Is theatre obsolete?

One of my favourite podcasts at the moment is called “This Jungian Life”. It is a playful, intellectual, psychological look at different themes and issues occurring in society, drawing heavily (but not exclusively) from Jungian psychology (founded by Carl Jung). I have always been interested in psychoanalysis, but this podcast has made this realm of symbols, dream analysis and metaphorical reading so accessible and utterly enjoyable. The ideas they discuss are deeply philosophical and relatable and often resonate with or give nuance to my thoughts around theatre.

There was one episode recently that stood out where the analysts interviewed political scientist and author of The Identity Trap, Yascha Mounk. In talking about this book, Mounk described a social political shift that he has witnessed, where left leaning politics has gone from assuming the possibility of universality, towards a position that refuses the possibility of shared understanding or any sense of universality when one’s identity markers differ from someone else. This thinking is described as something along the lines of “if you don’t share my identity, you can’t ever understand my experience” and any attempt to understand is experienced as an affront. Neither the analysts nor Mounk were denying the importance of identity categories and working to rectify social injustices. But they were having a pretty rigorous discussion about some extreme thinking that is occurring where an attempt at trying to understand another person’s experience is portrayed as a destructive, hurtful or offensive act.

The discussion pointed to the dangers of over-identification with identity categories. Becoming fixated on one’s identity can make it so important and all-consuming that one can become reduced to only being that. This can have negative social consequences, because it can lead to the denial of any shared commonalities between people who look different or are from different backgrounds or experiences. It can also have negative personal consequences, because to only know who we are through our identity categories denies all the unknown in the collective unconscious (a Jungian term) and all the possible things we do not know about ourselves yet, which might be waiting for discovery. They also discussed the risk of ignoring the innumerable characteristics and aspects of experience we might share in common, which can make one’s experience in the world quite isolating. To hone in on an understanding of one’s self based on just a few aspects denies the complexity and plurality of a human being. To be clear, none of this discussion was denying the importance of identity categories for making material progress on social injustice, but was opening up the possibility that there may be a shadow side to this limiting and rigid activist thinking.

So what does any of this have to do with theatre? Well, this thinking is around us in creative sectors. Through this logic, I can only create from autobiographical knowledge and not deviate from my lived experience as an artist, because I only have authority to tell stories that have literally happened to me or which align with my identity markers. Now, it is not a bad thing that artists are being asked to contemplate what stories they can tell and why they must be the ones to tell them. Sitting with big ‘why’ questions can generate responses that can lead to a deeper understanding of one’s process, reason for being an artist/the mission they are serving, and what impact they want to have. “Why this work? Why now? Why me?” are responsible questions to ask, and usually make for higher quality work.

With this responsibility in mind, I took a look at the work I have in development. Some of it draws on autobiographical experience, some of it does not. If I am not able to use my creative, empathetic imagination to create characters who are not like me, it’s going to make for some pretty mundane theatre. Luckily, the podcast offered more thoughts that helped me think through this quandary. 

My ears pricked up when one of the analysts, Joseph (whose resonant, soothing voice surely has curative powers) suggested, that there are only so many emotions, and, despite our proneness as human beings to literalism, we may find ways to connect despite not having the same literal experiences, through having experienced similar emotions. His salient point was that the notion of not being able to understand someone who has different identity markers only holds if emotions do not matter; in Joseph’s words, it “only exists if emotion is totally irrelevant and extracted from the narrative”.

And if that is true, then theatre is obsolete. 

Fortunately I don’t think it is true and it is unlikely I am alone in thinking this (afterall, theatre continues to be made despite extraordinarily difficult economic conditions). I think the creativity of the artist allows them to make emotional connections that can help audiences come to new understandings of their lives and make sense of experiences in new ways. 

This is what I was trying to do with a new musical I recently wrote, where most of the characters have had experiences I have never literally experienced. Because I do not want to only write literal autobiographical monologues, I did what Joseph described: I imagined what the emotional content may have been when writing a scene. I asked, what could that character have felt in that moment? When have I felt that? What was it like? How might it be the same or different for this character? Where do we connect emotionally? (Now of course, that’s not all I did — there was endless research, conversations, dreaming, rigorous editing, workshopping, dramaturgical discussions with colleagues and more research. None of these ideas excuse sloppy or lazy process!).

Asking these questions and making a creative offer in response is different from claiming to know what it’s like. And I’m not sure that’s what lines of dialogue are anyway; I see dialogue as suggesting what it might feel like. It points us in the direction. But the actor and director and creatives still have to interpret, they still have to figure out the variations of how it could feel, for character and audience, hence the numerous interpretations different teams can come up with on the same text. Then, it’s up to the audience to decide whether we got it right or whether it resonates or entertains or whether they care. 

Another thing that occurred to me was this: if could manage to use my skill and creativity (along with my lived experience) to try to empathetically imagine what it could feel like to be in circumstances different to my own (in a way not dissimilar to what the analysts on This Jungian Life described doing as therapists) then perhaps it would be possible for other people to do the same. It seems to me that one of the vital purposes of making art is to enact a leap towards others, to reach out beyond oneself and one’s experience towards another and by doing so, experience the endless possibilities that constitute our realities. AAnd this is what we ask our audiences to do every time they come to the theatre: they leap into the unknown and attempt to make sense of a new world, new characters, new ways of experiencing. So, if this is the expectation for what audiences must do to meet and understand our work, should not the artist attempt that act of leaping towards that which is not them at some point? 

Another great point in the podcast was made by one of the analysts, Lisa, who talked about patients who in deep suffering experienced a symbolic image arise in their psyche. The symbolic, Lisa explained, is healing “because it connects us with the universality of the human experience”. If that is denied then we may be denied meaning and healing in our lives. She said, “When we can understand our suffering is universal then it has meaning. Then we can bear it”. Those big human emotions can connect us at a deep, fundamental level. 

I believe theatre is at its best when it is in the realm of the symbolic. The symbolic is often connected to what makes theatre theatrical and that which makes theatre theatrical is what differentiates it from other art forms. Theatre works with time, space, meaning making, energy, metaphor. It is temporal. By experiencing the metaphoric, the symbolic, through time, space and energy, we understand what could be, what might be, and how we are connected. The theatre’s potential is to go beyond everyday life and touch the collective unconscious, touch that which we can all connect to, beyond the literal. It operates in the realm of feeling. In this way it is more important than ever. Whereas something like film is good at showing life as it ‘really’ is, often in literal visual terms, I believe theatre works best when it goes beyond what literally is and aims to explore how life really feels or could feel, leveraging the awesome power of symbol, metaphor and archetype.

So, is theatre obsolete? Or, is it one of very few ways we can transcend to where we are all connected?