Is theatre brain food?

Good news for Book Clubs from recent scientific research allegedly showing that "Being pulled into the world of a gripping novel can trigger actual, measurable changes in the brain that linger for at least five days after reading."

Emory University in Atlanta used 21 students ~ admittedly not a massive sample, given that the population of its home state Georgia is ten million ~ and found that "reading a good book may cause heightened connectivity in the brain and neurological changes that persist in a similar way to muscle memory. The changes were registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the the primary sensory motor region of the brain."  This is the area associated with "grounded cognition", the phenomenon which shows thinking about an action can activate the neurons associated with that physical act.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” said neuroscientist Professor Gregory Berns, lead author of the study. "We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

The students read the same text, Robert Harris's thriller Pompeii, over 19 days and were given brain scans each morning and for five days after completing the book. This was the bit Prof Berns got excited about: "Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel, they retained the heightened creativity... almost like a muscle memory." Anyone who was a bookish child will recognise this effect without the need for science. I must be one of many who can recall protagonists in the books I inhabited more vividly than many real people.  And there's a general acceptance that films and videos have a huge influence on those who watch them. If imagined scenarios on page or screen can significantly stimulate mental activity, what about plays?  

I'm curious about the way stage drama, possibly considered an 'art' like sculpture only moving & talking a bit, seems overlooked as a power to stimulate the same responses. It certainly wasn't so in the past.  Think of Queen Elizabeth I, hastily pushing playwrights in the Tower lest they stir the people to revolt, and other rulers who took similar steps.  The Greeks tragedians understood the power of drama to change minds, and used salutary myths to warn and guide.  Is there something anodyne about much of the 'theatre' promoted nowadays, with a mission to entertain rather than excite or disturb?

 The exorbitant cost of seats in large venues can maybe take part of the blame: the 'market' is seen as children who want easy and funny, and older middle-class who want familiar-name revivals.  I don't think either assumption is true. In the Pub Theatre I co-run with founder Rosie Finnegan, audience feedback often comments with huge positivity about how unexpected, and powerful, they find the plays we put on. "Thought-provoking" is a frequent comment, alongside enthusiastic accolades.

 A play is finished sooner (probably) than a novel, but live performance has the added element of shared experience ~ in situations not bounded by red plush seats, this can magnify responses to the dreaded mob mentality.  Maybe that's what Queen Elizabeth feared. Playwrights like Tim Crouch are already deliberately exploring the impact of audience on performance in their writing. Maybe what we need is less posh sets and media stars in title roles, and more  plays that reflect on ordinary life. It's not escapist glamour, but that's what Strictly Come Dancing is for, isn't it?

Truly national theatre? Well, male-dominated and indifferent to the regions so Yes.

There are several reasons I haven't done much on, or with, this blog but every now and then something comes up which I really want to keep on record, if only for myself. This time it's the National celebrating its 50th birthday. Half a century of sopping up funding for the capital with very little changed from those Yes Minister days when the joke was that the director of the National would be apoplectic if required by the government to earn that name by actually taking their productions around the country... This point was made by the i newspaper's Arts Editor's today, under the pithy heading A great landmark for The National Theatre, but just how 'national' are they? 
      "As the National Theatre celebrates with a televised gala, I still wonder how truly national our publicly-funded national companies are.

      The National Theatre actually does do some touring. But the English National Opera does literally none – yet taxpayers across the country are paying for it. With the Royal Opera the answer is the same, zero touring. The Royal Ballet does tour – to Japan, Australia and America. Perish the thought it should ever venture into Manchester or Bristol or Newcastle or anywhere in Britain.

       It’s not good enough and at a moment when we are celebrating one national arts company, the Government ought to take a closer look at how national our so-called national companies are. We all pay for them, we should all reap the benefits."

The National evidently enjoyed a good jolly ~ or a 'splendid evening' as Paul Taylor also writing in the i reports: a marvel of gracefulness, pace and profound yet humorous and lightly-worn pride in a half century of extraordinary achievement. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the evening was also a logistical triumph, a seamless flow of rare archive footage, succinct contextualising comment and excerpts from thirty-odd of the theatre’s greatest hits...  a stirring interplay between the past and the present-tense of the show.

           It all sounds marvellous, darlings ~ you can read the details here ~ until the point at which Mr Taylor notes, mid-eulogy on this celebration of the astonishing variety of new work the National has produced from Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967) to London Road (2011) that

           "It was embarrassing that Alecky Blythe, who did the book for London Road, was the only female writer represented. I think that I would have traded one of the three extracts from David Hare for a gobbet, say, of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin."

           A good point, and shameful that neither Nicholas Hytner nor any of his associates, assistants, or consultants, made it at the planning stage.  I didn't even enjoy London Road, but I'm very pleased there was at least one woman in the corner of this celebration of everything the National has done for the theatre in the last half century...

           "Here’s to the next 50 years," the report concludes. Here's to quite a few changes, even if that means demolishing the entire notion of National theatre as a building or an organisation, and replacing it with lively, challenging, locally-based drama groups who don't mind actually touring.

Breeching the wall

I haven't written much here for a while. Thoughts on things dramatic flit past like damsel flies across a murky pond (that latter image being a simile for my mind, mostly) but life has mostly squashed them like ... what is the natural predator of a damsel fly? A frog.  But I was having a conversation about need for realism in a short play, and decided to note my own view, which is: absolutely not.

When I say, realism, I don't mean in the sense of, Does that window really look like it opens on a conservatory/brothel/Parisian street?, or even Does it look like a window? the answer for which, unless you're Theatre Royal Bath or a ritzy West End theatre with the production budget of a drone squadron, the answer is almost certainly No. I'm talking about the convention of the fourth wall, which requires actors to prance before a darkened mass of largely silent onlookers, pretending their observers don't exist and the only 'reality' is the memorised words of the preordained situation they will replicate until it's time to go off stage, have a drink and a bath and go to bed before doing it all again.

Of course theatre, from 6th century Athens onwards, inevitably involves a bit of memorising and repeating situations. Otherwise it's impro, or games, or maybe a riot. To my mind the really significant element is acknowledgement of the audience, and that's what early theatre ~ and theatre in Elizabethan times ~ certainly did. I don't mean Brechtian ruthless exclusion of illusion, I mean acknowledgement that whatever the style of drama, this is an art form that occurs in real time ~ not a movie where scenes are re-shot for perfection but a shared act of human experience, and all the more precious and privileged for that. As Tim Crouch said: "the creative act is not performed by the artist alone... the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."  In other words, what is special about theatre is that the audience is NOT inert, silent in the darkness, unable to press pause and go off to put the kettle on or answer the phone. Those people are present, they are the third element in that curious triangle that starts with the playwright, moves on to the director and team, and finally completes when the audience hears the words, watches their interpretation, and responds emotionally.

So that's why when I start a short play I turn as soon as possible to the audience, addressing them directly, insisting they realise they are a key part of this journey.  That's literally true ~ responses of laughter, or shuffling inattention, have huge impact on a performance. But it goes deeper than that. Picasso said the task of an artist is "to wake people up" and to me that means not hectoring them about my opinions but alerting them to become more strongly aware of their own.  Stand-up comics do it by creating delighted unease amongst their audience: no one is quite sure they may not be called out to account for themselves, whether they heckle, laugh, or sit straightfaced. I think drama that breaks the fourth wall, that addresses the audience direct with an appeal to listen and believe, makes a similar though internal 'call to account'. It challenges us as audience to engage with the challenge, to wonder what would I have done, and to connect more fully with emotions, whether empathy or aversion. Theatre is about being human, and there's nothing trivial or 'merely entertaining' about that.

Image: The Globe production of Twelfth Night (at the Apollo) 2012 ~ actors dressing on stage before the play opens. I don't know how historically authentic, but very appropriate, as Shakespeare is brilliant at breaking the fourth wall abruptly after emotional scenes, demanding that we never lose touch with the immediacy and impact of the action.

"Anything and everything is worth thinking about and questioning."

Goneril:   Hear me, my lord, what need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five -
Regan:     What need one?
Lear:        Oh reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous...

Mark Ravenhill  delivered the welcome address at the Edinburgh Fringe on Friday and took the opportunity to deliver what the Guardian is calling 'some home truths'. Reminding his audience that public funding for arts didn't begin until the 1940s and has been steadily eroded in recent years ~ a bit like the NHS, you could say ~ he argued that this, and even a subsequent total demise, could be in the interests of artists. 

      "Let's look on this as a good thing. Didn't the arts become safe and well behaved during the New Labour years? I think they did. I think they weren't telling the truth - the dirty, dangerous, hilarious, upsetting, disruptive, noisy, beautiful truth - as often as they should have done."
      "Artists are needed more now than ever before. You're the ones who have the freedom, if you choose to use it, to think of new possibilities, crazy ideas, bold, idealistic, irrational, counterintuitive, disruptive, naughty, angry words and deeds. Because these are the only things that can adequately respond to such a huge meltdown in capitalism and the only way that we might find a way forward in to a different future... Maybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? If I didn't have to fill in forms, tick boxes, prove how good, nice, worthy me and my project are to a well meaning gatekeeper, maybe I'd make something better - more truthful, more radical?"

Lyn Gardner, Guardian theatre guru, thinks he has a good point. "At a time when the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening in every city, town and village across the country, perhaps Ravenhill's speech is timely in questioning the role and function of the artist. Among the most ringing lines in the speech – quoting a famous post-punk line – is that that a rising generation shouldn't look to the past for their own futures, but rip it up and start again...  

Which does slightly beg the question, what if you're not into proving how nice you and your project are, if your projects are challenging and innovative and brave - how can you afford to bring them to our artist-needy world unless you're rich or have a rich patron?  Arts funding, despite its sneerable form-filling requirements, brings access to creativity to people who would never otherwise have that chance.

And if you've forgotten the lyrics of that 1983 pop chart number, they're a little ambiguous:
       And there was times I'd take my pen
       And feel obliged to start again
       I do profess
       That there are things in life
       That one can't quite express
       You know me I'm acting dumb-dumb

Do we need new theatres?

Maureen Lipman was challenged by the i's Susie Mesure earlier this month with that question. The interview took place in London's newest venue, Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, and as the actress acknowledged, it's a good question. We need dramatic performances, but do we need more big buildings to sop up arts funding in repainted moldings and reupholstered seats as though red velvet is integral to community culture?  Enterprising theatre companies large and small are moving to site-specific performances, to open-air and street theatre, to performances in pubs and rural halls and shop doorways,  but it seems in the eyes of funders, theatre means not a show but a building.

The point Maureen Lipman was making was that arts ministers ~ including the current Culture Secretary Maria Miller who she describes as a “nightmare” ~ know nothing about art, and governments would rather invest in buildings than the people who actually create art.

“We never seem to have an arts minister who knows the slightest thing about it. They seem to pick someone on the grounds that they were in a school play. Who was the last arts secretary who actually bothered to go to the theatre I wonder? So we always fall foul of the cuts.”

So her response when challenged about the virtues of opening a new playhouse when so many other arts ventures are struggling is agreement: “ I have a theory that you can always get money for buildings, but not for people. That applies to hospitals and schools. Or The Shard. But can you get money for people? No. They’re taking grants away from all the existing companies… There are more places to work, but no reps: nowhere to learn your trade."

The interview concludes in paradox: “Art is essential in a society but it’s the easiest thing to cut because if you cut it down, if you repress it, it will come out at the sides, like a pressure cooker. So there will always be art.”

The UK premiere of Fifty Words by Michael Weller at Bath's Ustinov Studio ~ an excellent production incidentally ~ is pitched in the brochure as a study in male/female relationships: This is the night when they say everything there is to say, reveal every dark secret which has been kept hidden and reach new heights of passion and intimacy.
I'm not sure the cliché 'reach new heights' is apt for the tigerish wounding process but my point is, this is an effective taste of the content of the play, and dark secrets in marriage are usually to do with infidelity. You'd expect, wouldn't you, a cupboard full of skeletons and most of them lascivious. Within the play programme there's an in-depth analysis, by a relationship counsellor, of the role of affairs in marital breakdown. Adam seems to be seeking someone to meet his needs outside the marriage without entering into the depths of a committed relationship, Julia Cole explains helpfully. Again leaving aside the spacial metaphor (though depths seems to me profoundly more appropriate than heights for issues of cohabitation) this provides a not-surprising extension of anticipation for the viewer, yet the article is bannered in red

SPOILER ALERT You may prefer to read this after the show, it reveals various significant details or material that may spoil your enjoyment of the unfolding action.

This intrigues me.  Reveals plot detail, possibly. Preempts the pace of story-line development, maybe. But spoils your enjoyment? When did you ever say to anyone 'I don't need to see that new production of King Lear, he dies in the end you know.' Or 'If you haven't seen Three Sisters yet, don't let anyone tell you whether they get to Moscow or not because that would spoil it completely.'?  I don't know about you but if I like a play, or a film, or a book, I return to it with increased enjoyment, not in spite of knowing what happens but because of that. No longer a who-dunnit, but a how-and-why dunnit, in crime terms. It's only pot-boilers like The Archers (I imagine, I'm not a follower so I'm guessing here) that people feel aren't worth spending any time with once they know.

And maybe informed anticipation has a place even with sagas and soaps. Coronation Street website has SPOILERS on their banner, giving fans a chance to glimpse developing storylines. This is in line with Victorian melodrama, when punters couldn't get enough spoilers and storylines like Murder at the Red Barn were ripped straight from the newspapers. Nowadays we like a little more psychological subtlety but doesn't that make the facts of the story less, not more, important?

So I dunno. Would you watch an Agatha Christie's Marple on TV if you knew that story?  Will you make a trip to the cinema to see The Great Gatsby, or any other film-of-the-book for that matter?  Surely with live performance as with films we go not for the plot but the adaptation, to see what nuances and insight the director and actors have brought to the writer's words. And that's no disrespect to the playwright, it's the challenge and the delight of working in theatre.

I wasn't in the UK when Maria Miller expounded her intention as newly-appointed Culture Secretary to "focus on economic impact' and 'demonstrate the healthy dividends' that investment in the arts brings into the economy,' creating a brand identity of Britain overseas'. The Guardian article summarising her speech arrived on Facebook with a kite-tail of angry comments.  The Arts Council responded with a 113 page dossier to show it generates more than four times the amount received in Government grants - but as that's a pitiful 0.1% of their spending, the figures aren't exactly bankers' bonuses.  Examples used to highlight their artistic success are all theatrical: War Horse, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and Matilda the Musical.  "Everybody agrees you don't put money into the arts primarily for economic benefit," says Sir Peter Bazalgette, new chair of the Council: "What it does for our quality of life and how it fires our imaginations, the fantastic contribution to education and our sense of identity is clear."  I haven't trawled all these shows' prices, but tickets for a family of four to see any matinee of Matilda would cost over £300, which suggests that economic benefit is coming rather higher up the scale than education, imagination, and cultural identity.

But if it isn't the role of theatre to make profit for those not involved in (and possibly antipathetic to) its production, should we even be arguing its effectiveness in that role? Theatre makes a direct, dynamic, contribution to communities, creating insightful, thought-provoking stories about ourselves ~ past, present and future ~ which evoking every human experience from life-affirming to socially-challenging.  Danny Boyle in the Olympics opening ceremony showed that. Surely the sparkling fallout from that event should be more about taking the theatrical experience into the community than 'researching the relationship between publicly funding arts and how talent feeds into the commercial sector.'

Lyn Gardner, the Guardian's voice on all things theatrical, seems to feel that way in a recent blog:
 'One of the most encouraging developments in recent years is the increased understanding from theatres and companies that education and participatory initiatives must be at the heart of their work. They are core activities, not add-ons, because for many in the local community it is these, not another revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream, that make a real difference to their lives – and which, crucially, they will be willing to defend.'
(I like this particularly because it appears a covert swipe on the recent mish-mash production of The Dream at the Bristol Old Vic - a stunning misuse of budget that could have put on scores of small productions around the city. As a comment I overheard in the interval put it: 'All that money on those Thunderbirds puppets? They'd have done better giving it to a voice-coach.')

I googled why theatre. It seemed a good place to find someone who wouldn't start with economics. I found Howard Shalwitz, who in 1978 'had an idea for a new kind of theatre that would shake up the nation':
The idea was simple—pull together a group of exceptionally talented actors, mold them into a company, seek innovative scripts with something challenging to say, and find fresh approaches to acting, directing, and design. Above all, don't be afraid to take risks. 
      This simple idea proved revolutionary. The new company caught on immediately with local audiences and critics and... continued its explosive growth in artistry, audience, and impact for 13 years. Plays premiered on the Woolly stage began to be produced in New York and across the country... 
      Responding to the neglect of its historic 14th Street neighborhood, Woolly Mammoth also launched an award-winning outreach program to make a difference in the lives of young people. It offered low-cost acting classes and pioneered the idea of "Pay-What-You-Can" nights at the theatre. People of all backgrounds and all ages responded to the exceptional creativity of Woolly's plays and programs.

Howard Shalwitz does include a reference to the economy - specifically to revitalise neighbourhoods - in his list of Ways That Theatre Makes Our Lives Better, concluding with one that is surely more useful to the health and wealth of a community:

"Theatre influences the way we think and feel about our own lives and encourages us to take a hard look at ourselves, our values, and our behavior."