Physical Theatre

I couldn't count the amount of times I've heard people say that theatre in Dublin is bad as there's no physical theatre. And let's not talk about the odd time I read the papers (refusing to get the Irish Times means that at least I'm spared the mantra from them). I have a problem with this. I don't have a problem with 'physical', or dance theatre, or theatre of movement yada yada yada, I have a problem with the assumed primacy of it. Just as I have a problem with 'pure' cinema. Hitchcock may be pure cinema, as Truffaut said the second last of the masters, only Welles arriving in the era of sound when text took over and people lost their visual purity, but just watch him in a real theatre with real normal people rather than a film studies class and see the difference. I can appreciate Hitchcock when I read about him or watch how he puts a scene together, but when you are in a crowd his films are frankly embarrassing. His misogyny is crass beyond belief and, on the two occasions I have gone to see rep presentations, both in crowded cinemas, the audience giggled and finally laughed out loud at the picture. Another example, from a lesser director, I watched a TV version of Dr. Zhivago a couple of years ago, and I thought of the different choices made in presentation from David Lean's. David Lean's version had a scene where Lara was in a horse drawn carriage with the older man, he tried to kiss her, cut to the Hussars drawing swords, the carriage starts bouncing, the hussars charge the protest march, carriage bouncing, hussars crack heads, blood stains the snow. Okay, so I know she was raped and was a virgin, in the TV version it was made explicit that this was the case - rather than some kind of visual allusion which merely trivialises.