Gut feelings - usually right?

I have made a few booboos in my time, usually omissions and I’m prepared to confess the main two - Warhorse and Festen. Should have seen both. Otherwise I go on experience and yes, a gut feeling.

Generally speaking, yes, the gut instinct can be useful.

But thankfully it’s rare I see something genuinely terrible, without any sort of redeeming aspect to appreciate. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something so terrible that I’ve had to admit defeat and fall asleep in my seat to make better use of the time.

In fact my gut is telling me not to book for Pretty Woman... but the mother has overruled that. How she heard tickets were on sale I’ll never know, but in the space of 5 minutes I had text messages today hinting at how much she wants to see it (‘I really want to see this son’), to full on panic that she was being too subtle (‘Please book for me ASAP. Please. Thank you. Love you’).

Clearly the woman is scared I’ll mess up the Christmas gift again this year.

I don't think I've been to anything I really wanted to see and not liked it. I've definitely been brought to things that I've hated (All or Nothing for my dad's birthday) but I think that's the only legitimately bad show I've seen so this far my gut has been pretty kind to me. It helps that I don't really see musicals without having listened to at least part of the cast recording beforehand anymore. Matilda is probably the reason as I went in blind and came out not remembering any songs and being underwhelmed but I've since listened and found how clever a lot of the lyrics are and come to appreciate it more, so now I get to know the songs (at least the early ones so as not to spoil myself) so that I know if I'll enjoy it and so that I don't have to learn anything new which would have caused me to disengage with the show. Obviously you run the risk of the cast not living up to your expectations like say Bridges of Madison County recently (I was acutely aware of mistakes because I knew the score so well) but even in that case the acting won me over instead (and the singing was only rarely disappointing).

I tend to have a decent instinct if I'd like a show or not. Often I can see favourite shows again on subsequent productions some of which may be better or worse.

Also certain performers and producers, you can have a good idea will always give you a good show.

Due to the cost of getting to and potentially staying over in London, I have to be pretty sure I at least think I'm going to enjoy a play before spending out. I wish I could take more punts but that's just the reality. The casting goes a long way, for example I always wanted to see Adrian Lester onstage so the minute he was announced in Cost of Living at Hampstead earlier this year, I booked. As it turned out the play wasn't great bar a few exceptional moments, but I got to sit on the front row and witness Lester's acting, so I came away very happy. And no doubt one day I will book a cheap NT ticket so I can finally say I've been to the NT, but hopefully it;ll be for a good production! (Of course with the advent n NT Live even this has become more and more of a moot point).

Agreed, one of the most disappointing things I've ever seen.

This is a very interesting thread. I’m also thinking about what I don't want to see again. For example I don't want to see The Duchess of Malfi or Endgame again. If you have not seen either, then yes, go, they are both essential in the drama canon. I would like to see new work which isn’t preaching. I fear that although we have the most brilliant actors and can stage work with theatrical effects, not always needed of course, we don't have the writers. I’m watching Succession on the telly at the moment and it is written utterly amazingly with set pieces Chekov style and twists. So are our writers writing for the telly now? An old discussion I realise but part of the bigger picture.

I’m sure in the past there were plenty of plays that reflected the times, the scandals and political stuff and we wouldn’t have a clue now. Even the serious plays, Macbeth is a good example, have contexts and internal language we need to have explained to us ( by good teachers or programme notes) but the best plays capture us through that magical thing, ‘drama’. Are the play readers missing plays because they are looking for the concept, ‘now’ work?

Oh sweet summer child. Welcome to what Germany has been like for the last 40 years and drove people away in masses until theatre became a tiny little bubble for an intellectual (wannabe) elite. Believe me, there's room for things to get way way worse. At least Britain still HAS writers who write new plays on a wide range of topics and pick up current subjects for the stage, occasionally creating something truly amazing like The Jungle. Over here all they do is forever and ever rehash the same classics in a variety of idiotic "concepts". 

I find TV just as much hit and miss as theatre, to be honest. Didn't last more than 2-3 episodes of Succession for example, because I just can't be bothered to care for rich privileged people and their fighting over money. I also think that it must be easier to get into theatre-writing, you can start small on the fringe, in Edinburgh, regional theatre, etc. and hope to go on to better things. But to get your stuff picked up and produced by a television channel must be hard as there's so much money involved from the get go. 

PS: Interestingly, my gut feeling told me "Hell no!" about &Juliet, but with the first positive reports from Manchester I'm now starting to sway. Having heard about the "frame" of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway bickering over the story makes it appear to make a lot more sense. Sometimes an initial gut reaction is based on being unaware of something important, so I'm willing to change my mind. 

I think a more obvious cause is probably the money they get paid for TV!

With every tech company thinking that they need to get into content creation for their own streaming services there’s a real need for good writers to actually create all that ‘peak tv’. And it’s easier to jump from TV into feature film writing than theatre - there’s more cross-pollination.

The two situations are probably intertwined - if all the strongest writing is going to TV, because that’s why the money is and where reputations are made, then theatre Directors have leeway to play with their own conceptual ideas because there’s not the depth in the writing they are working with to create a compelling production on its own. And if writers see the theatre is becoming more director-led and TV more writer-led the they may well find the latter more appealing creatively, too.

Plus a TV series is genuinely a much longer form of storytelling than theatre - even the big 2-part theatrical epics like Angels in America and The Inheritance are only as long as a limited series - if you truly have a story you want to tell over 10 hours or more then TV is the only place to do that.

I'm sure it will. English theatre is at its heart commercial and needs a paying audience to come for it to survive. A quick Google search tells me that UK Theatre receives state funding to a tune of £364 million p.a. in total. German theatre receives... get this... 3.5 BILLION Euro. So directors don't care if people stay away. They've never cared how many people they've driven away (and often into the arms of commercial bright fun musical theatre) since Regietheater became a thing in the 70s. Their biggest problem is that the audience, who accepted all of that stuff willingly over the decades, is now dying away and they failed to rope a younger generation in. There'll be interesting times ahead. 

I haven't seen much "concept" staging in Britain - I mean, I come travelling from Germany so often to AVOID that kind of thing - but what little I've seen, I still thing that British directors manage to put the actors center stage. And there are still plenty of new interesting plays written about contemporary issues and not just classics mauled about time and again to drive some bizarre concept home. Not sure if anyone here has seen this, which says it all: