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One of these shortcuts is a belief that theatre – especially political theatre – is about a message…. [I]f the theatre were about messages, wouldn’t it be simpler to email everyone? Jeffries – writing, I suspect, with tongue firmly in cheek – describes much political theatre as running into the room and saying things like: “Do you know what I’ve just realised? Women are living in an individualistic society in which the few thrive at the expense of the many.” And indeed this is not a “message” that many people would need to have disclosed to them. But this is a cheap trick. You can reduce the complexity of any artwork to a truism and then dismiss it for banality. What does Citizen Kane tell us? Money can’t buy you love. What do we learn from Macbeth? What goes around comes around.

The problem is when we get so anxious not to miss the point that we end up pulling apart the play, trying to get at the important message within. But theatre is not a fortune cookie. In fact, maybe one of the definitions of bad theatre is that it can be reduced to a simple message – and even then we have to be ensure that it isn’t us, in the audience, turning the theatre experience into a one-line platitude.

—Easy way out: why it’s weak to walk out on theatre | Stage | guardian.co.uk (via slavin)

(via turtalia)