I agree with every ounce of that Ian.

Widespread inter-tribal violence, the environmental catastrophe, the normalization of the abuse of animals, the fact that lawyers make 10,000% more per hour than theatre makers. The growing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

How can we spend our precious art-making time on this earth doing anything but setting the groundwork for a full-scale revolution?

Why should we coddle the status quo if the status quo is happy keeping our art form poor and powerless? Why spend our time perpetuating a tired business model? What are we playing it safe for?

I’m all for infiltrating the mainstream so as to chip away at the system from within. And – sure – let’s make theatre enjoyable. But if we follow that model to its conclusion, we get the splashy Broadway extravaganzas that many of us seem to find so distasteful.

We need a concrete strategy for extracting ourselves from (and staging an attack on) the status quo at the right moments.

You’re right. We’re not at war with our audience. But we need to empower them as allies in our revolution. This doesn’t mean subjecting our communities to abuse in our theatres, but it surely also doesn’t mean pandering to what we think their idea of “entertainment” might be.

Make art the way we want to make it – on our terms. Ask the questions we want to ask. Once we know what we want to say, it’ll be easy to build in the seduction elements that will pack our houses – if widespread influence is the goal.

The revolution in theatre needs to happen at the business end of the stick: an army of Arts Admin rebels so furious with the injustice of the current creaking theatre apparatus that they lead the march to a new model. A model that empowers artists to ask the kinds of questions we need artists to be asking. And theatre can retake its rightful place as a valued moral compass for the communities it serves.

Send me a t shirt. I can’t speak for everyone who contributed a sentence, but i think there’s more of a focus on the former (reducing complacency) than the latter (creating discomfort). I’m not sure embracing any of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty is going to salvage/re-energize our medium. It should be challenging, but I’m all for people enjoying themselves. That way they come back.