Location, BSECS 2022, Online
This was a contribution to a roundtable on ‘Eighteenth-Century Theatre Today’. Here are my notes for my contribution.
‘Read not Dead’, R18C revivals, ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’ are all – to a greater or lesser extent – inspired by Restoration and eighteenth-century texts. They are focussed on a ‘product’: it’s about getting a play (the product) on its feet, in front of an audience, in the air.
The only people who are interested in such events are those who are interested in the product. This means either updating the product (setting it in a capitalist dystopia, like RSC’s Venice Preserv’d) or finding a specialist audience.
But what about Restoration and eighteenth-century process, which is to say the way that theatre professionals prepared to act, or thought about the actor’s preparation, three hundred years ago? Such theory and practice is very different to modern practice, but shares a few points of connection too. When it comes to raising awareness of eighteenth-century theatre, a focus on process has a few advantages:
- It can be of interest to anyone preparing any play and looking for inspiration about different ways of preparing to act. This is a much larger professional and amateur audience than those interested in eighteenth-century products.
- It might help theatre professionals, current and aspiring, to better understand eighteenth-century plays.
However, the challenges are
- It may not be possible to maintain a balance between distinctively eighteenth-century practice and the demands of contemporary preparation (‘eighteenth-century’ becomes a gimmick, or becomes something else)
- A focus on process does not raise the profile of eighteenth-century theatre beyond the world of those already working in the theatre.