It is perceived as, and indeed sometimes is, old-fashioned. That is both its strength and its weakness. While the 21st century internet communications highway powers along its technological path into a digitalised sunset, theatre is all too often two planks and a soggy tissue. It cannot go forward, it cannot go back. It has nowhere to go, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
All roads return to the same point.
Not that there aren't attempts to evolve, adapt, even rival its computerised confederates. Where once we whistled the set, now we sing the hydraulics. And the problem is also social. Theatre hides in dark corners of old buildings or cozies up in new. It has unwillingly crawled up an intellectual fox-hole pursued by marketing hounds, refusing to come out even when attacked by ferocious terriers.