What if theatre disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?

For the second What If? interview I met with writer, director and poet Alan Fielden to talk about the social and personal value of theatre, and breaking from tradition.

Alan Fielden is an Anglo-Korean writer, director, and poet. He is the 2018 recipient of the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust Award (for Marathon with JAMS), and his writing has been published in Murmur, Minor Literatures, 404ink, Der Grief. He teaches Playwriting at Worcester University and runs a poetry/performance night called Wedding around London.

This interview is condensed from a longer conversation.

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T So we’re in a dystopian future where theatre is just a distant memory...

A We all go to sleep, and in the night, these aliens come and make it all vanish. We wake up and everyone and everything connected to theatre has gone.

T Everything, theatrical history too?

A Yeah, let's go with that.

T So why are you asking this question?

A I think it's to do with a nagging feeling in the back of my head about how much social value theatre has. How much is it fiddling while Rome burns? How much of it is an indulgence? Doing a one month run of a show, maybe a few thousand people see it and take it home. Compared to film or a book that's seen or read by millions, what is the effect? One way of quantifying that effect is imagining if theatre disappeared, would the world be any different? A pessimist would say that the world would keep turning and nothing much would change.

T Does theatre have a different role that's not about social impact?

A I have problems with the idea of theatre being an engine for social change. It’s something I think we talk a lot about in England, a lot in the shadow of Brecht, and I think that I would like it to be the case. But my approach to making theatre is that I want something in your internal machinery to be effected. And that might not be in the sense of ‘now I'm going to vote Labour’ but that you recognise something in this play that feels like it's speaking directly to you.

T There's something that we get from theatre that's not as sexy to market but fundamental to our experience.

T I wonder if theatre disappeared, what kind of theatre would exist?

A Yes, I think one of the things you wrote in response was - what would replace that need for storytelling and contact? It seems that people go to the theatre to see their story told. I'm sure that there are many people, myself included, that feel like they go to the theatre and don't see their particular worldview, or experience of way of being up on that stage. So for me there's an impetus to be manifesting a world view or an experience that isn't being seen.

T For you personally, can you articulate what it is that you're not seeing?

A We seem to always start from a place of psychological interpersonal character-based narrative. English theatre - enormous generalisation - wants to work through our problems through characters, rather than with sensation or composition or juxtaposition of feeling, more nebulous and poetic ways of talking.

T So there is a norm and it's hard to sit outside of that. If we destroyed theatre and all its traditions does that mean more experimental forms would exist in the mainstream?

A There’s something deeply appealing about this idea of a Year Zero. Up until pretty recently the driving forces of English theatre were public school educated white men. They set a certain tone and have done for hundreds of years and that tone has an influence on the kind of stories that are told and the way they are told. If you're going through a certain kind of education system and the things you are exposed to are of a Western tradition, Socratic, Ancient Greek, Christian morality, all that kind of stuff, it's going to result in a certain kind of storytelling form that's adhering to certain kinds of narratives. There are different ways of presenting the idea of a human, a character, of conflict or of the inner and the outer world. I would like to believe that if we started from Year Zero and we started from the people we have now in a place like London and we had a theatre and ecology that was representative of London, very different things would be happening.

T Lots of experimental work feels reactionary, in that it’s playing to an audience that expect the traditional. You're then subverting their expectation rather than playing to a different, new audience. How do you break out of that? Is it about audience - making theatre for an audience who don’t yet go to the theatre?

A I think you have to plow your own furrow and just keep going.

T So, if the theatre buildings went as well, what kind of spaces would we make theatre in and what kind of media would we use? I wonder whether we'd go for something really stripped back or if it would be like a Katy Perry concert..

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A We'd make a lot of really bad mistakes because there's a lot of thought and acoustic science that we’ve learnt.

T How would we arrive at it?

A Maybe we’d get this yearning, a feeling - we’d say ‘I've been going to a lot of gigs recently, I feel really moved, but I kind of want the people onstage to talk to each other and put on hats, and for the lighting to change... I feel there should be a kitchen sink in the corner…’

T Perhaps we’d combine theatre into other artforms? So gigs would become more theatrical...

A It would be like a Talking Heads gig.

T But would we need an Ibsen?

A Someone might eventually say, ‘can we try it without music?’

T ‘...And I want to not be able to eat and drink, and for it to be quiet…’

There's something magical and specific about an Ibsen play. There's a lot of human existence in those plays. Do we need that or is that romantic - we've always had it so we feel it’s important?

A As a younger writer, I was more strident about that kind of work. As I get older, I feel like it would be horrible if we lost these plays I used to rail against. They're incredible works of craftsmanship. Someone sat down and crystallised something profound into 80 pages. There's just also room for other things.

T Would we write three acts plays if we didn't already have them?

A Maybe we'd take the closest approximation, like novels. And we’d think, this might work on a stage. Let's get all the bits where the characters speak and put it on paper.

T I was reading John Yorke’s Into the Woods, and it's so convincing that this storytelling structure is psychologically fundamental.

A I do think it is. I teach playwriting and some of my students have never read a play. So when I'm teaching, I'm trying to find stories that we all know and remember. The one story we all know is the the garden of Eden and the banishment of Adam and Eve. So we go through the inciting incident, the climax and the conclusion. You can tell that story to anyone and it has that arc that feels so natural. The way I see it is that you can distill playwriting or storytelling down to: there's a world that's in relative equilibrium, you disturb it, and you work out how it's going to be resolved. That process by which something is resolved seems to be the human thing, the thing that we're interested in. Everything's fine, now it's not, how do we make it fine?

T Theatre is the ultimate world creating space. The world is never going to be perfect, so there’s always going to be a desire for change, so does that mean there will always be a need for theatre?

A Yeah, but do you think that film can do that?

T I think so. But there's something about the liveness of theatre that makes you as the audience complicit in that experiment. With film you can chose to engage or not engage with it. So, what has theatre got that other art forms don't have?

A  It holds the audience together, and holds them to account. You are called to bear witness to something together. I saw Ostermeier’s The Enemy of the People and at some point, they just stopped the show. They opened it up to everyone to talk to each other about what should happen next. Some people were incensed and shouting out that the characters should do this or do that, and the actors were fielding those responses and this conversation happened in the auditorium of the Barbican. This is somewhat how I imagine it would have felt to see a Brecht production. It felt charged and that we were all there together examining each other. That felt like an important and unique thing to do that I don't think happens in other artistic forums.

T Does theatre have to be a space for conversations to happen, do we have to change form or is it about the stories that we are telling? Is it about changing the narratives?

A The work I want to make is about private reflection and private changes; moments of disarmament and you are left almost with a song in your head or some kind of residue. Something has been disturbed in you, you have had to wrestle with something. And it didn't come about because we had a conversation it was because the play reached out and twisted something in you. That's the kind of work I'm interested in. And that's what poetry does as well. You read the thing on the page and you are affected in your DNA. And that has a kind of knock on effect to the way you might live. There's a lot of faith in me in people's reflective process. It's about giving people the opportunity to have time with themselves.

T Yes, that's about trusting your audience.

A Who actually does take time to reflect? It's a practice we don't seem to value as a society.

T Maybe if theatre didn't exist we would revalue it, we would think of it not as an alternative to having a drink, or the cinema or going swimming, but more of a separate experience.

A And it does have its origins in ritual and rain-dancing and putting poles in the ground and a mask on their face and saying I'm going to dance so someone isn't ill or we are going to talk about our dreams.The community coming together because something needs to happen or something needs to change. We need to meet each other. That's not something that happens in the cinema. I've got no idea what the stats are on people going to churches. We've got therapists. What about the community going to a therapist? Let's en masse go to this building and talk about what's wrong. That's kind of what theatre is.

T There's also something thrilling about the idea of you transforming into Linda but me knowing that you're Alan. The make-believe -

A That's a really good point. There is something so human about that. Children do that from such a young age.

T You see these elaborate costumes that exist across all cultures, it transforms you, it elevates you.

A And isn't there something about watching someone pretend to be someone else. There's a funny catharsis that reminds you that we're all pretending.

T You feel reassured by that.

A Let's try a different tact, someone says that theatre will exist but you, Tash, have a lifelong ban on working or seeing theatre.

T I would miss the bravery. I often feel I go to the theatre because I’m relatively cautious in my life and I go to feel that risk on stage from actors. Maybe without theatre I'd take more risks in my life. I'd start climbing mountains!

A friend and collaborator of mine, Natasha Kaeda, says that she writes to feel like she's actually experiencing her life.

A Right. It sort of acts like an anchor. A way to tie together all those accumulated thoughts

A We've talked about the effect that theatre disappearing would have on a societal level but to be more self-centred, one of the things that first got me into theatre was the community aspect - everyone pulling together. You do maths and then you do geography, and all of a sudden you're in Mr Godwin's class with these other 12 boys and you're asked to draw on your feelings, your perspective on the world. Suddenly your opinions matter. You're asked to creatively respond and you become a team. That feeling of supporting each other and coming through together - isn't that amazing? It's a wonderful thing to feel at the age of 15.

T And it stems to every aspect of theatre, you're a team in the audience and you're a team onstage and in that unique group of people that exists each night. It's all based on trust.

A Making theatre… There's a whole other conversation there I think. If I didn't have the opportunity to exercise that part of me maybe I would be mortally unhealthy. It's an enormous compulsion I've always had - to make and manifest something that's in my head.

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