Theatre? What’s that?
At the start of my ‘Showbusiness Show',
usually the first show of the three I do in a day, I talk a little about the
old Variety Theatres and the tradition of weekly rep. I tell the children that my set is called ‘a
theatre’, pronouncing the word as if it is a new word that the children will
not have heard before. It’s a little gag
about how theatres, especially the older touring houses, are struggling to
survive and have been since the invention of television. Of course I am of the generation that knew
life before tv, but there are far less of us around now! The children (as well as many of the adults)
who watch my shows increasingly need to be educated into the conventions of
Variety Theatre. They experience Variety
via the many shows on mainstream tv, and then the many repeats of the same
show, year on year. They watch audiences
responding to the live event, but of course they don’t respond from the comfort
of their sofas (unless of course it’s a football or rugby match!). They are voyeurs to the Variety experience
and don’t know what to do when they encounter my show for real. Hence the education bit at the start of my
Showbusiness Show.
I love the set up day at a new show. Yesterday morning, after one of those overnight
trips down from Derbyshire and a brief stopover in Nottingham Services, I
arrived at The Vintage Nostalgia Show (
website ) on a lovely site near Salisbury in the Wylye Valley. The show is one of a breed of new themed
shows that are cropping up now. This one
is perfect for me as I am both vintage and nostalgic. Almost hundreds of stalls of wonderful
paraphanalia from those years before tv and a delightful programme of music and
dance from the forties and fifties. And me!!
As I was setting up, but before I had
dropped the stage down, a young a man, mid twenties came over and hung there,
pregnant for a chat, so I became his conversational midwife and made the first
move. His name is Chris. He was a helper
on the slots; a stall of vintage slot machines. He looked at my trailer, looked
at the words Theatre Royal on the frontage and said, ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a theatre’, and I apologise if I
sounded a bit sarcastic as I gestured at the sign. I was very tired and I thought it was
obvious. In any case it was lost on him.
‘Theatre? What’s that?’ he asked, innocently. I asked him whether he’d ever been to a
theatre. He said he hadn’t. ‘Where you from?’ ‘Swindon’ was the
reply. I told him I thought there was a
theatre in Swindon ( website ). He said he had seen the sign. I looked at him to check he was not just
being very subtle and leading me up his garden path, but no, his was an
innocence born of telling the truth. I
took to him. ‘So you’ve never been to a
theatre?’ He confirmed the sad
truth. ‘Well, you’ll have to come over
and see the show tomorrow then’. After a
few more pleasantries we parted company.
There will be increasing numbers of young
people who have never have the chance to experience live theatre. This is both a sad legacy of the advance of
technology and of the state of our education system. I have tried to avoid politics in this blog,
but this is reprehensible. We are
abnegating our responsibility to the heritage of our nation by denying our
young people the opportunity to experience live theatre. OK yes we do take them some of them to the
annual Pantomime, but it’s almost the only experience that some children will
have of live Variety Theatre. But
there’s a lot more to Variety than Pantomime, as I am trying to demonstrate
with what I do. Nor is it a meaningless,
mindless entertainment. I hope my
audiences leave with more than just a half hour spent amicably.
Below is my new photo taken from the window
at the stalls at the Vintage Nostalgia Show.
That stuff at the top is blue sky.
Nice to see it again after so long in the rain.
All the best from a road near you,
Mr Alexander
