theatreVOICE

So here it is. Welcome to the all-new theatrevoice.com blog. It’s not as if people have been mounting petitions demanding one but we reckoned we should try one out all the same. It was long overdue, in fact - and it so happens that the launch of it coincides with the coming together of Rose Bruford College and The V&A Theatre Collections as joint funding partners for the site; an exciting new era - this being just the first in a series of planned improvements.

What will you be able to read here? Well I hope not too much along the lines of ’someone jogged my elbow and spilt my interval drink at the Comedy last night’. Spare us. This blog isn’t going to be hogged by either me or my co-editor Aleks Sierz - it’s going to be, we hope, a drop-in centre for ideas and thoughts from a wide range of theatre-makers and journalists on all manner of subjects, not least the recordings we’re currently streaming. And we hope that some of you out there will want to chip in too, friendly-like.

Do we need more theatre blogs? More chatter? It’s certainly a question I’ve been mulling over, and it re-poses the question I asked myself right at the start when I set up the site what seems like decades ago but is in fact a mere four years back. Our culture is now awash with commentary about the making of things - you can hardly watch a film on DVD or a major TV series without being filled in, ad nauseam, about how it was all done. Shouldn’t people keep mum and stop de-mystifying the process? Shouldn’t critics carry on interpreting in their presumptuous fashion? And artists go on making?

Beckett’s injunction ‘Never speak’ - when advising Billie Whitelaw about the wisdom of not talking to the press, would - if implemented as standard practice among playwrights - sound the death-knell of many an arts page and certainly this site.

I actually respect the obstinate reticence of writers like Debbie Tucker Green - to whose regular director Sacha Wares Aleks has turned this month to help get the low-down on her thinking; why would she want to relay her thoughts in one medium when she’s already chosen another to work in? Why would she want to pick apart the delicate fabric of her invention? These are assumptions of course - it may be she just hasn’t yet met a journalist she actually wanted to talk to.

Yet the risk of what might get lost through dialogue has to be scaled against the greater loss that comes through silence and abstinence. One of the impulses behind setting theatrevoice up was the very simple one of guilt: for reasons of sheer disorganisation on my part, I managed to lose the tape of an interview I did with Sarah Kane for the Big Issue some 10 years ago. What was initially a matter of minor annoyance at the time became a source of ongoing self-recrimination after she died: it wasn’t the world’s most in-depth interview but, once gone, there was no chance of anyone being able to access it in the future and draw any source of inspiration or information from it. Some of the stuff of interviews is very small change indeed - and yet, it’s often in the throwaway remarks that you get a lasting insight into the way a particular personality works, or a mindset operates, or a play functions.

Listen to David Pugh in ListenNOW and you’ll see what I mean; hearing about the battle he had to fight for Richard Griffiths to star in Equus, say, or the fact that Daniel Radcliffe hung out in his office as a baby is, frankly, ‘trival’ - but in this chit-chat what nuggets of insight there are into the way the theatre world works - with its need for tenacity and reliance on happenstance.

What’s true of a recording is I think also the case for spur-of-the-moment scribbling. Sure the blog offers a place for sustained polemic, we hope, for appraisals of theatre books and printed matter as much of performances and productions but alongside that, in the midst of that, will be the half-developed idea, the incidental remark - and that will have a value too. There will be times when people think - ‘so what? did we need to read that?’. But then, in defiance of all the rules about ‘serious coverage’ and the pecking-orders required for posterity to take note, I hope visitors scrolling down will hit on things they never knew about or thought about before; and maybe, if they’re so inclined, their contributions will grant others equivalent moments of accidental epiphany too.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 1:59 am, by Dominic Cavendish and is filed under Audio 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.