Subject: # 14227 Teatro Inglés Siglos XIX y XX Grupo A

Student´s name: Cristóbal Borillo, Pablo

Title of the paper: The future of theatre: revolution or carelessness

Author or topic: How the theatre could be in the future regarding my opinion

Abstract : 724 words exactly

In order to explain some of the ways in which the theatre can evolve, we should bear in mind the recent trends and attitudes taken by those on which this art depends.

On one hand we have the low number of people attending plays, due to many reasons: low quality performances because of low subventions, very few plays being shown due to the previous reason given and to the shortage of available theatres, little variety of plays.

On the other hand, we have the government, which has in its hands the possibility to choose what will happen with theatre. Regarding its attitude towards it, that is, its not giving many subventions, the fact that these subventions are not huge amounts of money, and the fact that very few advertisements of theatres and plays are displayed on the media, makes the distance between the audience and the theatre longer.

Personally, I think there is another fact we should consider too, it is about the little theatre information given in schools. This creates no interesting nor knowledge about theatre in future teenagers and current children. Thus, a bigger effort to create a long-term interest in little time is needed, in order to increase the audience.

Moreover, there is an issue we cannot avoid talking about, it is the new technologies and how things evolve. Cinema is said to be the evolution of theatre but, since it was created till now it has evolved, it has many new ways in which represent and with which interact that help movies cover a wider number of situations and stories. It can also help us perceiving things in different forms theatre cannot. Therefore, cinema creates a much bigger impact than current theatre can create. Cinema has another advantage: it has the capacity to get to much more people than any audience any play can have, due to the lack of need of the actors to interpret the story each time the movie is played and therefore, there is no need to make them travel throughout the Earth and it can be easily translated instead. (Teresa Cardona Cruañes, El futuro del teatro, 11/01/2006) (Clara Rodríguez Ríos, Paper IV, 11/01/2006)

However, there are some things that may help the theatre rise in audience and popularity. One of these things is the possibility to experiment with the human mind thanks to the proximity of the actors to the people attending the play, as happens in a play named “Improv”, where the lizard brain is used after 26 hours of performance, taking one’s mind to extremes and experience new feeling and situations. Things that can only be felt in person, never in a movie. (Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Newspapers Limited, , December 2005, 11/01/2006)

Another thing that will help theatre go up again is the fact that the theatre engine is a more solid plataform than in the past, and the ways to study the related degrees are clearer and the people is more aware of their existence, one could choose the job of actor or of director with more security of his/her career than 30 years ago. Furthermore, due to the fact that the theatre is nearer to its public and that what characters live at the plays affect them more, theatre can be used as a plataform from which launch, make official and spread social complaints, realities hidden to the majority of the people.

Finally, my conclusion is that, in spite of what seems to happen nowadays, the fact that theatre may be disappearing, to be poorer and poorer, I personally am quite sure it will rise in the future, because of the need for expressing what is being hidden, to remind people of past mistakes in order to not to repeat them and to showthem extreme mental situations and how life can be (appart from the animal brutality related to the lizard brain, there are other more pleasant situations if brain is correctly put to the test) if they work for it to be a reality. Moreover, current society feels a big need to complain about many things that are happening in our world and theatre seems to be a perfect place to do so.

Bibliography:

Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Newspapers Limited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1672140,00.html, December 2005, 11/01/2006

Teresa Cardona Cruañes, El futuro del teatro, http://mural.uv.es/matecar/futuro_del_teatro.htm , 11/01/2006

Clara Rodríguez Ríos, Paper IV, http://mural.uv.es/claro2/paperIV.html, 11/01/2006

Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Pablo Cristóbal Borillo
pacrisbo@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press