It’s not you, it’s me. For the past few years I’ve feigned interest, kept a note of names to be reckoned with, and even dropped a few of them into conversation, to see if I could get away with it.
But when you realise that you’ve seen only one play in the past 12 months it’s time to fess up that theatre no longer forms part of your cultural diet. It has been cut out, and it hasn’t really been missed. Exit stage right.
This was a purely accidental development for me. Bit by bit, theatre slipped down the cultural agenda, and before I knew what was going on I had become the equivalent of the five-albums-a-year music fan.
In many ways it came down to time. There are only so many hours in the day when you’re not working or sleeping that you can dedicate to filling your brain with arts and culture.
It never ends, this feed of stimulation. There are dozens of books, new and old, to read. There are countless television programmes to watch. There’s at least one new film a week that a review piques your interest for.
When it comes to music it often seems as if the amount of fascinating new stuff that appears each week now equals what we got in an average year a decade ago. That’s before we start to dive into the cross-pollination between genres.
Add podcasts, magazines, exhibitions and events and you can just about squeeze in the time for a few square meals. It’s a good job that video games never entered the frame around my way.
Something had to give. It could have been a case of cutting back across the board – a take on the doing more (culture) with less (time) cliche. Bar the occasional Ballyturk, theatre fell off the to-do list because so many other things promised and delivered more.
There was a time when such a thought would have been unconscionable. Theatre was such an indispensable part of cultural life that any suggestion to the contrary would have been viewed as heresy.
Pickled in aspic
Yet time and again over the past few years, when I've been seeking excitement, intrigue, edification and entertainment, I haven't even thought about theatre. The growth in engrossing TV shows, for example, such as Transparent, Rectify and Halt and Catch Fire, has provided the dramatic thump you used to find onstage.
Films such as Boyhood or We Are the Best! – or rubbish ones like Gone Girl – provide talking points that run for weeks afterwards.
It would be wrong to say that theatre has given up the ghost, of course. Any form that can produce works as mesmerising as Anu's Monto Cycle, especially The Boys of Foley Street, still has a lot going for it. And other adventurous theatre companies and practitioners are also striving to do things differently.
The problem is that there’s just not enough of them, and they don’t seem to be catching the breaks for their work apart from occasional forays at festivals. Theatre appears to be pickled in aspic, a world that doesn’t seem to have changed very much in the past couple of decades, a form that often seems more interested in reviving the old than in championing the new.
Worse, like many aspects of classical music and opera, the bulk of those inside the tent appear not to welcome change. Like the strident advocates and practitioners behind that pair of old-school cultural standard bearers, theatre appears unwilling to allow new voices to describe and dictate new shapes. Or, if they do, it comes across as merely tokenistic.
But it’s as much the task of divvying up available time as diminishing returns from the forays into theatreland that has had a bearing on why I seem to have less commitment to theatre.
Old fashioned
What’s interesting about accidentally cutting out theatre is that I’ve had very little sense of missing out on anything remarkable.
With the exception of a heavily promoted production such as The Walworth Farce, it's extremely rare to hear word-of-mouth wowing about anything that happens on an Irish stage. It's a sign that theatre seems to rely largely on old-fashioned ways of getting the word out about a play – and if you miss the reviews, features and interviews, the production disappears into the ether. Theatre does not do Fomo.
Perhaps all of this will change. Perhaps, in a few years, I'll see the light and regularly return to the stalls, chastened and abashed. But, right now, the time and need for the stage are just not there. Other matters, such as the new Björk album, A Most Violent Year and Duncan Campbell at the Irish Museum of Modern Art are taking precedence.
The Irish Times Irish Theatre Awards take place on February 22nd. Jim Carroll will not be there
