Last night I watched Gaslight in Hamburg. We don’t have much opportunity to see these chocolate box dramas these days. There’s a self conscious cleverness in the writing, the gender politics sit funny to a modern ear, everyone is at pains to distance themselves from things. Often the result in performance is a play that no longer works because everyone’s trying to modern it up. The English Theatre of Hamburg is letting the play sit in the era it was made. I was genuinely surprised there wasn’t a hatstand on the stage. This is a 1920’s show about the 1880’s. So it would have played like a piece today set in the 1980’s. There’s a sharing of delight in how backwards everybody was back then, and a smugness in the writing about how modern people understand theatre so much better. There are little jokes and tricks about staging and the fourth wall, the characters decide whether to go and see a comedy or a tragedy while the audience wonders which one they’ve gone to.
Five actors make it all. I think they’re being paid the same as the actors were when it was founded in the seventies. Still, nobody does theatre to get rich. My friend was playing the lead – she’s the reason I was there. She’s working really hard every night for the people of Hamburg.
The house was packed. Long curtain, tiered seating. The auditorium is very reminiscent of Frinton. They obviously don’t have a big storage unit though. A chaiselongue, some attractive pieces of brown furniture, but someone has gone down the AI art route. You have got to be really good with prompts to get away with that and they aren’t. There are three great big generic paintings that have no individual style and are saying nothing, ultimately generic, dead art. They take up a lot of space on the back wall, like vortexes of mediocrity sucking the beauty from the people breathing and feeling things so close to them. We used AI to bulk up Christmas Carol one year. 3D printed canvases. Adam took his time though to get things right. They looked good and it was them or a blank wall. I dunno though, you can get shitty old framed landscapes for virtually nothing all over the country. It’s not hard. Is there ever an excuse for making artistic humans share space with that dross? I like that the generation at school have started to use “That is AI!” as an expression of disappointment. “It’s RAINING! THAT IS AI!!!!” “You broke your phone? So AI for you.”
So the art on the walls was AI. But the show itself wasn’t AI – I was glad I made the effort. The audience was mostly German but they enjoyed the nuance and particularly enjoyed it when people talked about tea. “Let’s go and look at the funny English”. I like this of the people of Hamburg. It speaks well of them. There’s no German Theatre of Plymouth. Perhaps there would be an audience, but I doubt it.
I enjoy these things – we used to be able to see them all the time on regional tours. Does London Classic Theatre even still exist? They were one of the last outposts of it. Alastair at Original Theatre Company, but he’s been quiet lately too, or I’ve missed it. It is so easy to go under particularly with the cost of storage / warehousing. Very few people can be Sonia. Brian and Louis have spent decades of full time hard work and risk and disappointment and luck and joy to get to the stage they are at. If you can solve storage perhaps you can weather something like COVID as a small scale theatre company. Frinton are still going! But with your main income being ticket sales you’re fucked if you stop moving. I’ve often dreamt of making a theatre company, banking a few years in that, making work for people and joy for people. I’ve got the bare bones in a storage unit that’s costing me too much already. Perhaps it is something to turn my eyes to when I get back from America. We need the rep. It was how we all learnt. Now everyone is cutting their teeth in these large scale immersive shows where the audience is cattle and the actors are paid in lice.
For now I’m in the air again. Landing soon in Budapest.
AlBarclay 