Self-fulfilling prophets of superficiality?

Mike van Graan Mike van Graan graduated from UCT with a BA Honours degree in Drama and a Higher Diploma in Education. In 1998, Van Graan won the Fleur du Cap award for Best New Script for his trilogy, Dinner Talk. His play Green Man Flashing has been nominated in the same category for this year's Fleur du Cap awards as well as in the Johannesburg Naledi Awards. Van Graan has three new scripts that will premiere in the first quarter of 2006, including Some Mothers' Sons at the Klein Karoo Nasionale Kunstefees, Two to Tango at the Liberty Theatre on the Square, and Mixed Metaphors (directed by Jaco Bouwer) - a play about being young in contemporary South Africa and featuring performance poetry, video and music - at the State Theatre.

A few years ago, when I first entered Green Man Flashing into the PANSA Festival of New Writing, the prevailing wisdom among the audience who saw the staged reading was that while it was ground-breaking in raising important contemporary political, social and moral issues, there really was no audience for this kind of work any more. As if to confirm this sentiment – emanating largely from a theatre-literate audience – a “lighter” piece walked off with the Audience (“popular”) Award at that Festival, while Green Man Flashing won the Jury (“serious”) Award.

However, when it premiered a few months later at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, audiences had to be turned away from Green Man Flashing, as it had sold out, and it had done so without selling out to the lowest common denominator by watering down its primary moral and political themes.

Within the theatre community we seem to create our own self-fulfilling prophecies, ie that after a force-fed diet of anti-apartheid theatre, post-1994 audiences are tired of political theatre, that “serious” theatre is a loser’s game, and that musicals, boy band tributes and comedy are what “the market” really wants. And so – thus continue our self-created myths - if one wants to survive without one’s professional life being held hostage by visionless, politically bankrupt and administratively challenged funding bodies, then one has to compromise one’s art and simply give the market what it wants.

In the absence of hard market research data (a massive deficiency in the theatre industry which, hopefully, the pioneering work of Deon Opperman will help to address), one has to theorise on the basis largely of anecdotal information. I recently had two shows - one, a comedy that ran in Johannesburg, and the other, a piece of serious (some would even say “depressing”) theatre in Cape Town. There are no doubt other factors contributing to it, but the average audience attendance was not that different between the genres (the myth is that the comedy should have attracted significantly more people, and greater income).

Too often we think in terms of binary oppositions. But it is not about either/ors, about “serious” versus “light”, about “high” versus “low”; rather, it is about providing the full basket of forms, styles and themes for audiences to have access to, and to choose from. Like different brands of toothpaste, there are different markets for different kinds of theatre. The challenge to writers and directors of “serious” theatre is not to blame “Philistine” audiences, or purveyors of competing, more popular forms of entertainment for lack of support for their work, but rather to do the research, to find the audience for “serious” theatre, and to devise and implement effective marketing strategies to sustain and build this audience. At this point we simply do not have the research to show us whether, for example, John Kani’s Nothing But the Truth or Lara Foot-Newton’s Tshepang, both qualifying in the “serious theatre” category, have done any worse in terms of audiences than, say, another award-winning play, King of Laughter by Craig Freimond. Furthermore, I suspect that audiences support work – comedy or serious, “low” or “high” – because of previous experience of the quality of the work of the director or writer, so that, for example, Saartjie Botha and Marthinus Basson will always attract generally good houses.

To say that audiences “no longer” want serious or political or socially engaged theatre is to assume that once upon a time they did. But again, we simply do not have the research to show us the range of theatre that was available prior to 1994, whether audiences went to comedy more than drama, whether they went to classical drama more than contemporary South African drama, etc.

My instinct tells me that, rather than audiences no longer wanting serious theatre, it is now the case that they simply have more choices than during the apartheid era. Even within theatre there are more options, including stand-up comedy (which rose sharply after 1989), international blockbuster musicals, Barnyard Theatre entertainment, etc. Since 1989, the entertainment options have exploded. We have DSTV with multiple channels, major pop icons touring the country, more DVDs and CDs available now than during the cultural boycott, the internet, computer games, play stations, magazines, books, and so many more things to do with one’s leisure time and disposable income, like go to the local casino or strip club, not generally available ten years ago. These have not led and will not lead to the death of theatre, serious or otherwise; rather, they are shaping a contemporary audience that perhaps we in the theatre industry with our staid institutions, buildings, training and strategies haven’t quite begun to understand. Perhaps we are trying to pour old wine into new wineskins, or trying to fit square pegs into round holes, or whatever metaphor implies a lack of keeping up with the times on our part, rather than the failure of the times to deliver us a market or an audience for our work, as if it were our right.

Our society is in transition and there is huge and ongoing contestation around fundamental issues such as identity, human rights, power and freedoms. In my view, the need for theatre that takes on these issues, that gives public space for debate, that provides opportunities for new insights and that allows for catharsis, is at least as imperative now as it might have been prior to 1994.

In the same way as public spaces, eg newspapers, radio, television, etc were narrowed during the apartheid era for dissenting views so that theatre played an important role in educating and challenging audiences, so today we see the narrowing of public forums for debate and discussion (some for political reasons, others because the demand for increasing profits requires editorial columns to be usurped by advertisers) so that theatre (whether in formal theatres or festivals or even again in community spaces) will again become an important vehicle for social engagement – but hopefully, now, with better aesthetics.

At the moment the primary challenges lie not with the audiences, but with theatre practitioners.

LitNet: 24 Mei 2006

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