Stage struck

The play's not the thing for telly, writes PETER CRAWLEY

'IF THIS was on television," Mark tells Jeremy in a desperate whisper, "nobody would be watching." He has a point. In fact, this scene is on the telly, playing out over 2½ of the funniest minutes of Channel 4's Peep Show.

The luckless flatmates, on a double date at the theatre, exchange pained glances while two actors, dressed in black, recite florid lines from Christopher Marlowe’s Lust’s Dominion: “What, die for me? Away.” “Away, what way? I prithee speak more kindly.”

There’s barely a line between Mark and Jeremy that you couldn’t quote more happily: “I’ve got Heat on DVD at home. We’re watching this, when, for less money, we could be watching Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.” “I’m going to pretend I am watching Heat.”

No one will appreciate that gag more than regular theatregoers, who generally enjoy the tart tang of self-lampoon. But Elizabethan verse drama, theatre students and earnest audiences are soft targets. Find me an example of any theatre as dry as that, I prithee.

TV really seems to have something against theatre. Last week, for instance, the CBS show The Good Wifewent a swipe too far against Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company. It's not that Steppenwolf isn't above parody ( Being John Malkovichtook some potshots at the actor's alma mater), but the show clearly had no idea what it was sending up.

Representing an internationally recognised theatre company as a group of crude puppeteers doing “dinner theatre” with English accents, the episode got short shrift from the Chicago Tribune, which called it “a snobby and dazzlingly ignorant slam” and “a numbingly lazy and generic attempt at humour”.

The theatrical view of television hardly eases any tensions. When Aaron Sorkin wrote a play about the birth of the medium as an acrimonious legal battle between its inventor and a communications mogul in The Farnsworth Invention, it was criticised for being “better suited to a screen”. You just can’t win.

Another case in point is Blood in Alley’s current Jumping the Sharks in Smock Alley Theatre, a show about a media executive with a taste for narcotics and depravity. Even the title knows where it hurts, rubbing the medium’s nose in the sad fate that awaits all good TV shows.

It’s a struggle to think of one charitable view that either medium holds for the other. But, thankfully, not everybody has switched off. Sheffield’s influential Forced Entertainment built a channel-hopping performance style by making theatre for people “who grew up with the television always on”, and both forms might still learn from one another. I’ve lost count of how many plays would benefit from the telly norm of collaborative writing, or how many TV shows could improve by unshackling themselves from slavish photo-realism.

The jokes and barbs will keep coming, with varying definition, but maybe one day TV and theatre will forget their differences and get the big picture. Stay tuned.