Theatre and Culture from Scotland, starring The List's Theatre Editor, his performance persona and occasional guest stars. Experimental writings, cod-academic critiques and all his opinions, stolen or original.
On the one hand, I haven't listened to the Beyonce album yet. On the other, I've read all about it. On the one hand, I am intrigued by such a major pop personality banging on about dirty stuff in an explicit manner - it seems to challenge the repressive puritanism that has silenced queer voices throughout the past century. On the other, I am not sure that songs about blow-jobs are necessarily appropriate for younger listeners. I am still trying to work out the meaning of her Superbowl show. It might be a celebration of black radical politics, or the equivalent of those tasteless sexy Halloween costumes.
But the usual questions about pop music - does it have a good beat? how does it relate to her previous work?- have been subsumed in wider discussions. Some of these reflect the obsession with celebrity (a variation on the belief that pop and rock singers are actually singing about their lives, not performing). Others worry about her social impact (most of the people who call her a role model are trying to get on the cool bandwagon). Lemonade is not a collection of tunes, it is a sociological document, which embodies conflicts around gender, race, desire, fame, money, exploitation... This has been going on for a while: Madonna and Prince in the 1980s, even the hysteria around Elvis and his pelvis in the 1950s. Rock (masculine, serious) used to get the heavy duty analysis and the fun, wild critique. Pop (feminine, playful) can get you a PhD in sociology these days. And it depresses me, because theatre criticism is so beige, by comparison. I've divided theatre criticism into two, before (for convenience rather than accuracy): popular and academic. But there is a gap: conversations about theatre in the manner of Beyonce. The diverse, the playful, the worried, the ecstatic, the witty. I like a good authority to make my claims look academic. In this case, it is Habermas and the public sphere. He says that the public sphere is a notional space where ideas are debated. Theatre seems to be sitting in the seats at the edge of the piazza, frightened to speak out and whispering opinions to itself. It's not getting in and about the matter. Maybe I still want to be Lester Bangs, but theatre criticism is timid, soft-spoken and irrelevant. Maybe it's like my inability to leave a bad relationship, as theatre criticism clings to print even as print, made stupid by illness, treats it as badly as the beloved in an old blues. I want to be rolling around in the mud, wrestling members of the manosphere. I want to get kicked in by a group of feminists who resent my assumption that I understand female oppression. I don't what to be writing for the special edition of Which Theatre Production. Theatre is so much, has so much to add. And until it gets the kind of analysis Beyonce gets (maybe not as much, I suppose - no-one cares that much), it is going to remain the wall-flower at the prom. Hold on: Beyonce is theatre. Let's go. Let's go.
As it happens, I am off the Happy Pills again. I am experiencing considerable friction within my nervous system. I'd like to apologise to the lovely and patient people who share my workspace at the CCA, and the duty managers who have had to put up with a higher level of distraction than usual from this hairy little bloke in the suit who seems to have lost his keys again. I am in a real temper today. I was looking on Twitter to find somebody to flame, but the always intriguing @thejennawatt diverted me. Instead, I am going to have a go at Diderot.
The ever growing list of UK theatres where I can't afford to see shows is growing ever longer.
It's ironic: Watt makes theatre, but she can't afford to see as much as she'd like. My research into the history of theatre allows me to pretend I have a long-dead culprit. When Diderot challenged the status quo of pre-revolutionary France, he advocated a bourgeois theatre. In the following centuries, architects, playwrights, companies and philosophers followed his lead, culminating in that day when Wagner turned off the lights in the auditorium, and forced audiences to make a pilgrimage to see his latest epic cycle. Basically, it got expensive to keep the riff-raff out, the kind of people that used to go to the Globe to have sex with a prostitute, shout at actors and occasionally listen to Shakespeare's poetry. Of course, it is really Aristotle's fault (he did say that tragedy was for a noble class who had time and money), and a by-product of capitalism - oh, and the replacement of live theatre by the cinema, then television, then the internet, leaving what used to be the top entertainment as an esoteric taste. Speaking as someone who decided that romantic opera is the pinnacle of live theatre, and is preparing to take his place with the Werthers Original set, I am worried that Jenna Watt has spotted the massive problem with any research into theatre. It has become expensive, exclusive and the means of production have shifted it beyond the financial reach of many people. This removes it from the public sphere what Habermas talks about - no good being part of public debate if only the rich can afford to see it - and the political content of works like Iphigenia in Splott is belied by the price of the ticket. For rough guide, if the class of characters that a play is about can't get a ticket, it's not serious about them. It doesn't solve the problem entirely, but when Scottish Opera are offering bargain tickets to students (do they still do that?), or Buzzcut is pay-what-you-like, maybe the directors of the theatres could, like, offer cheap seats at the last minute, or go out into the street and give away any tickets that are left half an hour before the show? I know that last suggestion would cause problems. Anyway, access to culture might not be a human right, but I think it is part of a democratic society. I'll get around to that some day. I've got withdrawal symptoms to enjoy. In the meantime: I try not to forget that there is an economic dimension to Watt's question, and probably a class one, too. That neoliberal mantra about choice is a right load of hot air when that choice depends on how much spare change you've got.
