Louise Burns, Professor of ‘London Stage in Text and Performance’
What did you do before coming to Arcadia to teach?
I was teaching at a British university before I came to Arcadia’s center in London. Before that, I worked professionally in the theater from the age of 18 until I was in my late 30’s. And then I did post-grad at Rada and King’s College London, studing Theater and Performance with a specialization in Dramaturgy and looking at political plays from the post-war British period to the 2000s.
What’s your favorite thing about theater?
The way that it talks to the world today. Whether it’s a play that was written two-and-a-half thousand years ago or two-and-a-half weeks ago, theater has a way of reflecting exactly what’s happening in the world and how we’re responding to it. And it’s constantly changing, it’s the fluidity of the disciple. The audiences that were watching a play in the Greek theater, in Athens, took those ideas differently than those of us sitting in the West End in 2018. But, what’s happened to those characters and the experiences they are having are collectively the same; it’s just how we respond to them.
What’s the most important thing that a piece of theater should possess?
Immediacy. Absolute immediacy. If that play does not talk to me, to somebody else, to the world outside, what’s the point? It needs an audience, doesn’t it? It’s got to talk to an audience— somehow, someway. But it has to have that urgency, it needs the urgency— that’s what I mean by immediacy.
Is London the best place to access theater?
I think it’s one of the best places, but it’s not the only. No, not by any means at all. Something I always do is, whenever I go to a new city— whether it’s in Britain or throughout the world— I try and find a theater that I haven’t heard of, that I don’t know about, and then I go and explore it.
