Theatre is as dead as mutton, completely superseded by film and kept in play by working class subsidies to an elitist and largely incompetent cast.
we no longer train people to be able to understand such issues as embedded in live performance.
Not so sure either of those are right. Film's been around for a century, but that century's been far from devoid of good relevant theatre.
Don't think a lack of 'training' of audiences is the issue either. For instance, throughout the seventies and eighties John McGrath toured his 7-84 theatre company around the country, much of the time in little villages in the Highlands, where a lot of the audience had never seen theatre performed, and certainly not theatre that was about issues close to them, like what Thatcherism was doing to their communities. Those shows by all accounts were electric, incredible occasions, that people remember vividly to this day as genuinely moving and important events in their lives, despite their lack of experience of the form.
I think society has to be in a certain condition for theatre to be a living form, though. In a society like ours, where there is a general assumption that all options have been tried and a sort of thoughtless, dead consensus on how we should govern the country and live our lives, theatre is little more than either middle-class intellectual backslapping or middle-class attempts at social worthiness. It has nothing to offer, and film, which does escapism and imagining utterly different worlds more easily, is ascendent. (Although, English film is similarly shit, and in similar ways: middle-class directors setting films in council estates because they think that's real, but turning out something that's not real at all because they don't understand the world they're setting it in.)
In Romania under the communists, theatre was very vibrant, original, important to people, and of a high standard. It was one of the only public places where subversive conversation was possible, because although the scripts were vetted, the actors could change them subtly, or the director could use a classic play to comment on the issues of the day and ridicule people metaphorically. Everyone knew who/what they were talking about, but you couldn't pin anything on them. Now the commies are more or less out and the society's freer, the theatre's shit. The film's starting to become really good though.
Theatre started out in the Dionysia, as the one point in the year when the whole city (well, the free men) could actually debate their values, and even today, if it doesn't involve people politically it hardly ever works. (There are exceptions, like Tom Stoppard and arguably Oscar Wilde, where the writer is of such genius that he can make anything enthralling, even if it's all basically about his own clever head rather than the world outside).
There is a valid comparison with football, in that both of them, when they work well, create a massively powerful connection / feedback loop between the crowd and the players that makes you all feel like one meta-being. I'd say that's happened in about 1% of plays I've been to though, and maybe 20% of football matches.
Anyway, back to Ronaldo... boooooooooooooooooo...er, feckin hell that was amazing.....right then.... tear him for his bad hairdos!
Yes, I got sick of hearing it United fans sung it that often Saturday eh!!! 
