Talk: To be right, or to be real?

Sam Pout

8 Feb 2022

On the 5th Feburary, I hosted  an open discussion and Q&A at Omnibus Theatre on the importance of collaboration and how 'emerging' artists can support their work and each other. 

It was a free event, inviting any artist to come and ask questions, share their ideas and listen to fellow creatives offer their expeirences. We organised this in response to the cancellation of VAULTS Festival 2022 with the intention to give creatives a platform to be able to meet and talk about their work, something integral to the atmosphere created at Vaults. 

In the future, we intend to host more events like this designed to hand over the conversation to artists for them to discuss what they feel is important to adress. 

To Be Right, Or To Be Real?

Opening talk by Sam Pout

When we heard about the cancellation of VAULTS Festival, like everyone else in the industry, we were devastated for all those involved in the hundreds of shows programmed. And as we know, VAULTS isn’t just about the theatre, it’s about the late night raves, otherwise known as networking. The festival offers the opportunity to make new friends and connections to then work with in the future. So when VAULTS was cancelled for the third year in a row, it exposed the need to ask how the industry can prevent losing more shows as another victim to the pandemic. Recently the VAULTS showed its support for cancelled shows by introducing VAULTS SPACE and VAULTS WORKSHOPS, offering free space for cancelled shows to meet and workshop. Theatres across London also showed solidarity in offering their spaces to host shows, The Pleasance and Omnibus Theatre as a partnerships, are housing 20 transferred shows, not intending to recreate Vaults but instead, as AD for Omnibus Marie McCarthy said, giving the companies confidence in their work by allowing their time to be 'artist led' (Masso).

‘Artist led’. What does this mean? Is it a kind of freedom that leads to full scale anarchy, for example a violent game of dodgeball causing broken lights and black eyes? Or does ‘artist led’ mean a facist style rehearsal structure with a centrally autocratic creative? Hopefully not, although as a dramaturg, the idea of life threatening dodgeball is something I encourage, and will take part in, and win. These are extreme examples but I’m sure many of us are familiar with such scenarios. Arguably though, the best meaning for 'artist led' work is the ability and freedom to take risks.

Sometimes when we take a risk, we think we should do it but we’re unsure of the outcome, or in theatre’s case, unsure of the reception to our work. We ask ourselves, is an audience ready to hear this? Will they accept it? Will it be financially successful? Unfortunately the question of money is the most predominant factor that defines the idea of risk taking and so our efforts are demoralised when a lack of money becomes a brick wall. In an effort to inspire, philosopher Alan Watts once asked, ‘What would you do if money were no object?’ Although this is a privileged question, we should hypothetically ask ourselves the same in order to follow a drive or passion? Inevitably however, if something is uniquely brave and honest, money will always be a mountain to climb when producing a show. 

Twitter can be amazing in its ability to unify the theatre community, but it can also breed competition and uninvited envy when someone publicly celebrates a successful bid. If unsuccessful, we naturally compare ourselves and our work to someone who is gifted money from ACE. It’s not a helpful mindset to have, but we do fall into thinking that a successful bid must be ‘right’, and if I was rejected for example, then there is something relatively wrong about the work I’m producing. Whether you believe this or not, this feeling is often unavoidable. 

So what does it mean for theatre to be right? Let’s imagine a scene. One character, we’ll call them Character A, stands centre stage and talks for 5 minutes, the audience are given one voice, one opinion, one version of the truth. Thus within the context of the play, this first opinion is probably right. Now take Character A but make them share those 5 minutes with another, meet Character B. Now we have two voices, two opinions and so now we naturally ask: which character is right? We see this simple method of creating conflict everywhere from judicial courtrooms, to the House of Commons, even all the way over to Cassa Amor. The audience are left to decide for themselves who is right and who is wrong. This kind of dialogue, debating to reveal the truth is in essence, a form of collaboration. 

We also see this same scenario in the rehearsal room. Theatre director Anne Bogart says ‘collaboration is too often misunderstood as agreement, and too much agreement leads to too little happening.’ (Bogart, What's the Story). Following this idea, surely disagreement or conflict leads to a lot happening. When we collaborate in the rehearsal room, and discuss ideas, disagree, unpack and critique, we may feel like we are getting no where because no idea is concrete. But this uneasy fluidity contributes to our developed awareness of our work, leading to a more holistic understanding of the ideas we’re presenting. Plays offer opinion, they offer an argument, or a version of rightness; however because a play’s rightness is always up for debate, it’s best to not opt for being right because there will inevitably be someone there to say you’re wrong. 

What I think is a better objective, is to try to be real. The idea of authentic theatre is hotly debated, and a show’s level of authenticity often relies on what type of theatre it is. Some claim Alecky Blythe to be so real it’s Documentary theatre, but some say it’s immoral and superficially constructed. Some may say the naturalism of Henrik Ibsen is the height of  realism, but others suggest it’s replication and performance of life invalidates its claim to naturalism. When I’m dramaturging writers, in our conversations the word ‘real’ comes up a lot; ‘Do my characters seem real?’ Does the drama feel real? Questions I ask myself when I’m writing too. Everyone will have their own answer to these questions proving that the definition for real is very had to pin down when concerning theatre. So how can we define such a subjective notion? Perhaps the answer can be found within its subjectivity. 

We all have our own idea of what theatre is and should be, and we try to follow that path with every project we’re apart of. Thus, when we see a piece of theatre, we all respond differently and individually react to moments, but importantly as a collective whole. Therefore, could we argue that the authenticity doesn’t lie within the theatre we’re presented with, but actually within the audience themselves. Within theatre and life in general, what we see affects us based on our physiological, social, interpersonal and internalised relationship with the world. And because of this, our subconscious reaction to theatre is organic, we may hide it or mimic another’s response to feel part of the crowd but that wouldn’t be a real response. The authenticity of theatre comes from how it affects our senses, memories and relationships which ultimately make us human.

So that all sounds great, we all want our theatre to enact change. But how do we put that into our work? Well, the answer is I think in what I mentioned a few minutes ago: the meaning behind artist led, the freedom to take risks. When faced with the extremity of an unknown outcome, our body produces adrenaline. Here are a few facts about adrenaline I found from BuzzFeed.

1. It makes you see better.

2. Your lungs expand allowing more oxygen to flow to your muscles. 

3. Adrenaline enhances memory retention.

4. It allows you to forget about pain and increases your concentration and alertness.

5. It can even restart a stopped heartbeat. 

The adrenaline fuelled risk is one of the most affecting things we call upon, causing a very real physical reaction.

But how is this relevant to theatre? Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart opened in New York in 1985, imagine the adrenaline pulsing through the cast and crew on opening night. A lot of us are familiar with the feeling of waiting in the wings, imagine that but knowing that you were about to very publicly address one of the most affecting yet silenced epidemics the world was facing. To give you a scale of the play’s impact, The New York Times review included more information about AIDS than it had published in the previous 4 years put together. What united all those associated with the show was this universal feeling of adrenaline and the presence of risk, the feeling of doing something right. Whatever they were doing was affecting them and in turn affecting their audience, thus the country and therefore the democracy of theatre.

As writers, artists and collaborators, we are left with a choice: to be real, or to be right. Don’t try to be right, not every single person in that audience will think you’re right. Instead, try to be real, because doing something that is nurtured organically with good intention breeds rightness. Taking a risk, and collaboratively making bold and daring theatre might be successful, might be less so, we all have our own idea of success anyway. There comes a time when every artist must alter their perspective of success, this is easily done by using the Character A/B scenario. Ourselves and the theatre we make is Character A and a lack of success or acclaim is highly likely to enter the space as Character B. Both characters may not agree with each other, thus conflict ensues. As stated before, it is this conflict which reveals a truth within the work, not to be hidden from no matter how overwhelming. A negative review or an unsuccessful ACE application must not be seen as failure, but instead as Character B. 'Failure' eventually will become your frenemy, because we can use their response to improve our next venture. Ultimately, we should be award ourselves with the ability and confidence to collectively do something ‘if money were no object’, doing so is a very real act of theatre. And if we’re lucky, producers will acknowledge the authenticity in risk more, because such risks reveal a truth about the the world and in doing so affect it, hopefully for the better.

Works cited

Bogart, A. What's the Story : Essays About Art, Theater and Storytelling. Routledge, 2014. 

BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/nissancanada/facts-you-didnt-know-about-adrenaline. (accessed 4th Feb 2022).

Masso, G,. 2022. Fifty Cancelled Vault Festival Shows Find Their New Homes. https://www.thestage.co.uk/news/50-cancelled-vault-festival-shows-find-new-homes. (Accessed 3rd Feb 2022).