I don’t go to enough plays. I wonder if other academics working on theatre feel the same way? I suppose I (or they) could play the ‘theatre history’ card, and say that I don’t need to attend contemporary productions because I’m too busy trying to reconstruct what happened in a theatre three hundred years ago, but this does little to assuage my guilt. I enjoy seeing plays, and the more things I see on the stage the better my overall knowledge of drama. After all, who knows when something I see in a modern setting might spark an idea for my research? 

Today’s post, however, is about a very specific kind of modern production: student theatre. I don’t see enough of this either, especially given that Newcastle University has a thriving, and well-named, theatre society (NUTS). I have made it to a few productions, however, and enjoyed myself at every one of them. As well as having fun, though, I’ve also become fascinated by the peculiar experience of attending a play with my students in it. There are, I think, two main things going on.

The first is that I see the actors in their roles very strongly indeed. Of course, this is almost always that case when watching live theatre, but when I watch student theatre it occurs to a particularly strange degree. The students sitting around me in the theatre also see the actor in the role (‘isn’t Jake good?’ or ‘I remember practising that with Izzy’, etc.), but whereas they see their peers in the characters, I see my students. Lady Macbeth might have written a particularly good essay on The Beggar’s Opera last year, and I might have a meeting with Duke Senior later that week to discuss a dissertation draft. In other words, I bring my personal experience of the performers to the play, but that experience is out of step with everyone else watching the actors that day. Although this can be weird, it need not be a bad thing: such trips to the theatre let me see a new side to people I had so far only known in an academic context. They also, however, occasionally arouse one other emotion, which is fear. This fear has its roots in an irrational feeling of responsibility for my students’ capacity to analyse and perform a work of theatre: part of me is worried that, through the mispronunciation of a line or the poor blocking of scene, the production will reveal something that I should have taught the actors when they were in my classes. This is stupid on several levels but I can’t deny that I haven’t felt such nervousness and responsibility, especially when watching student Shakespeare.

In addition to ‘seeing-the-student-in-the-actor-in-the-role’ (and its attendant anxieties), the other phenomenon I want to talk about is even more egocentric. It concerns the fact that I, and any colleagues with me, are often a recognizable presence in the audience. Not only are we older than most of the students who have come to see their friends (or for some cheap live entertainment), but we might be dressed differently or – in the eyes of many of those around us – be more often seen in front of an audience than within it. It doesn’t happen every time, but, on several occasions, students have come up to me at the interval to ask for my opinion on the play (or on the production), and, once, even the director came to see me and thank me for coming to see her work. Such events make the intervals and other spots of time around a show just as weird as the experience of watching the play itself. Partly this is because I can’t speak freely about these productions: the critic in me often gets into a fight with the pedagogue, tying my tongue in the process. More fancifully, I also can’t help but compare this side of the lecturer/student drama equation to the theatre of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the question of who was in the audience was often of equal importance to who was acting on the stage. Not that I would compare myself to Charles II, or anything, of course.

So, there you have two observations on the experience of a lecturer attending student theatre: I see the students-in-the-characters and feel as though I am no longer an inconspicuous and unconstrained part of the audience. These things won’t stop me seeing more plays by students (I don’t see enough theatre), but they may sometimes make me nostalgic for my own student days, when I could be a regular but unremarkable face at the ADC – although I didn’t see enough theatre then, either.