Audiences & Politics
As Hydrocracker developed its new work WILD JUSTICE, AD Jem Wall mused on the role of the Company’s work in having political conversations with its audiences.
From Hydrocracker’s perspective, all theatre is political, or has the potential at least to deliver a political message - if by ‘political’ we mean engaged with the operation of society and the state. Political theatre is thus evidently not the same as ‘theatre about politics,’ although that confusion clearly exists.
For us, theatre becomes political primarily when it challenges its audience to think. Indeed, that has been the aspiration of Hydrocracker since we began performing in 2007 with the stated goal: ‘we want our audiences to do more than sit in the dark and watch.’ But how is that goal to be achieved? If we want our audiences to think, or indeed to act, it is not enough, we believe, simply to present theatre that tackles political problems. In sharp contrast to theatrical practice in much of Europe, England’s mainstream theatres – beyond our large urban centres – have grown timid about presenting so called challenging work.
At Hydrocracker, we have two interlocking answers to this issue, and to finding ways to reignite thought. The first is to try to present theatre in a different way, using site-specific theatre as a means to an end (too much such theatre seems to be an end in its own right). We look for work that has perhaps been overlooked because it is familiar, and try to make it into something new. We have done this with shows like THE NEW WORLD ORDER – Pinter reimagined in the Victorian setting of Brighton Town Hall; or with THE ERPINGHAM CAMP – Joe Orton’s reworking of The Bacchae, set in a holiday camp, which we performed on Brighton Pier, using the audience as holidaymakers. For the past year, we have also been looking for ways to reinterpret and represent Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
The second answer is to look for ways to create and write new work that forces audiences to think and to react. Thus, for example, our development process on Neil Fleming’s new work, WILD JUSTICE, has included the staging of a public debate (in which Jo Berry took part). WILD JUSTICE is a play about revenge – it will fail to achieve its goal unless we as a company, and Neil as a writer, find a way to talk about revenge that moves the ‘theatre’ out of the conventional and directly engages the audience in the process.
Jem Wall October 2014