One Sunday night in late 1989 my girlfriend took me to see
Theatresports at Belvoir Street Theatre in Surry Hills, Sydney. I can point to exactly where I was sitting
that night because the show changed my life.
I was 22 years old and working as a Trade Marketing Associate for
Unilever. It was my first ‘real’ job
after graduating with a Bachelor of Business (BBus) and my life consisted of a
week working for people I neither liked nor respected and weekends getting
drunk with a gang of friends who had also gone to expensive Sydney private
schools. My girlfriend wasn’t part of that
gang. She didn’t really like any of my
friends and she hated the drinking. I'm
still hazy as to why she liked me at all.
I’d resisted seeing the show for months. Not out of any objection to the theatre but because
Sunday night was when The Eddies played the Woolloomooloo Bay Hotel. They were a terrifically fun cover band with
a tight horn section that was doing happy, danceable versions of Blues staples
years before The Commitments repopularised that style of music. When you’re 22 and hate your day job a massive
drunken Sunday night party full of people as desperate as you are to squeeze
the last drops of fun from the weekend is an irresistible offer. Monday morning consequences be damned.
One Sunday she prevailed. She
booked (and presumably paid for both) tickets to see a heat of the Cranston Cup,
which remains Australia’s pre-eminent improv comedy competition. Her friend Julia Zemiro was in the Sydney University
team that night with Daniel Cordeaux. Also
on stage that night were Marko Mustac, Ewan Campbell and Andrew Denton. It was intoxicating. The audience cheered the teams and booed the
judges just as Keith Johnston intended. It
was funny, witty, unashamedly Australian, raw and generous. It was a million miles from The Eddies’ contrived
white boy renditions of 1960’s black American music. By the time we stood to
reprise the deliberately cheesy Theatresports National Anthem I was high. We hung out in the bar afterwards with Julia
and Daniel and it dawned on me: -
These people are my age. If they can do this wonderful thing then why not me?
I had never before questioned my role as an uncomplicated consumer
of cultural production. Straight away I
enrolled in workshops that started in January.
I performed on the Belvoir Street stage for the first time in February. In March I founded Instant Theatre,
the theatre company that strangely morphed into the consulting business I run
today. I left full-time employment in
June 1991. In the following years Instant Theatre performed for the general
public in stinking student union bars, grotty pubs and tired little theatres
and for corporate types at shining resorts across the world. I told myself that we only took the corporate
gigs to fund the general public shows. I
dreamed of a career in television and wrote some bad scripts for other
people’s shows and pitched worse ideas for shows of my own. After a few years the corporate theatre briefs
got more specific and I drew more and more on my BBus. By 1995 I was calling myself a sales/marketing
consultant and I date my current business, Dramatic Change, from then.
Ever since I've fought a persistent drift away from producing
content and back towards simply consuming it.
I’m in my mid-40’s and ‘why not me?’ is no longer enough reason to monopolise
a stage, column inches or even bandwidth.
Last year I quit stand-up comedy and the improv that I love may well
follow. I've decided that having the
capacity, and even the ability to command an audience’s attention is a necessary but
not sufficient reason to produce stuff if I have nothing that to say that needs
saying.
A contributor to the Economist’s online blog known as W.W. wrote a
piece in early November that argued against the need for more American students
to study engineering and the ‘hard sciences’ as market forces have determined that
America has enough of these for now.
Rather W.W. argues in favour of the humanities: -
I spent last evening reading a fine Pulitzer prize-winning novel by a graduate of a state-university creative-writing program. I appreciate everything math majors do for us. I really do. But, as far as I know, a math major has never made me cry.
The argument that we need producers of Art as much as we need
builders of bridges and factories and inventors of machines to mitigate the
effects of climate change is an old one and always well stated. As my second degree is in English and
Australian Literature I’m hardly unsympathetic to studying the humanities. One of the few defensible rationales for
studying Literature at university is that it makes for a more discerning and perhaps
better consumer of Art provided sufficient intellectual rigour is required
to pass the course. Art is the key word here.
Anyone can bash out a sentence on a keyboard (viz. this blog). The only cost of entry to getting on stage at
a stand-up comedy open mic night in London is proximity to London. But it is unlikely it will be Art. At best it is someone learning a craft and
finding a voice and we can only really guess at that person’s motivations. The early stages of an artist’s career
involve remaining interesting to enough of the right people for a long enough time to get the skills to properly articulate an idea in a manner that is both compelling
and intellectually rigorous.
Neither Theatresports nor The Eddies pass this test. Both shows were hugely compelling but as there
was no intellectual rigour, no message whatsoever, both were entirely
disposable. With improv comedy, the one form
where I have at least a modicum of talent, meaning will always be absent. For all the skill it takes to do it well, the
engagement with an audience, the quick-witted cultural referencing and very occasional
moments of sincerity, I doubt that improv will ever change a single opinion. How can it?
It is calibrated to automatically give an audience what it wants already. As Keith says: -
Don’t be original be obvious.
Could there be a more blatant directive
away from Art? It is as fatuous and limiting
a statement as, “The customer is always right.”
Yet it is the driving principal behind the thing that drugged me in 1991
and has me waking up on the far side of the world twenty years later wondering
what I've done with my life. The writers’ block that chased me out of stand-up
comedy pursues me still. I've hated the
last few improv shows I've done. It’s no
longer enough for someone to marvel at my ability to extemporise a film noir
opening to a made-up faerie tale. If I
have nothing to say then why am I demanding an audience’s attention?
I will continue to write and perform
whenever I have something to say. The
rest of the time I will stop apologising for being a consumer of Art rather
than a producer of tat.
