Success is nothing but the vagueness of relevancy—a ‘successful’ theatre production depends on its relevance at a given time in a given place, perhaps. Theatrical reception is purely relative. It depends on innumerable concepts, such as the location where a performance takes place, epoch, what the society is exposed to, who are the audience members, in other words, what the audience members of a particular country experience. To explore this idea, I will call it communal preset theory’ in which, the audience members accept, understand, agree or disagree with certain performances and not others with respect to their shared cultural, historical, religious, sociopolitical, and economic backgrounds—or because of their segregated realities. In other words, the audience members will apply their communal experiences to the performance—or their own personal experience. Let’s think about shared experience for this example, considering that individual experience would result in a chaotic range of quantum possibilities.
When audience members attend a performance, there is a process of recognition: it might be the identification of situations, the characters’ actions, linguistic features, or culturally renowned names. Taking this into consideration and noting the existence of mimetic (culturally evolving) representations such as character archetype since the epoch of Greek Theatre, theatrical representations and social structures are, indeed, endless cycles of relevancy, representations and receptions.
What is perceived is sometimes clear, precise. The theatrical form can be concise, logical, the language is semantic and the concept is there, in front of the audience. There is no escape but to capture word by word, every single notion of what is portrayed on stage. Which does not offer an extended space to add external values, because the performance and its words give the audience everything they would need. The relevancy of some performances are the highest they could possibly be. For instance, performances like ADMIN, Project Arts Centre, that verbally explored the notions of the contemporary experience of anxiety, labor, lack of essential needs, incredibly expensive rents, or Asking for It, last at the Gaiety Theatre, that verbally, visually, physically explored rape culture, drinking and drug culture, suffocation of social media and exposure, depression, alcoholism, family issues, etc. Even though such topics, sometimes, may be considered too much to be placed onstage, they are one hundred percent relevant to the contemporary society in which they are performed. Additionally, the audience members are able to instantly capture what occurs due to the sense of crystal clear communication between performer and audience member. The concepts of the performance have a structure that will lead the audience to agree, disagree, and to fully capture the essence of the piece, the intentions. However, the reception of an Irish piece in other areas would be questionable, if at all possible and permitted.
On the other hand, ‘relevancy’ can be more easily adapted in different contexts and in different nations. The gaps are there, allowing the audience to bring their own interpretations, their own conceptions and their own dramaturgy. It is safer to speak about nothing in some countries, but the nothingness is precise for the people know how to demystify nothing into experience. This notion could be easily interlinked to censorship in publications as an example. Playwrights such as Federico Garcia Lorca would not be able to explicitly write about the oppressive government, so the notion of a national problem was condensed into the structures—white walls of a house in Spain in The House of Bernarda Alba, which was Lorca’s last work before he was killed in 1936.
Reception, may be more subtle at times, which happens when there are certain gaps where the audience members can fill in with their own communal experience of a certain issue, for instance. The artists, including writers, directors, designers, etc. may offer a mysterious perspective, a subtle taste, an allusion to something much bigger than the theatre box (stage) could ever hold. The language may be fragmented, which would possibly be ridiculous to some spectators because of its superficial meaninglessness. The pragmatism that could leave many audience members unsatisfied, expecting much more. The pragmatics here may be applied as a whole, for example Hecuba in the Project Arts Centre, being performed to our respective contemporaries, thus, a classic which has not changed in language and intention, but the audience may intertwine it to current affairs. Or the utterance pragmatics (utterance and pragmatism are terms studied under linguistics. Utterance is the smallest unit of speech—let’s say a word—and pragmatism, in simple words, is the study of symbols of words, e.g. metaphors or words that depend on different contexts to have meanings) such as in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, last produced at the Smock Alley Theatre. The vagueness that could make a piece of work less engaging, less relevant, less successful—financially. Perhaps because of the distance, perhaps the displacement of the audience being themselves trying to recognize them and their lives on stage. The vagueness of relevancy is more explicit after linking external dots.
