Introductory Sketches

The trail begins with my anxiety that my approach to devised theatre – as a critic – is based in the same concerns as my approach to scripted theatre. After wide reading, I stumbled upon a common theme in many devised process: a dialectic process informs their creation and development.

The following research trail examines fragments of my quest to find an interrogative instrument for devised theatre. There’s no conclusion, beyond a vague assertion that some but not all devised performances can be analysed in terms of a dialectic process.

One major case study of Joint Stock’s Fanshen and a smaller one for Gecko’s The Arab and The Jew provide examples of dialectic in devised work.

A brief survey of devised political work from the 1950s to the 1980s is conducted through studies of Heddon and Milling’s Devising Performance, Baz Kershaw’s The Politics of Performance and C. Carr’s On Edge, concentrating on evidence of dialectic in their construction, alongside Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and Lecoq's auto-cours teaching technique. 

A tentative suggestion is made that a dialectic process informs the development of devised theatre and is an important process within it. 

A Brief Note on 'Dialectic'

Throughout this blog, the word 'dialectic' is used by me to mean its simplist, Hegelian format: a proposition (the thesis) is set against an antithesis. These combine to become a synthesis, which provides its antithesis - and the cycle continues.

The word is much contested, and Hare's use of it suggests he is considering it as a Marxist dialectic, which adapts Hegel to a more socialist historical narrative. Further consideration of the concept is beyond the scope of this study, although the application of deconstruction, dialectic's opposite philosophical concept, would be fascinating.

What is Devising? A look at the 1960s

A fundamental problem was defining what 'devised theatre' means: it covers a broad range of practices, from the Lecoq inspired Clout and Theatre Ad Infinitum through the sketch-based revue of Kieran Hurley's National Theatre of Scotland supported  Rantin' to Forced Entertainment's extravaganzas. Like physical and visual theatre, 'devised' can be as much about marketing as reflecting shared processes.

And despite its ubiquity, it remains awkward in the context of British theatre: The Stage newspaper, for example, still catalogues productions by author and director, even though the collective creation of much devised work makes this difficult. The status of the script, based on Shakespeare but encouraged by the rise of writers at the start of the twentieth century such as George Bernard Shaw and established by the dynamic playwrights of the 1950s (Beckett and the English 'Angry Young Men'), has been joined by the cult of the director – Peter Brook, Trevor Nunn, Bertolt Brecht and the dynamism of the RSC in the 1960s.

Equally, its history is shrouded in mystery. While there are hints of a genealogy through Artaud’s anarchic proclamations, allusions to the actor as the focus of theatre in Grotowski and prototypes within surrealist and futurist performances, it was not until the 1960s that collective creation became acknowledged. In the USA, as part of the huge social changes during the 1960s, companies like The LivingTheatre, The Bread and Puppet Theatre and the San Francisco MimeTroupe created performances that did not fit within the recognised framework: variously called 'happenings' (after John Cage's experiments) or guerilla theatre, they had a clear political intention but a deliberately incoherent structure.

Thesis: 1960s Radical Theatre
Antithesis: British Political Theatre
Synthesis: Case Study: Fanshen