'Drunk Theatre' Deligitimizes Theatre as a Career Choice

I have read Richard Burton, noted Welsh actor, could recite any bit of Shakespeare’s writing given the line number, act, scene, and play title. I have also read Richard Burton could polish off three bottles of vodka in a normal day.

It was on a normal day that I attended a local theatre fundraiser. The fundraiser was staged inside one of the many vague dark lecture halls that we call theatres in Toronto. The audience assembled for the performance with a gorgeous din of tinny laughter, consumptive coughing, and electronic beeps. One of the organizers stood upon the stage and produced a bottle of hard liquor.

She said, “all participants today should [there was no “must” here, all was done under the participant’s own volition] take two or three shots of this bottle before they join the performance.” 

What progressed next appalled me.

The actors, we can call them that as I have seen many of them on other stages performing with passion and focus, took of the drink and performed scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.  Every so often the actors would take a break from the action and reach for another shot. Over the course of the evening they became more and more sozzled. The performance, in turn, morphed to an orgy of slurred lines, belches, and in some cases, topples. The audience roared with laugher.

No laughter emanated from my chest.

I don’t like to think of myself as a prude, although that’s what a prude would say, but at that moment, in that audience, I felt I was a prude. In that moment I noticed myself aligned with Malvolio from Twelfth Night; calling this orgy in front of me “mad;” that these performers had “no wit, manners, nor honesty.” The faces around me were hooting and guffawing. All were having fun, but I could not participate.  I could not understand what was funny about drunken performance.    

Shakespearian plays are full of drunken characters. Drunken characters that are present for laughter and entertainment.  Fan favourites like Falstaff, from the Henry IV’s and The Merry Wives of Windsor, or Sir Toby Belch, from the earlier mentioned Twelfth Night, have entertained audiences in laughter for centuries.  Alcohol consumption and Shakespeare have a long history; but never have I experienced a performance whose sole purpose is the overindulgence of spirits; overindulgence done in effort to get a rise out of a paying audience.

(I should say that these ‘Drunken’ performances are not glorifying excessive alcohol consumption. They often have a disclaimer that states this.)

It seems that this paying audience is no anomaly.  There have been a myriad of performances and fundraisers across the Toronto theatre landscape that feature ‘Drunken Shakespeare.’ There is even a Broadway show called ‘Drunk Shakespeare.’

The Broadway show follows that model I witnessed in Toronto. Professional actors drink five shots of whiskey and perform Shakespeare. The YouTube promotion displays laughing audiences. According to reviews: the show sells out and is a hot ticket; although the space for the show is small.  One reviewer calls the show ‘a great success for a sometimes suffering medium.’  

For the last -- I don’t know -- how many years that I have been working in the theatrical medium, every artist and organization I have worked with has struggled with the idea that the theatre is ‘dying.’ No one is coming to performances any more.  No one is funding it. Theatre is disappearing across North America. Some claim it has become obsolete. It is a struggle for every artist to get those butts in the seats, to make work that is relevant, to make work that pays the rent. Gimmicks of all sorts have been ramped out. Puppets say foul words subverting the Sesame Street phenomenon. Actors play their own instruments, on stage, during musicals; even with impossible scores like those of Stephen Sondheim with his blue notes and chaotic time signatures.  Immersive hotels populated by masked creatures flood every theatre scene. Yet, the audiences still are not coming.

Sure, there’s peaks in audience attendance; a hit here and a hit there, but over all the North American theatre scene looks bleak. Longstanding theatres are closing or in a constant state of almost closing.  The once venerated musicals and plays of Cole Porter and Eugene O’Neill have been replaced by popcorn costumed nostalgia concerts. Yet, overall, those butts are distant.

Missing.

Unreachable. 

The reaching of butts cannot be done by cheapening ourselves and our art form. The actor is not a court fool to be gawked at. To be thrown a dog’s dinner and expected to lap it up with relish.   

All right, so ‘court fool’ might be an overreach.

I’m reminded of an internet meme that’s often shared around. The meme targets the underpaid (sometimes not payed at all) professional actor.  It states that a ticket price is not $40 because of a two-hour performance. It’s $40 because of the years of training that has gone into that two hours; the years of reading, the years of experience that goes into the creation of performance. I have never met a performer that does not ooze creative spirit and that creative ooze is not the product of genes. It’s the product of experience and hard study.

‘Drunk Shakespeare’ degrades all this study; all this experience. In the act of downing a shot of whiskey to make people laugh at sloppiness in effort get a buck, the performer sends a message to the audience that what they do is not important.

‘Here’s me doing my life’s work drunk.’

In that one shot, the whole legitimacy of acting as a vocation, as a career, is thrown out.  Acting becomes a hobby for people to do between drinks. Much like karaoke. Everyone can do karaoke. Therefore, everyone can act because this actor is doing it drunk. 

There I go sounding like a prude again. 

Look to other vocations.

Musicians are not taking a shot of vodka and sitting down to play Beethoven’s ninth.  Painters are not standing in front of audiences, downing a forty of bourbon, and creating. A lawyer is not in front of the court, drinking a bottle of wine, and questioning a witness. There is no cardiologist calling for a shot then plunging into a coronary. If there is, they should be arrested.  

We delegitimize our skills as artists every time we give over to these party antics. It may be fun in the moment. The audience may laugh, money may flow through the box office, but the theatre becomes more and more of a joke when the people inside of it treat it as such.

Richard Burton died at the age of 58 by a brain haemorrhage. He also suffered liver cirrhosis and kidney failure. One of Burton’s last films, The Klansman, featured him sitting or lying down in most scenes because he could not stand up straight. You can hear him slurring lines throughout the film. It was said the makeup artists on that film had to cake Burton’s face with pounds of foundation to cover up the yellow tinge of alcoholic jaundice.

 That night at the Toronto theatre fundraiser I saw a yellow jaundice. A yellow jaundice covered with dollars and laughs.