DunsPlayFest is enthralled by the empty space. The waiting stage, the deserted theatre, the dreams taking shape, the infinite possibilities … ah, the heart beats faster.
“A stage space has two rules. (1) Anything can happen. (2) Something must happen”. Those words come from Peter Brook (1925-2022) whose book The Empty Space (1968) is something of a holy text for actors and directors. He is a good friend to our festival which, of course, takes place in a vast hall originally designed for soldiers to march up and down in. We build a theatre, with two stages and a place to eat and drink, from scratch. But, as Brook writes, theatre just needs the space - “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space, whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”
Indeed. As we are fond of repeating, as Brooke there explains, all theatre needs is a space, an actor, a script and an audience. Of course, some productions are unimaginable without their exquisite sets, terrific lighting effects or fabulous costumes but none of these things are strictly necessary; the other four are.
The last of these, the audience, is sometimes forgotten about by theatre-makers, but is of course just as essential as the other three. The performance of a play is an act of communion. Everyone in the room contributes. And when the curtain comes down, that’s it – the moment has passed.
This is why filmed performances from London theatres watched in village halls all over the Borders, interesting as they often are, are ultimately unsatisfying. To watch a play intended for the audience actually present in the space, however crafty the camera-work and skilled the acting and direction, can feel like trying to appreciate a restaurant by watching people eat there. Play-watching requires participation, it is of the moment and unrepeatable. “Nothing in theatre has any meaning before or after. Meaning is now,” as Brook says.
Actors are often being urged to “be in the moment” and rightly so: the worst productions, apart from those undermined by a lack of professionalism, are those in which the actors know their lines, as it were, too well, and cannot disguise the fact that they have said the words many, many times before. This is a problem that community theatres rarely face and that is one of the reasons why community productions (we refuse to use the word “amateur” which in this context has come to be synonymous with “utter crap”), why they are often so much more interesting than some professional work. It matters more to the community players and the fact that half the audience knows the heroine, who is the barmaid in the pub or works in the estate agents, adds another layer of tingle and dare to her embodiment of someone else altogether.
As Brook writes, “Drama is exposure; it is confrontation; it is contradiction and it leads to analysis, construction, recognition and eventually to an awakening of understanding”.
Brook, considered one of the greatest of all theatre directors, speaks eloquently about acting: “Preparing a character is the opposite of building - it is a demolishing, removing brick by brick everything in the actor's muscles, ideas and inhibitions that stands between him and the part, until one day, with a great rush of air, the character invades his every pore”.
He wanted his actors to feel absolute freedom. Obviously, the freedom of an actor pretending to be someone else, speaking lines from which he cannot deviate, required to stand on a particular spot, is a specialised sort of “freedom” but Brook believed that within that confined and apparently tiny space, infinity exists. Watching a great actor like Judi Dench, who is always there, you might feel that you are beginning to understand what he meant.
It is, again, a matter of the moment. Theatre is in love with the present. (“Shakespeare doesn't belong to the past. If his material is valid, it is valid now.”) And that is why there will always be theatre, because it is always a brand-new day, and children keep coming, seeing the world for the first time. And theatre, at its best, takes us to the heart of things. As Peter Brook writes, “Many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience on the stage that transcended their experience in life. They will maintain that Oedipus or Berenice or Hamlet or The Three Sisters performed with beauty and with love fires the spirit…”
We believe, then, that theatre matters. And it begins with an empty space, waiting
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