Opening Speech: Samuel West on the new Berry Theatre in Hedge

Opening Speech: Samuel West on the new Berry Theatre in Hedge End

7th April 2011
The Berry Theatre in Hedge End was officially opened by Samuel West on the 7th April 2011. Please read his opening speech.
“We’re here tonight to celebrate something very unusual: the opening of a new theatre. I’ve never done that before, and I’m very pleased and proud to be asked; thank you.
When I was performing in ENRON in the West End last year I discovered that the actor-manager Charles Wyndham had bought and knocked down an entire city block and put up a thousand-seat theatre which he called the Wyndham’s. But he had half the block left over. So he built another theatre.
It’s a hundred years since he did that and nowadays you’re very lucky to get one new theatre, let alone two. Even those tend to be tiny and stuffed under a new office building, almost as an afterthought. So it’s right that we should raise a cheer tonight for the Eastleigh Borough Council, the Hedge End Town Council and the foresight, bravery, persistence, effort and cash that have led to this exciting new building. And to have so many of the people responsible for it here is important too, because ultimately theatres are not buildings, they are people. A congregation. A crowd.
I want to talk a bit about that congregation tonight and why I think the theatre does it so well. It’s very easy nowadays to do things in our own little boxes. To shop, travel to work, eat and entertain ourselves without ever really meeting or interacting with other people. But in the theatre, we do things together.
And like live sport, the theatre is one of the last great unmediated experiences. Just as only you know that that was never a penalty because you were there and you saw it, in the theatre you decide what to believe. Nobody’s filming it for you or editing it for you or selling it to you pay-per-view. You can look where you like and believe what you choose. That’s important. And we do it together as we have done since the Greeks. Coming together into the same room, turning the lights out and telling stories. In fact, we’ve been doing it since there were stories and campfires to tell them round. We come together not as customers but as an audience. Interesting word, audience. First of all, its root is the same as ‘audio’ – we hear a play, first and foremost. Secondly, it’s a collective noun: an audience is one thing. It brings its ears and not just its money.
So what do we do in this great new building before this wonderful collective noun? Well, anything we like. That’s the great thing about theatre. I believe it to be the greatest art form, because it can contain all the others. The work of the poet, the sculptor, the painter, the video artist, the choreographer, the fight director, the composer can all be part of that great thing, a piece of total theatre. So we love it because it’s live, we love it because it’s real, we love it because it’s communal and we love it because it can blow our heads off. But what theatre does better than any of these things is to nurture our imagination. It gives us empathy. And now if I may, I’m going to talk about something from my side of the curtain.
When we act, we are pretending to be somebody else. How best to do that? By looking at things from their point of view. You may be called on in your career to play things you find it hard to agree with. Indeed, if you’re playing a Nazi, I would hope you find it impossible. But you still have to understand. Your Nazi can’t just be ‘evil’. He or she must have reasons for doing what they do that make sense, even if only to themselves. It’s up to you as an actor to discover those reasons, and to play them as well as possible. I believe that good theatre can teach us something very extraordinary: that human potential is infinite. And wonderful though that is, the principle cuts both ways. If we are all capable of anything, then there’s no such thing as intrinsic evil, only choices. We all have a Macbeth within us. When we watch Macbeth, we are fascinated by the man and his actions, and yet he’s a child murderer, probably one of the most famous in history. We watch Macbeth and his disastrous decisions and learn from them so that we don’t make the same bad choices and the same mess of our own lives. We empathise without sympathising. It’s an important distinction. As an actor, if you’ve played Shylock the Jew properly, from his own point of view, you can never be anti-Semitic. If you’ve played Romeo, weeping on the floor of Friar Laurence’s cell, exiled from the woman he loves and the city he grew up in, you never feel quite the same again about asylum seekers. And the same principal holds for our audience too. If we do it right, this same empathetic projection happens in you. It makes us all better people.
It’s been a difficult month for the arts. On the way down I tweeted that I was going to open a theatre and someone replied “Don’t tell them – they’ll want to close it!”. A 30% cut to arts council grants and a 28% cut to local government grants have squeezed the arts on two fronts. Last week the local theatres of Derby and Exeter were told they will lose their funding altogether. It’s important for us to remember how a theatre can be the hub of its community. Not just providing work for dozens or hundreds of people, but a good night out for thousands who live locally or come from even further afield. Perhaps in 20 years time we’ll see the first West End play written by somebody who started in the youth theatre here as an eight year-old. Perhaps if the theatre flourishes and continues to work with local children they’ll feel it is a place that belongs to them, a place to tell their stories, face their fears and dream their dreams. And they’ll take the experience and the empathy and the fun they’ve had here out to other theatres in other towns, or other jobs elsewhere, to become empathetic lawyers and librarians and bus drivers.
It’s also good this week to remind ourselves how profitable the arts are in this country. That they generate much more in income than they cost in subsidy. That 80% of overseas tourists mention them as a reason for coming here. That the unsubsidized West End is only the tip of a flourishing and successful pyramid supported by tiny amounts of public money – only 14p per person per week – which allows actors and theatre artists to gain experience and audiences to watch things cheaply, and so we hope, more often.
145 of the 187 Brits who have been nominated for Academy Awards in the last 30 years began their careers in subsidised theatre. Who knows where the people who start work in this theatre will end up, and how successful they will be, and how much money they will make for the Treasury, and how much pleasure they will give to audiences worldwide, but my first job, in Birmingham Rep Studio (perhaps a third the size of this place) was The Browning Version, designed by a young graduate called Alexandra Byrne. It was her first job too. After being nominated three times, she’s just won her first Oscar.
So let the Berry Theatre be an important brick in this pyramid. Let it take its place proudly and loudly in the artistic life of this country, and this world. Let the hundreds of people who collaborated to bring it about be celebrated tonight, and the thousands who will fill it over the years find joy here, for as long as its walls reverberate to tears, cheers laughter and applause.”
Thank you.