Stage Struck

You ain't seen nothin' yet, predicts Peter Crawley

WHAT WILL theatre look like in 2011? It will be formally adventurous, with mixed results, full of consideration and sometimes great wit, with a heavy emphasis on one-person performances and occasional encouraging displays of ensemble theatre.

It will also be strangely familiar, like the double take of déjà vu. That’s because theatre in 2011 (or the first quarter of it at least) will be a lot like theatre in 2010. As production companies sit on their hands and wait to know their funding for the year, starving venues are giving people a second or third bite of the cherry.

That's no bad thing. Anyone who missed the criminally short run of The Company's As You Are Now So Once Were Wein the Project last September can catch it in the Peacock in February. The Girl Who Forgot to Sing Badly, Elysium Nevada, Between Foxrock and a Hard Place, My Life in Dresses, Forgotten, Momentand The Tinker's Cursewill all hit the stage again soon.

Cinema has remakes, music has cover versions, art has reproduction, but theatre's tendency towards revivals is a deeper compulsion. Critics who become too familiar with the fate of Willie Loman will often ask if the world needs another Death of a Salesman, or if The Playboy of the Western Worldis fit only for lip-syncing. But audiences (and marketers) know the pleasure of recognition, and theatre makers will find room to manoeuvre in even the most hoary classic: Macbeth as a garish despot with a mammy fixation, Hedda Gabler as a psychotically bored yuppie. Same same but different.

Theatre is a model of progress through repetition. A playwright writes drafts, actors run lines and drill movements, directors rehearse and take it from the top. Everyone knows what practice makes. There’s something quite profound in how this repetition emulates life: our day-in, day-out existence, the gathering seasons, the layering years, our journey towards whatever it is that practice makes.

In the continuum of performance, every tragedy will be restored to equilibrium, no matter how many gouged eyes. The story never ends. Beckett played wry games with that open secret when Vladimir and Estragon, told that Mr Godot won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow, keep waiting through six disappointments a week and sometimes one matinee.

We go back, too, because some things merit repeat viewing. Even scripted shows change and evolve. So do we. Live long enough and you'll see King Learfrom the perspective of every generation, your sympathies shifting. Even Freefall, Corn Exchange's deft drama of a declining nation, became more profoundly sad in the space of a year, with nothing added but time.

There will be a hunger for the new that won’t be sated for a few months, but for the moment, some things bear repeating. No matter how familiar they seem, we haven’t seen it all before.