Flare Festival 2015: When was the last time you saw theatre that really challenged you?

Dave St-Pierre Company at Sadler's Wells in 2011 proved challenging for critics. Photo by Alistair Muir. 

When was the last time you saw theatre that really challenged you? 

Hold up. Back up, back up. I'll start again. 

When was the last time you saw some theatre? 

I don't want to assume that you go the theatre. Experience has taught me that would be foolish. 

I studied theatre, I work in theatre, I teach theatre yet barely anyone I spend time with goes to see any theatre. You would have thought that over the course of my life I would have gathered theatre going people around me; fellow students, theatre makers, other theatre lecturers and practitioners but even those involved in it, are often rehearsing or touring or just 'busy' and don't tend to go much. Sure, I probably have more theatre going friends than the next person, but for most of my good friends and family, theatre isn't a part of their lives unless I make it so (Apart from my retired mum who practically subsidises the Almeida and Royal Court). My friends do a range of jobs; teachers, beauticians, careers advisers, engineers, designers, students, librarians, barmen and stay at home parents. For them, going to the theatre doesn't enter their head or often feels like a challenge in itself before you even get to the content or complicated explorations of the relationship between performer and audience (Meh?!). 

So I was thinking about these people, as I tend to do, over this last week.

I have spent the week knee deep in Manchester in order to write reviews for the Flare Festival; set up four years ago to celebrate and showcase 'radical' international theatre work. The idea behind the festival is threefold; to support the artists work and provide an opportunity to meet and share ideas, thus setting standards for future theatre work, to put Manchester's theatre profile on the map and lastly to 'galvanise the contemporary theatre audience'. It's that last bit that got me thinking, who is this 'contemporary theatre audience'? Are they different from other audiences? Are they like the people in the future council like from Bill and Ted?  Do they include people I know; engineers and librarians? I'm not sure. When I returned home after my week of challenging experimental theatre I enjoyed explaining my exploits to my ecologist husband. The look on his face as I describe an actor shuffling around the stage with trousers around his ankles, dribbling in order to illustrate Bacchanalian revelry, illicit a 'Wow, that sounds bonkers!' as well as a look on his face that says 'I'm so glad that I don't ever have to see that'.

I had one night off from the Flare Festival to see something from the MIF, most of the good shows were either over (Tree of Codes) or impossible to get tickets (The Skriker) so I went to see The Invisible Dot Ltd's The Crocodile. It was an adaption from Dostoyevsky, but it was also a comedy and had that bloke from The Inbetweeners in it and someone who looked a bit like Matt Lucas. The difference in the make up of the audience was staggering. The crowd was not exactly ethnically diverse but they were certainly not the same people I had seen at Flare. I noticed one group of blokes behind me who looked a bit like a stag do, wearing smart shoes and jeans and slight variations on a check shirt, there was a family opposite me and and older couple next to me, who appeared to find the seats quite uncomfortable. The show was funny, it was not innovative, it was satirical but not challenging. No one was going to leave there and go straight home and plan the take down of the neo-liberal empire but it was was arguably theatrical (set in the traverse, a piano taking the place of the crocodile) and everyone had a good time. 

The audience who came were there to be entertained. Yet, the audience at the Flare festival were also there to be entertained as well. I felt, perhaps inaccurately, that some of the international performers at the Flare might have been horrified by the lightweight fare on in the MIF. Yet, we know that doesn't make either sort of theatre bad. You get different theatre for different tastes. Some people like Taylor Swift, some people like Kraftwerk. To a certain extent we can accept that in other art forms. Yet somehow different audiences for different types of theatre feels wrong. Theatre is about a shared experience, if we are segregating our audiences, are we truly challenging or are we preaching to the converted? 

Does it matter though? 

Does theatre like that which has been displayed at the Flare need to be seen by a wider audience. Some of the theatre at Flare was very funny, albeit in a highbrow way, some was beautiful, and some like Andy Smith's Preston Bill very much reflected the working class experience (I think I might be talking about class here), in theory, anyone coming could have got something from it. 

Most of the audience at Flare comprised of the theatre makers taking part, some of these were older but they were mostly in their twenties, recently graduated, and charmingly open and energetic. In terms of class it is hard to say, I know that class is a British obsession and 'doesn't exist' in countries like Germany in which education is free for all, but at a guess I'd say they were 'educated'. At an artists forum, discussions were had about the dearth of European theatre in the UK and there was much speculation about the cause. I am currently reading Duška Radosavljević's brilliant book Theatremaking in which she discusses the intricacies of translation. She describes not only the need to translate words, or complex symbolic phrases, but also differences in concepts and contexts, which can prove challenging for audiences watching work from different countries. For example, at the artists forum, Sammy Metcalfe from Spanish/English company Sleepwalk Collective spoke of the different responses to nudity in the UK. On the continent, nudity is no big deal, it is understood that a naked body can speak of more than just sexuality. However for UK audiences, perhaps because of our Victorian heritage,  the presence of a naked body is so potent an image, it can negate the meaning of the whole show. 

The Flare Festival challenged me. As a lecturer, and now as a student, this is good. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing because I should be challenged. Sometimes it challenged my patience as my 'Buzzfeed' brain was forced to engage with work that treated language and time as absurdist concepts and I was blown away by work that forced me to confront my white middle class privilege. The energy and buzz of the Flare bubble was great for all involved and there was much for all to come away with. Yet, when I returned back to my world, it all felt a bit niche, apart from a few funny anecdotes about penises, I couldn't share it with anyone, which is often the difficult and wonderful thing about theatre as opposed to TV. Yet, this is a real shame, because it meant it lost a little of its power and theatre is at its most powerful when it is shared.