The heady heights of the Today programme came under fire from Guardian blogger Elisabeth Mahoney last Friday for an interview with theatre heavyweights Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart.
Jim Naughtie’s interview with the pair about their upcoming production of Waiting For Godot garnered was criticised because the interviewer, according to Mahoney, indulged the thespian, falling over every polysyllabic utterance of theatrical babble with gushing delight. Not the sort of behaviour you expect of hard-hitting breakfast news.
The problem is, theatre often lets loose the “conceptual” parts of people that we don’t want to see. Serious, even dour, individuals suddenly become filled with strings of words that mean nothing when they talk about the theatre, suddenly accountants laud “the conceptual arc of textual reinterpretation” and lawyers create a interval-ode to “the writhing mimesis of pain before us”.
It must stop. The theatre-going public at large seem to believe that theatre is not about experiencing something, but how many clever things you can think up to say afterwards. Think again. The only reason to spend money on a good seat is to be transported, and it doesn’t have to be somewhere where you know the longest word in the room.
The only response to these comments should be “Really? Oh DAAling, I think you missed the point completely”. That, or simply, “Nuff said”.
