Tag: GCSE

Littlewood’s Actor Training – The Composite Mind

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was Littlewood’s approach to training actors?

NH: In the commercial theatre at the time you went off as an actor and did your actors’ training; then you would finish your actors’ training; then you would act; then you get your script, you would learn your part then you would perform your roles. In contrast, Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still! So always, in those very early years up to the mid-1950s, they were still doing daily movement training; vocal training; improvising; doing Stanislavski exercises. She’s doing things that would always keep the actors on their toes. Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space. What that means in terms of weight, flow, speed, rhythm. Equally vocally: having a dexterous voice and being able to manipulate that. Not just coming on stage doing your lines and off you go. Instead her actors were really grounded, fully thinking, creative people. Not only training them as individual actors but also instilling a belief in collaboration. She had this phrase ‘the composite mind’ – I think it is an important one. The importance of collaboration: that theatre is something that is done together. You needed to learn that; you needed to learn that as an ensemble. The ensemble wasn’t something in the British theatre tradition at the time, you had a company and you hired your actors for that particular production. Companies didn’t work in that ensemble way, in the way that Littlewood wanted them to do: training the actors.

PC: Is there a pinpoint moment when she discovered Stanislavski in particular and Laban?

NH: Really early!

PC: Before Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood’s first English translation of 1937?

NH: I don’t think that it was pre-that translation but she was certainly using it in the 1940s. I have seen some of her early notebooks and she is absolutely ripping off An Actor Prepares! Doing workshop notes of things that she is going to do and giving lectures on Stanislavski to people who turn up to do her sessions. So she would run this quite ad-hoc training thing.

PC: I think the dates of those Hapgood translations offer real insight into how advanced Littlewood’s training methods were. Benedetti’s introduction to the most recent translations explains how the staggered translation of Stanislavski’s writing led to massive misunderstanding of his theories on training.

Hapgood’s Stanislavski translation – dates of publication:

An Actor Prepares – 1937

Building a Character – 1950

Creating a Role – 1961

The first book covers the first year of Stanislavski’s proposed course and talks about the more psychological and cerebral methods, whereas the second and third bring have an emphasis on physical action. The circumstance of publication, the growth of the American Method, as well as a simple neglect of those last two texts led many to overplay the idea of Stanislavski as cerebral and psychological in approach rather than rooted in the physical. So for Littlewood to combine the psychological strategies of An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative. This combination has now become common place with actor training and the development of ‘physical theatre’.

NH: Yes this three-pronged approach of Stanislavski, Laban and Meyerhold is innovative and influential. You wouldn’t think that they had a relationship with each other but they absolutely do in Littlewood’s practice.

Summary

  • Littlewood believed that you always kept training and that was a big thing that distinguished her from other directors at the time and still!
  • Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares influenced Littlewood’s approach to training and rehearsal.
  • Laban was hugely influential on Littlewood. That sense of wanting the actors to constantly be thinking about how they move their bodies in space.
  • Meyerhold’s Biomechanics also influenced her work on physicality and movement.
  • Littlewood’s combination of the psychological strategies in An Actor Prepares with Laban and Meyerhold’s physical approaches was truly innovative.

Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and the Move to Theatre Royal, Stratford East

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 5

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Theatrical style
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

 PC: I know that she enjoyed touring, did this inform her relationship with space? Did they always have ambitions to be in one space?

NH: They were touring when Theatre Workshop formed in 1945 and they toured until the end of 1952. The ambition was always to try and reach this working class audience that would completely get what they were doing but it never really happened. It happened sometimes, but mostly not. They’re touring little theatres around the Lake District and then going up to Scotland, mainly travelling around the north. The decision to move to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East was really because they were poverty stricken. They were doing one night stands left, right and centre and not able to make a living; they were living this really hand to mouth existence. The opportunity at the Theatre Royal, Stratford came up and I’m not sure what the exact arrangements were but the theatre manager, Gerry Raffles, who was her partner by that stage led the move. But the company was reluctant as they saw it as a sell out, particularly Ewan MacColl and he didn’t go with them to Stratford East. He refused and as one of the founders of the company that was a big deal. His view was that the move to London would mean that they would then be courting the critics; they’d be really small fish in a big pond, having to play the game of the commercial theatre world. He believed they wouldn’t be reaching the broad working class audience that he was really keen to try and attract. The counter argument that Littlewood presented was that Stratford East is a working class community, so rather than going out and trying to reach those communities, those people, those audiences, let’s try and work within a community. She wanted to get that local working class community into that space – the continuous loop. They did a lot of work to try and achieve that: they made lots of connections with trade union organisations: getting write ups in the local newspapers; commissioned a local journalist, Anthony Nicholson to write about the local railway industry which was a big employer in the area, a play called Van Call. So, in terms of the space, that was the journey if you like.

PC: Did they venture out much during that time in Stratford East, back to the job centre queues?

NH: No not until that shift back to the work at the end in the late 1960s and early 70s and even then it was more about animating communities through fairs and fun palaces rather than political activism in the traditional sense.

PC: So how did they get people into this new theatre out in East London?

NH: There was a distinct body of work that was done around the classics including her productions of Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson. Again that was about responding to what was going on at the time in terms of the productions of Shakespeare; it was the time of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. All very much about these heroic leading figures, about the beauty of the verse being very predominant. She wanted to bring the social guts back to Shakespeare and did these amazing productions: Richard II, Edward II, she did Arden of Faversham: a little known Renaissance play. Influenced by Adophe Appia, they were very stark visually: stark, plains of light and ramps. It was about bringing the social world of Shakespeare into play; it was about political intrigue; it was about power and who has power, who doesn’t have power; how do people lose their humanity in the search for power. It was about coming out of the Second World War and responding to those big political ideas. Doing Macbeth, for Littlewood, becomes even more pertinent at the time. But she sees all these very glossy, glamorous productions of Shakespeare and thinks: “No that’s not it! Absolutely no! That is not what this is!” She was interested in the guts the gore and personal, political ambitions. She wanted to get that social world in with the Shakespearean productions that she did. Then there was another shift: she had got a good reputation for putting on these really imaginative and creative and vibrant theatrical pieces. So writers started sending her unsolicited scripts, she got sent 19 year old Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and she got sent Brendan Behan’s The Hostage and The Quare Fellow and then local writers as well – You Won’t Always Be On Top was by Henry Chapman an actor who had started to do a bit with Theatre Workshop. It evolves, if you like, rather than there being a conscious decision to say I’m now going to do my Shakespeare. It just evolves.

Summary

  • The decision to move to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East was really because they were poverty stricken.
  • The company was reluctant as they saw moving to London as a sell out, particularly Ewan MacColl and he didn’t go with them to Stratford East.
  • Stratford East was a working class community, so rather than going out and trying to reach those communities, those people, those audiences, Littlewood wanted to try and work within a community.
  • She wanted to bring the social guts back to Shakespeare and did these amazing productions influenced by Adophe Appia, they were very stark visually.
  • Writers started sending Littlewood unsolicited scripts: she got sent 19 year old Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and she got sent Brendan Behan’s The Hostage.

Littlewood’s Approaches to Texts and Devising

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 4

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Social, cultural, political and historical context

PC: Is there a clear difference in her work with text compared to her devised pieces?

NH: Yes. The form was always about making it work with the text, so whatever the text required was the form that was made. Or in terms of the more improvised pieces like Oh What a Lovely War or earlier plays like John Bullion it was about the best relationship between the different elements of production. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage which I think is a really lovely way of talking about that work. She constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact: put that next to that, what does that do? Try it again here, what does that do?

PC: I know that Littlewood was very playful with her actors: was her experimentation with form rooted solely in her playfulness or was it rooted in a research and understanding of the theatre?

NH: I think it changes given the different contexts she was working in.

  • In the beginning the impetus was political
  • then it moved through to wanting to make really vivid theatrical imagery
  • then the idea of the authentic working class voice becomes more important (A Taste of Honey, You Won’t Always Be On Top and Brendan Behan’s plays)
  • Then she shifts into wanting to be much more improvisational, breaking down that relationship between the auditorium and the stage space with interruptions and humour to develop a relationship with the audience.
  • Then after Oh What a Lovely War she gets completely bored with theatre and theatre spaces full stop and she starts doing community projects for kids and makes plans for this big cultural centre – the Fun Palace. This idea lives on in the Fun Palace events run across the world at the start of October led by co-directors Stella Duffy and Sarah-Jane Rawlings.

So yes there is definitely the sense of her anarchic spirit driving these shifts but it is also about her ever growing knowledge of the theatre that never allowed her work to stay still.

Summary

  • Littlewood constantly reordered scenes making something like Oh What A Lovely War, to see what was going to have the most impact. Derek Paget uses a term collision montage.
  • Littlewood’s anarchic spirit drove shifts in her approach but changes always came about with her ever growing knowledge of the theatre.

 

Littlewood’s Continuous Loop and the Authentic Voice

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 3

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Influence
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing
  • Theatrical style
  • Innovations
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice

PC: What was her existence during the Second World War? Did she continue making theatre?

NH: She was making a living by doing lots of radio. There is an early period when she went to Manchester because she’d met a guy called Archie Harding at RADA. He’d come and examined a verse speaking competition that she’d won. So she went off to search for this guy and he offered her work at the BBC. This led to her doing quite a few documentary pieces; most famously a piece called The Classic Soil. She’d go out, again you can see real links with the theatre, she’d go out and interview ordinary people in their ordinary working or living environments and just talk to them. She had a big thing about wanting to hear the authentic working class voice.

PC: How common was the documentary style that presented the authentic working class voice?

NH: Not common at all; it was a really new thing; it was again with Ewan MacColl. We mustn’t underestimate the importance of him in that early period. The two of them were totally in cahoots and developing things. It is worth looking up The Classic Soil.

PC: This search for an authentic voice and specifically an authentic working class voice in Joan Littlewood’s work, along with Erwin Piscator’s Living Newspaper technique and Peter Cheeseman’s Stoke documentaries, are seen as early examples of what has become known as verbatim theatre. Joan’s legacy can be seen in Alecky Blythe’s Little Revolution or Dan Murphy’s new play Carry on Jaywick. Are there examples in her theatre work that were influenced by the radio documentary form?

NH: Yeah, I think definitely that idea of presenting the authentic voice is a root of modern verbatim theatre. She felt the authentic working class voice wasn’t being heard on the British stages at that time so it became really important to her. A good example is a play called You Won’t Always Be On Top (Henry Chapman), which was set on a building site. It was one of the plays that she did in the 1950s in which she collaborated very closely with the writer and the script was evolving in rehearsals, which happened a lot with her work. She took all the performers off to a building site and they had to learn how to build a wall because they had to build one in the production every night. She had this incredible replica of a building site on stage. But more important than the visual authenticity, was the focus on patterns in the voice. Joan wanted to have that very real quality of back and forth banter that happens in lots of contexts, but this building site in particular. I think that idea of trying to document and record and authenticate the voice does have a line through to verbatim theatre today.

PC: In terms of records of those things. Is there the play text?

NH: Yes there is the play text of You Won’t Always Be On Top and there are some great photographic images as well. Another is The Long Shift, a play she wrote with Gerry Raffles, who became her partner.

the-long-shiftCourtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive Collection.

It is about miners down a mine shaft so you see that attempt at visual authenticity there.

This is the set for You Won’t Always Be On Top.

you-wont-always-be-on-topCourtesy of Theatre Royal Stratford East Archive Collection.

You can see she is trying to create a truthful recreation, a very naturalistic looking environment.

PC: She is not usually associated with that style of work.

NH: No but it was a major part of what she did. I think that is one of the things that is really interesting about her: there is no set style. She believed that theatre should always be organic, made in the moment.

PC: The authentic voice seems to be an important debate at the moment, in the theatre and broader society. Theatre is accused of being too London centric, whilst the country, post-EU Referendum, as a whole is suffering a disconnect with working class people, particularly illuminated by the Labour Party’s current identity crisis. So a hypothetical question: How might Joan Littlewood respond to modern Britain in terms of creating her theatre?

NH: She referred to the idea of the continuous loop between the theatre, the audience and the local community. So I think it would be interesting to think about what the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, has become. When Littlewood was there it was a staunchly working class environment predominantly. It is now an incredibly multi-ethnic community and the theatre has evolved to reflect that community. Theatre today, like in Littlewood’s day, is predominantly a white middle class pursuit but at Theatre Royal, Stratford East it absolutely isn’t. It is one of the most diverse audiences and I think that is because they work with that ethos of the continuous loop. You have to go out into the community, find out about the people, who the people are, what their narratives are, what the voices are, what the stories are that they want telling. Then you go back into your theatres and you make that work, you commission it, you make it.

Summary

  • Ewan MacColl was an important part of Joan Littlewood’s life and career in that early period. We mustn’t underestimate the importance of him.
  • Littlewood had a big thing about wanting to hear the authentic working class voice. She’d go out and interview ordinary people in their ordinary working or living environments and just talk to them.
  • The idea of trying to document and record and authenticate the voice does have a line through to verbatim theatre today.
  • You Won’t Always Be On Top and The Long Shift had a set that tried to be a truthful recreation, a very naturalistic looking environment.
  • The continuous loop: you have to go out into the community, find out about the people. Then you go back into your theatres and you make work in response to what you find.

Littlewood’s Context and her Political Convictions

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 2

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Influence
  • Theatrical style
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: What was most important to Littlewood at the start of her career?

NH: I think it was the political convictions. The fact that she became involved very early on in the 30s with Ewan MacColl and the Workers’ Theatre Movement. She had gone to RADA, left RADA because she couldn’t bare the sterile nature of the theatre that she was expected to do: the “anyone for tennis”, “cup and saucer” theatre which she abhorred. So she’s looking around saying look we’ve got some people here doing hunger marches, we’ve got a general strike, there are people that are in an extreme state of poverty and the theatre of the day is simply not addressing those social, economic, political issues. So that was the galvanising force initially: a real political impetus married with this passion for theatre and how theatre could be a voice for that experience. Theatre offered a way of approaching it, tackling it, investigating it in a way that would also be entertaining. Theatrically, at the same time, she is a real magpie, getting interested in the European theatre traditions. She is one of the early people in Britain, with Ewan MacColl, to start looking at Stanislavski, Piscator and Meyerhold and thinking – “These are great!” – whereas the British theatre tradition was still very much a text heavy theatre – the voice of the ac-TOR speaking. She thought no, there are these people that are doing these incredible theatrical pieces of work that she was really excited about. So I think that initial period was about trying to marry a theatre with a political impetus and an entertaining theatricality. But also about experimenting and how she could be a magpie and pick on all these influences she was seeing from abroad.

PC: What was her first stylistic response to that political impetus?

NH: Mainly that the theatre of her day was not how it should be. She was very much reacting against what she was seeing in the British theatre. As well as the influence of what she was seeing from European practitioners and seeing a theatrical vitality that was exciting for her. I think the first works from the 1930s were quite expressionistic, with short scenes, many of them very visual. You’ve also got this Agitprop movement, the Workers’ Theatre style of theatre, which is out on the streets, pulling on a cart and doing work to people in unemployment queues, queuing up for labour exchange and for jobs. These companies would pull up and do these short sharp topical sketches. They used a visual short hand: the bowler hat or the top hat for the posh blokes and the flat caps for the workers. They were doing scenes that were trying to show the workers’ experience back to them.

PC: She was involved in a few companies. Did she have a company then?

NH: Yeah, the Theatre Union and that worked until the beginning of the Second World War when people went off to fight and then they reformed after the war as Theatre Workshop in 1945.

Summary

  • People were doing hunger marches, there was a general strike, there are people that are in an extreme state of poverty and the theatre of the day was simply not addressing those social, economic, political issues.
  • Theatre offered a way of approaching it, tackling it, investigating it in a way that would also be entertaining.
  • She is one of the early people in Britain, with Ewan MacColl, to start looking at Stanislavski, Piscator and Meyerhold
  • Stylistically she was very much reacting against what she was seeing in the British theatre.

Introducing Joan Littlewood’s ideas

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Nadine Holdsworth: Part 1

Nadine Holdsworth is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Warwick. Her research has two distinct, but sometimes interconnected strands in Twentieth Century popular theatre practitioners and theatre and national identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She has worked particularly on Joan Littlewood and has written Joan Littlewood for the Routledge Performance Practitioners Series in 2006 and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre with Cambridge University Press in 2011 http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1107532043.

email: n.holdsworth@warwick.ac.uk


Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Social, cultural, political and historical context
  • Theatrical purpose
  • Innovations
  • Key collaborations with other artists

PC: There are only a few working on the historic and academic study of Joan Littlewood: yourself, Robert Leach, Wendy Richardson and her documentary series In the Company of Joan, Tom Cornford doing research into Theatre Workshop at Central, as well as, the archives at the British Library and Theatre Royal Stratford East. You are one of only a few voices in the academic community when it comes to Joan Littlewood. So why her? What drew you to Littlewood’s work?

NH: I was introduced to Theatre Workshop’s work early on. When I was at college I did a production of Oh What A Lovely War. I was 17 and that sparked my interest in her. That carried on when I was at university: I studied a few more texts; I did A Taste Of Honey (Shelagh Delaney). I was always really fascinated by her as a figure, I loved the fact that she was this incredibly feisty, maverick, free speaking, no nonsense figure. A woman working in a male dominated period. Women really struggled to be taken seriously and she was. I was interested in her and the fact that she swore, and she smoked, and she was a hard-drinker, and she got married, then she refused to marry, she didn’t have any children. She completely defied what women and femininity and women in theatre was at that time. So her as a figure. It was also about her representation of class that really got me interested. She was one of the first figures I came across who presented that authentic working class voice in a way that wasn’t taking the piss, that wasn’t belittling those figures in relation to the more dominant socially elevated characters. She was taking them seriously and honouring their experiences. You get it in Oh What A Lovely War with the soldiers in the trenches. Or that experience of those two women in A Taste Of Honey, living on the margins of life. They’re not seen as dumb or stupid, they’re taken seriously and their lives are taken seriously and represented seriously. And the sheer theatrical vibrancy of the work. It is very easy to forget how radical and ground-breaking that was at that time.

PC: You say it is easy to forget…

NH: It has been forgotten.

PC: It is criminal really. So how do we begin spreading the word? Oh What a Lovely War is often the way in with Joan Littlewood, but is it the best way?

NH: I think it is one of the best ways because Oh What A Lovely War provides a culmination of everything that has come before. You can see some of the very beginnings of her practice, that agitprop, Workers Theatre Movement style of theatre which is about a real political campaigning agenda (1934 onwards). So there is that element to it. There is also the elements that you find in her 1950s work, more social-realist, I think someone referred to it as magnified social realism – A Taste of Honey style. The trench scenes, for example, where the soldiers are just living out life, bantering, chatting to each other, reading stories and playing the harmonica. Then you’ve got the technological aspects which she was very interested in. She was influenced by Piscator early in her career and his ideas about how you can put the world on stage; how can you make that connection between that theatrical world and the real world; how can you bring that documentary material into a theatre space? So, the ticker tape, the slides, the photos and the statistics are part of that. You also have the popular theatre tradition in there with the Pierrot show.

Oh What A Lovely War (1963) blends and brings everything together she was experimenting with over the decades before that. So it is a pretty good way in I think. What becomes frustrating is when it’s the only thing that is looked at in relation to her because she is such an influential figure across the board.

Summary

  • Joan Littlewood was a woman working in a male dominated period. She was this incredibly feisty, maverick, free speaking, no nonsense figure.
  • She presented that authentic working class voice in a way that wasn’t taking the piss, that wasn’t belittling those figures in relation to the more dominant socially elevated characters.
  • The sheer theatrical vibrancy of the work was radical and ground-breaking at that time.
  • Oh What A Lovely War provides a culmination of everything that has come before: agitprop style, magnified social realism, technological aspects and the popular theatre tradition.

Still to come…

Littlewood’s Context and her Political Convictions

Littlewood’s Continuous Loop and the Authentic Voice

Littlewood: Approaches to Texts and Devising

Littlewood, Theatre Workshop and the Move to the Theatre Royal, Stratford East

Littlewood’s Shakespeare: Politics, Strong Women and Conventions

Littlewood and Design

The Composite Mind – Littlewood’s Actor Training

Littlewood: Music, Stanislavski and Laban in Performance

Littlewood and Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War: A Collision Montage

Everyone should study A Taste of Honey and Oh What A Lovely War in Drama.

Brecht’s Legacy and Influence

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 8

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Influence
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: What or who has Brecht influenced?

TK: Is it in the making of theatre or in the writing of plays that we’re looking for the influence or is it specifically in politics? I would say politically he has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence. Okay, the making of theatre perhaps we should leave to one side as we have talked a bit about that already. And we shouldn’t just be British in this, we should look more widely. In Germany, a generation of writers like Dürrenmatt, already in the 1950s and 60s, but then later figures like Heiner Müller above all, are obviously very explicitly influenced by Brecht. They tried to take Brecht a stage further, with greater or lesser success. I mean I am not a great fan of Dürrenmatt, I think of his work as sort of a sub-Brecht rather than a next stage. Then in Britain the wave of influence comes a lot later, but you could say the whole generation of Howard Brenton, David Hare and David Edgar, people like that, are influenced by Brecht’s plays and to a certain extent by the idea of a political theatre of that nature. Hare said that he didn’t like Brecht but there are nonetheless similarities. And all of them have done translations of Brecht’s plays or adaptations at sometime or another. In the next generation, Tony Kushner in the United States says that he always goes back to Brecht and thinks of Brecht as a huge influence. Mark Ravenhill who wrote Shopping and Fucking also thinks of Brecht as a sort of father figure of his own theatre. You can also look beyond Britain, Germany and the US: Brecht’s influence on the writing of drama and the making of theatre is huge in India and in South America and in parts of East Asia. To a certain extent his politics are more readily accessible and his models of society make more sense in a developing economy than they do in a very advanced capitalist economy. You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so he is popular there.

PC: Augusto Boal?

TK: Yeah Boal is another very important example.

PC: Boal is interesting as a kind of collision with naturalism as invisible theatre is almost uber-naturalism: spectactors become performers in reality. He represents a cross over.

TK: Brecht was also already interested in this kind of ‘spectactor’ with the Lehrstück experiments around 1930. In The Decision or The Measures Taken the chorus was all 400 members of the audience who were coached in the songs before the play started, so they were spectactors.

PC: That reminds me of some verbatim theatre at the moment – Little Revolution by Alecky Blythe. It is a response to the London riots. They had members of the community caught in the events that were performing in a play where all the words were verbatim from the community.

TK: Brecht’s theatre is very experimental and he takes experiments in different directions. All the plays are extraordinarily different in their structure, their dramaturgy, their whole texture and feel, one rich in its language the other deliberately pared down and impoverished in its language. He is always trying different things and in a way you could look for a legacy as vague as: intelligent socially engaged experiment; anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another. And of course there are lots of different versions of that, and if he were still around he would be practicing lots of different versions of that too.

PC: I know you are more textual scholar but do you ever get theatre makers to respond to your research?

TK: I have very little experience of working in the theatre at all. The only person I have really worked with is Di Trevis. I have known her for years. She has been very amenable to trying things out for me. The most recent thing that we have done was realise a production of a play which Brecht himself never finished, which is just a load of fragments, but really a load of fragments, a pile of mess in the archive, hardly any worked out scenes, it is not an unfinished play, you can’t even see what the plot was supposed to be. I tried to make it into a play and she tried to make it into play in the theatre, and that is a very recent experience. It hugely informed the way I will write about that play – it is called Fatzer by the way – in future; well I’ll be doing an English edition of it for a start, which will be informed by the script that we arrived at. I’ll also be writing about it as a project that failed and why it failed and what we should draw from its failure. Because lots of sort of more sophisticated literary critics write about it very much as a post-modern fragment, as if Brecht were deliberately sitting down to write a fragment, whereas I think the practical work in the theatre brought out absolutely clearly that in 1926, when he started working on it, he sat down to write a play but it got derailed and fell apart.

PC: Forced Entertainment are a company working currently that explore the fragmentary nature of storytelling and society. Their work is sometimes deliberately unfinished and actively presents failure. But you don’t think that Brecht himself had such post-modern intentions with the play you have worked on?

TK: It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished. Whatever we may think about Brechtian form, although it is different from play to play, once he began he mostly had a pretty strong sense of the direction in which something was going to develop. He was very dependent on the big speech really. His dialogue is not very fragmented at all, in comparison with some modern playwrights, certainly in comparison with Tony Kushner – he can write amazing scenes in which nobody ever finishes a sentence – Brecht never did that – his is much more a literary enterprise tied to the traditions of the time.

Summary

  • Politically Brecht has had the least influence. But in the making and writing of theatre he has had a huge influence.
  • You can see the contradictions and the conflicts more directly in developing economies, so Brecht is popular there.
  • A kind of ‘spectactor’ found in Augusto Boal’s work can be found in Brecht’s Lehrstück experiments around 1930.
  • Anyone who is engaged in intelligent socially experimental theatre is carrying Brecht forward in some way or another.
  • It is clear that Brecht was always aiming for something much more finished rather than exploring what leaving something unfinished means.
  • Brecht was very dependent on the big speech. He takes a literary approach tied to the traditions of the time.

Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 7

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Set text for GCSE and A level
  • Theatrical style
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: Brecht’s theatre is often mediated: the stories are told by somebody for a purpose. Is that most clear in The Caucasian Chalk Circle?

TK: Yes. It is strikingly clear there because you’ve got the singer, who is on the stage, mediating the story: mediating between the outer story and the inner story of the play. Also between that and the audience, which he does explicitly when he says things like, “Here is what she thought but could not say” and he speaks her thoughts. And we’re told explicitly that he is holding a book of the story in front of him much like John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald that we discussed earlier. Like John the Baptist, the singer comes from a different time frame, he’s on the stage throughout, he has a book with him, it’s described as a small book, not a big book. But in other ways it is so remarkably similar that you can’t help thinking that Brecht still had this image in mind when he was writing The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

Grunewald_Isenheim1 Grunewald_Isenheim1 John the Baptist

PC: You have spoken about every one of Brecht’s plays being a new experiment, what was the experiment with The Caucasian Chalk Circle?

TK: Well, I think The Caucasian Chalk Circle is interesting in lots of ways, but partly he started off trying to write a play that would be a star vehicle for a Hollywood actress who he had met that might actually get him success in the States. That had been something that had escaped him so far. He always wanted to be a success (that is absolutely clear), he was vain about his own ability. Okay with some justification. But he was frustrated that he couldn’t get through to a bigger audience in the States. So that was maybe where it started off. But then it soon drifts away from that and the actress never took any interest in the play. So it becomes an experiment in thinking about the world after the war. It’s almost the only one of Brecht’s plays that almost ends optimistically. You have to have those ‘almosts’ in there because they’re in the play as well. I mean the singer says we’ll look back on this as ‘the golden age nearly of justice’ or ‘which was almost just’. So that ‘nearly’ sense is very important in the play. It is also an experiment in looking at how a world can pick itself up, or what prospect there is for the future after cataclysmic historical change. That’s what happens in the play, you know, there is a revolution, a war, all of these things going on in the background, and in the end we have a society that is brought back together again; the old order has been deposed. But the new order looks like it is going to be just as bad as the old order was, possibly. What are the hopes for the future? Of course the hope for the future is the child, the symbolically adopted child of the peasant and the returning soldier, and that is the hope for the future.

PC: Does the child represent the connection between the two worlds: the wealthy and the poor?

TK: Yes. The child is a child of aristocracy but has become a child of the people. So that is part of the experiment of the play. I think it is also a quite serious attempt to get back to the basics of Epic Theatre, which is why I think it has the singer and the framework and so many things that we think of as features of the Epic. Because The Life of Galileo had been a little bit, well Brecht himself describes it as retrograde in technical terms: ‘technically a great step backwards’. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is more of an open attempt to engage with the idea of Epic Theatre, and to engage with an audience in that way.

PC: The way you describe it as ‘almost optimistic’. That word ‘almost’ is a good way to sum up his work. His plays challenge the audience with an ‘almost’ and tease you into engaging with them.

TK: You always have to see with Brecht what the alternatives might have been and how it might have all gone wrong (or right, or in any case differently). There is none of the inevitability of the traditional theatre. The traditional ending to comedy is a wedding and The Caucasian Chalk Circle has a happy union of the lovers. But it is not an unambiguously celebratory moment. There is a dance at the end, but it’s a dance that isn’t just a glorious dance of “now the rest of life will be wonderful”. There is a much more threatening undercurrent in the background: the sense that this is also a historical moment which may pass and difficult times may come again.

Brecht talked about this in his acting theory as well. You’re meant to see that characters make choices and it could have gone the other way. That triggers in the audience a reflection on their own choices and what would happen if … I think that is very much the spirit of the ending of The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

PC: It is interesting that Brecht chooses to put the ‘what would happen if …’ on the audience. In the theatrical context he reacts against that question is the actor’s: the magic if of Stanislavski. The “what if…” is swallowed up and digested by the actor and then presented to the audience. Brecht makes an interesting and striking shift away from his theatrical context: refocusing what theatre is.

Summary

  • The singer in Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle is strikingly similar to the mediating role played by John the Baptist in the Isenheim Altarpiece.
  • The Caucasian Chalk Circle is an experiment in thinking about the world after the war.
  • It is also an experiment looking at what prospect there is for the future after cataclysmic historical change.
  • The ending of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is almost optimistic.
  • Brecht thought that actors should show that characters make choices and it could have gone the other way. That triggers in the audience a reflection on their own choices and what would happen if …

Brecht and Emotion: His ideas on acting

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 6

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical style
  • The relationship between actor and audience in theory and practice
  • Key collaborations with other artists
  • Methods of creating, developing, rehearsing and performing

PC: I think it is a fundamental misunderstanding of Brecht to say that there is no emotion in his theatre.

TK: Yes, that’s something that really annoys me.

PC: Could you tell me a little about how emotion was created by Brecht’s actors through the observation of the social condition? How does that differ from Stanislavski’s work on acting?

TK: The distinction that the director Di Trevis made when I worked with her, and the distinction that her actors understood from the work that they were doing, was the distinction between working from the outside in, and working from the inside out. What they understood as Stanislavski’s method was to imagine a psychology of a character, providing a back story in psychological terms for an individual, so that you have an individual psychology in your head and you try to act out of that. Whereas what Di was trying to persuade them to do was to observe the way in which people behave and hold themselves and physically interact. So very much the outside. To observe people as examples of a particular social situation and to act out of that instead. Now of course the two meet in the middle, but I think that is the distinction. So that if you start from the outside you don’t end up with a character that has no psychology, and you don’t necessarily end up with a caricature either or a stereotype, although I think types and caricatures are much closer to the Brechtian understanding and they’re not out of place in Brecht’s theatre at all. Whereas they are completely out of place in a Naturalist theatre. And if you start from a psychology then you may also start to discover the social conditions which create that psychology. So the two can meet, but it is those very different starting points which seem to be the key to the work that she was doing. Does that make sense?

PC: Absolutely, it makes sense. I think that the distinction is clearest with earlier Stanislavski theory, the ones that had such an influence on Lee Strasberg’s Method acting. However, it is fascinating to see the similarities with Stanislavski’s later ideas for physical actions being the starting point for character. His idea was that the actors started with the observable, outside actions, even before reading the text. But like you say the distinction is clearest in the outcomes: Stanislavski used observable, outside actions so that the actor could inhabit the role. Brecht used observable, outside actions so that the actor could capture an accurate social condition, even a stereotype, as long as it served the social/political purpose of the play.

TK: Yeah, but I think there is a definite a distinction. I don’t think the difference is that huge and obviously both men shifted their ground. The idea that there is such a big conflict between them is strategic for Brecht. He wants to be different from Stanislavski. What is more, by the time of Brecht’s work with his newly founded Berliner Ensemble at the beginning of the 1950s, Brecht was a suspect thinker for the authorities of the German Democratic Republic. They needed to think of themselves as followers of the Russian model, and they even staged a big Stanislavski conference in Berlin with part of the motivation being to knock Brecht into shape and get him to toe the line. Therefore, in the context, insisting on the difference became very important, whereas in another context that might not have seemed so important.

PC: And this desire to be different influenced Brecht’s ideas on acting.

TK: Yes. Brecht is always warding off the psychological. His plays are full of spilt characters and slightly caricatured characters. Quite the reverse of psychologically realistic characters. He quite liked comic actors as well, because they don’t get caught up in the psychology of their characters so much. They are much more likely to act slightly over the heads of their characters, to insist on a distinction between actor and character. He loved Charlie Chaplin because he demonstrated the little man rather than being the little man. And that idea that there is a divorce between the actor and the part he’s playing is quite important for Brecht’s ideas. Ernst Busch is one of his favourites, and Helene Weigel of course. Both gave us archetypal demonstrations of the sorts of people they are playing, rather than becoming those people. It’s much more about showing than being. I think part of that comes again from this attention to external movement, behaviour, posture and things like that as an expression of something social rather than just of something psychological.

PC: Did he achieve this by getting his actors to observe people?

TK: Yes. Getting back to the pictures, Brecht’s files for his plays are full of pictures, mostly cut out of newspapers, and press photographs of the sorts of people he has in mind when he is writing. So amongst the materials for The Caucasian Chalk Circle he has a whole page stuck in an album of pictures of women refugees with babies or children slung over their shoulders. There is an archetype: of the woman with a bundle on the run; and the actress playing Grusha has to become that, rather than being a completely singular individual. You see them again crossing the Mediterranean. Brecht would have been writing about refugees again. Grusha is a refugee.

PC: That idea of collecting pictures is exactly the kind of task that students are encouraged to do in preparation for their portfolios. How did these photographs have a direct impact on actors like Helene Weigel?

TK: Well, for example: Brecht assumes that Helene Weigel had the image of a woman after the bombing of Singapore (Singapore Lament, Life Magazine, 23.03.42, photo license pending) in her mind when creating Mother Courage’s ‘silent scream’. It is a picture that he kept in several contexts, in his published collection of war time photographs – War Primer (http://goo.gl/r91UUf) and in his work journal in a different version.

Summary

  • Brecht wanted his actors to observe the way in which people behave and hold themselves and physically interact.
  • Actors should use people as examples of a particular social situation.
  • Characters can still have a psychology if you start from the outside.
  • Stereotypes and caricatures are not out of place in Brecht’s theatre.
  • Brecht wanted to position his ideas as different from Stanislavski.
  • Brecht liked comic actors and admired Charlie Chaplin because they don’t get caught up in the psychology of a character.
  • Brecht kept files and notebooks filled with photographs that influenced his productions.

Brecht: Verfremdung is a Funny Word

Posted on by Phil

Interview with Tom Kuhn: Part 5

Tom Kuhn is Professor of Twentieth-Century German Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are in political literature in the 20th century. He has worked particularly on Bertolt Brecht, and is the series editor of the main English-language edition of Brecht’s works.

Connections to the GCSE, AS and A level specifications

  • Theatrical purpose
  • Influence
  • Significant moments in the development of theory and practice

PC: Brecht took many ideas from historical theatre conventions and experimented with them in his own work. Many of the conventions have a connection with this elusive and somewhat confusing term: Verfremdung. My definition is: the process of moving an audience from identification to detachment. What do you think of this definition?

TK: Yeah, using identification is perhaps a little over-stating it. But I don’t think it is completely wrong. It is rather more from sympathy than from empathy. I would say that Brecht is quite wary of identifying with a character. But yes it is taking you from something recognisable to moving outside. Or the other way round as well: showing you something which seems completely strange and then suddenly you recognise things and think, “hang on, this isn’t different to the world I know.”

But Verfremdung is a funny word. People make the mistake of thinking Brecht is a systematic thinker, a philosopher, but Verfremdung is a word that he starts using before he has actually entirely decided what it means, and then he gradually tries it out. It is experimental again. How am I going to make this word do some work for me? And then eventually, and this is terribly important, it starts to crystallise absolutely around social phenomena. People also sometimes forget, when they’re talking about Brecht, with all this talk about epic theatre and songs interrupting the action and being able to see the lighting in the theatre and all of those sorts of things, they forget that the whole purpose of this is to analyse social phenomena. Brecht is interested in politics and society, so to call a modern production of something ‘Brechtian’ simply because it uses some of those outward characteristics is really missing the point, unless it has that social/political edge. That was what it was all about as far as he was concerned. So Verfremdung came to mean not just that alternating experience of sympathy and distance, of the strange and the familiar, but was absolutely a path to understanding the social condition that we are in, the social circumstances of his characters and actions.

Summary

  • Brecht wasn’t a systematic thinker or a philosopher.
  • Brecht started using the word Verfremdung before he had decided what it meant for the theatre.
  • It came to mean understanding the social condition by moving an audience from something they recognise to a state of detachment. Or the other way around.
  • The whole purpose of Verfremdung is to analyse society.
  • Theatre that is described as ‘Brechtian’ must have a social/political edge.