Rav Casley Gera

OK, bear with me. Dumb title. Titles are tricky. But necessary.

I saw a play today: Electronic City. It’s by Falk Richter, a German playwright; it was performed by MIT students, a member of whose company is staying on my sofa right now. It was good. It’s a good play, snappily, energetically performed. Anyway, here’s the thing; it was performed in the Dana Centre, a science-museum in miniature which apparently exists for people to “talk about science.”nNow, in studentworld and in Edinburgh, I’ve seen drama performed in a huge range of venues - churches, cupboards, quadrangles; I know plays have been performed at Edinburgh in toilets, Birth, Deaths and Marriages offices, and sewers. I once planned a love story that took place in the showers of a swimming pool changing room. That would have been shit. But mostly, I didn’t realise until today how strong the potential of anywhere-theatre is.

You’ll have seen from casleygera.com how enthusiastic I am for RSS - which, in plain english, is a way of syndicating the contents of web pages so you can see them in a range of places - from your mobile to a screen saver. I love it because it strips out all the crap, all the flash and graphics and adverts, that have taken over the web since broadband, refocussing on what really matters - content. I love it because it gives infrequently-updated sites (like, to be honest, mine) a way of making new content available to people without them having to constantly check the page. But mostly I love it because of its sheer, raw power - RSS is the technology behind podcasting, behind many mailing lists, and pretty soon we’ll use it for everything from newsflashes (a reader which pops up new material in the corner of your screen then fades it again) to photos (a feed which delivers one photo each morning that summarises the world the previous day). It brings back control - re-centring around the user a web that had become centred on the providers.

Now, this power - of a web where the core content can come in a million ways in a million contexts - has a lot to teach theatre. Think of film - tho we still “go to see a film,” no-one seriously thinks it’s the only way to see a film anymore - you can watch one on the way to work, if you want to. You might not - many film lovers can’t think of anything worse - but the option is there.

But theatre, for the absolute most part, remains rooted in just that - theatres. Theatres which struggle constantly to stay open, have a stranglehold on programming, and are full of braying rich people.

Well, bollocks to that, I say. Bring on the sidewalk plays, the park plays, the pub plays - even the Pizza Express plays. Because never before have the defining trends of digital culture been so in tune with those of the most analogue art form in the world, theatre. YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, RSS - all creating a more flexible, organic web, where connections are fluid and live and always evolving, and the difference between producer and audience blurs. No live art form is more able to match these trends - and the ever-present camera phone lets them be remembered.

Of course, it’s not going to please purists. Yes, great films are better in the cinema than on an iPod on the way to work, but how often do you get to the theatre? Yes, the sound today was terrible, and I couldn’t hear everything, and it’s not as immersive as in a dark theatre. But the audience was different, and larger, and the essential points get through. Web designers who have spent ten years making their sites look better and better are suddenly facing up to a world where design doesn’t matter at all - just content. Theatre could learn a lesson, and teach one.