A platform for communicating (further) with the audience…..

The point of theatre, of course, is that what’s on the stage speaks for itself; a show that needs a good programme note for its creator(s)’s intentions to be known has failed, at least on one level, to communicate itself fully. But theatrical communication is a two-way street; and creators, of course, learn from their audiences, too. Sometimes, as the old ad for BT used to say, it’s good to talk. And for as long as I’ve known it, the National – alone amongst London’s leading theatres – has offered a year-round complementary (but not, alas, complimentary – you have to pay £3.50 for the privilege) series of “platform performances” to offer artists an opportunity to explain themselves and audiences a chance to interrogate them.

These informal occasions, done on the stage of the show in question before the evening performance at 6pm, naturally attract the theatrical enthusiast: people who want to expand their knowledge of a show, and have been sufficiently challenged by seeing it to want to get some context and meaning from the creators. It’s a chance for artists and the audience they are serving to get closer to each other. And sometimes, as a critic whose work records my own reactions to something publicly, I get the chance to mediate that dialogue in public, too, as I did on Friday evening when I hosted a National platform with director Emma Rice and Tom Morris, her co-adaptor, on the current production of A Matter of Life and Death.

The show has given rise, of course, to an (ongoing) argument of the role (and age) of the critics, or at least the “dead white male” variety castigated by Nick Hytner as a result of (some of) their reviews for this piece, which in fact were far from universally damning – the joy of London’s wide-ranging press is, as I’ve often pointed out here before, how widely different the opinions can be on the self-same show. (And for the record, even amongst the senior broadsheet overnight critics, while de Jongh, Spencer and to a lesser degree, Nightingale were in the naysayer corner, both Billington and Taylor found much to admire).

But though that debate has in some ways usefully focused attention on just who we all are and how critics, whoever we are, never come to the theatre as a blank slate, it has also, less usefully, distracted from the work itself. So it was good, as a critic who actually did enjoy the piece, to bring the conversation back to the work itself, and note that except for one brief public comment from the floor, the reviews were not even mentioned.

Good theatre, as I’ve already said, shouldn’t need to be explained; and indeed, one of the great joys of Emma’s work for her company Kneehigh (co-producers with the National here) is the visceral engagement it provides for audiences that transcends verbal communication — text, as she explained, is just one part of her armoury, and that text (mostly provided by Morris) remained fluid virtually to the first night. But one fascinating admission was made by both of them: that they had failed to make it clear that there really is a choice of endings, and that the outcome truly does depend on the flip of a coin.

Alan Ayckbourn, of course, has long revelled in such theatrical devices, indeed once on this very same Olivier stage in Sisterly Feelings, seen here in 1980, in which a flip of a coin also spins the play in alternative directions. (According to the synopsis on alanayckbourn.net, “There are two alternative scenes for Act I, scene II and Act II, scene I. The decision for which scene is used in Act I is decided by the flip of a coin. The decision for which scene is used in Act II is made by the actor. This is a play about two sisters and the choices they make (or have made for them) over the course of a few months. There are four possible versions, determined by one random and one deliberate choice. The story starts with a funeral, at which Dorcas, Abigail and Simon are faced with a dilemma and decide to toss for it. This means that either Dorcas or Abigail goes with Simon. Later at a picnic, Dorcas has a deliberate choice. One decision leads to a night under canvas for Abigail, the other to a day of sports for Dorcas. The inevitable end of either choice is a wedding.”)

In the case of A Matter of Life and Death, the flip of the coin literally decides life or death. But though Rice and Morris have experimented with different ways of communicating that this really does happen in the play, audiences don’t believe it. During previews, they experimented with getting a member of the audience to call the fall of the coin – but one night that member called the opposite of how it had fallen to try produce the happier ending (the actor, however, decided to play it as fate had decreed, rather than as the audience member had falsely called it). Theatre, that great ephemeral, playful art, changes nightly in the playing. That discovery alone adds yet another dimension to the piece that I had missed when I saw it. And now I want to see it again, to see if the choice goes the other way.