Medicinal Theatre

It’s funny how, just when you’ve had a thought about the world, one so often then reads somewhere a quote or idea that exactly echoes your feelings.

Reading Cate Blanchett’s interview in this month’s Vanity Fair, her theatre director husband Andrew Upton says about his and Blanchett’s work with the Sydney Theatre Company:

“The most important thing to achieve will be generational change in the audiences. From the older generation there’s a slightly medicinal quality to the approach to culture, which is that it’s good for you and will make you a better person, which I think is a kind of turn off. We’re hoping to take a more joyous approach.”

Exactly what I was trying to say below. Although, I prefer not to lump myself in with the ‘older generation’, I was brought up with that ‘medicinal’ approach to culture. So, it’s always wonderful when a production such as The Bridge Project's The Cherry Orchard playing now at BAM proves that classical theatre can be wholly enjoyable whilst still delivering its message (the sugar-coated pill, so to speak.)

[Of course, if this were Proper Journalism and not a blog, I would immediately re-write the entry below. But blog entries are supposed to stand as written at the time (although I must plead guilty to the occasional re-jig of an infelicitous sentence or piece of clumsy syntax), and a complete re-write is not the Done Thing.]