Showmanism

I treated myself to a night out at the theatre this week. A video from Nathan Lane popped up on my social media a little while ago talking about a production called Showmanism.

And he was right. It was one of the most extraordinary nights of theatre I have experienced.

Weirdly, it turned out to be the third time I’d seen Dickie Beau perform in the last couple of months because he was in What It Feels Like For A Girl and season 2 of The Gold.

The show is described as a concise histrionic of performance and takes you from the emergence of speech, through a history of theatre, from the Ancient Greeks, to Shakespeare’s Globe, to the present day.

Dickie lip syncs while embodying the words of actors, directors and writers including Sir Ian McKellen, Steve Nallon, and Ram Dass.

I left wanting to watch it all over again, thank you Nathan.

In researching the show, Dickie brought together a range of insights into communication, community, and self-expression. There were many things which made me think, ‘I need to learn more about this’. My knowledge of Greek theatre is limited to watching Antigone at school a very long time ago now. So I was fascinated to hear how amphitheatres were designed like ears, how labourers were paid a day’s wages to go and listen to what was said, and that the masks worn enabled the ‘true voice’ to be heard.

I spend a lot of time shaking my head at the performative nature of social media where the focus is on projecting a persona, rather than being your true self. Where it’s all about making a noise and ‘going viral’, rather than listening. Where connection is an illusion.

Showmanism discussed the opposite:

How theatre gave a voice to the voiceless. Women and slaves were excluded from society but their voices were heard on stage.

How we’re forced to perform a role, to be ‘someone’, as soon as we are born as people project their hopes, dreams, and ideas about what we should be on us. And that means we need to break free of others’ ill-fitting expectations to be ourselves.

How theatre binds us. There is a town in Bavaria called Oberammergau, which has put on a passion play every 10 years since 1634, in thanks for being delivered from the plague. I had never heard of this. Around 2000 people from the town take part in the production and the men grow their beards over the 10 years to get them to look right for the part.

That listening is just as important as speaking. Without an audience, there is no theatre. There is no-one to play to. No-one to hear your story and be moved by it.

Terence McKenna, one of the voices Dickie shares, said that speech is the single most revolutionary technological invention in history. It even works in the dark! It’s also the first example of virtual reality. 

Language existed before speech. You could understand what signs or clicks meant before we started to speak. “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh.” Which means speech is part of us.

As you know, I love ideas, communication, and storytelling so this show was right up my street.

The programme notes contain a fascinating interview with Dickie about how he came up with the show.

He said: “We’re evolved to be communal animals, but how we live in the West interferes with that in so many ways. People live alone or in pairs, or in nuclear families, and we accept that as if it were a given. But there are studies that show how people who are reared by a whole community are less likely to experience early developmental trauma because there’s always another organism available to them. So I was wondering about these gathering spaces, like the theatre: what aspects of them are potentially sacred? And that gave me the ‘envelope’ for the show.”

I now have a warren of material to go down to learn more about all these ideas.

What have you seen recently which really made you think?