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.

58 Movies: nothing on!

The thing we have come to miss the most while on the road, has been English language movies. Germany, along with Spain, Italy and France are the only European countries left (to my knowledge) where dubbing still applies. All TV shows, and most Feature films are dubbed. Here is a quote from an article from the Goethe Institute’s website:

“In no other country in the world are so many films dubbed for the cinema and TV screens as in Germany. The preference for dubbed German versions of international productions has given birth to an industry with its own professions, which have to deal with the issue of remaining faithful to the original – and at times with sceptics “

More info on the dubbing history in Germany can be found at: http://www.goethe.de/kug/kue/flm/dos/en218244.htm

Now off course, this is excellent news for the large contingent of German actors working within this industry, but for tourists, it’s a constant irritation if you do not know the language. Only in major towns like Berlin, Hamburg are you able to find cinemas that show feature films in their original versions, and even then the selection is usually limited to a few films and odd screening times. When we are in smaller cities, the suggestion of going to the movies usually gets a laugh from everyone and then we resign ourselves to watching James Bond in German on the TV.

However, from my own experience of picking up languages I can only say that when you hear a language it is usually easier to retain: “Upstairs Downstairs” “When The Boat Comes In” “The Professionals”, “The A-Team” ,were all series that helped me achieve better English when I was a kid, because they were shown on TV and at the movies in original languages and subtitles allowed me to understand words that I didn’t know. Subtitles are just a question of habbit, but then off course if the Germans started reading subtitles, what would all the German actors do ?