Shakespeare. Shouting. Seventy-three.
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For me, theatre in the 1970s was about only a few things. Black spaces, featureless sets. Minimal costume. Language I couldn't entirely follow. The strangeness of soliloquies. And explosions of shouting. A bit like normal home life, in fact.
Our local municipal theatre was a brutalist architectural dream with some of the sharp edges smoothed off. I loved it. Its dark grey concrete slab of an exterior had the theatre's name in huge metal letters bolted onto it. So impressive. And that's even before you'd entered the low-lit orange of the foyer. A true tour-de-force of 1970s-ness. It's probably a Tesco now.
The great thing about theatre is it reinvents itself every second during every performance. Memory takes the emotions it engenders and empowers and boils them down to a handful of vague recollections... as in the above. And art takes those recollections and turns them into something more solid, something that won't fizzle away, no matter how rocky its foundations. Which is where my Shakespeare Festival poster comes in.
It's a distillation of everything I remember about that period in the theatre. The strength and starkness of everything. The strangeness - I've always felt much more alienated in theatres than I ever have done in art galleries. And the style. Maybe it'll ring true with you too.
It's available now on this website. Here's a link.