Why have a national theatre? What should it look like? How do you ensure that people feel involved enough to care? John McGrath is grappling with the problem in the most direct way possible.
The new National Theatre Wales is currently in full programming fury. With its first year of work beginning in March 2010, and the key staff in place since March, the organisation has until the end of the summer to put together a year of work that will say in clear, bold, invigorating terms what National Theatre Wales is going to be. Some projects are taking shape quickly, some remain terrifyingly abstract; new ideas and possibilities are arising just at the moment when the staff are trying to lock things down. All a bit of a creative chemistry experiment; as it should be.
In making our choices we are very aware that our opening programme will be a statement about the very idea of a national theatre, and the possibilities for such an institution in the twenty- first century. We want National Theatre Wales to be national in the sense of responding to and belonging to the many voices and lives across the land, never settling into one idea of identity or history. So, in our first year of activity, we will explore the possibilities for a national theatre in Wales first and foremost through the question of place. From Spring 2010 to Spring 2011 it will produce one new show a month, every month, for a year. Each show will be in a different location in Wales; each will use a different approach to making theatre. There will be new plays, and classic stories, site-specific work, physical theatre, circus, interactive drama and documentary explorations – the fullest possible range. But, more importantly, each piece of work will relate to its location, asking the question: “What can theatre be here, now, with these people?” At the end of the year we hope to have created a unique map of Wales through our theatrical experiment; and also to have mapped the possibilities of theatre through this journey across land, population and seasons.
The success question
As we turn this big idea into a programme of work, one of the key questions on our minds is: “What will success look like?” As a new national theatre we have a responsibility to a country-full of people to create a theatre that really means something. So we need to be rigorous with ourselves. Just looking out for some good reviews and checking our box office targets won’t be enough. We have identified three clear values to guide all our work and decisions. We want the company and everything it does to be engaged, innovative and international. This means that rather than running education projects, or having an experimental studio, or organising the occasional international exchange, our core work should be embedded in a sense of community, should always take theatre in new directions, and should explore our place in the world. And when we judge whether or not we have succeeded, it should be on these terms.
But even with a clear sense of what we are trying to achieve, we can’t just evaluate our own success. As a national theatre, we need to open up a debate about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it to the widest possible community. Of course, everyone will bring their own thoughts and histories to the debate: quality, excellence, relevance, newness, significance. All of these and many more words are used to express whether a piece of theatre is good or mediocre, and they all mean different things to different people. The question of aesthetic judgement has, we all know, troubled great philosophers over the centuries and won’t be answered in this article. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing that we can do to address it in a more rigorous way.
Theatre of debate
A great thing is about running a national theatre is that you are answerable to a very clear set of people – the nation. You don’t need to buy into ideas or ideals of national identity (I certainly don’t) to accept that your community is everyone who feels they have a stake in the country. So at National Theatre Wales we want to do the best we can to assess the quality of our work through the engaged response of our national community. This doesn’t mean that everyone will tell us what they think. But we want everyone to feel that they can. And to make this offer real, we are developing a range of ways for people to be part of the conversation.
On the ground level our TEAM is a bunch of advocates for the company who are volunteering to spread the word about our work in their own communities; and who will feed back on the responses of those communities to what we do. Our Assembly programme will take a theatricalised form of debate across the country, discussing everything from the specifics of shows, to wider social questions, to what National Theatre Wales should be and how it’s doing.
Casting the net
As a starting point we have created an online social network which is open to everyone and where a lively community is already debating where the company’s work should take place, and what its policies should be in areas such as casting, new writing, and environmental sustainability. This network has taken off extraordinarily successfully, demonstrating how a non-building-based company can develop a real community by exploring the interplay between the live and the digital. Unlike the rather flat or over-complex one-way traffic of information found on many arts websites, our network site is inherently interactive: blogs and forums are at its centre, people talk about the work they have made themselves or seen elsewhere, as well as the work planned for National Theatre Wales. It’s all a big creative conversation.
At the heart of the network’s success is the inherent promise that this community of people will be key judges of the company’s success. By showing from the offset that we really do value and respond to people’s opinions of what we are doing, we create a community that is worth being part of. As the programme develops, we want everyone who comes to a show to feel part of the company. We will give them real, practical, fulfilling ways to develop their involvement; and having built this ownership, we will be working with all of these engaged individuals to assess how well we’ve done.
Critics will be welcome, international visitors will be invited and their opinions will be of great value to us, our peers in the theatre world will be key to our growth. But first and foremost it will be the National Theatre Wales community who will answer the question. Did we do what we said we’d do? And was it any good?
John E McGrath is Artistic Director of National Theatre Wales.
w: {www.nationaltheatrewales.org}