Hello, I'm Gill at www.engvid.com and today's
lesson is on the subject of going to the theatre, okay? So, this links a little bit with another lesson
we had with meeting up with a friend, one of the options was to go to the theatre, while
another is to go to an art gallery, so this one is if you have arranged with your friend
to go to the theatre, this is what to expect when you get there. And also, in the second part of the lesson,
we'll be looking at ways of talking about the play that you're watching, maybe either
in the interval or at the end of the play, you would want to talk to your friend about
what you've been watching, okay. So, first of all, going to the theatre, you've
probably been to the theatre in your own country, so you know what's involved. But this is specifically for a UK type of
theatre, okay. So, you've probably arranged where to meet
already, either outside the theatre or inside, in the foyer, which is just inside the entrance,
the entrance hall of the theatre, the foyer, which is a French word, in the bar, or in
the café, or in the shop. Not all theatres have all of these things
in them, it depends. The bigger theatres will have all of those
things. Smaller theatres will probably not have all
of those. They may not have a shop. They may not have a bar. Some theatres are actually above a pub, the
public house in the UK, they're very small theatres, so there is a pub, somewhere to
drink, particularly the downstairs part of the building before you go up or behind to
the back of the building to the theatre section, so we'll talk about that a little bit more
later on. So, you arrange where to meet, so these are
the names for different places to meet in or around the theatre. And then when you go in, you may have to,
if you don't already have your tickets, you need to go to the box office. This is the place where you get your tickets. You may have already paid for them in advance
or you may want to ask the person in the box office, "Do you have any seats for today's
performance?" and they might show you a chart, the seating plan, where would you want to
sit? Okay, so the box office is where you go for
your tickets, right. And then once you've got your tickets, you
may also want to buy a program, which is a little booklet containing a lot of information
about the show that you're there to see. So, the program will list the names of the
people performing in the show, the people who have been involved in the technical side,
the lighting, the sound effects, the costumes, creating the scenery on the stage, all of
the sort of artistic side that goes into a production. So, the program will give a sort of - it's
a kind of way of giving credit, you get the credits in the program for everybody, because
it's a big sort of team effort putting on a play, lots of people are involved. So, all the credits for everybody who has
worked on that production will go into the program. And there will be a little bit about the story
of - if it's a play or a musical or whatever it is, there will be a bit of information
about the show itself, what it's about, so it's a useful thing to look at before you
go in to see the show. Okay? So, then you're inside the theatre building,
and then when it gets close to the time that the show is due to start, you will probably
hear an announcement over a loudspeaker, usually. You will hear something like "Ladies and Gentlemen,
the show will begin in five minutes.", something like that. "Please take your seats.", meaning please
go in and sit down, it doesn't mean take, people joke about this. When you take your seat, it means you sit
down in your seat, it doesn't mean you pick the seat up and take it somewhere. So, it's a little bit ambiguous, but "Please
take your seats" means go in, sit down, we need you in there ready for the show to start. So, when you hear that, you go to the entrance,
into what's called the auditorium, the sort of central part of the theatre where everybody
sits, where the audience - the audience sits, and they're looking up at the stage where
the performers are, so you have to go in. So, at the entrance, you have to usually show
your ticket to somebody who is checking to make sure that people don't go in who have
not bought a ticket. That person is called an usher. It's a funny old fashioned word, but they
will check your ticket and they might say - they might give you some directions like
"Turn left, just go up the steps and your seat is just over on the right", something
like that, so you go in, into the auditorium. If - on your ticket, you may have some numbers
and letters that tell you where your seat is, but there are some smaller theatres called
"fringe theatre". They're not big theatres in, say, London,
West End, the London West End, the big theatres in Central London. A fringe theatre, as I said earlier, it's
often a little theatre above a pub or at the back of a pub building. So, those are quite small, often there is
only seating for maybe 40 or 50 people, 60, 70 at the most. So, with a fringe theatre, often there are
no seat numbers. There's nothing on your ticket to say where
you should sit. You just go in and look around and decide
where you want to sit. So, if you're one of the last people in, you
just have to sit wherever there's a space. If you go in early, you can probably find
a really nice seat in the front row or something, okay? So, a larger theatre - on your ticket, you
will usually have the row number and the seat number. So, in an auditorium, you've got all the rows
of seats like that, and say that's the stage there, and then you've got rows and they're
often "A, B, C, D, E", etc., so the rows are in letters and then within each row you have
seat numbers. So, that would be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. So, if you have D3 on your ticket, you want
Row D, Seat 3. If you have G38 on your ticket, you need Row
G, and it must be a very long row to have at least 38 seats in it, go along, you often
have to go past people, say "Excuse me, Excuse me, Sorry, Excuse me" to get past people who
are already sitting there. So, find your seat, sit down, get comfortable,
get ready for the show to begin, okay. One very important thing is to switch off
your mobile phone, okay? If mobile phones ring during a performance,
it's one of the worst things that can happen in the theatre world. It's very distracting for the performers and
it's very distracting for other members of the audience. People get very angry if mobile phones start
ringing. So, don't disrupt the show. Don't spoil the show for yourself and for
other people. Turn off your mobile phone. And also, you know, you're there to see a
show. You've paid money to see it. You need to concentrate on the show. If you had your mobile phone on and you were
checking your text messages at the same time, it's not like watching television where maybe
you've got your mobile phone on and you're also watching television, it's not like that. You really need to concentrate 100% on the
play or the show that you're seeing. So, sometimes people have said they saw someone
in the audience with the light from their mobile phone shining. They could see somebody was actually on their
phone during a performance, so I know sometimes it's - there's an emergency or something,
but really, you should turn your mobile phone off, okay, for various reasons. Right, and then you can really sit back and
relax and enjoy what you're watching. So, and then quite often, any production,
any performance will have an interval, usually there's a first half and a second half with
an interval in between. So, you have a choice, quite often, whether
to just stay if it's a 20-minute interval and, if you're like me, you'll think "Oh,
I just want to sit here and read the program or something. I don't want to get up out of my seat and
walk out with all these other people and then stand around not knowing what to do for 20
minutes. I just want to stay in my seat and just read
the program or chat to my friend or whatever.", but you do have the option of going out in
the interval. Some people order drinks for the interval. They may have ordered drinks in advance and
paid given a name and they go out and they find that their drinks have been set out for
them with their name to save time, or people just go out and get some drinks at the bar. Sometimes, though, you're not allowed to stay
in your seat in the interval. Sometimes, because the production people want
to change what's happening on the stage, if there's no curtain to close off the stage,
if it's an open stage, they may want to change the set or do something and they don't want
people sitting there watching them while they do that, so they might say "Ladies and Gentlemen,
please leave the auditorium during the interval.", so it depends on the production, really. Okay, so that's the first half of our lesson. I hope that's been useful with some vocabulary
and the kind of things to expect in a UK theatre, so we'll now move on to the second part of
the lesson and have a look at a little bit more to do with talking about the theatre
with the friend that you're with. Okay, so you've seen the play, the show, or
you've seen half of it and you're in the interval and you're with your friend. So, the most logical thing to do is to talk
about what you've just seen. So, what will you talk about? How do you talk about a play that you're in
the middle of watching or that you've just seen? What kind of things can you say? So, I think it helps to look at different
aspects of the play. All the different parts that go into it. So, the people performing, things connected
with the story, who wrote it, the visual aspect of what it looks like onstage, so let's just
go through those and see what kinds of things you can talk about. So, one of the obvious things when you go
to a play is you're watching actors and actresses and you may be thinking "Oh, they're so good,
the way they're performing, they're so good at what they're doing.", hopefully. So, the acting, but maybe they're so good
that you forget that they're acting. You start to think these are real people,
maybe. So, actors, that's the word for a male actor,
but nowadays, female actresses are also called "actors" nowadays for reasons of equality. Women are often called "actors" as well, but
the word "actress" is still used as well, so actors, actresses, the acting, the acting
in general. So, you could say to your friend, "Oh, isn't
the acting good?" Isn't the acting good? Meaning all of the actors, aren't they good? Okay. You may think, if you're at one of the big
theatres where they have very famous people performing there sometimes, you may think
you've seen one of those actors before, perhaps on television or in a film, so then you might
have a look at the program to see which - what's the name of the actor playing that part? And then in the program also, you get little
biographical notes for each performer to say where they have appeared before, other plays
they've been in, films they've been in, television programs they've been in, so you can read
a little bit about each actor in the program and then that might help to remind you of
a TV program perhaps, where you saw that person before. They may have been in a completely different
kind of role, the character, the role, it's called the role or the part that they're playing,
actors sometimes play quite different personalities in the different roles that they do. So, you could find out from the program if
you think you've seen someone before, okay? So that's one thing to talk about with your
friend. And then, the production itself, the actors
are playing characters, so they're fictional, often fictional characters, so each character
has a different personality, they're all behaving in different ways. There will be relationships between the different
characters onstage. So, you might want to talk about a particular
character, what you think of them, if they're a nice person or not a nice person, whether
you like them or dislike them. Of course, if in a play, if all the characters
were nice people, it would probably be very - a very boring play because the thing about
plays is that there has to be some kind of conflict, a problem to be resolved. So, if all the characters are nice to each
other all the way through the play, there won't be very much drama in it. So, you have to have some bad characters or
badly behaved characters in a play, otherwise there's nothing - nothing happening, okay. So, the characters and how they behave is
another subject you can talk about. And then, what links in with that is the situation
that the characters are in, the story that you're seeing. The plot, the word "plot" is to do with the
sort of consequences - if somebody does something, then that makes something else happen, and
then that makes something else happen, the plot is the sort of forward movement of the
story, okay. So, you can talk about that, one character
does something, and it sets off something else happening. It may cause an accident, for example, so
if a character leaves a child's toy on the floor and they don't tidy it up and the child's
toy is perhaps something with wheels on it, a little toy train, and then another character
comes along and they don't see it but they step on it and they fall over and hit their
head and hurt themselves, that's part of the plot. It's a consequence of somebody doing something. Okay, so you could talk about whether it seems
realistic, true to life, or exaggerated, because in Drama, things can be exaggerated just to
make it more exciting. It could be surreal, even, if it doesn't really
feel real, it just feels - it seems very strange, strange things happen, that would be surreal. Not real, but surreal. Very, very odd things happening, okay. And then there's the question of who actually
wrote the play or the show, whatever it is. Whether it's written by a man or a woman,
what their nationality is, whether it's a translation that you're watching, maybe with
a Russian play like by Chekhov, in the UK, that would be performed in an English translation,
and there are lots of different translations of the same plays by different translators
in different periods in history, so you could have a modern translation of Chekhov, or you
could have a much older translation of Chekhov, so all sorts of things like that to talk about. Okay. And maybe you can also read in the program
about the person who wrote the play, find out a bit more about them from there, okay. And then there's the visual aspect of the
set, what you can see on the stage, the scenery, furniture, things like that. What does it look like? Is it a room in somebody's house, or is it
in the open air in a field in the countryside, near a farm? It could be anything. So, you talk about that and whether you think
it's been well designed or not. Okay. Costumes and hairstyles, there's somebody
in the production team responsible for these things, so you can talk about the - what people
are wearing, the actors are wearing, their hairstyle, whether they're modern or historical,
is it present day or is it a long time back in history when people wore different styles
of clothes? Then there are things like the music, the
sound effects, which add to the atmosphere of the play. And the lighting, just lighting, you know,
the different colors, different effects, if it's a scene, for example, in the countryside
on a summer's day, the lighting has to try to suggest sunshine, so that's something that
has to be achieved inside an enclosed building to create a sense of sunshine in the open
air. So, there is a skill to the lighting. So, those are some specific things you can
talk about with your friend either during the interval or after the play. And then, okay, so say you've watched the
whole play and it's come to an end and then it's time to go home, so you might want to
say just a few general things afterwards to your friend. Maybe "Thanks for coming.", "It was interesting.",
or if you really liked it, "Oh, it was amazing.", or "It was fascinating.", there are quite
strong positive things to say. If you think it was a bit strange, you could
say "Oh, it was unusual. It was an unusual play, but interesting." You don't want to sound too negative about
it, even if you really didn't like it, you don't want your friend to think that, you
know, you've both wasted your time bothering to go, so you could say "Oh, it was unusual,
wasn't it? I haven't seen a play like that before." "It was strange.", or if it was a comedy,
"It was funny.", or "It was sad.", it could be both funny and sad in different places,
"It was dramatic.", of course, you expect any play to be dramatic, the word "drama"
means a play, but "dramatic", it might be more than just normally dramatic. Very exciting, for example. And you can just use a word like "Oh, it was
enjoyable. It was really enjoyable, I'm glad we came,
and see you again soon.", that sort of thing. So, I hope that's given you some ideas of
how you would talk to your friend about a play and anyone you see afterwards, if you're
having a conversation a few days later and you're telling them about the play that you
went to see, you can tell them a little bit about it, too, using the similar sorts of
ideas here. Okay, so, if you'd like to go the website
www.engvid.com , there is quiz there to test you on this lesson, and thanks for watching
and hope to see you again soon. Bye for now.
