THE POWER AND THE GLORY
May I please take a moment to express my gratitude to those of you who have been perceptive enough to tap in Rodoweft@aol.com on your computer keyboards in order to send me your owlish greetings and comments on the topic of the week.
We are approaching a particularly busy period in the owl year. I am reminded about this daily as Penny, my mate and mother, titivates our carefully concealed nest and its surrounding ivy on the wall of the Granary Theatre, Malcaster. She is preparing for her annual contribution to our personal rodent-control campaign, in which I have my rather energetic role to play, so I hope you’ll forgive me if, occasionally in the near future, I seem somewhat distracted. I will have a brood of owlets to feed.
For several weeks I have urged your attention to an unpalatable fact of British life: interest in Amateur Theatre is declining; local councils encounter insufficient opposition when they seek to pennypinch by closing their local theatre. We are fully aware that Audiences have declined as increasing work-pressure has made the instant convenience of televisual dross more attractive, but what are we to do about this?
Jonah the elder (my special quacker friend, the one who saved the life of my illustrious grandfather, Oscar) and I have discussed this seemingly intractable problem at length. During my evening hunting sorties, when I spot the light on in his study, I drop onto his windowsill and tap the glass with my beak. He looks up from his work, smiles at me, opens the window and lets me in. I perch on top of his pipe-rack for a while and we exchange thoughts. Sometimes Cara (his mate) pops in to say hello.
Last Wednesday, we had been together for about ten minutes while he tugged and preened at that ponsey beard of his, then he befowled the air with his disgusting pipe. Suddenly, without warning, he said, “What they need is an interminable power cut.”
“You what?” I queried.
“A power cut,” he repeated. “Not just a short interruption to the supply, but a complete collapse of the power-generation system that’s going to plunge them into darkness for months; a reversal of polarity might do it, now how can that be arranged?”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded.
“They rely on electricity absolutely and assume that it will be available always.” He paused to rekindle that abominable furnace, glancing at me as he did so over the glinting frame of his semi-clerical spectacles, his smoke-filled eyes became bloodshot (as did mine) and feigned perspicacity. “You see, all they’ve done, these cinematic moguls and televisual whizkids, is to hijack the principles of our beloved Theatre, wrenched them out of our grasp and changed them so that we cannot reach them any more. What is television if not a proscenium stage in the corner of everyone’s living room? What is cinema if not Theatre, but a theatre churning out the same performance in boring repetition?
“But, to power them – or to work their precious computers or any other of the gadgets that they regard as so essential – they need a constant and utterly reliable supply of electrical power, right?” For a few seconds he glared at me and sucked on his pipe.
“Just imagine...” he continued, his eyes glowing with zealous glee, “...if they lost their powers of augmentation and artificial enhancement, and just suppose they were no longer allowed to invade people’s homes, and just suppose all those homes were in darkness. What WOULD the people do to entertain themselves?
“We would return to The Age of The Skop.” he announced, “the age of the Anglo-Saxon village story-teller, but with slight enhancements: we would benefit from the lessons we have learned since the reign of King Alfred The Great. The story-teller might involve more performers to support her or him and practice with them in advance of appearing before the public. And he would use the forms of illumination that began as experiments in Elizabethan Theatre and developed through the Restoration and Victorian periods: troughs of tallow with lighted wicks floating in them, a burnished bowl held behind a bright torch to direct its rays, candles... can you imagine the magic we could create?
Health and Safety would have a fit, but they’d be irrelevant.
And can you imagine the scene in any community, anywhere, as night` falls and the people begin picking their way – lanterns glowing in the dusk - from their darkened houses to a central meeting point where the skop prepares to perform. He or she would be the master of all the old skills of Voice Production, Speech, Mime, Movement, Mask... and the lights would gutter and flicker... there would be a hubbub of people’s voices as they chattered excitedly among themselves... can you imagine the tension that would grip the people as...”
“What is electricity?” I asked.
Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".