Got to watch a pretty powerful performance of everyone's favourite feminist Greek tragedy Medea this afternoon, and quite legitimately so. We've paid for the rights to screen various titles in the National Theatre Live series and it looks like this could be money well-spent. Somewhat to our surprise we got a very good turn-out from our first year IBDP students, who're studying the play for their Language & Literature course. We didn't want to make it compulsory to watch and we'd guessed we might get about five rows but the lecture theatre we used turned out to be fullish.
Indeed it was instructive to watch the audience watching the show. They did pretty well for a young crowd watching a, to say the least, sombre performance, but not surprisingly a significant number struggled to view the proceedings in an entirely attentive manner. It was a timely reminder for us to put in place some sort of protocol regarding appropriate behaviour. I'm not talking about a set of rules to be imposed as a disciplinary straight-jacket but something genuinely educational to help develop an understanding of how theatre works.
A few years back (probably about twenty-five, come to think of it) I did the same in the secondary school I was teaching at when we screened what I termed Lit films as 'enrichment' (and those were compulsory viewing.) Actually we were very successful at getting civilised behaviour from even the youngest kids. It's surprising what you can get out of people when you communicate the reasons why the conventions of what might be broadly termed 'theatre etiquette' developed. Mind you, in those far-off days we didn't have smart phones to contend with. Progress, eh?
By the by, Helen McCrory was sensationally good in the starring role. She scared the heck out of me.
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