Willingness to tackle difficult material

One appreciates then why certain avant-garde departures might only take off in the theater, and particularly in the kind of theater where the public attaches some self-regard to their willingness to tackle difficult material. Alas this also means that a lot of long-suffering folks will end up sitting through hours of tedious nonsense, and then try to cheer themselves up by imagining the work was not so bad after all.

This I am not willing to do. It may be a question of age. After about forty minutes of the Pirandello that wasn’t Pirandello, there came a moment when, quite suddenly, all the actors retreated into the deep shadow at the back of the stage. Whether they had actually gone and this was a scene change, or whether they had faded in order to rematerialize in some revolutionary statement of the way theater ought to be, I do not know. I grabbed my friend’s hand and said, Now!

And suddenly the play began

Had this been a movie I would definitely have headed for the nearest pub. But I was trapped in the very front row of a small experimental theater with people sitting cross-legged on the floor around me. There was a definite feeling of shared watching, nothing like the separateness one has in the cinema. It would have been unkind of me to go. And suddenly the play began to work. The sheer mechanical inanity of the dialogues and the weird dislocation of the non sequiturs began to excite me, to the point that at the end of the performance, when, after the final mad scene, it appears that the whole play is simply starting over in a kind of loop, I was actually rather disappointed when it didn’t continue.