Theatre Everywhere
Take a bow.
Dulcie (Rosa Ferraro) and Lord Brockhurst (Adam Richard) in The Boyfriend, 1986, Princes Hill Secondary College.
I have spent most of my life working in theatre. Yes, I’ve been in the odd musical or play (see above for my first musical, about 40 years ago), but many of the theatres I have performed in have been non-traditional. When we hear the word theatre, we think of big stages, revealed by the raising of a curtain. Those theatres, even the ones that show films, are known by the term proscenium arch. It describes the window into the dramatic world, the creation of that mysterious fourth wall that the audience can see through but the characters can’t see out of. However that is not the only type of theatre.
Anytime someone stands up in front of a group of people, they have created a theatre. Whether doing stand-up comedy on a plank of chipboard supported by milk crates, busking in a busy shopping mall, even addressing your colleagues at a weekly meeting, theatre has been brought into existence. This might sound ominous and terrifying, like someone unfolding a stadium from their shoulders, a Transformer clad in curtains and folding seats, with spotlights for elbows. It is more powerful than that.
Theatre is centuries old. Some of the ways we experience it is hard-wired within us. Ancient traditions that we innately understand as soon as they are presented to us. We know that the end of a performance requires applause. Even when you’re in an office meeting, and it’s just your boss telling you all one more time that they managed to do the job they are paid to do. Bravo. Clap clap clap. A football stadium roars in excitement, fear, disappointment as play continues — and they do not call a sequence of actions on the field a ‘play’ by accident. Sport is like commedia dell’arte — there are rules that are followed, and how events transpire in and around those rules creates the drama, comedy and excitement that brings roars to huge crowds.
If you treat every group that is being addressed as an audience, and every talk in front of that group as a performance, and every situation those talks take place in as a theatre, you have unlocked a set of tools that will make these experiences not only easy, but also fun. Radio is theatre, podcasts are theatre, holding court in a pub while you tell a group of people about a terrible date you went on is theatre. Make the most of your time on these stages. As Mamma Rose tells her daughter in the musical, Gypsy ‘Sing out Louise!’ Stand your ground confidently, speak with authority and gravitas, own the space you are in and when you are finished, bow your head ever so slightly to indicate that people may applaud.
Audiences understand the roles they have been asked to play, and one of them is paying attention; they just need to be reminded that they are in a theatre. It can be done entirely unconsciously, and all it requires is a little bit of stagecraft, which many people are skilled in deploying without knowing they’re doing it. Next time you see an engaging speaker, or someone who hosts a meeting better than anyone else, pay attention to what they are doing, the little things that seem like nothing, but in fact are everything. You don’t wander on a stage, you walk with purpose. You don’t just stand anywhere, you stand where the most people can see you. You don’t talk in your regular conversational voice, you project.
I’m teaching some of these skills to a group of writers in Sydney. In this day and age, when so many writers are independently published, and every opportunity for publicity must be maximised, stagecraft and media training are essential and nobody tells anybody how to do it (I mean, they do, but they charge an arm and a leg for the privilege). I’m looking forward to engaging the Sydney Speculative Scribes in this world of theatre for writing, as opposed to writing for theatre.
As well as hosting the workshop, I’m also the featured reader at the Sydney Speculative Scribes Open Mic event at Paramatta’s West Words on May 10.
As well as here on Substack, this newsletter appears on Patreon along with the Adam Richard Has a Theory explicit feed, available on Substack for paid subscribers. Speaking of my seemingly endless daily Doctor Who podcast, it is also available on YouTube, for those who want to watch me talk incessantly. I have also been making ludicrous videos of myself watching Knots Landing over at TikTok and Instagram. For those of you under about 100 years old, it’s an old soap opera that was a spin-off from Dallas, another old soap opera, but one that they sometimes make you read about when undertaking communications degrees (I was the only one in mine that had any idea what that was about).
Glitter+ continues to be an unhinged mess of a podcast, with an all new show joining the likes of Christine Lahti in Space, Me. I Am. A Memoir, and Syrupy Tubcast (where we’re currently watching a made-for-TV Christmas movie every month in the 12 Tubs of Tubmas). If you loved Sex and the City, but you just could not with And Just Like That, then do we have the podcast for you! Subscribe to Glitter+ wherever you get your podcasts to get all the Posh and Fab lunacy.
I’ll be heading off to Swancon in Perth at the end of the month, to try and inveigle myself into Australia’s Science Fiction community, and to see if I’ve managed to progress beyond the shortlist for Best New Talent at the Ditmar Awards. (I’m very excited to still be eligible for best new talent at the age of 55).
And, if you’re part of the bear fraternity, I may be making an appearance at a certain annual event in Melbourne in June…
Cheers
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