Andrew Eaton-Lewis: If the media is in crisis then so is theatre, and Enquirer is a case in point

ON THURSDAY the National Theatre of Scotland launches a new show, Enquirer, exploring “the crisis in the newspaper industry”.

“The explosion of digital media… has completely wrong-footed the industry and left it reeling,” proclaims the blurb on the NTS website. As well as reeling, we’ve been “rocked by ongoing allegations of corruption, bribery and illegal practices” in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal.

Nice bit of marketing there, but I’m tempted to throw the ball back at them. If the industry I work for is in crisis, then so is theatre, and Enquirer is a case in point.

Let’s start with the Leveson Inquiry, the main prompt for Enquirer. I think the ethical debate it has prompted might be the best thing to happen to the media in years. Has it damaged the reputation of journalists? Only amongst idiots who can’t be bothered to distinguish the good ones (who have, mostly, been the ones exposing all these shady practices) from the bad ones. As for plummeting print sales, I don’t want to be flip about this, because a few friends have lost their jobs as a result of those falling sales, but there is no such thing as the “newspaper industry” any more than there is a “CD industry”. CD sales are falling, but music is not exactly stopping. The media, like the music industry, is evolving rather than dying.

What about the NTS then? Enquirer is yet another example of “documentary theatre”, a genre in which scripts are assembled from news reports, court transcripts or, in this case, interviews (with people working across the “newspaper industry”). I don’t want to prejudge Enquirer, but I mostly hate documentary theatre. I’ve long thought, actually, that it is evidence of a crisis of confidence in theatre, of an art-form desperately trying to justify its existence in an age where people seem to like Reality TV more than drama.

The rise of Reality TV made drama look somehow old-fashioned and, worse, fake. Why watch something made up when you can watch something “real”? Faced with this, many theatre-makers panicked, and tried to prove their authenticity by engaging conspicuously and self-consciously with the “real” world, rather than hold their nerve and – in a thrilling, dramatic way – expose the fact that Reality TV is a dramatic construction just as much as a play is (a fact that more recent reality TV shows, like The Only Way Is Essex, are having fun playing with).

Where’s the drama in Enquirer? In true stories told by journalists, apparently. See, not only are we not in a crisis, we’re doing the NTS’s job as well as our own.

• Last week Andrew… got quite excited by the trailer for David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. It’s sexy, brutal and bizarre, and features Robert Pattinson shooting a gun through his own hand. Yuck, and yet… tell me more