Catch It While You Can

One of the unexpected fascinations of reading the somewhat academic tome A History of Russian Theatre has been finding out about famous Russian actors of the nineteenth century whose work was obviously of the highest order in creative terms yet now is lost for us forever, except for very general reports of what their performances were actually like. It's strange to think that despite being reasonably interested in the world of theatre in general I'd never heard of the likes of Martynov and Shchepkin, two giants of the Russian theatrical world around about the 1830s.

In some ways, though, the very loss of their work adds a kind of value to it. From a distance we can catch echoes of how meaningful it was for their enraptured audiences, and I suppose this is still true of theatre today. When I think about my life-time of theatre-going I realise that very little of what I've experienced would have been captured on film - and there's a strange sense in which even the best films of theatrical performances can't ever quite completely capture the reality of the moment.

Perhaps, at some deep level we don't really want to capture it. Part of the magic is the fact we know it happened as a gift in time, but we never expected or needed the gift to last.