Creeping the boards

i don't go as often as i like but i think that theatre is hugely unappreciated. the last time i went was with DG and RickyT and LC to see the Jacqueline Susann biography thing - it was briliant.

This means that now I never go to the theatre.

Anything that mixes intense gratuitious bouts of combat with Buddhism and philosophy gets my seal of approval. It embraced Brecht's concept of community theatre by combining the trivial with the profound.

I like the theatre a lot, but go less than I would like (lack of theatre buds with cash, not easily drop-in-able as cinema). I also think that cinema has changed the way we see plays, and often as not plays have a hard time in bringing up what they are good at. Yes there is an awful lot of revivalism in the West End, but even having two or three good contemporary theatres to be used as feeders for decent West End productions (the ALmeida, Royal Court, fringe like The Kings Head) makes London a very vibrant place. But are you really going to risk a tenner on a fringe play which odds are will be cramped, poorly staged and probably badly written? I know I got burnt twice in a week twoi years ago and having put my head into a fringe theatre since.

Mark, you seem to be forgetting that the story of Monkey is one of the oldest and most important in Chinese culture. The story of Tripitaka's journey from China to India to collect Buddhist scriptures is based on an identical journey undertaken by a Chinese priest, Hsuan Tsang, around 600AD.

The "modern" version of the story was written by Wu Cheng-en in the 16th century.

The television entertainment programme came some years later.

Artistic, political importance of theatre. Well in Western world its pretty much as a feeder for cinema now. However in more oppressive regimes theatre - in its very small scale local sense, can be the only route of satire, political discussion etc (look at the Czechoslovakia under communism).