The Youth of Yesterday
My day job is Audience Development at a smallish but well-respected regional theatre. ‘Audience Development’ means telling people who don’t want to go to the theatre that they do, really. If I say so myself, I’m pretty good at it: my persuasive Irish genes are hardly dormant, and as Mario will tell you, I like to get my own way.
In the line of Audience Development duty, this morning found me standing in front of a group of a group of people who don’t want to go to the theatre (in the business they’re called the ‘as yet disengaged demographic’). The strange thing was that they shouldn’t have been disengaged: they were drama students at the local college.
Earnest, sullen, giggling, sprawling, gum-chewing, hungover: they were all there. Great kids, who paid attention and didn’t take the piss, but who ultimately didn’t give a toss about what was on at their local theatre. I’m not condemning them for their indifference: when I was in their shoes I was pretty much the same. In fact, I was exactly the same; I went to a school not far from this college, and I’m pretty sure some well meaning marketing type came and spoke to my A Level Drama class about the exact same theatre where I now work. Did we become regular theatre goers? Did we buggery.
I wasn’t even a particularly avid theatre goer when I was studying Drama at university; a university that had its own theatre on campus, for crying out loud. Oh sure, we bought tickets to see stuff at the theatre on campus about three times a term, which were absolutely mandatory for some module or other. Sometimes we even traipsed up to London for a big hit West End show, but those weren’t really educational: they were piss ups and singalongs. They were photo opportunities of mates sprawled on the train floor, beer cans in hand. They were fun.
What I really took away from the Fringe this summer (apart from a stinking cold, some ace reviews and eight billion fliers) was the realisation that theatre is happening everywhere, all the time. I could and did see up to four plays a day, seven days a week, and the sheer variety of these shows was staggering. When I was a sixth former and a student I was one of the ‘as yet disengaged’ because I didn’t know that theatre was really there to be engaged with: theatre to me meant performance assessments, drama society shows and the occasional school trip. It was infrequent, it was fleeting…it was something I knew I wanted to do, but one day. Not yet. Not right now. Someone’s just opened another bottle and the real world can wait…
Standing in front of a group of college students this morning, I knew very well the exact thing that they were choosing to ignore: the real world, whatever that means to you. Employment, relationships, grief, cheesy jokes, deadlines, traffic, cake and all the other bits and pieces that make up someone’s world. I was incredulous: didn’t these kids realise, didn’t they understand? The economy’s crashing and the world’s going to end before Christmas; David Cameron is in power and people keep allowing Emma Watson to shit all over some of the best characters in literature; the real world, whatever it means to them, is not what it should be: why don’t they want to escape into theatre? When I was your age…Jeez, let’s not go there. I was their age pretty recently, all things considered. And actually, the end of that sentence is …I was exactly the same as you.
And that’s ok. It’s ok because I found out this summer that I have to go to the theatre as much as I can; nothing is so invigorating, so fascinating as theatre, and now that I’ve had a month of seeing four shows a day, I want more. I’ve spent approximately sixty percent of my wages from the past two months on theatre tickets, and that’s fine. I’m glad that I realised how important going to see plays is to me. How ridiculous is it that it took me a year of running my own theatre company to realise how much I love theatre?
If those students are hoping to pursue theatre, they’ll get to this point, too. I hope that they do. I hope it doesn’t take them as long as it took me. It’s embarrassing, more than anything else.
Empty Photo Theatre 