Desperately signalling theatre

Apart from the pantomime donkey on a fly wire, another thing struck me about The Journey to Reims at the Finnish National Opera: the use of national flags. A similar thing happened last year at the Finnish National Theatre production of King Lear. To signal that a character was of a particular nationality or political sympathy, that character had to wear or carry something bearing the national flag of the country in question. King Lear was bursting at the seams with people modelling and brandishing English, Scottish, and French flags, for example.

Oh dear. This got me thinking again about the nature of theatre, which usually means a 10,000-word essay on whether violence in Edward Bond is or is not gratuitous. I should stop now, but I'll plough on.

Did the directors of these productions think that their audiences wouldn't understand the idea of nationality unless it was brandished in such an obvious way? If so, it doesn't say much for their view of their audiences or their view of the scripts. (King Lear was in a modern Finnish translation and The Journey to Reims was adapted, in Italian, by the director himself.) No, I think it's not that. Maybe it's just, like the flying donkey, tapping into the traditions of pantomime. Or perhaps something more sinister is at play.

There is a rumour, which I cannot confirm, that undergraduate students at the biggest Finnish theatre school have to prove their worth as performers by stripping naked in front of classmates and teachers. I don't know if this is true, but if it is then it is a horribly two-dimensional view of both theatre and humanity. Just imagine, for example, as a performance experience, which would be more powerful: running around naked in front of your colleagues, or acting out, fully clothed and solo, the time when you lost your virginity.

Sadly, the two-dimensional stripping naked approach appears to have its echo time and again on stage, through productions where the ability to shout loudly and stand naked or semi-naked in front of an audience seems to take precedence over the artistic integrity of the theatrical work in question.

It is such self-aggrandising theatricality that poured ice on my enthusiasm for professional theatre just over 17 years ago, when I left university with a freshly printed theatre degree in my pocket. I felt that the theatricality was being viewed as more important than the drama. I felt that the performance of ideas was being corrupted by the idea of performance.

So, does waving a flag as a clearly blatant theatrical sign demonstrate the same underlying philosophy? Is the intention behind such sledgehammer symbolism to illustrate an inaccessible script for an uncomprehending audience, or to demonstrate that the actor-bearer is performing a role in a theatre piece?

Oh no. Here we go again....