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. 

Antithesis: The Carnivalesque Leads to Irony

In chapter 4 of Devising Theatre, Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling discuss the growth of devised performances within the explicitly political companies of the early 1970s, before charting their demise over the subsequent decades. For some of these companies, the energy and immediacy of the devised process – such as CAST’s ‘rock’n’roll’ pub theatre (Heddon and Milling 2006, p 97) or El Teatro Campesino’s happenings to support California striking farm workers (ibid, p 96) – allowed the presentation of complex political ideals in a satisfyingly potent performance. However, over time, these companies returned to the ideal of the script.

Baz Kershaw (Kershaw 1992: pp 67 - 90) identifies a dialectical process in the evolution of British political theatre during the 1970s: the thesis of Marxist agitprop theatre (represented by CAST, a company created by performers expelled from the more traditional Marxist London Unity Theatre) and the antithesis of the carnivalesque (that is more anarchic, permissive and playful, defined by Bakhtin as the inversion of the status quo and its values) as espoused by The People Show or 'early Welfare State' - this carnivalesque could equally apply to the strategies of The Open Theatre in the USA.

Kershaw sees a more sophisticated, ironic form of political theatre emerging as a synthesis of the Marxist and carnivalesque, without limiting the diversity of alternative theatre to a monolithic whole: a perfect dialectical process of thesis and antithesis tending towards a synthesis. Irony, for Kershaw evades the obviousness of rhetorical agitprop, feeds a sophisticated audience's need for complex, layered theatre. Interpretation is no longer fixed, but open to diverse readings. 

THESIS: Joint Stock's Fanshen
SYNTHESIS: Gecko's The Arab and The Jew