Many people go to the theatre than you think. Enjoy, or not, what they see, and return home happy, or not, with the experience. For many it's a habit that the theatre forms a part of their life. Once a week, once a fortnight, or maybe once a year? No, that wouldn't put you in the category of a habitual theatre goer. But it's not bad. So we concur that there's a notable number of people going to the theatre fairly often. But how many people have the healthy habit of READING theatre?
Less, much less. In fact I would guess very few. Even fewer are the books of stage plays written and published. There had been a period, in my early teens, when I was considered a book-worm by all those who knew me. Definitely one of my favourite pastime (equal to being out with boys). I swallow them all up (the books, not the boys)almost as soon as any was published.
I found, still do, that style of writing very interesting. Pages and pages of conversations by the characters in the play, in script form, with the text describing their actions and expressions in brackets. Like:
"So there you are!"
(He turns and looks surprised. She ran out, banging the door behind her).
I remember new ones coming out regularly to feed my hunger with such almost visual stories, which had let me to become a stage actress for a spell of time, until destiny interfered ... but that's not what I set out to talk about here.
This type of books seem to publish less and less. I suppose the entertainment industries want people to go the cinemas and theatres, not to read all about it first. It's said that people don't know how to read theatre (How can they if there aren't any available for them to read?) Also that the tangle, snarl-up technique to write scrip form theatre books is lost (How can it not if writers stop writing all together?).
So now even though scripts are still being written, they remain circulating only amongst writers, studios and actors, not to the readers in the street. The very few that did get published don't sell they say. And the even fewer that did sell apparently nobody reads. The once fertile field of wonderful theatre plays and cinema scripts for the public is not a field any more. It's a desert. An erial.
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