Denis Edwards: Laughter the best drawcard

Terence, a Roman playwright, once suffered the humiliation of being the only person at his play's opening night. A devastated Terence found he was abandoned for the gladiator contests and bear-baiting.

It was an early example of the dominance of sport over theatre. The struggle continues.

In New Zealand the contest between sport and theatre is clear-cut: Daniel Carter and Daniel Vettori v Romeo and Hamlet, or in retailing terms, The Warehouse against Smith and Caughey's.

While theatre administrators must sweat on attracting a nod in Creative New Zealand's annual funding round, sports administrators glow in the Beehive's love - generous funding for rugby and the America's Cup.

It is not all gloom for theatre. It has its successes - galvanising the ethnic market, particularly the Polynesian and Indian communities, and capturing the loyalty of enormously influential middle and upper-middle class 40-plus females.

However, faced with a steamrolling sports industry, these are but brave flowers in a desert's rocky soil.

Yet sports and theatre could be more equal, given each delivers more or less the same product: a collective experience requiring wit, intelligence, physical skill and showmanship.

Both have intensity, emotion and conflict in a relatively small space. Both have prospered by presenting young men in the best possible light, with theatre willing to go a fraction further.

The casts of Ladies Night andForeskin's Lament baring, among other things, their souls was much appreciated by that largely female audience.

Both sport and theatre are accessible to anyone wanting to try them, which sometimes regrettably they do.

Sport manages its lesser talents rather better, easing them on to the back courts and distant fields, safe from the sensitive eyes of the purist and connoisseur and well away from anyone being asked to pay to watch.

Theatre has had its moments of being close to the centre of leisure. Shakespeare pulled a cross-section of the population, including the workers, into the Globe, although the actors didn't always appreciate their reviews - hurled eggs and tomatoes.

Shakespeare competed with other entertainment options, some of them extraordinarily popular, including public executions.

Some time in the early 20th century, during George Bernard Shaw's reign, theatre was colonised by the intelligentsia, who decided it was too good and too powerful for the uncomprehending masses. It became about, rather than for, the common man.

The common man took the hint, shrugged and wandered off back to sports, although there had never been a real break.

But no one should call the undertakers for live theatre just yet. A recent study discovered the most compelling reason for people to head for the theatre was the opportunity to laugh.

Comedy is what's wanted, something sport does not do particularly well. Theatre can be brilliant at it, and there is a big audience for it - take the one-liner studded plays of Roger Hall and David Williamson, Alan Ayckbourn's comedy of awkwardness and manners, the hard blackness of Tom Scott's The Daylight Atheist.

Setting up a comedy-only theatre, as distinct from stand-up comedy, might not be a laughing matter.

It worked for Terence. He became a comedy writer and spent his years basking in comfortingly packed houses.

* Denis Edwards is a novelist, playwright and past president of the New Zealand Writers Guild.