A Trip to the Theatre

What is the point of the theatre? The whole point of such performances are surely to move you in some special way, but you are always far too far away to actually become involved in the characters. I just seem to struggle to get past the fact that there are two people on the stage, pretending to be other people. You really are not going to get truly lost in the story line. Even worse are comedies, which either have to be over acted so much you loose any subtlety in the acting to force the laughs out, or worse still are ones which require audience participation. I really hate audience participation – you pay to see a performance then realise that you have to chip in to make it work, so if you pick a bad night the crowd you have been lumbered with can ruin it. And by god do you pay. To go to the theatre in the West End in London will cost you £50 for a normal ticket and £4 for a half time drink (necessary). So for a no frills trip to the cinema for two will cost you at least £110. Then you have to pay to get there, which costs about a billion pounds. For such money you expect to have one of the best nights of your year, but you probably won’t because ‘it was a bad audience’ or you were ‘sitting behind a pillar’.

There are no such worries if you to see 300 at the IMAX, where an actor’s eye lash was about as big as an entire West End stage. It was too big in all honesty; you really have to move your head in order to move from one side of the stage to the other. This wasn’t helped by the fact we were late so had to sit at the front. The sheer bigness wasn’t awfully kind on the blue-screen special effects, so if I were more of a nerd I am sure I would have had a field day. As I was leaving I over heard two such people discussing how the seats should be shifted backwards (sensible) and the screen should be made bigger (moronic). The film it’s self is probably my new favourite film set in the past (which I don’t generally like) but it was a bit over gay in its use of tight pants and lack of tops on males. It also had rubbish music – it was shot in a kind of cool modern action film way but set in the past, something I haven’t seen before, but had the traditional generic dramatic score you get on all such films.

But yeah, better off going to the cinema then and due to the virtue of living in Manchester I only paid £5 for the privilege as opposed to ten times this for the theatre. And thank god 300 required no audience participation.