I feel like I haven't seen many proscenium arches recently. In Punchdrunk's The Duchess of Malfi we dived up and down the stairwells of an office block. In Sucker Punch, the whole auditorium is reconfigured as a boxing ring with us as the punters. The One-on-One festival at the BAC put the audience directly in a room with the performers, or offered us a new experience, perspective or sensation. In Rimini Protokoll's Best Before, we had handsets that operated and manipulated avatars on the large upstage screen. Even Lifegame, on the heavily decorated proscenium stage of the Lyric, Hammersmith, breached the actor-audience divide: the subject of this biographical impro show, Kerry Shale, had to check details of his wedding day with his wife in the stalls.
There is widespread enthusiasm for immersive, site-specific performance, as well as a revival of interest in older performance forms like theatre-in-the-round, traverse, promenade and street theatre. But what have we all got against the proscenium arch? No single manifesto or programme announced its demise, but various accusations seem to come up time and time again. First, that the proscenium arch was designed for a theatre based on lavish illusion, which we no longer have the taste for. Second, that it embodies a middle-class set of social and cultural behaviours, normalised as the unwritten rules of How To Watch Theatre. Third, that it promotes passivity – which today's audiences, used to interactivity and with shorter attention spans, will not tolerate.
The suggestion that there is something infantilising about illusion goes back at least as far as ancient Greece. Plato's "cave" metaphor compares our knowledge of the truth to that of slaves watching shadows thrown on a stone wall, each believing their perceptions to be real. Bertolt Brecht's use of the Verfremdungseffekt attempted to suppress full-scale belief in theatrical illusion, and his ideas have continued to be shibboleths of radical theatremakers ever since.
But is theatre truly illusionistic? To create an illusion, you must trick someone into believing something untrue. Who believes that what they are seeing on stage is real? Who thinks, when they go to see Macbeth, that he himself is standing there in front of us, scheming to take the Scottish throne? No one.
Even a stage designer's trompe l'oeil is not really illusionistic; if the curtain goes up to reveal a brilliantly painted backcloth with Duncan's castle on a distant hill beneath a sky pregnant with ominous clouds, no sane person believes they have knocked down the rear of the theatre, laid waste to the landscape and erected a distant castle. Just as with stage violence, a more usual reaction is to appreciate the fidelity of the representation and, in the back of your mind, wonder how they did it.
Despite what Brecht said, we don't need reminding that these are performers: a glance at the programme will settle any doubts we have on that score. In my view the theatre isn't illusionistic at all, so in using a picture-box stage we run no risk of convincing anybody of the literal truth of what they see.
Second, does the proscenium arch really represent the triumph of the middle classes? As I've written elsewhere, audience behaviour, even in proscenium arch theatre, is extraordinarily variable throughout modern history. We should remember that styles of performance from music-hall to pantomime to standup comedy to rock gigs take place under proscenium arches. In none of these would you say the audience is uniformly middle-class.
At the same time, is there any evidence that we are genuinely more interactive than previous generations, or that our attention spans are any shorter? The studies are inconclusive. Phrases like "the MTV generation" or "soundbite culture" are waved around whenever theatres use a bit of multimedia or make their audiences walk about a bit, but both are flamboyantly lazy and vapid.
Last, the passivity issue. Conventional audiences aren't passive, they're quiet – which isn't quite the same thing. Watching After the Dance at the National Theatre last week, I noticed several kinds of audience response: applause, laughter, murmurings of concern, quiet attention and occasionally, during particularly painful moments, pin-drop silence. It struck me that 900 people choosing to remain dead silent is a powerful act of communication.
The proscenium, with its vertically stacked audiences and focused eyelines, creates conditions for potent, simultaneous collective experiences as much as any other performance configuration. Don't get me wrong – I'm not saying it's all we need, and I love the variety of experiences that our theatrical ecology offers us. My only concern is that, in our rush to explore new forms, we simplify and neglect the complexity of older playhouses. Their work is not yet done.
