What I learned from NewsNight Review...

People talk about theatre on the BBC's Newsnight Review every Friday. But what does one learn from the discussion?

Watching a discussion of August: Osage County from last Friday's show (28 Nov) you might have gleaned the following about theatre, about characters and about form in drama:

1. It's a post-Beckett world. Get over it.
2. People who live in the Oklahoma plains don't talk about T.S. Eliot
3. The set is fantastic. Or it's ridiculous.
4. It's not believable for Southerners to talk about poetry or to talk in poetic ways about nationhood
5. If the [insert marginalised identity character here] had been black, people would have been protesting
6. You don't go out much to the theatre, so when you do, you want an impressive set.
7. The form is ridiculous. It's not theatre; it's a mini-series.
8. The Killers' new album is not a departure from the second, but more a return to the form of the first. Oops, The Killers isn't about theatre.
9. A guy from The Communards is now a curate! Sorry. That's not about theatre either.

How interesting!

I am now going to watch some neurosurgery, and then sit on a couch and talk about it.

I don't get out to much neurosurgery, so when I do, I want there to be fireworks. Not necessarily fireworks, per se, literally, but the doctor in this case, with his soundtrack in the operating theatre, well, I just don't believe that neurosurgeons listen to Streisand while fiddling with grey matter. I found a lot of the procedure very intriguing, but I couldn't get a handle on what was actually going on. This is informed discussion. I have no experience in neurosurgery, and nor do I have any technical vocabulary through which to discuss or analyse its workings, but I think I'm qualified to review it on national television because I saw it and, goddamn it, I felt things. Perhaps if I just keep describing the way I felt the facts, probably put together by qualified doctors, will fall in behind me. There is no denying what I felt, because I am the only one who can communicate it, so it holds true. This way, what I feel becomes fact, and incontestably so.

Sorry. Actually. I'm not sorry.

I don't mind people talking whatever shit they like about theatre and plays, but when the discussion is actively veered towards the uninformed participant I do not see why I should not eavesdrop in a pub rather than have my TV license fee go towards travel expenses and cucumber sandwiches in the green room. Somehow we have come to equate the expression of uninformed and felt opinions with the democratic and egalitarian, yet we allow our media outlets to elevate and to emphasise and to encourage uninformed opinion, which automatically means that a hierarchy of values is at work. We simply don't have the courage to acknowledge the shape of it, or to confront what those values have become.

This relates to what Roger Ebert (h/t Alison) blogs about in terms of the rise of CelebCult and the displacement of news from newspapers. "The news is still big. It's the newspapers that got small," writes Ebert, and I can't help feeling that with relation to the media's discussion of theatre, whatever you make of Steppenwolf's production of Tracy Letts's play, that the theatre is still big.

In the meantime, I'll try to work upon reeling less when ex-pop-star curates find the poetry of Eliot in the mouths of Oklahoma citizens unbelievable and intellectually disjointed. Patronising fuckwit. Sorry. As I said, I'm working on it.