspend my disbelief, but I very rarely have been sucked into the world of a play in the same way I have been for books, films, or videogames. I dub this the 'Brad Pitt effect'.
Brad Pitt is a fine actor, I recognise this, but if I never see another film with him in again, I won't feel a sense of loss. The trouble is, he's been in too many films and he's too well known, so that whenever I see him on screen, I no longer think "who's this new character?" I think "there's Brad Pitt." (To get a similar effect, next time you watch a Brad Pitt film, try mentally appending "said Brad Pitt" onto every line of dialogue he speaks.)
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| Brad Pitt - an actor |
Ultimately, I think the stage-play* is a limited and outdated medium. Few people I have told this to seem to agree. The theatre is still held as a bastion of cultural refinement. But I shall elaborate upon my reasons for thinking this nonetheless:
Firstly, as I have said, there is the issue of suspension-of-disbelief, ie. the willingness to accept that what you are seeing is not an artificial performance, but a present, genuine event to which you are a voyeur. Even when you do begin to fall for the illusion, it can only take a very small thing to remind you that you are watching a play: a fumbled line, a cough in the audience, a poorly chosen set-piece, another character coming out from the side of the stage.
Some of the above are not exclusive to plays of course. Any medium can be interrupted by external events, and a bad line of dialogue or turn of phrase in a film or book can be just as jarring as a glitch in a videogame, but plays, due to their complexity, are more susceptible than most to such interruptions. I think the reason for this is that a play is asking you to both watch and imagine at the same time.
With a book you have only the words and your imagination, nothing visual. You conjure the world around yourself. Conversely, with a film or a videogame**, you can literally see the world. With a play you are likely only to be shown a handful of objects, a chair and table to evoke a dining room, say, or a doorframe and fence to evoke a back garden. You have a few visual symbols to latch onto, but are asked to imagine the rest, never entirely seeing or entirely imagining the whole thing. It is always abstract.
The choice of props is so crucial in a play, and I think it is often overdone. Warhorse overreached itself in trying to represent the scale of the Great War. The more you see on a stage, the more you realise is missing. It's a sort of uncanny valley. Complexity is the enemy of a play. The best plays have few props and few characters. Where a play excels is dialogue, not action. So the characters need to be psychologically rich and compelling to watch.
For the characters to come to life, good actors are needed, and those actors need to be good every night of the performance, speaking each line as if for the first time. It is a great challenge.
To me, putting on a successful play, with all the work involved, is like building a life-size house from matchsticks. The dedication and technical accomplishment is to be applauded, but you might just as well have built a better house out of brick and mortar.
The medium of film is that better house, and films have superseded plays in almost every way. For one, a film, once made perfect, is always perfect, whether you watch it once, or a hundred times. I know some people like that thrill that something could go wrong in a play every time, that it is live and exciting, but why? No one really wants to see the play go wrong. And who really cares is the timing or the delivery are ever so slightly different from one night to the next? I'd rather watch a film where the best delivery has been chosen once and forever from multiple takes.
In another way, film offers a breadth of genre which plays never could. The medium of the stage-play could never contain 2001: A Space Odyssey, Koyaanisqatsi, Inception and the Bourne Identity, to pick but a few almost at random from my DVD collection. It lacks the cinematography. A play cannot jump between scenes, cannot show events from multiple angles, cannot blend together or transition between images, cannot move faster than life or in slow motion, cannot create epic images.
And yet films can do everything that plays can, only they can be enjoyed multiple times and have a lower cost of entry. They can do soliloquy, dialogue, and set pieces, and they can do so much more besides. In a play a character may be angry and you will be able to tell this from his body language and his voice. If you are close enough you see that his face is red, or he is sweating under the lights. In a film you could be shown a hundred things besides.
The camera could focus on the glass he is gripping in his hand, or the way the hairs bristle on the back of his neck. Or the camera could focus on something else entirely, a child upstairs overhearing her parents argue, or even something more abstract like the boiling of a kettle or the serene lake outside. By not being limited to a single viewpoint, myriad new creative possibilities are opened up.
Plays are limited by length as well as location. Many of Sergio Leone's films, and some of Akira Kurosawa's too, are around three to four hours long, as is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Neither the actors nor the audience of a stage play would have the stamina for a play that long.
So to summarise, plays are limited visually by the lack of cinematography, in setting by the difficulty of changing scenes, in character numbers by the logistics of hiring more actors and fitting them on the stage, in length by the patience of audience and the stamina of actors, in audience reach by the relatively high cost of tickets, the non-repeatability, and by the costs and organisational requirements of putting on a single performance in a single place.
The only advantage I can see plays having is that aforementioned thrill of being live and tangibly present (provided you can sit close enough). And, frankly, that doesn't cut it for me. Perhaps greater artistry comes from the limitations of the medium, as surprisingly evocative images can come from a haiku, but I have rarely seen it, particularly in contemporary plays.
Yes, Shakespeare, widely considered one of our greatest literary minds, chose it as his sole medium, but the fact that the medium is still so absolutely enthralled by four-hundred-year-old scripts suggest that little of lasting value is produced today. The only thing most current plays seem to trade on is either their "it's just like watching the film" special effects or the famous name attached to them.
What do you think? Have films totally surpassed plays, or does the medium still have something to offer except a feeling of smug cultural superiority over the people queuing up at cineworld?
* To make it clearer, I am only discussing narrative stage-plays here. Although I'm not keen on the genre, I think stage musicals are still relevant in the cultural landscape, as do other forms of stage-entertainment like live music, opera, ballet, performance poetry and magic shows, among others.
** This is not entirely true of older videogames, whose objects tend to be more symbolic, but I think videogames have other strengths which compensate for this, and which I will discuss in a future post.
