Your Voice Theatre

Your Voice Theatre is a new project by The Bear Educational Theatre. The idea is that we play one-hour long interactive theatre shows, but rather than doing it in the morning for school students, we do it in the afternoon for adults and members of the general public. It sounds like a regular expansion into a new market, but there is a lot more than just that behind the move. Your Voice Theatre offers a new vision of what English theatre can be and the role that it can play in modern Czech society.

This article is about that philosphy, what theatre is and what English theatre in the Czech Republic may need to become.

The article is in five sections ….

The Program

At the time of writing, Your Voice Theatre has produced 14 different events. The main body of this program has come from the repertoire of The Bear Educational Theatre, the shows which are suitable for older students. We have resurrected some shows from the past including shows that were previously only played online like Sherlock Holmes and 1984. However, new pieces have also been created and a big part of the satisfaction of running the program so far has been seeing how well new experimantal formats have resonated with live audiences. Totally new programs have been The Getting To Know You Show, A Meeting with Dr Frankenstein, and an instant theatre production of Macbeth by Shakespeare.

The common factors of Your Voice shows are 1 – They are played at 4.00 o’clock in the afternoon, 2 – They have low production values in terms of sets and props and costumes. 3 – They are very audience-centred. Actors talk with the audience before and after the shows. They often talk with them during the shows too.

A Focus On The Audience

This focus on the audience is central to the concept of the theatre. Being based in Prague we want to create shows that are accessible to everybody including non-native speakers of English. In fact, as with The Bear Educational Theatre, the main target audience is people who are learning English. We want our audiences to feel that they have time and space to process what they are watching. Shows are often broken up so that we can check in with the audience and even when this is not the case the actors will sit with the audience at the end to answer questions and reflect on the story that was played.

This is different to the more traditional ways of presenting theatre where part of the job of the audience is to admire the people on stage and be impressed at their skill. With Your Voice it is more a feeling of …… we are going to look at this story together, we will play it, you watch it, and then we will get together and discuss what we all think about it. In this sense it low-status theatre where the actors are not aiming to put themselves above the audience. It is an attemt to present content that would normally belong in traditional theatre while generating the kind of atmosphere you would get at an enjoyable workshop.

Instant Theatre

If we were to produce a full-scale professional evening theatre production of Macbeth for example the first thing that we would need to take care of is raising money, quite a lot of money. That money would go on hiring a set designer and a costume designer, a lighting designer, a stage manager, then something for a soundtrack and a casting for a large cast of actors. Rehearsal would take weeks and there would be a lot of pressure on marketing to make sure that we sell enough expensive tickets to get at least some of the money back. The result would be a 2 hour show and a big stage full of people, set, and various lovely things to look at. It would also mean a lot more time and effort spent on production work rather than on doing anything especially creative.

With instant theatre there is almost no production work. The stage will be empty, the actors will have symbolic costume pieces, if that. The show will be reduced to a few acted scenes linked by narration and the actors will have one rehearsal where the blocking of those scenes is established.

The performance will be basically underprepared, but if the actors have learned their lines, they will be able to play the scenes well enough for the audience to be engaged with the story. And that is the idea of an instant theatre show, it is about the audience meeting the story. It is also about us meeting the story through acting it and then sharing and comparing our experience with that of the audience.

Is Instant Theatre Better Than Normal Theatre?

Instant theatre is certainly different to fully-produced evening theatre and it has a number of benefits for the audience. Firstly, it is obviously a lot cheaper to visit and convenient in the sense that you do not have to sacrifice a whole evening to see a show. It is also convenient for non-native speakers to have the story of Macbeth explained while still getting the experience of seeing scenes played out in original Shalespearian language.

Having said that, I have seen professional productions which are fantastic. The set design, lighting, staging, acting, and music came together to serve the play and the story in a way that was incredibly satisfying. Instant theatre can never hope to match that. The thing that bothers me about fully-produced evening theatre though is that this perfect catharsis of the different elements very rarely happens. I often leave the theatre thinking ….. that should have been better. These are theatre professionals who had time and money to produce a show, why wasn’t it more satisfying? The money that was spent did nothing to make the themes of the story or the characters clearer to me.

With instant theatre the audience meets an attempt to shed light on the story and the characters in a way that is still essentially theatrical, but which focuses in on the bare bones of a story, without trying to create an impressive spectacle. The feedback so far has shown that meeting stories in this way is still a satisfying experience for the audience. It is certainly a satisfying experience for the actors who get to play a lot of different stories and characters in the time that it would normally take them to play just one.

Why this could be a positive new direction for theatre.

I am not sceptical about the future of theatre in the sense that I believe that people will prefer staying at home to watch Netflix, etc. I think that people do still value live entertainment and always will. Indeed there may soon be a resurgence of live entertainment as people seek authenticity in an AI driven digital world. But I do think that it makes sense for theatre to change in a way that appeals to a new generation of theatre-goers.

I do not think that in this age of film and special effects that theatre has the same power to blow people away that it had in the past. I do not think that it should even try to do that any more. Theatre should focus on the thing that makes it unique, the fact that it is live and that audience members get to share an experience with others in real time.

There is already a treand towards things like improv and standup comedy. These are forms of theatre that break the fourth wall and rely on a certain kind of rapport with a live audience. The role that theatre has traditionally played in society may well change as the yonger generation become less willing to spend hours watching an elaborate production of a classic story, especially if that production is not quite satisfying. Another thing that I see happening, is that long classic plays are abridged or sped up to cater to a perceived inability in the audience to focus for a longer time. I find these efforts futile and prefer the idea of creating a new way of presenting culture over surgically deforming the traditional ways.

It is early days for Your Voice theatre, but the signs are good that we have found a new format that has a future.