Theatre Red

I used to write satires.

I was the author of several plays burning with rage at our sleeping spoilt society. (Don’t bother googling for them; I wrote them under a different name, before I was the woman I am now.)

‘We live healthier wealthier lives than any time in human history, yet we’re bunkered down like it’s the Ice Age,’ my satires would say.

They objected to our materialism, but saved their greatest vitriol for the fact we didn’t even know how to enjoy it.

I don’t know if my audiences ever learnt a thing from my satires.

But I learnt two things.

Every satire has a target.

The first thing I learnt was that audience members never expected to be that target. If they found they were, they were shocked – an entirely understandable response from anyone who is perfect.

(It fascinated me that anyone would choose to identify themselves as the target. It’s not as though I named names. But they did. And paid for the privilege of doing so.)

The second thing I learnt was that offended audiences members had a simple defense mechanism, a mantra they would repeat. They didn’t always use the same words, but the gist was the same.

I was told I shouldn’t underestimate an audience; an attitude that proved difficult to adopt when audiences kept turning up, only to be surprised that I’d written a play aimed at the people who might actually attend.

‘That’s obvious’ they would say.  As if the purpose of a satire was to take them  on a journey of intellectual discovery, and at the end of the class they would understand relativity, or something else that had absolutely no relevance to their day to day lives.

But satires are not about knowledge. They’re about ethics. They’re not interested in what you know. They’re interested in what you do.

Satires aren’t classrooms. They’re trials.

And when you’re convicted of crimes against humanity there’s no point saying you didn’t know it was wrong.

Or that you did…………

I no longer write satire.

Now, I write with a gentler irony. Which kind friends might call maturity and honest ones despair.

Veronica Kaye

Whenever someone says they see a lot of theatre, I’m not sure whether it’s a claim to expertise, or a cry for help.

I do not claim to be an expert.

This is not because of a lack of experience.

I’ve been around.

It’s simply because I hear such a claim with suspicion. (There’s a hidden violence to it, like the Australia Day air force fly by;  it’s official, and ominous.)

I imagine there are fields of human endeavour where the claim to expertise can be fairly made. Perhaps stamp collecting.

I don’t think it can be made in theatre criticism.

I’m not arguing that a theatre critic cannot, and will not, amass something that might pass as knowledge. (And I’d certainly argue they should be trying to!)

What I’m arguing is that to identify yourself as an expert is a political act.

You’re asserting an authority to which you have no right. Your knowledge is so tied up with your values and preferences (aesthetic, philosophical and political) as to be best thought of as personal.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t share that very personal knowledge with others. It is, after all, what the theatre makers are doing in the first place.

But the assertion that your knowledge transcends your personal perspective and somehow speaks for us all is something a psychologist might indeed describe as a cry for help.

The rest of us could be excused for hearing it as a war cry.

Veronica Kaye

I regularly tell people I don’t want a career in theatre.

I am regularly misunderstood.

It is assumed I’m not serious.

But I’m deadly serious about what the art form can achieve.

I want more than a career.

I’m not suggesting the absurdity that there’s something wrong with being paid for creating art. I’m not peddling the conservative myth that somehow it’s more noble to starve.

And I fully appreciate that being paid for creating art over an extended period of time (which I guess is how you might define a career) could prove to be exactly how some great art is made.

(But there was a poster doing the rounds of facebook recently suggesting something like this: ‘Art work is work and should be paid.’ It struck me more as a mischievous slogan rather than a serious attempt to engage with an issue of economic justice. Of course, if you paint a picture and it sells you should get money for it. But why should you get money just because you paint a picture?*)

When I say I’m not looking for a career in theatre, what I’m saying is simply that the most important thing is not that I get paid.**

And when people speak as though it is, I think it is they who aren’t serious.

Veronica Kaye

* Yes, I’ve answered a slogan with a slogan. More on this later.

** And what is the most important thing? That we give the audience a twofold gift: Joy, and the ability to pass it on. Much, much more on this later.