Has Theatre Become Irrelevant?
No longer is “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.” In these times, I won’t catch the conscience (or even the attention) of very many people with a work of drama. (I have no sense: I’ve written a verse play for voice: Colonization Of A Small Planet.)
Film has taken over. Theatre (even opera) was once pop culture and spectacle like film is now. But film can do spectacle better and is even more accessible than even theatre was in Elizabethan times.
Theatre is moribund. This is unfortunate, but inevitable. Mounting a theatre production is prohibitively expensive, and so are the admission prices for the vast majority of people. Never mind it’s availability, except for those physically near the theatre.
The only hope is screenwriting (script-writing). But then the writer has little control over his or her work, and it is problematic for many other reasons I don’t have time to elaborate on here.
