Stage Struck

PETER CRAWLEYon theatre's populism v elitism dilemma

IT LOOKS as if my favourite show of 2010 will also be my favourite show of 2011. Pan Pan's The Rehearsal, Playing the Dane(back for a limited tour) is a stripped-down riff on Hamlet, maybe the most over-familiar play in the canon. It's such a sensory overload – cluttered with gags, references, an onstage audition and an audience vote to elect the prince – that it leaves you stimulated, confused and giddy.

Basically, you get cast as Hamlet. It plays games with the play, with theatre, with culture. It's a production I'd recommend to anybody. But how would "anybody" feel about this? For a start, the more you know about Hamlet, the more it rewards you. And when Gavin Quinn's production makes revealing allusions to Samuel Beckett's Endgame, setting this "quintessence of dust" loose through an obstacle course of dustbins, the anointed will feel delighted while the uninitiated might think it's plain trash. For every nerdgasm in the theatre, there will be someone for whom the earth has not moved.

This is a prickly question for theatre in general, which has never quite got over its own Hamlet-proportioned identity crisis. It is essentially a niche pursuit sidelined by mass media. Oh, what a noble art form is here overthrown! But theatre is resilient and adaptable: it can ape commercial practice (think of Les Mis, Catsor anything starring Twink), or let cinema and television alleviate the burden of realism while it experiments with absurdism, expressionism or reality.

Sometimes, though, if it gets treated like a minority art form, it behaves like one, shunning the hoi polloi. John Carey once described the modernist literature of Joyce, Woolf and Eliot as an effort to shut the masses out of culture “by making it too difficult for them to understand”.

That may sound paranoid, but it contains a shiver of discomfort for anyone who works in the arts, still caught between the desire for popularity and the hermetic chill of elitism. Who should they make work for: those in the know? Or those in the dark?

Recently, while waxing lyrical over She She Pop's Testament– a similarly post-dramatic take on Shakespeare's King Lear– a colleague pointed out that there hadn't been a straight-up, pre-post-dramatic Learin Dublin for years. Who was this benefiting? I have no time for "purists" who say you can't monkey around with Shakespeare's structure or meddle with Ibsen's endings, but one of their quibbles seems unanswerable: what's the point of radical reinterpretation if your audience doesn't first have an interpretation? This matters, because theatre needs to reinvigorate the jaded connoisseur while also replenishing its audience.

For my money, Pan Pan gets the balance right: assume some familiarity, by all means, but throw us a lifeline. Nobody likes a know-it-all.