Best of This Week’s Theatre Blogs – 19 Mar 2010
What should the role of a national theatre be? In the week when the National Theatre of Wales staged their first production, Anne Bonnar considered the challenges which the National Theatre of Scotland is now facing and what might lie in store for its counterpart in Wales.
“A theatre company’s work should speak for itself but the expectations of a national theatre company weigh much more heavily. How long will it be before the inevitable public debate about its role, its policy and its relationship with the Welsh speaking National Theatre?”
“But it does seems strange that even ten years after the mid Nineties in-yer-face boom in abrasive theatre, critics and audiences still feel that showing violence in theatre is somehow a step too far.”
“In some ways, there is too much theatre out there. Certainly, too much bad theatre. The ratio of bad plays to good plays is depressingly high.”
“I was to go first. That’s when the nerves hit me. I stumbled through my first piece, forgetting all the coaching and practice we’d just had. The run-through continued and I pulled myself together a bit for the second piece.”
“Every day we spent at least 15 minutes looking into another student’s eyes, no facial expressions or body movements allowed, just feeling the other’s presence and projecting our own. ‘How lame,’ I thought, ‘How artsy.’ Then something strange happened.”