Theatre versus Cinema

A deliberatly provocative title for this post.

Clearly both are supreme art forms with the ability to transport people in space and time, inspire, move and entertain.

But here's an interesting observation -

Theatre claims to be obsessed by the relationship with the audience, the 'live' experience is revered.  It seems to me that there is a edge of superioty Theatre feels it has over film and television here.

If this is true then tell why when you Google 'Theatre admissions' do you get nothing? and when you do the same for Cinema the first four sites give you cinema admission figures back to the 1930s?

If you go to the Arts Council web site you cannot find how many people go to the Theatre (you can't even find their annual report but that's another story) you can find the Taking Part survey which tells you how many people took part in arts or cultural activity last year but this includes activities like 'knitting'.....!

If I make a television programme I know the day after it is aired who watched it, where, and what the demographic breakdown of the audience is.  If I make a film, I know exactly how many people saw it in which parts of the country.

If I produce I piece of Theatre, I may carp on about how precious my audience is but I don't seem to count them, know who they are, what the mix is or how to fill my empty seats.

Surely if Theatre cares so much about its audience it should at least count them.....?

Comments

[Swollen Foot]

I think that theatre is not as pretentious as people make out and that the high ticket prices are at fault for that, as they give off an air of exclusivity. But the theatre has so much to offer in terms of style and versatility. I agree with the comment by Francois in that respect. As for the information on audience numbers, I don't know anything about that but I suspect it may be, as Simon Harris says above, something to do with the scale of cinema sales in comparison to theatre ones. It's unfair to say that theatres don't value their patrons, as they need them to continue to produce plays. Cinemas will never have a problem with bringing in big business. Those are my thoughts!
http://swollenfoottheatre.blogspot.com

[Jordan 1]

Great men always have their own unique charm, besides is to let the audience like TV role, especially need personality is bright.

[Simon Harris]

Maybe you're also blurring audiences and markets. In the cinema, there is a kind of macho swaggering that comes with the publicising of audience figures. In cinema, the distributors call the shots and it is in their commercial interests to advertise their gross takings. In the theatre, each building is generally an individual business with a variety of different considerations to take account of beyond the straightforward commercial imperative of the number of tickets sold. Because of the level of subsidy required for theatre to exist at all, beyond purely commerical enterprises, the number of people in the audience is less important than the kind of audience. Quality versus quantity in the pursuit of public rather than market value...

[Francois]

An interesting point about how the two fields seem to view their audiences; perhaps it's to do with cinema depending absolutely on paying punters in the absence of public or private donors.

Here’s what I think theatre artists mean about the importance of the live experience. Theatre happens before you: it exists in the interaction of two groups of imaginations (the actors’ and the audience’s). The interactions occur not just between the groups, but within them also, which is why an audience can make a collective response to something without having to talk about it. As a result, every performance is different in its atmosphere and meaning: not necessarily very different, but none the less you can feel that difference if you watch the same show on successive nights. A cinema audience shares some of those characteristics but, because the film cannot react to the audience’s feelings, it is necessarily a one way street.

That’s also true because theatre has an inevitably democratic element. Something is happening on stage in front of you – not just ‘something’, but the presentation of a vision of reality, of certain ethical values, of a political perspective. The theatre audience has the possibility of intervening – indeed sometimes does (as during early performances of ‘Look Back in Anger’). It’s the difference between politicians on the hustings, meeting people as they used to do, and politicians on TV. Macmillan’s ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was a brilliant piece of improvisation in response to a heckler – it was theatre fulfilling its living democratic possibility in a way that cinema or television cannot do.

That doesn’t make theatre better than cinema, just different. There are distinctive things that cinema offers that theatre doesn’t – notably the possibility of fixed reference to the past – but that’s another post.