The Language of Theatre

When I was still living in Denmark, I remember going to a local theatre to see Macbeth. This particular version of Macbeth was performed by a visiting Japanese theatre company, and included puppetry as well as actors. I had a thoroughly enjoyable evening and remembering coming away from the experience with images I still remember today. In London, many regular visiting companies regularly perform a huge range of plays from Shakespeare to new writing in an array of different languages. These events are almost always oversubscribed, the interest in foreign language plays clearly on the rise; and rightly so: Theatre, being the amalgamation of the visual and the spoken, remains an international language. Hearing a familiar line spoken in a foreign language with its different vowel and consonant sounds often opens up a completely new way of understanding or experiencing that same line. Where we fail to understand the spoken word because of the unfamiliar language we tune our senses in more acutely to what we see before us. Thus, it can be more enriching to watch a play in a foreign language as we are less prone to sit back and relax and let it come to us. Foreign Language Theatre demands active viewing and is not always an easy task, but if you invest in it you often come away with lasting impressions, as the one left me by the Japanese Macbeth many years ago.

Which is why the task set us by our producers, American Drama Group Europe is a hard one: Although we perform in Theatres, our main audience (the bread and butter of the company) is still that most fickle and enigmatic of audiences: The Teenager.
Moreover, because our play demands more engagement (being performed in French) this is often an audience that we are struggling with; there are different elements in this struggle:

• First is the willingness: One of the premises of theatre is that the audience is willing to be there and willing to listen. In our case this is not always the case.

Much to our credit and our director’s we almost always manage to draw them in, in spite of their sometimes openly voiced reticence. Still, many of them have been told to go and so between a maths lesson and a “boring” French play, well guess what they opt for?

• Then there is the engagement:  Foreign language theatre plays demand engagement and concentration. Most young people nowadays need constant stimulation and cannot sustain their concentration for more than a couple of minutes. ( see my forthcoming entry “ generation X-BOX” )

So this is our daily task; Mostly we are quite successful, sometimes it is an uphill struggle to “save teenage souls” in spite of themselves.