Meyerhold,Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde is part of a series of six documentary films about the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s. The series concentrates mainly on the development of the visual culture of Russia during this period and its influence on a range of artistic activity including literature and theatre. Once it was decided to undertake a film about Meyerhold, and include an element of his acting theory, biomechanics, it was obvious that it would be almost impossible to recreate these movements precisely and in fact this would not be desirable given the type of film that was being planned.

The actor William Rousey and I agreed that this would not be a manual on “how to do” biomechanics. In the film we experimented with movement from our own point of view within the context and framework of a documentary film and based on our research into Meyerhold’s work. In the end the decision was made to film the movements as shadows. This satisfied a number of criteria. The black and white nature of the images of shadow movements and the black and white photographs of Meyerhold’s productions together would preserve a visual unity in the part of the film which features biomechanics. Also, the idea of using shadows instead of showing the bodies as they are in a real setting, was in a sense to depersonalise the movements. In this way viewers would be encouraged to concentrate on movement as an image rather than movement as direction. In other words to establish the graphic essence of movement in Meyerhold’s biomechanics.

An actor in Meyerhold’s theatre company demonstrates biomechanic exercises.

Therefore, our main task was to discuss how Meyerhold used the graphic experiments of the avant-garde for solving the problems posed by the need to create a new theatre for a new era. Underlying this thesis were a number of integrated concerns and goals which had preoccupied Meyerhold’s thoughts for some time about the development of contemporary theatre in post revolutionary Russia; firstly to solve the problem of combining the two dimensionality of the set design and the three dimensionality of the actor’s body, secondly to reduce the theatre’s dependence on naturalistic set design, thirdly to reduce the theatre’s reliance on text and words and lastly to breakdown the distance between the actor and the audience, doing away with what Stanislavsky called the fourth wall.

Portrait of Meyerhold from the 1920s

Often Meyerhold and Stanislavsky are presented as advocating two diametrically opposed “systems” for training actors, however both were concerned in releasing the actor’s emotional and expressive potential albeit using different means. For Stanislavsky the actor needed to tap their inner emotions to express or externalise them in a physical or oral manifestation. For Meyerhold movement and the development of the actor’s awareness of their body was of prime concern in this task - finding their way inside from without.

The period in question saw massive social, economic, political and physical changes. Cities and towns became dominated by an industrial landscape which brought with it a new mass culture.These changes and moreover the revolution, demanded new plays for а new era and with it came а change in the type of audience that attended the theatre. Before the Revolution the theatre was the domain of the middle and upper strata of society, now it had to cater to factory workers, soldiers and former peasants seeking education and enlightenment. To solve some of these problems Meyerhold turned to a number of sources. Firstly to Russian avant-garde artists and secondly eastern drama, in particular Kabuki Theatre.

Actor William Rousey and Russian actress Oksana Petrova demonstrate biomechanics in shadow form, from the film “Meyerhold,Theatre and the Russian Avant-garde”

Russian Avant-garde artists had been experimenting with new visual forms and techniques, breaking down the taken for granted perceptions of classic art, emphasising the flatness of the canvas and a more decorative approach rather than straight depictions of reality, as a basis for new forms in painting. Collaborating with avant-garde artists in set and costume design gave Meyerhold the opportunity to eliminate the dependence of theatre on naturalistic motifs and scenes and to increase the emotional potential of the theatrical space. It provided new possibilities for the movement of actors in collective scenes, the drama of the masses and a theatre of wordless action, because it created the possibility of a theatre independent of literature altogether. In addition the new age was the age of the machine not nature. Humans would have to learn to work with machines if a new world was to be built. They would have to reconcile themselves to a new order, a mechanical order which imposed new values and which was growing up all around them at the beginning of the 20th century, an age which was personified by mass production, speed and dynamic movement.

Explaining biomechanics, Meyerhold differentated it from the ‘ Moscow Art Theatre’s’ system for training actors. It brought the actor to the centre the director’s composition. Biomechanics allows the actor, perfectly controlling their body and movements, firstly, to be expressive in dialogue; secondly, to be the master of the theatrical space; and, thirdly, in integrating with the crowd scene, the grouping, to impart to it, their energy and will. According to biomechanical theory, every movement must not simply be realistic, or lifelike but deliberate and in particular responsive to the movement of the partner. Emotion would reveal its dynamic framework: the moment of арреаrаnсе, the development, the rising and falling, the culmination, the exhaustion.

William Rousey and Oksana Petrova demonstrate biomechanics, Moscow

As Meyerhold observed, “the path to the image must begin not from emotional experience, not ‘from within’, but from without, from movement. Moreover, any movement, the tilt of the head, the turn of the body, the smallest gesture, even the fluttering of eyelashes, should ideally involve the whole body of the performer, who possesses musical rhythm and quick, reflexive ‘excitability’.”* Meyerhold therefore turned rhythm and movement into a component of the performance which created content as well as form. Meyerhold’s first experiment with Biomechanics was in his production of “The Magnanimous Cuckold” in 1922. Lubov Popova designed a constructivist set with moving parts and flywheels. When the actors first stepped onto Popova’s machine they found themselves in an entirely unfamiliar territory with no make up or decor on which they could fall back on. Every movement whether intended or not, required sculptural form and significance.

William Rousey and Oksana Petrova demonstrate biomechanics, Moscow

Meyerhold was strongly influenced by eastern drama and the Japanese theatre Kabuki, especially its principles of stage direction which indicate or suggest a place rather than showing it. He attempted to create an analogous system for Russian and Soviet audiences of the 1920s, using the technology of Kabuki theatre and synthesizing it with contemporary innovations, instead of using Japanese signs - music, colour, symbolism and costume, as exotica. What captured Meyerhold’s interest was not the beauty of Kabuki but rather its ability to externalise emotions or a state of mind through the rhythm of the actor’s body movement. The basis of the Kabuki actor’s technique is dance and its essence is a series of gestures each of which contains a specific meaning - Kabuki converts words into gestures, it stresses the dynamic tension of poses - it moves from pose to pose. Other parallels can be drawn between eastern theatre and Meyerhold. In Kabuki drama the audience is an integral part of the performance. Many plays were based on real events of the day or had them consciously integrated into already established plays. An audience would recognise certain characters from an event which had taken place that week. For instance political figures or other famous or infamous people who the audience would know and would be part of topical discussion. The point was to make theatre more relevant to the political and social milieu of the time. Meyerhold borrowed this idea but took it a stage further.

William Rousey demonstrates biomechanics, Moscow

During the performance of The Dawn on 18th November 1920 the news of the taking of Perekop in the civil war was announced. Meyerhold read out the telegram from the stage announcing victory over the enemy, substituting it for the herald’s line. This was an instance of involving the audience in a way which at the time was innovative and new and in keeping with the stated aim of the Russian avant-garde of bringing art and life closer together. The political significance of such an act as mass meeting and performance was not lost on the audience either. This breaking down of boundaries and boundary transgression was manifest in Japanese culture despite the rigidity of the social structure. The distance between the actor and the audience, the stage and the audience is dissolved or reduced, creating a kind of equality, a collective or mass experience. In Meyerhold’s work actors and audience are no longer separated from each other by a hierarchical set of relations. Art and social reality could come together in a consciously collective passion of social masks rather than through the individually expressed emotion and psychology of the actor. This, together with Meyerhold’s other developments in acting and set design, paved the way for any number of innovations and changes in the way theatre was both performed and perceived.

—————-

* Citation is from an article by Meyerhold, published in the newspaper Izvestiya 1922 (exact date unknown).

For further information on the documentaries of Michael Craig please visit his website: Copernicus Films.

Diagrammatic form of one of Meyerhold’s biomechanic exercises.

On the final day of a week-long conference on Movement held at the school of The Moscow Art Theatre, the delegates are treated to a tour of the Chekhov Theatre building lead by the school’s distinguished Director Anatoly Smeliansky.

We sit waiting in a grand foyer hall, where Stanislavsky would once rehearse his company and where he argued with Chekhov. We are told that when Dr. Smeliansky enters a room, his students normally show their respect by standing up. We have spent the week calling him by his first name, but when he enters, much to his amusement, we rise to our feet, half as a little joke, but half as a genuinely felt sign of respect. As he speaks to us, it strikes me how this unimposing, small man with a warm infectious smile and a surprisingly youthful giggle, stands in such stark contrast to his surroundings in this room.

The walls in the foyer of the Chekhov Theatre are literally crammed with portraits of Smeliansky’s predecessors and actors and directors, who have all long since been dead. These imposing monochrome faces stare down at us from thick black frames, which are squeezed uniformly side by side, giving little air to the elegant wallpaper behind them. There is no room for the living. Even space for the newly-dead is seriously limited. The installation of a new member to this eminent club of theatrical ghosts would mean the necessary removal of an old one. “It is a real problem” says Smeliansky “Who could you move?”. Russian politics extend even into the afterlife.

These grainy old photographs capture each actor in some of their proudest moments; the characterisations for which they were once famous. An actress is depicted in one picture as a beautiful goddess holding a dagger aloft. This is placed next to a contrasting image of her, where she is drastically transformed into a comical old lady with crudely drawn on wrinkles clutching a hearing trumpet. We know from the photograph that this image is from some comedy, but it is not funny. The tone of this exhibition is sombre. It is not a celebration of the lives of the figures it displays, but a gloomy, cenotaphic documentation of this theatre company’s history. These photographs capture a different age and one imagines a photographer with his head under a black cloth, the pop of a flash bulb and the smell of sulphur. The subjects in these old images would have had to sit still for quite some time during the taking of these pictures. The pictures do not capture genuine ‘live’ moments. They do not capture life.

Spatially, the photographs relate to each other with as much precision, formality and sombreness as soldiers in a military May Day Parade in Red Square. Like Lenin’s mausoleum, only a stone’s throw from the Chekhov Theatre, this grand hall has come to represent an age gone by. This gallery, as well as a tribute to the pioneers of naturalism, is a thumbprint of Russia’s turbulent political history. These ghostly framed images, Smeliansky explains, have been rearranged with each change of political leadership according to how the memory of each of these deceased artists favoured with the political regime of the day. A constantly changing posthumous hierarchy. Some of the frames have been removed in disgrace during one coup, only to have been reinstated with the highest honours after another.

Meyerhold, the visionary director who had worked as an actor with The Moscow Art Theatre as a young man, appears in this exhibition as a tiny figure sitting in the front row of a group photograph taken in 1889. He has not been given his own plot in the exhibition, though he is without doubt one of the most famous names to have ever been associated with this company. He was a cast member in the first ever production of Chekhov’s The Seagull , the play which inspired the company’s emblem printed into the wallpaper covering these walls and chiselled into the grave stones of those in the photographs. He appears only as one of many in a picture of one of Stanislavski’s early theatrical troupes. For some time, Meyerhold could not be seen at all in this photograph. Accused of being an anti-Soviet formalist during Stalin‘s regime, he was executed for anti-government, political activities. In the photograph, his image was creatively and painstakingly turned into a parasol held by the actress sitting behind him, an attempt to erase him entirely from history. He has since been reinstalled, and a reprint from the original negative has replaced the doctored print.

The most prominent positions in the gallery have been reserved for Stanislavsky and Chekhov. Their portraits take pride of place in the centre of the hall. I notice that they have been given a little more space than the others, but only a little, and not enough for them to dominate or to draw too much focus, or perhaps to appear to be too far above their comrades. Free of any ornate detail, their frames are as black, simple and monumental as every other frame in the hall.

As a western visitor, one is struck by how the country’s history and politics is indelibly engraved into the walls and the lives of Russian people. Their history stares down at them as oppressively as these photographs. It is stamped onto their architecture. It flavours (or doesn’t) their food. And after a week of observing students at this school, it is clear to me that it is also ingrained in their bodies and deeply rooted in the way they move.

The conference, which is focused on the teaching of movement, has given us an opportunity to share our practices with both The School of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAXT) and the lesser known, but still prestigious and equally historical neighbouring school GITIS. European practitioners also have the chance to confer with each other, and to observe and compare their approaches with their Russian counterparts. Focusing every day only on the mechanics of the human body and ‘how we get actors to move’, has been an interesting study. And paradoxically, it is here, sitting in this place of stillness, not moving, being stared at from all four walls by these haunting black and white faces with stern dead eyes, that things start to click. I am able to begin to make some sense of our differences, our similarities and most usefully where my beliefs about movement and acting have been challenged or reaffirmed.

It occurs to me that the training in these schools refers always to what the school’s forefathers laid down as a system of beliefs. Academic references are made only to the dead. “Stanislavsky told us this.”…“Chekhov taught us that”. Such quotations are the fabric of the school and dead men’s ideals are practiced religiously. The photos on these walls are almost like icons of prophets. Stanislavski’s name is uttered with an almost holy weight. All of the work I have seen in the school this week, seems to be an attempt to emulate the golden age of theatrical history captured in these photographs. The ideas shared are very familiar to all of us and it is exciting to be in this very place where the work of these great artists sent the ripple through the world which changed theatre. These Moscow schools are so confident in their legacy of a system, a tried and tested, world-famous method, that little time is needed to explore the unknown. Through its association with Central [Central School of Speech and Drama] and by inviting conferences such as this, MAXT is stretching tentative fingers out into the world in the spirit of sharing, but one gets the sense that they wish to share what they know, as a kind of gift, rather than needing to learn very much of anything from the outside world.

This confidence is startling and physical. These Russian teachers are like great masters. They are given an aura of great importance. They are formal in their dress and their demeanour. They are stern yet adored by students who are nothing but utterly respectful. The movement work is focused, serious and not playful. By comparison, we westerners seem like new age hippies. Young upstarts, slightly scruffy, liberal, brash and a little spoilt. These Russians have stiff backbones and we are like sponges. Their work is rooted, strong and sturdy like their buildings, and we are like balloons, tethered to our theatrical history, but still floating freely in the wind. Our work is a constant search for answers. Our ideas change. Sometimes in taking risks we make mistakes, or discover what doesn’t work. We quote the living as well as the dead. Our work moves. The work in Russia is set in concrete; still, solid and unchanging like these photographs.

From this week spent in Russia I have learned that I have been naïve to think that my country’s politics and history are not equally ingrained into my life and my body. It has not happened oppressively like it has for the people of this country, but in a surreptitious way, and in the form of political correctness. I have developed an instinct for what it is ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ to turn from thought to word or action. In these classes at MAXT and GITIS, and also in the school performances we have been privileged to see, I notice behaviour, small fleeting gestures or dynamics in relationships, which trigger a reaction, which I can neither articulate or justify in the moment. One might call it ‘mild culture shock‘, my body actually becomes tense, it flinches or winces. I hear through translation, people saying things which I have been conditioned to be afraid to say out loud, or even to think, yet I sense the irony of coming from a country which would not torture or execute me, or turn me into a parasol for speaking freely. The Russian students are all, with very few exceptions, remarkably beautiful with chiselled athletic and muscular bodies. There is a clear attractive aesthetic, which raises questions for me about the selection process for these students. Are the short and the large excluded from this place? Or have they been hidden away for the week behind parasols? Or are young Russian people just all beautiful? The material we see in these shows seems largely to be preoccupied with overt sexual activity. My reaction to watching young people thrusting genital areas is far from prudish, but I am shocked nonetheless, and it comes from a built-in instinct which tells me that much of it is sexist if not misogynist. But in the context of this environment, this different world, I have to accept these differences as being only quaintly old fashioned, like the hair styles I see in the street. Like I remember people used to be in my country not so long ago. I consider how I have been politically conditioned to a level of arrogance which instantly makes me conclude that I belong to a more enlightened culture. I conjure a mental image of portraits of Queen Victoria and Margaret Thatcher glaring at me from black picture frames. I realise, I too am a creation of my historical and political heritage and that it is also in my body.

Throughout the week, there have been several audible gasps from western spectators. An elegant, yet formidable ballet teacher from MAXT with a stiff hair bun almost as high as her long neck, asks a student to face a wall close-up with his feet turned out so the instep almost touches the skirting board. The Grande Dame proceeds to kick the student’s heels repeatedly towards the wall. An effective, no frills, no fuss way to improve the student’s turn-out, tried and tested by the great founders of this institution. Acrobatics classes at GITIS are equally tough in their approach. Students are ruthlessly bent and pulled and stretched into place. I see British delegates squirm and shift uncomfortably in their seats, imagining themselves leading the same activities and being presented with lawsuits. Our approach would be softer, wrapped in cotton wool, kind, soft and sensitive to the student. We might have a long discussion about our feelings and then fill in some forms. But I watch these classes with complete envy. This work is remarkable! These students are physically articulate. They have the kind of dexterity, balance, poise and grace, which I can only ever dream to nurture a fraction of in my students. They are fearless without being dangerous or loosing control. They have presence in bucketfuls. Their focus and discipline seems to me to be from an age gone by; one I start to feel I desperately wish we could return to.

Similarly when observing some of the presentations or workshops that we westerners offer to the conference, there is often a bristling from the Russian delegates. A chorus of shaking heads or tutting disapproval. One almost gets the sense of the dark figures in the photographs joining in with these dismissive whispers. It becomes clear that our ideas either fit with theirs, or they don’t. There is no grey area. They are not to be swayed. It seems we specialise in the grey area. We are inspired by the old, but we are looking for the new. What each of the western delegates’ presentations seem to have in common is that they are about release. Physical release, or releasing the imagination, or in my case, releasing self-consciousness. The work is playful, experimental, some of it impenetrable, bogged down by academic theory and not effectively demonstrated through practice. Some of it is dangerous, pretentious and at times even silly. And little of it has the expectancy of an immediate outcome.

Without doubt, I cannot help but feel that the Russian students would really benefit from loosening up a little. The quality of their movement seems to me to be invariably hard, crisp with much jerking and slapping of hands. The movement is direct and precise, intense, heavy, clean, crafted in fact. What we bring is soft and light, casual, indirect, released and a little messy. Our movement is a celebration of freedom. Something perhaps we take for granted. Some of it seems at times somewhat frivolous in this environment.

Both MAXT and GITIS separate movement as an aspect of training which is not related directly to what the students do as actors. The actor needs to be able to fulfil whatever the role requires. So the actors train, to be able to do almost anything that might be demanded of them physically. And it seems that they can! Their movement training is detailed, vigorous and thorough, and they have a covetable level of skill, in acrobatics, ballet, stage fight and bio-mechanics. Whether or not this makes them better actors, who can tell.

While I am genuinely amazed by the quality of the work in these classes, I find it difficult to departmentalise each element of training in this way. For me, movement is as much about acting as voice, text and emotional engagement are. To act is to be physical, to speak is a physical action. An actor’s training ought to be where all of these rivers meet, not neatly divided into rigidly separate components like black frames sitting side by side on a wall.

Russian delegates confess to us that they know that westerners are much better at playing. They do understand the importance of play, but are still learning how to do it. It is relatively new to their culture. Perhaps then, they are open to some things after all. If they do have any play, they clarify, it will happen in acting classes, but not in movement. There just isn’t time. If I worked in Russia I may be classified as an acting teacher, but not a teacher of movement at all, this has become clear.

My training was with Jacques Lecoq. I understand the need to seek wisdom from what has gone before us. We studied the ancients; Greek Theatre and Commedia Dell Arte, but the emphasis on our training was not to recreate these forms religiously, or even with historical or technical accuracy, but to use the same principles as a springboard to create theatre which has not yet been created. Lecoq is now dead, but his image will not haunt me from a metaphorical imposing black frame. He will be a living memory, moving and looking forward. I feel theatre should be lead by the living and not the dead. It should move. This has become my own belief to which I have realised I too am religiously bound. There is no grey area for me either in this respect.

The exhibition of portraits has encapsulated this theatre’s heyday. It is a museum, a glorious fossil trapped in amber, eternally locked in the past and not moving….or at least moving cautiously and very, very slowly. But, oh my, what great days they must have been!

I do feel genuine respect for Dr. Smeliansky when I rise to my feet and for all of the ghosts in this hall.

Peter Bramley is Head of Movement at Rose Bruford College and the Artistic Director of Pants on Fire.

Visit Rose Bruford College’s Stanislavski Centre for information on the College’s special collection photographic archive, including a sample gallery.

For information on the Moscow Art Theatre School see here.

Ever since James Macdonald’s original production of 4.48 Psychosis for the Royal Court in 2000, Kane’s last play has generally been put on with three performers on stage, incorporating the “[v]ictim. Perpetrator [and the] [b]ystander” (4.48: 231) as ‘characters’. Apart from Daniel Goldman’s production for the Old Red Lion theatre in 2006, there hasn’t been a production of 4.48 Psychosis with a cast of more than 3 people to date, and in contemporary German speaking theatre, there is also a tendency to stage the play as a monologue with the occasional actor impersonating the psychologist only. What these stagings have in common is that they are ideal for a smaller cast and the often tight budget of small to middle-scale theatres and companies. When it comes to exploring the possibilities of Kane’s admittedly intense text, however, I have always felt that a smaller cast falls short of expressing the raw immediacy of Kane’s last play. In my opinion, the poetic images of 4.48 are just as strong as the ones that can be found in Kane’s earlier work and staging these can be as much of a challenge as staging the impossible stage directions in her earlier plays.

In September 2007, I was invited to explore these images with a cast of 15 final year drama students by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. The following is a gathering of impressions relating to the rehearsal process and its often surprising results.

Concept

Every act is a symbol
the weight of which crushes me (226)

Every single one of Kane’s plays shows a clear structure, even where this may not seem apparent right away. She possessed a great sense for detail and a renowned talent for the staging of raw emotions and was convinced that, in the theatre, anything was possible. Yet recent scholarly articles on 4.48 Psychosis and productions of the play took an approach that was very much in keeping with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s understanding of a ‘post-dramatic theatre’. This has always failed to convince me. Both claiming that Kane’s last play was a suicide note and that it was in a sense ‘post-dramatic’ due to its challenging form (no stage directions, no characters, no plot as such) to me always seemed to lessen its artistic impact rather than appreciating it as a well-structured piece of art.

I started with the assumption that what we are witnessing as an audience in 4.48 is the artistic vision of a depressive mind approaching mental breakdown. In this, the lines of the play are structured like the thoughts of the mind in question; their formal realisation on the page indicating delivery just as much as it is marking out the space and time between one respective thought and another. I conceived the image of a mind in turmoil, of different voices struggling to express an illness that was striving to attack the mind as much as the soul itself. In order to achieve this unity of a closed set and the expressiveness of several voices acting as one, my ideas culminated in the staging of a ‘physical’ chorus.

Body

Here am I
and there is my body

dancing on glass (230)

The lines of the play indicate a separation of body and mind which constantly problematises the concept of the self as a whole. As often is the case with pathological depression, the voices portrayed seem to be separated from the body and its physical form. In order to emphasise this separation and its consequences, I decided on a staging that would underline the physicality of the living and breathing body as a contrast to the poetics of the lines. Due to the absence of subtext, I found that the play offers an enormous potential for physical exploration.

Working with a cast of fifteen actors opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Inspired by an eastern European theatre tradition, I worked with physical expressions of emotions to support the lines rather than trusting their vocal delivery only. A text as powerful as this, I felt, could only lose when staged in the “talking heads” tradition so prominent on the western European stage. What my approach resulted in, thus, was a challenging physical training for the cast which helped the actors convey emotion before working with the actual lines from a vocal point of view. This, I found, not only made the intention of particular lines clearer and very precise in the end, it also helped the actors fall back on a physical way of expression that could surpass the Stanislavskian background most of them were coming from. As opposed to method or character inspired acting approaches, the physical approach also made it easier for the actors to channel Kane’s raw emotions instead of getting too overwhelmed by their relentless immediacy.

Space

Hatch opens
Stark light (225, 230 and 239)

The concept of an audience watching an actual mind in turmoil made me realise that the setting as such was of great importance to the overall success of the production. From an early stage, I initiated several thoughts on angles and geometric patterns that would convey a claustrophobic atmosphere without compromising the actors’ space. I eventually decided to use Libeskind’s architectural plans for the Holocaust Tower in the Jewish Museum in Berlin as an inspiration and the production’s scenographer, Sinead Cormack, designed a set of angles that would make the audience experience the show differently according to which seats they chose to sit in. In the end, the stage was surrounded by five meter high concrete walls which added a genuinely claustrophobic atmosphere without taking away too much space.

This idea was also in keeping with initial lighting ideas. Ali Sim’s simple yet effective lighting design underlined the overwhelming height of the walls without shifting the focus from performers to set. My initial specifications regarding the colour and intensity of the lights were met perfectly with a mixture of amber and blue shades for general covering purposes. The play’s recurrent line “hatch opens/ stark light” also required a bright lantern from a top corner of the space that would place the outside world out of reach of actors and audience alike, thereby adding to the hermetic character of the production.

Voice

watch me vanish
watch me

vanish (244)

In keeping with traditional ideas of the chorus as being both body and voice, I sought to base the lines of the play on a solid foundation of challenging movement and breath which would allow for a whole range of intensity levels. Although several lines were given out to individual actors, these were always embedded in a general scenic structure that very much relied on the physical and vocal presence of the chorus. At no point could the action or the emotional complexity of the scenes be accredited to one individual only. Where individual lines and monologues were given out, this happened in accordance with the surrounding members of the chorus, thus creating the illusion of several contradictory thoughts in one mind. This practical approach to chorus work was influenced by research of such eastern European companies like CHOREA and FARM IN THE CAVE, but can also be found in most contemporary practical research on traditional chorus work.

The results of the above were genuinely striking as to the intensity of Kane’s lines. Since the synchronised speaking of the chorus generally signaled at least some kind of unity of thought, the play’s moments of language loss could be acted out far more powerfully as this could ever have been done without the notion of a chorus impersonating different aspects of the one personality. Intensity varied from whispers in the dark to intense and loud chorus work, all the while indicating different shades of emotion expressed in accordance with the spatial indications in Kane’s script. In addition to the challenging movement, it was possible for the actors not only to vocally portray subtle differences in the depressive mind, but also to add intensity to the lines in a way that would allow for a more complete emotional exploration of their contents. Most of the actors found the necessary vocal training for this extremely helpful and most of the cast made huge progress regarding the full use of their vocal potential on stage.

Rehearsal process

Cut out my tongue
tear out my hair
cut off my limbs
but leave me my love (230)

Even though most chorus work requires strong links and a general awareness of each other within the cast, 4.48 was special in that it also required a mutual understanding of and a commitment to the raw emotions and dark humour evident in the text. In order to be able to portray multi-layered feelings, the cast had to find and accept a particular kind of solidarity that would allow for an artistic portrayal of even very intimate emotions such as different shades of despair, anger, hopelessness, loss and longing. Consequently, rehearsals started with a challenging physical session over a period of four full days which was aiming at demolishing personal barriers and anxieties about the other’s body. This physical exploration not only served to awaken physical listening skills in relation to other actors in the space, it also helped generating a special kind of focus and awareness, which would later be incorporated into the synchronised movement exercises of the chorus work.

Since my understanding of some of the play’s scenes was that they were, in fact, memories or images from the past, I also called sessions with one or two actors at a time in order to work on individual relations. This allowed for very precise work on the abuser-victim relationships so prominent in Kane’s work. These individual sessions especially showed that the physical aspect of the rehearsals also helped the actors build character clues that would later allow them to conjure Kane’s raw emotions by triggering physical movement patterns.

It was evident that some of the emotions the text required would bear hard on the actors, feelings of hopelessness and loss being among the hardest. In order to utilise these emotions as actors, several exercises relating to spatial expression were used to shift the impact of the scenes from actor to audience. Breathing exercises were introduced to assist in channeling emotions rather than playing them off each other.

The range of powerful images I was able to develop with this kind of work never failed to surprise me. Incorporating such abysmal images as the breaking of a neck, the psychological torture of an anonymous victim, and puppet images of a helpless chorus added a particular kind of uneasiness to the production which would otherwise have been lost in a cacophony of voices. The split of a body and a mind in turmoil were illustrated by visceral imagery, the breaking of bonds and the fragmentation of relationships could be staged physically, and the feeling of loss and unreciprocated love was illustrated by distance and the tearing apart of connected bodies.

All of this made for a surprisingly ‘total theatre’ in an Artaudian sense, which I will strive to explore even further in the future.

References

Hope, Christine, Royal Court Education Pack on the Sarah Kane Season (London: Royal Court Theatre, 2000)

Kane, Sarah, Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001)

Sierz, Aleks, In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today (London: Faber and Faber, 2000)

About the author

Alex Mangold trained in Germany and is currently conducting PhD research on the theatre of Sarah Kane at Aberystwyth University. He works as a director and as a translator of such playwrights as Howard Barker and Richard Bean into German.

Short Video Documentary: The 4.48 Experience

Credits

All photographs included in this article are the property of Keith Morris. Copyright © 2007 Keith Morris, All Rights Reserved.

Protection

My first play Protection was about a team of social workers. My Mum is a social worker so I had the benefit (if you can call it that) of having grown up with social work as an offstage presence in my life, but I knew very little about what it actually involved, so I set off to find out. At this stage I was influenced by the process which David Hare outlined in his book Asking Around, about researching his state-of-the-nation trilogy at the National in the early 1990s. It seemed necessary to immerse oneself in a world in order to pursue some sort of objective factual truth, and to undertake lots of interviews. That very much appealed to me at the time because in another life I would have been an investigative journalist, but it also seemed to provide a sort of crutch to bridge the gap between my inexperience and my creative ambitions.

As an audience member I’ve always had a hunger to see plays which offer me unique insights into other worlds, and naturally these are also the kinds of plays I want to write. But in practice this has always meant writing about subjects I know very little about, and so a period of factual research has to come first. In Protection this was very much about getting to grips with child protection law and quite dry procedural issues. But one recurring theme that this part of the process did unearth was the destructive impact which private sector management techniques were having in the public sector. Strategies originally designed to manage money and resources were being applied to people: social workers, clients, care home staff. This was to become the political heart of the play.

Then interviews with social workers added the next level. I spoke to idealistic trainees, cynical seasoned workers at the coal face, weary team managers, old school social workers approaching retirement, social policy lecturers and local government officials. I spent a day in a care home talking to the residential staff and meeting some of the kids. The worker’s personal stories about the emotional impact of such gruelling and often distressing work are what gave the play its emotional heart and lifted it above documentary. Their beliefs, impulses and struggles provided archetypal drives for characters, and imbued the play with credible motives for action, which then underpinned all my imaginative work from there on in. But another happy side effect to the interviews grew out of my obsession about typing them up word for word. For an hour’s interview this takes roughly four hours and is painful in the extreme, but its benefits are immeasurable. The act of committing to paper every nuance, hesitation, tangential thought, and grammatical quirk of an interviewee somehow “locked” their way of speaking into my mind in such a way that I found I was able to reproduce it at will when I came to write dialogue. (This technique was to become invaluable in later plays when I was tackling inner city subcultures with their own slang and idiosyncrasy.) So the three elements of factual, emotional, and linguistic research combined to create an authentic piece of social realist theatre.

How To Disappear

Things were very different for my second play How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. If Protection was a literalist piece of social realism, with a schematic research process, How To Disappear was a nightmarish netherworld of skewed timelines and characters waking up dead. The research and writing process were to be the most emotionally harrowing I’ve ever undertaken, a process perhaps mirrored by the play also losing its way in the theatre industry before being plucked from obscurity when it won the John Whiting Award.
Things started well. I knew I wanted to write a play about people who go missing, and I approached the National Missing Person’s Helpline, and the Met Police “Mispers” Unit, both of whom agreed to see me and were very helpful. But when it came to contacting some actual missing people, I found they were, understandably, a bit difficult to find. I asked the Helpline if I could advertise on their website, for interviewees who’d gone missing and come back. I asked the Met if they’d show me the Thames Ledger — a book recording the details of every corpse that has been retrieved from the Thames for the past 200 years. Both turned me down flat. The Met said, “You have to remember that everyone in that book is someone’s husband, wife, brother or son.”

I’d encountered a moral issue here which wasn’t relevant to my previous play. Whereas with Protection social workers were only too happy to speak to me, this was because I was shining a light into a misunderstood profession and to some extent fighting their corner. But with missing persons there was no getting away from the fact that I was, in effect, saying “Tell me your tales of trauma and breakdown so that I can go away and make money out of them.”

Empathetic research

It was at this point that I had to make a leap — I had to fall back on my own imagination and trust myself to make it up. I see this now as a fourth form of creative research, what I’d term “empathic research”. It involves a lot of day trips to resonant sites within the play (Southend in the case of How To Disappear) and standing looking at the sea listening to miserable music and trying to imagine wanting to throw yourself in. It involves visiting homeless hostels and arguing with priests about the meaning of life. It involves staring at blank Word documents for seven or eight hours before finally committing a blast of frustration and rage to the page from someplace only accessible when the writer is at as low an ebb as the character. It involves hearing that character’s name spoken in public and looking up for a moment because you think someone is talking to you.

As it turned out it is perhaps the most potent form of research for a dramatist, but it took me exhausting the other avenues before I was forced to rely on it to fill the hole in the middle of my play. But like emotional memory it’s also the most traumatic. It’s also of course, the most alchemical, and the form that least lends itself to analysis and explanation. It is the way in which playwrights access the metaphysical.

Collaborative research

Locked In was my first play for teenagers. It is set in a pirate radio station and written almost entirely in hip-hop verse. And Mehndi Night was my play written for Bengali girls as part of my residency in 2007 at Mulberry School in east London. I have an ongoing and very fruitful relationship with Half Moon Young People’s Theatre in Limehouse, London, who have an interesting process which they take their writers through. It begins with writing up an idea for a play for 14-17 year olds as a prose treatment, then deciding with the director on a couple of five-minute sections to write up as full scenes.

These are redrafted a little and then used as a stimulus text for a project they run called Careers In Theatre. This is a taster day run for about 80 Year 11 students from across the Borough and involves them producing a play-in-a-day inspired by the five-minute text. It is ostensibly about career pathways for students about to leave school, but it also doubles up as a fascinating way of test-driving early ideas with their target audience.
In allowing the students free reign to create their own performance inspired by the text and not restricted by it, it allows a writer access to the imaginations of groups of young people who may be very different to oneself. It’s an extraordinary way of blowing open an idea and (although they might not realise it) allowing the young people it is for and about to make their own mark on the play at a formative stage. But it’s also like walking into a room full of living breathing characters from the play, because of course Half Moon want plays about East London teenagers, so the target audience and characters are one and the same. I suppose it is a form of experiential or collaborative research.

Mehndi Night

Developing Mehndi Night at Mulberry School with Bengali teenage girls took the principles of Careers In Theatre and applied them over a much longer period. A group of ten 15-year-old girls met once a week after school from January to August with me and our director Jools Voce. The luxury of time in this case meant I was able to take my cue from the group in a much more meaningful way, and to ask them what they’d like me to write a play about for them. In this sense I was very much “their” writer; we’d identify broad themes that interest them, Jools would devise all sorts of imaginative exercises to generate material along this theme, I’d then go away and shape their ideas into a rough story outline or sketch, then bring them back and read through them. We’d hear their criticisms and suggestions for changes, and repeat the process until we’d settled on one idea that everyone was equally excited about.

This became a project about identity and self-representation for the girls. As a group they were fully aware that they did not feature much in the mainstream media, and early on we encouraged them to take the opportunity of performing in Edinburgh as a way of speaking to a mainstream adult audience about themselves and their experiences. Of all the plays I’ve written, it’s the one I’m most proud of. It was certainly the most rewarding. It was such a privilege to be allowed into those kids lives and culture with such honesty and generosity of spirit. I don’t know what you’d call it as a form of research, perhaps a sociologist would call it ethnographic, but I can tell you it’s certainly the most fun, and feels effortless once it’s underway.
The story we came up with revolves around a mehndi party, a traditional Bengali celebration the night before a wedding, roughly the equivalent of a hen night. Half way through the festivities there’s a knock at the door and a long-lost sister turns up, who had been banished from the family four year previously for becoming a rapper. Her arrival splits the group in half and the rest of the play looks at whether the family will allow her to come back, and the various perspectives for and against what she did. Within this simple structure we managed to look at an array of issues facing third-generation Muslim girls in the modern world — with a level of detail and emotional truth that I could never have accessed working alone.

After one particularly electrifying performance of the play, the girls were clearing up and a rather earnest journalist came up to them and started grilling them about: what is it you’re actually saying here? That women should be in the home? That they should or shouldn’t perform? They debated the point with him for a while, but clearly still suspicious, he asked them if this was their work or if someone had written it for them. And about five of them in this big group just turned to him and said: “No, we wrote it.”

And that’s the greatest compliment they could have given me.

Fin Kennedy is an award-winning playwright, www.finkennedy.co.uk. A slightly longer version of this article was given as a paper at the Between Fact and Fiction Conference, Birmingham University, 5th September 2007

Cross-fertilization between academics and practitioners

Interestingly, however, from the perspective of the university drama department, links between professional practice and academic research have perhaps never been tighter. At one level, the introduction of post-graduate ‘practice-based’, ‘practice-led’ or ‘practice-as’ research has realigned modes of knowledge production, nudging drama and theatre studies away from philology and closer to embodied epistemologies of performance. On another level, the influx of professionally recognized practitioners holding lectureship positions speaks of a belief that ‘practical work’ or the knowledge gained by ‘practical experience’ should infiltrate and enhance research departments.

The recent increase in funded appointments such as ‘Artist in Residence’ or ‘Creative Fellow’ also indicates a sanctioned interest in dialogue between individuals traditionally separated by institutional structures. I myself am the lovechild – or bastard offspring, if you prefer – of a ‘theatre-practice’ meets ‘theatre-research’ embrace: as an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Holder, I ‘collaborate’ with the University of Leeds and West Yorkshire Playhouse in the research and writing of my PhD thesis on Dramaturgy and Literary Management.

In contrast to the demand for practitioners within universities, the movement of theatre studies lecturers into professional theatre-making cultures does not seem to possess an equivalent momentum. I am not, of course, claiming that theatre-making cultures have imposed an embargo on the transference of ideas and individuals across their borders. Individuals based within a university context do make inroads into the profession in a professional capacity – as writers, directors, designers, etc. But, in contrast to the qualities of professional experience celebrated by universities, to what extent are these individuals’ professorial credentials recognized or valued within theatre?

A myriad of over-determining conditions – chaotic funding structures; what David Edgar calls “hurly-burly careerism” and the long shadow of cultural heritage – mutually reinforce a working environment which leaves little space for the efforts of critical enquiry, comparative study and contextualization and, on occasion, challenges to the form, content and reception of theatre works produced. Scholarly endeavour is often construed by theatre-makers as uncooperative or hostile to the successes of a theatre event and is accordingly dismissed as risible or self-indulgent. To quote Harold Pinter: “We have a really profound establishment here… with profound traditions, and one of the essential elements of those traditions is mockery of the artistic or intellectually curious”.

A scholar in the theatre

If the central concerns of academia are commonly characterised as at best superfluous and at worst detrimental to the activity of theatre-making, then the potential roles for ‘a scholar in the theatre’ – the original title suggested for my AHRC Studentship – seem marginal when contrasted with those available for a practitioner in the university.

But what of this ‘practice’ that is so welcomed and encouraged by the university? All forms of practice? Or practice which lies beyond anything as pedestrian as the theatrical mainstream? The present disparity in the apparent receptivity of the two institutions may be related to and illustrated further by another contradiction within their recent histories. Over the past quarter of a century, the establishment of literary management departments within regional producing theatres has seemingly confirmed and consolidated the centrality of the playwright within national theatre culture. Over the same time period, however, academic interest in plays and playwrights as objects of study has markedly declined.

This is perfectly captured by Martin Crimp’s seventeen scenarios for the theatre, Attempts on Her Life. The kind of theatre that ‘intellectuals’ are interested in is the kind of theatre that ‘Anne’ offers: “theatre – that’s right - for a world in which theatre itself has died. Instead of the outmoded conventions of dialogue and so-called characters lumbering towards the embarrassing dénouements of the theatre, Anne is offering us a pure dialogue of objects…”

Drama and theatre departments today place as much emphasis on considerations of performance – text-based or otherwise – as they do on text – play-based or otherwise. A paradigm shift, characterized by a “renewed attention to the materiality of performance… and renewed challenge to the dominance of the text” was initiated in the 1970s by feminist, semiotic and cultural materialist critiques and vivified in the 1980s and 1990s by a poststructuralist breeze. The Derridean-derived confrontation with the, specifically, dramatic realist text resulted in revisionist definitions which sought to displace the ‘theological stage’ and also its authority, the “author-creator who controls and keeps watch over language and meaning”.

The rubric of performance was increasingly invoked as a conceptual strategy by which to, as Michael van den Heuvel has it, “destabilize and decentre conventional, text-orientated drama”. The poor old monologic, logocentric, ‘enclosed works’ of dramatic realism paled against the “ludic, liminal, liberating” glare of “sophisticated conceptual themata… abstract formal arrangements… compelling visual surfaces and stunning theatrical appeal”. Over the past 25 years, text, once the omnipotent purveyor of meaning, has been demoted to “just one element in the scenography and general ‘performance writing’ of theatre”. As an object of academic study, the status of ‘live event’ has superseded that of ‘literary object’.

Over a similar time period professional theatre – the sites of performance – has dedicated an unprecedented level of debate, organized strategy and resources towards the cultivation of new – specifically play-based, and often realist - dramatic texts. The demand for and commitment to new plays and new playwrights has given rise to a new professional tier within theatre companies and institutions: literary management.

Onward march of the literary managers

At their inception in the late seventies and early eighties, literary managers were charged primarily with the provision of a script-reading service: solicited and unsolicited scripts were to be read and reported on and any that might suit the theatre would be passed on to the Artistic and Associate Directors. In 1999 however, a review of the English Regional Producing Houses, commissioned by the Arts Council, identified that:

Across the creative industries new writing is the key to investment and productivity. It is the primary process through which ideas are ordered as the basis for performance… New talent needs to be nurtured by increasing the resources available to commission and develop work which may not make it all the way to the stage.

The findings of the Boyden report proposed that £25 million be invested in regional producing theatres. A renewed focus upon the development of New Writing across the regions saw more literary management departments placing greater emphasis upon the provision of developmental support for emerging playwrights. Schemes and programmes designed to ‘nurture’ the new writer became a central focus; Scratch Nights, one-off or weekly workshops, structured year-long writers’ groups, out-reach placements, festivals, competitions, attachments: a veritable feast of access points were created in the name of the writer.

In the professional theatre, the figure of the literary manager would seem to represent a stronghold for the literary text; a visible marker of the professional theatre’s commitment to New Writing. Over the past 25 years, the primacy of the playwright’s text has waned in the university, waxed in the theatre.

What sort of writing is New Writing?

But it is this conclusion I wish to interrogate a little. Whilst seemingly central to New Writing development cultures, where and how have the play and its playwright been positioned within and by writer development schemes? Where do emerging playwrights sit within the matrix of existing power relations exercised by directors, artistic directors and literary managers? What sort of theatre is being relentlessly written, by whom and for whom, and what are the material and ideological constraints – textual fetters, if you will – placed upon writers by the exigencies of the ‘creative industry’ within which they write? Here are four tentative conclusions drawn from observing and researching development programmes aimed at new and emerging writers across the country.

Perhaps the most banal point to identify, but interesting in as much as it veers from the academic norm, is the emphasis placed upon story-telling via the conduits of character, dialogue and plot, or structure. Character drives structure, and structure informs character. Given the format of development programmes and the nature of individuals who participate in them, this emphasis seems natural. Most development programmes are taught as a weekly series of workshops or meetings; those who take part in them, by dint of being ‘new’, are either young, inexperienced in writing for theatre, or both.

Character, dialogue and structure are the most easily identifiable formal organising principles of dramatic literature and are arguably the elements of craft which can most easily be codified and taught. In addition, the accepted mantra for new writers is ‘write what you know’: ‘realist’ doctrines tend to be the closest and most graspable form of dramatic expression for writers just learning their craft. Moreover, from a pragmatic perspective, character, dialogue and plot are the ‘essential ingredients’ of all television, most film and a lot of theatre. Learning how to write and manipulate these elements successfully grants a wider spectrum of professional opportunity.

Secondly, development schemes uphold the notion that the writer and their words sit at the centre of a theatre-making process, reinforcing the idea that actors, designers and directors primarily ‘serve the text’. It’s as if Derrida never happened! Development schemes develop text: the means by which ‘developed’ work is presented is usually in the form of a rehearsed reading, a ‘production without décor’ organized specifically so that the playwright may ‘hear’ his or her play and witness the effect of ‘their words’ upon an audience. Theatrical intervention is limited or denied, partly due to budget, but also so as to focus solely on the text and its impact. The driving motor of the pieces presented has to be the words, if only because all other theatrical flesh has been stripped back. More attention is now beginning to be focused upon the role of a writer within devising processes, or, as in Scotland, within the creation of ‘location theatre’, but in many quarters, the writer as the ‘beating heart’ or ‘engine’ of the creative endeavour is still dogma.

This seeming authority over production however, is belied by two further observations. Development schemes sit uneasily within the competing demands placed upon producing theatres. The individuals that organise and lead them are constantly caught in a vexed position between innovation and pragmatism. A theatre’s budget for New Writing, combined with the size, availability and suitability of their spaces over-determine both the nature of the plays that will see production and the means by which they will be produced. This is the case even at dedicated New Writing houses.

Amongst playwrights in development at the Royal Court, for example, it is common knowledge that should you want a chance of production – if you wish to make your play the most attractive option – then you write your play as a two-hander with one set. Even allowing for a misconception on the part of those playwrights I’ve spoken to, this articulation of perceived priorities speaks of a distorting influence upon the imagination of aspirant writers.

Lastly, development cultures operate rhetorical strategies which elide the power structures behind them. Each of the above constraints are eclipsed by a rhetoric of ‘opportunity’, ‘access’, ‘development’, even terms like ‘emerging’ itself. This is supplemented by a larger vocabulary describing desirable voices: voices that possess a ‘vitality’, an ‘energy’, a ‘rawness’ are good, as is an individual who displays, in the words of one literary manager, a “kind of urgency, a passion, a depth, a kind of truth to their voice as a playwright”. Leaden, clunking, derivative material is apparently not so highly valued. The language deployed by New Writing cultures is disingenuous in its attempt to present the theatrical ladder as a neutral meritocracy, not least because the language celebrates a cult of the new which is in fact a cult of the young. From my observations, it seems clear that power is concentrated in the hands of directors and Artistic Directors; playwrights possess as much agency as they are granted.

Canons and conclusions

This has far-reaching and troubling implications. At their inception, development cultures were allied specifically with the desire to “empower particular constituencies of writers and [were] to do with wider political issues of audience access and participation”. A number of programmes focused on developing writing from under-represented groups have since been created, but there is a shortfall between the work developed and the work produced by these writers. Playwright Winsome Pinnock has observed, as one example, that “the theatre is director-led, and it is a director’s passionate response to a play that determines whether or not it will be produced Because there are so few black directors with permanent places at theatre, plays by black playwrights are often just not picked up because there is no one to respond to their subject matter.”

The rhetoric of New Writing seems also to efface any trace of aesthetic or ideological allegiance. Referring specifically to New Writing houses in London, it is surprising that the saturation of venues has not led more theatres to publicly articulate a house policy or identity. The common opinion amongst literary managers seems to be that if you can “pigeon-hole a theatre, then it is in trouble”. If this is so, and theatres take pains to stress that they are simply looking to develop the ‘best’ plays from the ‘most exciting’ writers, then why is it so easy for theatre professionals to identify a ‘Royal Court play’, a ‘Soho play’, or a ‘Bush play’?

Mary Luckhurst has already sounded the call to academic researchers: “If the dramatic canon is formed largely on the basis of who and what gets performed… then there can be little that is more political than the selection of plays for a repertoire. But who is involved in the selection? Why do they choose certain plays and not others? What is the agenda of the theatre involved? What underlying state agenda might affect the choices made?”. Universities’ diffidence towards plays and playwrights has resulted in a relative indifference towards play development cultures; to the detriment, I would argue, of both academia and theatre.

One of the casualties of the mutual suspicion between contexts is that other component of my PhD: Dramaturgy. I mention this because, ironically, dramaturgical practice presents itself as a “space where academic and professional theatre makers (too often opposed to one another) can meet and exchange energies”. In the UK particularly, dramaturgy sits at the apex of a paradox; its core concerns draw upon and conflate structures of thought and action traditionally annexed off by academic and professional contexts. The term ‘dramaturgy’ and its agent, the ‘dramaturg’, has in recent years gained currency within New Writing cultures but in a limited sense which elides its critical contribution to artistic practice.

Dramaturgy is an opportunity to promote contextual and critical enquiry into both the process and the ‘product’ of theatre-making, an enquiry which is itself a self-reflexive and contextualised endeavour. The specificity of a dramaturgical contribution - over and above its value as a cogent articulation and application of dramatic craft - is, I believe, its latent capacity to look both at and beyond theatre and, synthesizing the observations made from this vantage point, to encourage re-evaluations of both theatre-making and the theatre event made.

A sustained analysis of theatre events made, paying particular attention to theatre-making processes prescribed by New Writing, is lacking from academic and professional contexts today. The questions to be asked of contemporary theatre practice should be generated by direct engagement with and sustained reflection upon theatre practice and theory. Unfortunately, at present, the blind spots of both theatre and academia are precluding important questions being asked. If there is a role for a dramaturg in the theatre today, then surely this is it.

Jacqueline Bolton is currently undertaking an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Studentship, studying Dramaturgy and Literary Management at the University of Leeds in conjunction with West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Books and Articles

Gottlieb, Vera and Colin Chambers, eds. Theatre in a Cool Climate. Oxford: Amber Lane Press, 1999.

Jonas, Susan, Geoff Proehl and Michael Lupu, ed. Dramaturgy in American Theatre: A Sourcebook. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1997.

Jurs-Munby, Karen. Introduction to Postdramatic Theatre by Hans-Thies Lehmann. London: Routledge, 2006.

Luckhurst, Mary. Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Vanden Heuvel, Michael. “Complementary Spaces: Realism, Performance and a New Dialogics of Theatre.” Theatre Journal 44, (1992).

Plays

Crimp, Martin. Attempts on her Life. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.

Reports

Peter Boyden Associates. Roles and Functions of the English Regional Producing Theatres – Final Report. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1999.

Conferences/Meetings/Interviews

Edgar, David. Keynote speech. ‘Next Stages: Dramaturgy and Beyond, Writers and their Careers’, organised by Manchester Metropolitan University in conjunction with North West Playwrights, Manchester, 29th-31st March, 2007.

‘Old Vic, New Voices: Meet the Literary Managers’. Old Vic, 16th October, 2006.

The Literalists

Of course, we are all familiar with the literalists. This label refers to the Great British tradition of naturalism and social realism. Its grandparent is George Bernard Shaw and its fathers are John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. It’s a theatre style that Scottish playwright David Greig calls “English realism”.

This new writing genre, which has thrived in subsidised theatres for the past 50 years, shows the nation to itself. It voices debates and deals in issues. Its stories are linear and based firmly on a recognisable social context. Its dialogues are convincing and down-to-earth. It is distrustful of metaphor and suspicious of fancy foreign work, which is usually characterised as effete, abstract and humorless. By contrast, English realism is muscular, earthy and wry. With English realism, concludes Greig, “the real world is brought into the theatre and plonked on stage like a familiar old sofa”.

You can see his point. Despite the deluge of the new, most new work is written in this familiar English tradition. And there’s a real failure of theatrical imagination at the heart of the whole literalist endeavour.

Most new plays are small in every respect: cast, space and theatrical ambition. Soapy dramas for couch potatoes. Whether they are about “me and my mates”, teen angst or underclass violence, they normally squat on territory that is already known — there’s little sense of exploration, or experiment, or excitement. Boundaries remain unbreached; fantasy is grounded by the twin ballast of naturalism and social realism. And while political theatre has experienced a boom in the wake of 9/11, it too usually remains chained to the literalist tradition. Think verbatim drama, think docudrama — theatre’s answer to reality tv. As ever, in this genre, what you see is what you get. Indeed, often what you see is all there is.

The Metaphysicals

The metaphysical wing is less familiar. It’s a good label because it calls to mind the tradition of metaphysical poetry, which was championed by TS Eliot in between the wars, and was the subject of a highly influential book of collected poems, edited by Helen Gardner and originally published in 1957, the year after the premiere of Look Back in Anger. In her introduction to these 17th-century poets, Gardner stresses their wit, their conceits and their imagination, and argues that they typically expressed “deep thoughts in common language” and “extraordinary thoughts in ordinary situations” (24).

She also contrasts the “strenuous” and “masculine” style of playwright and poet Ben Jonson with the more elaborate conceits of the true metaphysicals, such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell (18-19), who (presumably) are more “effete” and “feminine”. Donne, of course, was a “great frequenter of plays”, and Shakespeare — with his mix of wild imagination, philosophical speculation, ghosts, history and social realism — can easily be seen as the grand old man of the metaphysical tradition.

But if this label doesn’t appeal, maybe another would serve equally well. Playwright Anthony Neilson suggests “psychoabsurdism”, yet absurdism would do equally well. Or surrealism; or monsterism; or just plain non-naturalism. The labels matter a lot less than the work itself.

Crimp’s Attempts

On the Encore Theatre Magazine website, the battle between these two great traditions is joined over Katie Mitchell’s current revival of Martin Crimp’s 1997 play, Attempts on Her Life. If ever there was an anti-naturalistic play, it’s this one. With its open text, and disregard for the usual literalistic markers of a naturalist play (characters, scenes, dialogue and plot), the piece positively heaves with potential for imaginative stagings. And, in Mitchell’s new version, it comes across as a phantasmagoria of video effects, fast-paced acting and visual bravura. It is theatrical theatre par excellence. You couldn’t make a film of it.

Of course, the National — so frequently caricatured as a staid old institution — has, under the artistic directorship of Nicholas Hytner, contributed immensely to the recent consolidation of the metaphysical tradition: think of Mitchell’s Waves (2007). Think also of Jerry Springer: the Opera (2003). And of associate Tom Morris’s championing of innovative theatre companies such as Shunt, Kneehigh, Punchdrunk and Improbable, all of whom have been welcomed into the National fold.

In a stark illustration of how the National has turned the tables on other so-called cutting-edge theatres, it is useful to compare two versions of Chekhov’s The Seagull. At the National in 2006, Crimp and Mitchell’s version was fast, innovative and shocking; at the Royal Court in 2007, Ian Rickson’s was slow, cliched and traditional. One made you sit up; the other made you yawn.

New Arrivals

With the arrival of Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court in 2007, things look set to change. That theatre, once the epitome of forward-looking excellence, has recently begun to look lame. In 2006, its sell-out show was Rock ’N’ Roll by Tom Stoppard, a fine play but hardly innovative or contemporary; in the same year, Tanika Gupta’s Sugar Mummies also sold out, despite the fact that critics saw it as clichéd and soapy.

At first glance, Cooke has begun well. His first mainstage show, the National Theatre of Scotland’s revival of Anthony Neilson’s 2004 play, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, is a slap in the face of literalism. And his immediate plans, to stage Crimp’s translation of Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, and to transform the theatre space to accommodate Mike Bartlett’s My Child, sound very promising.

Other examples of regime change, at the Bush and the Soho, also look encouraging. Lisa Goldman, who began work as the new head of the Soho in 2007, has programmed Philip Ridley’s Leaves of Glass as her first play, and then followed this up with two other plays that sound as if they have their fingers on the pulse of the contemporary: The Christ of Coldharbour Lane by Oladipo Agboluaje and Baghdad Wedding by Iraqi writer Hassan Abdulrazzak.

At the Bush, Josie Rourke has taken over from Mike Bradwell, and promises not only to continue this venue’s fine tradition of innovative new work, but also to head the search for a bigger theatre space. For some years now the Bush has been aching to cast off its fringe status, and become an off-West End venue (in size if not location). Finally, David Lan’s use of his newly refurbished Young Vic theatre has also been experimental. By giving room to Dennis Kelly’s provocative and formally exciting Love and Money and to Debbie Ticker Green’s Generations, in Sacha Wares thrilling production, he has shown his support for new writers. In the Big Brecht Fest, he has staged the German master’s shorts in translations by Rory Bremner and Martin Crimp, by directors such as Katie Mitchell and Joe Hill-Gibbins.

But what about other writers? Five years after picking a title, and issuing a manifesto, the Monsterists — a group of playwrights, including Roy Williams, Richard Bean and Ryan Craig, dedicated to staging large-scale work — continue to make their presence felt. In 2006, one of their number, David Eldridge, had his play, Market Boy, staged on the massive Olivier space at the National, and Moira Buffini’s Dinner had a respectable West End run at the Wyndham’s three years before that. In the playtext, Buffini notes that her revenge fantasy is set in an abstract space “surrounded by darkness”. Good to see a metaphysical play in the West End.

Elsewhere, it is also cheering to note the presence of metaphysical elements in other recent work. As ever, the market leader is Caryl Churchill. Her 2006 play, Drunk Enough To Say I Love You?, was hammered by some of the critics, but its text is an imaginative account of postwar global politics mercifully free of any verbatim claptrap. Mark Ravenhill’s pool (no water) and Product (2006, 2005) both show distinctly Crimpian influences. Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer (National, 2006) had an onstage Lucifer, and the Scarecrow in Marina Carr’s Woman and Scarecrow (Royal Court, 2006) was the grim reaper. Playwrights such as Georgia Fitch (Adrenaline… Heart) and Kay Adshead (Bones) are at their best when their poetry fractures the form of their plays.

Conclusion

Whether the current grapple between metaphysicals and literalists results in better new plays is as yet uncertain, but it will have done its work if it concentrates minds on that often neglected side of theatre-making: aesthetics.
As Dominic Dromgoole, who is championing new work as well as that of the bard at Shakespeare’s Globe, says: “At this peculiar moment when we are all being asked to club together yet again and commit murder in the name of some gang we do not subscribe to and detest, to weaken the strength of another gang we loathe just as heartily, now seems as good a moment as any to re-attest the importance of the individual aesthetic.” (306)

Aleks Sierz is Visiting Research Fellow, Rose Bruford College.
April 2007

References

Anon, ‘The Battle Commences’, Encore Theatre Magazine, www.encoretheatremagazine.co.uk/?p=66, 18 March 2007.

Dromgoole, Dominic, The Full Room: An A-Z of Contemporary Playwriting, rev edn, London: Methuen, 2002.

Gardner, Helen (ed), The Metaphysical Poets, rev edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

Greig, David, ‘A Tyrant for All Time’, Guardian, 28 April 2003.