One of the weirdest parts of the recent Arts Council fandango, when it somehow managed to turn a rise in overall funding into a spectacular own goal, was its attack on the Northcott theatre, in Exeter. This place has long been treasured by its own audience, by the artists who work there and by the touring companies who visit. Capacity houses fill it, and the audience has been nurtured by a diverse and intriguing body of work into being one of the most shrewd, catholic and generous congregations any company could wish to play to.

Yet the theatre was told by the Arts Council that its audience was too “static” (a not very discreet code for middle-class - a sub-human species, according to the burly stevedores of the Arts Council). It was a grisly example of an attitude emanating from a central ideology that had absolutely nothing to do with the circumstances on the ground. Allied to that idiocy - which, thankfully, has been recanted - was a directive from on high that British theatre should concern itself less with texts and story and acting (the three crafts our tradition is built on), and concentrate more on “circus skills, street theatre and training”. Was this a response to the clamour of the good people from Barnstaple to Berwick that the streets be filled with jugglers uncovering their inner clown to enliven a day’s shopping? Was it hell. It was the prejudice of a doctrinaire sect - the “theatre should be more theatrical” brigade - who, at present, have a disproportionate degree of cultural influence.

At the same time as the Arts Council was holding the dress rehearsal of its own death throes, I attended a theatre awards ceremony in central London. Thankfully, they have stopped televising these affairs, which may have a direct correlation to the improved esteem in which theatre has recently been held. Television isn’t kind to sweaty, slurring figures getting tearful about the creative contribution of the co-star they have been trying to poison for the past year. These things are fairly ghoulish cocktails of insecurity and insincerity at the best of times. But wine and warmth usually settle a rosy glow on the event. At this do, however, someone had turned off the heating. A chill settled on proceedings, which slowed down the drinking, and the combination of little alcohol and a lightly frozen room blew a cold wind of cynicism through, to hideous effect.

Without the benefits of booze and bonhomie, all the egoism, self-celebration and fake concern were on display in a cold and clear light. And it wasn’t pretty. I and a few friends left at speed, wondering what had happened to the profession we loved.

Much of theatre at the moment appears to be on a triumphant roll. We have a revivified RSC, a National prepared to take extraordinary and bold risks, a fitfully intelligent raft of musicals and a collection of new companies, including Kneehigh and the scintillating Punchdrunk, prepared to reinvent what they think theatre should be capable of with each new show. So, why is it that a trip to the theatre these days so often leaves the feeling of a meal half eaten, of being served an appetiser rather than a main course?

British theatre at its best is salty. It is wild and anarchic. It grew out of a tradition of riot and carnival, ritual and protest. It has always been an uncontainable blend of observation and insight, of camp good humour and hatred of bullshit, of farty jokes and unexpected lyrical beauty. The weirdness of its provenance - religious mystery plays morphing into small-scale touring theatre, morphing into shouting in pub yards, morphing into the first theatres built in Elizabethan London - secured at its birth the impossible blend of the sacred and the profane, the high and the low, that has always been its strength. Yet what fused all those elements together was always one thing: the fierce relationship between the stage and the audience. In the spread sunshine of the first theatres, the actor would have to look into the eye of the spectator, standing or sitting in the same democratically shared light, and sell his joke, or sing his song, or tell his tragic story.

The realism of these theatres - and they were shockingly real, in their own way - was not based on sets or lighting or sound: it was based on the inescapable honesty with which the actor fixed the audience’s individual and communal eye, and told them that what he was saying was real. This is what Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe and many others wrote for – not the extravagant plush of the proscenium arch nor the hyperreal intensity of the black box, but a shared space, where everyone made up a story together. Nor did they write for directors who wish to impose some facile interpretation on a resistant text; nor for actors who want to showboat and demonstrate their capacity for being elegant or angry. They wrote for actors who were responsible primarily to the space between themselves and the audience where the story starts to happen, not to their reflection in the mirror. Any brief amount of time spent in the Globe, where I am lucky enough to work, opens one’s eyes to the rough grace of theatre that does not dictate a story, but invites an audience to share in it.

In one way or another, this connection between stage and audience survived, although it was rarely ever again as naked as it was

in the first theatres. Restoration theatre had its own peacocking, wild vitality, melodrama communicated via a complicated mode of mannerisms as directly as a modern television soap, and throughout the first century of the proscenium theatre, a long line of writers, from Wilde through Shaw, Maugham, Coward and Rattigan, found ways of addressing the fears and funny bones of an audience they came to know as an extended family.

It is a connection that seems to have withered away to a stump. The present landscape offers little of that direct connection. Boutique theatre events put together elegant packages of stars to play to subscriber audiences of the uber-rich, partaking in an interaction that is as far away from theatre as drooling over a porno mag is from making love. It is an interaction based on acquisition rather than connection. Theatre, which is supposed to make us tremble with delight or with terror, becomes a lifestyle accessory. This in part explains the explosion of interest on eBay in obtaining the impossible-to-get theatre ticket. Does anyone really want to see the play in those scenarios? Are they in search of euphoria or catharsis, or simply bent on getting their hands on somethingsomeone else can’t have?

Beyond the boutiques, the whole idea of collaboration has atrophied into a wildly overrated display of fey theatrics. It seems, too often, that when one goes out for an evening of supposedly magical theatre, one is subjected to a primary-school metaphysical lecture, adorned with indeterminate prancing about. And the oddest factors are often one’s fellow audience members, so browbeaten into appreciation by the barrage of praise that pours out of the press that, far from being collaborative, they are, more accurately, servile. A proper connection with an audience requires a bit of rough and tumble, a boisterousness and a difficulty, before the moments of sublime concentration set in. If the audience has been practising its sublime concentration in yoga classes for a week before, it rather takes away the element of achievement. And, where there isn’t a predisposed desire to applaud the sheer wonder of someone suspending themselves from a rope, or of being blown about by a nonexistent wind, there is a predisposition to happy-clap whatever the politics of a piece purport to be, without thinking them through.

Two recent stories exemplify this hermetically sealed new world. The first concerns a friend who was working at a boutique theatre, leaving its front doors and seeing a scene of what can only be described as limo rage. Five chauffeurs were bawling each other out, arguing over who had double-parked who in. This is a whole new form of community theatre, but it’s a community of oligarchs. The second is of an actor who recently worked with a young director: when he gently asked why they were approaching a scene in a certain way, he was told that was the way the critics like it, and they were doing it so they could get good reviews. The show duly went on to get great reviews, but an electrical circuit that is there only to maintain a current between directors and critics does omit two rather important elements - the audience and the play.

Yet maybe it is not just the loss of contact with the audience that has allowed so much rot in. Maybe it is also a deeper uncertainty about what the theatre is for. We all paddle around in the shallows of our postpolitical, nonideological age, afraid to espouse any cause for fear of being accused of lacking irony or, if we do espouse a cause, unsure as to whether arguing that single issue signs us up to a collective we would rather be dead than be attached to. Surrounded by such insecurity of commitment, is it any wonder the theatre flails around?

Without the knowledge of why it is there, without some securing rocks of value to tie a rope around in the surging sea of life in which a dramatic story travels, theatre quickly becomes fey and decadent, with whatever is flashy or self-glorifying becoming the purpose, rather than the frills. Nobody would want a return to the self-advertising commitment of 1970s theatre, a highly miserable period when the boys competed for who could make the veins in their neck bulge in the most startling ways, and the girls for who could snot the most and look the most sorrowful - acting that is all very well in a social-realist drama set in Fife, but a bit disconcerting in Hay Fever. No, theatre needs wit, it needs flair, it needs imagination, but it also, most crucially, needs some sense of gravity, however lightly held - some sense that what is being said matters.

Yet the second problem is naturally solved by addressing the first. It is by returning our attention to the audience that we regain a sense of importance in the theatre. Not by asking them to indulge in trivial little acts of imagination to show how adept the actors are at making Fairy Liquid bottles look like babies or elephants. But by looking at the audience, thinking about who they are now, where they come from, what they want and what they could be, and addressing that directly. By looking them in the eye - it is not easy to lie when you look someone in the eye - and talking to them about their most private joys and fears. Certainly, tickle them a bit, dazzle them a little, even seduce them now and then, but most important is to talk to them in a shared light.

The audience is the heart of a theatre event. Ignore them or, worse, just try to impress them and the heart will be concealed. Address the audience and the heart of a theatre event will be revealed. Where theatre does that, it has a future.

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