Theatre evening

Going to the theatre is a whole experience for me. It is not only to sit on a more or less comfortable sit and watch a play on the stage. There are a lot of little sensations that enhance the theatre experience.

The evening can start easily with your companions having dinner together or sharing some drinks before the play. Usually catching up or any new topic fills the conversation and you almost don't talk about the theatre, it is not time yet.

Afterwards you get to the theatre building, normally with a magnificent entrance. It doesn't matter if the theatre is in the big city or in a country village, the main door has always a look of greatness, full of people and light. For me it has a kind of class that you can not find in the cinema. Even if both of them are cultural business, for me the cinema looks more like an enterprise (more capitalist), more contemporary. The entrance to the theatre, instead, has a more classic feeling, a remain of old centuries, maybe even a bourgeois style. All together it seem VIP, as if it was an elite reunion, even if the audience dresses in the most miscellaneous ways: from the young ones in jeans to the elder marriages dressed up as if they were going to church, or the romantic couples boarding on a date shared with the stage. There, at this cultural VIP entrance, between the lights, the perfumes and a bit of a smell of tobacco is where the theatre experience starts.

Magnificent entrance to the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona)

As it has been said a theatre is a business company, so it is very usual nowadays to find a shop or a stand at the very entrance of the building giving you the chance to buy the booklet or various merchandise. That is also an extra point of the theatre experience. I like to take a look at this little shops even if I won't buy anything. I don't want to buy a t-shirt with the show's poster printed on top, specially if even before buying it I already know it will end up being a summer pyjamas; but instead I like to collect the booklets, this little dictionaries of the play where you can find out a lot of things about the show or the actors, and sometimes they also include interviews to the director or the main stars.

At the shop we can also buy sweets, candy, chocolates or popcorn (although we associate this las ones to the cinema). All of them, anyway, the perfect companion while you access to the stalls area, feeling butterflies in your stomach while you look for your sit. First the row, then the sit number. Dammit! Is in the opposite site. Better if I go back that way. And probably the first thing you do once you are already sit is to look at the stage to see how you see it, if you see it. When you bought the tickets online the row seemed closer to the stage, or the sit more central. That is very possible, the stalls map they show you usually has strange and delusional optical effects. But soon or later you get use to it and you convince yourself that after all you will enjoy a good view of the show.

As the room gets crowded it starts to be loud and quackery. At the beginning it's only a few whispers but soon the voices get louder and for a moment you think you will hear nothing from your far position if they don't shut up all together. That can maybe be followed by a little moment of internal reflection, voluntary or not, when you hope you are going to enjoy the show you have chosen for that evening, and after you realise how much you like this atmosphere and decide you should do your best to go more to the theatre. And while I think about all this feelings and thoughts that the theatre experience brings to me I also think if they are the same for everyone. What are your feelings when you go to the theatre?

But slowly the lights turn off and they take with them all the chatty voices leaving only, again, a whisper in the aire. The curtain opens.

Ricard Gispert

@ricardgispert