Theatre - Kate Kellaway on why audiences are part of the plot

I was shocked when the American playwright Wallace Shawn, whom I was interviewing a few weeks ago, told me sadly that the people most likely to appreciate his work in the States never see it. Was he suggesting that intellectuals stay away from the theatre? And could this, I wondered later, happen here? Might theatre by the end of the next century - or much sooner - have become terminally middlebrow?Already you can find plenty of educated people in England who have a deep-seated distaste for the theatre (Andrew Motion springs to mind. I believe he can't tolerate anything behind a proscenium arch). Yet read David Hare. He ardently and adroitly champions British theatre. But then he would, wouldn't he?

I started to think about it. I tried to imagine a world without theatre. What was it about theatre that was unlike other art forms? The more I thought, the angrier I became with people who disparage it - it was like rising to the defence of a friend. I was recently watching an amateur opera performed by schoolchildren, not a particularly good place from which to reflect upon the enduring delights of the stage, you might think. But as I watched the children sing in their dowdy, home-made costumes, I was reminded that theatre runs on adrenaline. And that this is a two-way thing. Compare the beginning of a play with the start of a film. In the theatre, the performers' adrenaline translates to an audience as suspense: there is a stirring before the lights go down. That particular, physical anticipation is missing in the cinema.

In a world where so much is threatening to become "virtual", theatre is actual - sometimes clumsily so. Theatre is full of imperfection, like life. It can go wrong and the possibility of this happening is part of the appreciation of it. Theatre is dangerous and can be upsetting. A play happens in shared time and there is something precious about this contact. An audience in the theatre is never the same twice. It may not speak, but it has its own collective character. And every performance is subtly different from the one before.

I love theatre because it doesn't last. That is the beauty of it. It's mortal. It is partly for this reason that I like writing about it, too. There seems a symmetry between theatre which doesn't last for ever and the ephemeral nature of journalism. There is more of an imbalance about reviewing art (that may stay around for ever) or a book (that has taken years to write).This is not to suggest that theatre is superficial or that criticism should be breezily slight. But theatre is of the moment and should be regarded like William Blake's poem: "He who binds to himself a joy/Does the winged life destroy/He who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity's sunrise."

It is often said that the best critics do not mirror performances, that too much description is a sorry thing. The critic should pronounce authoritatively - not stare and marvel. But for me, the thrill of writing about theatre - and the challenge of it - is partly to try to catch something of what it was to be in the theatre on a particular night. My hope is always that there will be, for the reader, an illusion of having been there too (even if in a restricted-view seat). In a modest way, reviewing resembles theatre. It is about illusion. It is a performance of a kind. I said that theatre does not last. But it does, or can, in the memory.

Some reviews survive, too, as marvellous records. And records can be invaluable. I remember reading the Guardian Weekly on a crowded bus when I was working in Africa, years before I had any notion that I would ever write about plays myself. In its tissuey papers, I read reviews by Michael Billington that took me back to England and made me feel I was seeing the plays he described. I found the reviews invigorating and vivid; I could be in the London theatre and squashed on to the African bus, laden with vegetables and babies, at the same time. Perhaps I'm writing partly for someone who, if not actually on the African bus, is nonetheless unlikely to have the luck to see what I describe.

A critic's relationship to the theatre is different from that of other theatregoers. Looking at the critics sitting in their aisle seats, I often fancy that some of my male colleagues are starting to resemble nocturnal creatures, badgers who have spent too long in the dark. And I confess I often feel like a reluctant mole, disinclined to burrow down for another first night.

And yet the marvellous thing is that, no matter how jaded or dejected you might feel, a good evening at the theatre can turn a mood inside out. It's as if a dull-grey stage were suddenly flooded with light.

Sometimes, it is the most unexpected shows that have this effect. I remember being in Paris for a day on my way home from somewhere else. Peter Stein's production of The Three Sisters was on in a theatre on the outskirts. It was sold out. I resolved to queue for a return. I was there early enough to watch yellow German pantechnicons rolling up to the stage door carrying a forest of tree trunks - Stein's portable autumn. By the time the audience started to arrive, I was weary and discouraged. But, at the last moment, two tickets were handed back.

Chekhov in German when you don't speak the language might not sound up to much. But I knew the play well enough to feel that I understood everything. The production was alive in an extraordinary, human way: it had the domesticity of a Vuillard painting but on a vast scale. When the French audience rose to give the cast a standing ovation, I got to my feet with them. It was as though I'd had a shot of brandy. I remember running part of the way back to my cheap hotel, my head filled with this other Chekhovian life.We all need moments of this kind - theatre can supply them.

For anyone who loves language, it is more than a pity to bypass the theatre. The stage is the place for linguistic experiment. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare, Beckett, Chekhov and Pinter are better on stage than on film. Theatrical writing that flourishes in Britain often does not translate (theatre is more immediate, there's a film over film). But whenever I seriously waver about theatre's future, it is Shakespeare, rather than any modern writer, who comes to the rescue. Shakespeare has never become a museum piece, he changes to suit time and place. When I taught Shakespeare to Zimbabwean schoolchildren, they all unquestioningly believed in the witches - this changed the nature of the play. I remember the same children acting A Winter's Tale in a boiling classroom. How collusive the heat seemed then, making Leontes's jealousy more fevered than ever, turning the play into something new - a summer's tale.

I was a schoolgirl myself when I first recognised the chameleon genius of Shakespeare. I was watching a production of Measure for Measure, directed by Jonathan Miller. It was set in the twenties. Mariana of the moated grange had a long cigarette holder . . . I was transfixed by the translation of the play into another time.

But I've since realised that Shakespeare is like theatre itself: embodying and weathering change - alive through the centuries.

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