Hi Theatre Chaps,

this isn't new news.... but we love it so much we've put it here anyway....

Tuesday March 30, 2004
The Guardian

Philip Pullman

Theatre - The True Key Stage 

The difficulty with persuading grown-up people about this is that if you deprive children of shelter and kindness and food and drink and exercise, they die visibly; whereas if you deprive them of art and music and story and theatre, they perish on the inside, and it doesn't show.

So the grown-ups who should be responsible for providing these good and necessary things - teachers, politicians, parents - don't always notice until it's too late; or they pretend that art and theatre and so on are not necessities at all, but expensive luxuries that only snobbish people want in any case; or they claim that children are perfectly happy with their computers and video games, and don't need anything else.

I'm not going to argue about this: I'm right. Children need art and music and literature; they need to go to art galleries and museums and theatres; they need to learn to play musical instruments and to act and to dance. They need these things so much that human rights legislation alone should ensure that they get them.

But just let's think about the theatre for the moment.

The experience of being in the audience when a play or an opera is being performed is not simply passive. It's not like watching TV; it's not even like going to the cinema. Everyone in that big space is alive, and everyone is focused on one central activity. And everyone contributes. The actors and singers and musicians contribute their performance; the audience contribute their attention, their silence, their laughter, their applause, their respect.

And they contribute their imagination, too. The theatre can't do what cinema does, and make everything seem to happen literally. There are no pixels on the stage; what happens is caused by physical bodies moving about in real space, not by computer-generated imagery on a screen.

So it has limitations. That isn't a real room, it's painted canvas, and it looks like it; that isn't a real boy, it's a little wooden puppet. But the limitations leave room for the audience to fill in the gaps. We pretend these things are real, so the story can happen. The very limitations of theatre allow the audience to share in the acting. In fact, they require the audience to pretend. It won't work if they don't.

But the result of this imaginative joining-in is that the story becomes much more real, in a strange way. It belongs to everyone, instead of only to the performers under the lights. The audience in the dark are makers, too. And when it all works, the experience we take away is incomparably richer and fuller and more magical than it would ever have been if all we did was sit back passively and watch.

I can remember evenings in the theatre, both as a child and as an adult, which were among the most important things I've ever known. Seeing Frankie Howerd as Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Old Vic when I was nine, and laughing so much I fell off my seat; watching Peter Hall's production of the Oresteia at the National Theatre, and feeling a sense of awe at the gradual unfolding of this ancient, savage, profound story; more recently, simultaneously helpless with laughter and shivering with pity and terror at the extraordinary Shock-Headed Peter. If I hadn't seen those things, my life would be much the poorer. Theatre feeds the heart and nourishes the soul and enlarges the spirit.

When we are adults, and if we're lucky enough to have developed the habit, we can find our own way to plays and operas, but children can't do it on their own. They need to be helped into the experience by people who've been there before, and who can excite their curiosity. A little knowledge helps a great deal. A theatre especially set up for children helps even more; and plays presented by people who know how to perform for children without talking down to them, or being facetious, or leaving their brains behind, are best of all.