I have a complicated relationship with theatre.
Part of me feels an obligation to engage with and support the arts. Another part of me can struggle with new ideas, unfamiliar interpretations and adaptations of stories I thought I understood.
Then there is the part of me that simply loves watching people perform.
I love seeing artists at their work, witnessing the skill and courage it takes to step onto a stage and feeling them change the mood of a live audience. A room can sharpen with anticipation, soften with laughter or become utterly still because of something one person has said or done upon that stage.
That exchange between performer and audience fascinates me.
Yet theatre also asks something of me that does not always come naturally. I am not claustrophobic, but I was a single child raised in a rural world. Crowds have never been my natural environment. Sitting close to a large number of people in one room can leave part of me longing for a little more space.
Perhaps that mixture explains why a genuinely successful evening at the theatre matters so much to me. I do not arrive guaranteed to love it. The place, the people and the performance have to draw me in.
Just recently, The Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury did exactly that.
We had gone to see The Hollow, based upon Agatha Christie’s story, but the evening began before we entered the auditorium.
Friends had suggested that we join them for dinner in the Green Room. It was the first time we had eaten there, and they were absolutely right when they said it was a wonderful way to begin a visit to the theatre.
The Marlowe’s catering and hospitality teams have achieved something rather special. The food was excellent, the portions sensible and the surroundings allowed us to settle, talk and enjoy being with friends.
Nothing felt hurried or awkwardly attached to the main event. The meal became part of the evening.
Going out can too easily become a sequence of deadlines. Find somewhere to eat, watch the time, finish quickly, pay the bill and hurry to the next place. You arrive at the performance technically on time, but mentally several minutes behind yourself.
The Green Room allowed the evening to unfold differently. There was time to enjoy the food, the conversation and one another’s company. By the time we moved into the theatre, we had been gently drawn into the occasion.
Perhaps that helped. The crowd no longer felt quite so much like a crowd. It felt like a gathering.
Then the lights dimmed, the audience quietened and another part of my relationship with theatre took over: the part that loves seeing people at their work.
One of the things I find extraordinary about theatre is the cleverness of taking one set and using it to tell a much larger story.
The stage for The Hollow gave us a single room, yet through lighting, sound, movement and performance we were allowed to feel the existence of a much wider world beyond it. The physical boundaries of the stage remained, but the story moved far beyond them.
Television and film can show us almost anything. Theatre often trusts us to imagine what cannot be seen.
What happens beyond the set begins to exist in our minds. We do not simply watch the story; in some small way, our imaginations help to complete it.
That requires remarkable skill from everyone involved, both those we see and those we do not.
We were treated to an evening of powerful acting, sometimes subtle, sometimes full-on, sometimes wonderfully comical, but always intriguing and engaging.
There is a particular pleasure in seeing performers whose work we may recognise from television and film practising their craft in front of us.
On stage, there is no second attempt waiting in the editing room. The performers have to sense the audience, hold its attention and respond to the atmosphere around them. Timing matters. A pause matters. The smallest movement or change of expression can alter how hundreds of people understand a moment.
The audience becomes part of that exchange.
Laughter travels across the room. A sudden movement produces a shared response. At other moments, hundreds of people become completely quiet together.
That is something a screen cannot quite reproduce.
Watching a play at home is not the same as sitting in a theatre, just as watching a concert cannot give you the feeling of being surrounded by live music. Nor can televised sport reproduce the experience of standing beside a polo field, hearing the horses approach and feeling their movement through the ground.
You can see what happens on a screen, often in extraordinary detail, but you are not quite there.
Being present changes the experience.
For someone who does not naturally seek out a crowd, there is an interesting contradiction in that. The closeness can still feel uncomfortable, yet the shared attention can also feel extraordinarily powerful.
Perhaps that is because the gathering has purpose. We are not simply surrounded by people. We are experiencing something with them.
Theatre also challenges the part of me that can resist a new interpretation of a familiar story. Agatha Christie creates a world many of us feel we know. We arrive with expectations about its characters, its atmosphere and the way the mystery should unfold.
Yet each production asks us to surrender some of that ownership and engage with somebody else’s interpretation.
I do not always find that easy, but last evening reminded me that this is part of the pleasure. A familiar story does not have to remain fixed. In the hands of another group of artists, it can reveal a different emphasis, create a different response and invite us to look again.
This is very different from the way I often engage with something through a phone or television. At home, distraction is always close by. I can glance elsewhere, interrupt myself or move on.
In the theatre, I had chosen to be there. I had taken my seat and placed myself in the hands of the people telling the story.
The care invested in The Marlowe over the years can be felt throughout the experience. It is not simply somewhere that presents a play. The hospitality, the building, the gathering audience and the performance itself combine to create an occasion.
At a time when so much seems to have become almost beyond compare in expense, I found myself considering how much pleasure the evening had given us and how excellent its value for money felt.
There had been good food, friendship and conversation. There was the anticipation of taking our seats, the ingenuity of the set and the pleasure of watching talented people at work. There would be more conversation afterwards, prompted by what we had seen and by the different ways in which we had responded to it.
During the interval, we agreed upon our next visit.
We had not even reached the end of The Hollow and were already being lured back by the irrepressible, timeless joy of Agatha Christie.
That seems to me a wonderful measure of the evening.
This had not been a dutiful visit made simply because I felt I should support the arts. Nor had all my contradictions about theatre suddenly disappeared.
Instead, The Marlowe had reminded me why it is sometimes worth challenging my reluctance, leaving the open space of my natural comfort zone and stepping into a crowded room.
There I found good food, friendship, imagination and the pleasure of seeing people practise their craft. I felt a live audience change around me and recognised that I was changing with it.
Perhaps that is what places such as The Marlowe continue to offer us.
A chance to gather, to pay attention and to experience something that exists not only upon the stage, but somewhere between the performers and everyone who has chosen to be there.
And sometimes, despite all my contradictions, being there is rather wonderful.
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