There is no theatrical institution more sadly underrated than the matinee. A long caravan of jokes, anecdotes and put-downs have encircled matinees, and left them identified solely as the last refuge of little old people trying to get out of the rain. In the self-perpetuating manner of things, this has now largely turned out to be true. But if you develop a taste for such things, as I have, and steal in among the little old people, you could get a surprise.
Two of my best experiences last year were afternoons spent in the spiritual home of the matinee, Chichester, where all other matinees come to worship. They were two beautiful productions of bold plays, Edward Bond's The Sea and Brian Friel's Aristocrats. But the beauty of the productions was an almost incidental pleasure within the context: a slow, trundly train journey through the Sussex downs, a brisk walk through the sea air of Chichester, a quick and not very good coffee, a leisurely settle-down with the programme, a terrific first half, a large ice cream, an excellent second half, broken only by the soft susurrus of light snoring spread around the auditorium, a melancholic walk back through the failing light, and the train journey home.
But it is not necessary to travel. Nor is it necessary to enjoy a matinee at the pace of an H E Bates novel. It's just as good to get hopelessly drunk or ripped at lunchtime, stroll into a local show, laugh hysterically for the first half-hour, feel strangely glum for the next, pass out for the third, wake to a new life for the last, and then leave refreshed.
The crucial advantage of a matinee is that it doesn't suffer from the crippling weight of high expectations. The problem with theatregoing at night is that, as the day ploughs on, you accrue a cartload of muddy hopes and desires, and you cannot help but take them in with you. If you've had a bad day, you want the play to redeem it; if you've had a good day, you want it to be topped off. And, as evening slips into night, we all feel a little tremor and slip into theatres hoping for the comfort of electric light and feigned vitality.
High expectations are the curse of theatre. Nothing else provokes the same weight of need and hopes. We buy crap books and let it pass, we eat disappointing meals and smile through, we go to appalling concerts and drink our disappointment away. But every punter who suffers a miserable night at the theatre seems to feel some weird Olympian rage, as if the foundations of their personality had been attacked. A large percentage seem impelled to write their "my journey to the hell of Shaftesbury Avenue" piece for the Evening Standard, listing their battles with car parking, the Tube and a shitty maItre d', as if they were fresh back from Vietnam.
Theatre seems to attract professional curmudgeons. Each month throws up a new sad-act media man, keen to exorcise his own self-loathing on the theatre, anxiously trying to quell his shame about the passions of his own youth. There was a ghastly fat boor at the Bush Theatre, who for two years turned up to every single first preview. He sat square like a toad on the back row, with his timid wife beside him. As the house lights came up at each and every interval, he would sigh as if he'd just been released from 20 years of solitary confinement, then loudly emit some choice judgement, such as "What a piece of shit", "Christ, that's dull", or "God save us from the second half". Every time the same sigh, every time a greater rage, every time he returned. Eventually, I threw customer care to the winds and told him to go fuck himself, to leave the theatre and not to return. Ever. His face crumpled like a child whose favourite toy had just been taken away. Where could he now express his life-denying sourness, if not at the theatre?
The problem with the theatre remains that when it's good it is so good that it sets intimidating targets for what comes after. That first big experience casts a lengthy shadow. Many adjust to the idea that later loves will be different in type, kind and duration from the first love: many don't.
But, at a matinee, such questions don't arise. You drift in, you appreciate what's given, you listen to the story, and laughter comes easily at a gentle pace. You can slip in a little legitimate shut-eye, in a country that still fails to understand the virtues of the siesta. And you can often find yourself filling up at teatime, eyes awash, your heart pleasantly burgled by the experience, and yet more pleasantly cleansed and refreshed before cocktail hour.
Evening theatre is a recent invention. Before then, daylight always set the timetable. The broad public theatre of the Jacobeans bubbled away in its funny cones pointing up to the sky; Athenian day-long festivals corralled the entire free populace into democratic proximity under the sun. There's no God-given prescription that says theatre should be the climax of, rather than a break in, the day. Now that we all live in merry, 21st-century flexitime, perhaps we should return more regularly to the old biorhythm.
Dominic Dromgoole is artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company
