Theatre Studios: A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making 9781138185647, 9781138185630, 9781315644325

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‘This is a rigorously compelling examination of a long-neglected area of British theatrical history. With confidence and acuity Tom Cornford lays out the tangled strands of influence and achievement that constitute the Theatre Studio tradition in this country. His examination of the benefits and pitfalls of ensemble theatre-making is sharp, provocative and always surprising.’ Sean Holmes, Associate Artistic Director, Shakespeare’s Globe and formerly Artistic Director of the Lyric, Hammersmith ‘This book recontextualises and critiques three fundamental strands of British theatre history through the lens of the theatre studios of Michel Saint-Denis, Michael Chekhov and Joan Littlewood. It is comprehensively researched, elegantly written, robustly argued and emphatically current.’ Jonathan Pitches, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds

THEATRE STUDIOS

Theatre Studios explores the history of the studio model in England, first established by Konstantin Stanislavsky, Jacques Copeau and others in the early twentieth century, and later developed in the UK primarily by Michel Saint-Denis, George Devine, Michael Chekhov and Joan Littlewood, whose studios are the focus of this study. Cornford offers in-depth accounts of the radical, collective work of these leading theatre companies of the mid-twentieth century, considering the models of ensemble theatre-making that they developed and their remnants in the newly publicly-funded UK theatre establishment of the 1960s. In the process, this book develops an approach to understanding the politics of artistic practices rooted in the work of John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci and the standpoint feminists. It concludes by considering the legacy of the studio movement for twentyfirst-century theatre, partly by tracking its echoes in the work of Secret Theatre at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2013–2015). Students and makers of theatre alike will find in this book a provocative and illuminating analysis of the politics of performance-making and a history of the theatre as a site for developing counterhegemonic, radically democratic, antiindividualist forms of cultural production. Tom Cornford is Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London.

THEATRE STUDIOS A Political History of Ensemble Theatre-Making

Tom Cornford

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Tom Cornford The right of Tom Cornford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cornford, Tom, author. Title: Theatre studios : a political history of ensemble theatre-making / Tom Cornford. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020029519 (print) | LCCN 2020029520 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138185647 (paperback) | ISBN 9781138185630 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315644325 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Ensemble theater–Great Britain–History–20th century. | Studio theater–Great Britain–History–20th century. Classification: LCC PN2595.13.E56 C67 2021 (print) | LCC PN2595.13.E56 (ebook) | DDC 791.0941–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029519 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020029520 ISBN: 978-1-138-18563-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-18564-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-64432-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by River Editorial Ltd, Devon, UK

For Anna

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements Introduction: ensemble theatre-making and the theatre studio tradition The emergence and development of theatre studios 4 Theatre studios and ensemble theatre-making 11 Remnants, practices, models: the organisation of this book 18

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1

SECTION 1

The London Theatre Studio (1936–1939) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–1952) 1

25

Remnants of the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic Theatre Centre 27 1953: the seeds of a new theatre establishment 28 ‘Transforming themselves from role to role’: the flowering of English acting after the LTS and OVC 31 Patterning behaviour: Saint-Denis’ Cherry Orchard (RSC, 1961) 38 The fruits of the LTS and OVC: the Royal Court and RSC studios 51

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3

Contents

Practices of the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic Theatre Centre Visionary paternalism: Copeau and Saint-Denis 68 The London Theatre Studio: ‘genuine theatre productions’ 71 ‘A school of acting’: training at the LTS 73 LTS Productions: ‘a permanent company’? 77 The Old Vic Theatre Centre: ‘wedding cake’ or arch? 84 The Old Vic Theatre School: ‘a firm technical basis’ 87 The Young Vic and the EXP: the studio that never was 91 Models of practice in the London Theatre Studio and the Old Vic Theatre Centre Pragmatism and vanguardism at the LTS and OVC 106 Gender and hierarchy at the LTS and OVC 117

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SECTION 2

The Chekhov Theatre Studio (1936–1942)

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4

Remnants of the Chekhov Theatre Studio From making theatre to training actors: Chekhov’s technique after the CTS 128 Studio-schools: Learning and teaching Chekhov after the CTS 133 The CTS and mainstream acting: Paul Rogers in The Homecoming (1965) and Beatrice Straight in Network (1970) 137

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Practices of the Chekhov Theatre Studio The CTS curriculum: technique, artistry, and social purpose 161 ‘Art must be based on technique’: exercises at the CTS 165 The rhythmical gesture: ‘our fundamental form’ 167 Atmosphere: the ‘feeling which does not belong to anybody’ 175 Progressive collaborations? Sketching performances at the CTS 178 Collaborating with the author: performances by the CTS 185 The end of the CTS 190

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6

Models of practice in the Chekhov Theatre Studio Chekhov and his studio: the material of performance and the problem of hegemony 199 Atmospheric politics: a model of radical practice from the CTS 209

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SECTION 3

Theatre Workshop (1945–1963)

215

7

Remnants of Theatre Workshop 1955: the end of Theatre Workshop’s studio phase 219 1963: Oh what a lovely war of the roses! 226

217

8

Practices of Theatre Workshop, 1945–1955 243 Was Theatre Workshop a studio before 1955? 243 Wayfaring, bricolage, and response-ability: Theatre Workshop in 1948 250

9

Models of practice in Theatre Workshop 275 The counterhegemonic project of Theatre Workshop 275 Direct action: anarcho-syndicalism and the making of Uranium 235 283 Developing theatrical standpoints: Johnny Noble and A Taste of Honey 289

Conclusion: why do theatre studios matter? 299 Lessons from the past 299 Studio practice in the present: Secret Theatre at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2013–2015) 307 ‘Shaping something into something’: Secret Theatre Shows 2 and 5 313 Bibliography Index

327 337

FIGURES

1.1

1.2

1.3–1.5

1.6–1.8

1.9 and 1.10

John Gielgud as Gaev declaring ‘The estate shall not be sold’ in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screengrab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:36:01). Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevskaya in Act Two of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:04:28). Roy Dotrice as Firs spills tea on Peggy Ashcroft’s Ranevskaya and she drops her cup in Act Three of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:22:27– 1:22:33). Judi Dench as Anya with Dorothy Tutin as Varya (Act One), with Ian Holm as Trofimov (Act Two), and with Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevskaya (Act Three) in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:40:01, 1:10:40, 1:39:17). Lopakhin (George Murcell) presents his plan for the orchard (Act One) and announces its sale (Act Three) in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel SaintDenis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:19:45, 1:34:37).

40

41

42

45

47

Figures

1.11 and 1.12 Lopakhin’s (George Murcell) offers of champagne and money in Act Four of in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:40:04, 1:43:09). 1.13 and 1.14 Varya (Dorothy Tutin) calls out to Anya (Act Two), and Ranevskaya (Peggy Ashcroft) calls Trofimov back after he has angrily left her in Act Three of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:11:47, 1:25:56). 1.15 The assembly before departure in Act Four of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:58:34). 2.1 Advertisement for the London Theatre Studio from the programme for The Sowers of the Hills (Westminster Theatre, 1935), author’s collection. 2.2 Rupert Doone’s 1935 Manifesto for the Group Theatre from the programme for The Sowers of the Hills (Westminster Theatre, 1935), author’s collection. 4.1 and 4.2 William Holden and Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:14:59, 1:19:32). 4.3 and 4.4 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:15:31, 1:16:18). 4.5 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:17:37). 4.6 and 4.7 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:15:53, 1:16:02). 4.8 and 4.9 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:16:38, 1:16:54). 4.10–4.12 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:18:00, 1:18:03, 1:18:15). 4.13–4.15 Paul Rogers as Max and Ian Holm as Lenny: ‘What you have you done with the scissors?’ in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:01:56, 0:02:06, 0:02:31). 4.16 and 4.17 Paul Rogers as Max in his armchair in Act One of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:11:15, 0:11:28). 4.18–4.20 Michael Jayston as Teddy and Ian Holm as Lenny in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:26:33, 0:27:01, 0:27:12).

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48

49

51

72

78

139 140 142 142 143

144

147

148

150

xiv

Figures

4.21

4.22–4.25

4.26

4.27

4.28–4.30

8.1a and b 8.2a and b 8.3

8.4

8.5

8.6

C.1

Cyril Cusack as Sam and Paul Rogers as Max in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:12:59). Paul Rogers as Max in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:18:25, 0:59:47, 0:52:59, 1:32:25). Joey (Terence Rigby), Sam (Cyril Cusack), and Max (Paul Rogers) first see Ruth (Vivien Merchant) and Teddy (Michael Jayston) in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:48:31). Max (Paul Rogers) is ignored by Lenny (Ian Holm, right of frame) while Ruth (Vivien Merchant) strokes the hair of Joey (Terence Rigby) in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (1:47:26). Paul Rogers as Max collapsing after the line ‘she won’t be adaptable’, and telling Ruth (Vivien Merchant) to ‘kiss me’ in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (1:45:41, 1:47:33, 1:47:57). Map of Theatre Workshop’s touring 1945–46. Map of Theatre Workshop’s touring 1947–48. Pages from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Notes for acting classes taken from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Note of Laban’s effort actions taken from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX. Sketch by Harry Greene and Joan Littlewood (1953) for the setting of Richard II by William Shakespeare, dir. Joan Littlewood, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 1954. The back wall of the Tricycle Theatre, London, following the run of Secret Theatre’s A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts, dir. Sean Holmes, December 2014 (photograph taken by the stage manager, Sally C. Roy).

151

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156 251 251

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265

268

322

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has taken a very long time to write. Much of the initial research for the first two sections was undertaken for my PhD, ‘The English Theatre Studios of Michael Chekhov and Michel Saint-Denis, 1935–1965’, at the University of Warwick between 2008 and 2012. That project was based in the CAPITAL Centre, under the aegis of the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, thanks to the imagination and tenacity of its then director, Carol Rutter. Without Carol’s faith and generosity I would not be doing the work I do today. My PhD was supervised by Tony Howard, and I could not have hoped for a more creative, perceptive, and considerate guide. I was also mentored and supported at Warwick by Paul Prescott and Nicholas Monk, whose guidance and friendship was invaluable. I was fortunate, just before completing my PhD, to be offered a lectureship at the University of York, where work on this project continued thanks to the enthusiasm of Talia Rodgers, who commissioned this book for Routledge. I was able, thanks to research funding from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, to undertake further archival research and, crucially, to begin research for the third section of this book, on Theatre Workshop. This was made a great deal easier and more enjoyable thanks to Derek Paget—external examiner on the MA programme for which I was responsible—who generously listened and responded to my initial ideas about Littlewood and her collaborators over dinner during his visits to the department, and then by email. I was also fortunate, while at York, to host a Q&A with Simon Stephens, who asked about my research and then kindly put me in touch with Sean Holmes at the Lyric, Hammersmith, who was then just embarking on Secret Theatre. Sean was amazingly open and trusting, inviting me to watch rehearsals and spend time with the company more or less whenever I wanted to, and

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talking to me regularly and at length about the project. The whole company likewise welcomed me without hesitation and were all generous and deeply insightful about their work, in ways that enriched this project far more than their relatively brief appearance at this book’s close may suggest. While at York, I formed Common Ground Theatre with Hannah Davies, and the series of productions we made together between 2013 and 2016 gave me an understanding of the working processes of the studios that I explore in this book, which I could not have hoped to gain at my desk. I am hugely grateful to Hannah, and to all of our collaborators, for those experiences. Last but not least, workmates at York read and discussed with me early versions of many of the ideas in this book: thank you to Kristyn Gorton, Mark Smith, and Karen Quigley for helping those ideas to grow. In 2016, I took up a lectureship at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama with most of the research for this book complete, but still no manuscript, and probably there still would be nothing to show for those years of work were it not for the support and encouragement of Central’s brilliant research community, led from the front by Maria Delgado. Particular thanks are due to Sylvan Baker, Ben Buratta, Gilli Bush-Bailey, Steve Farrier, Tony Fisher, Naomi Paxton, Amanda Stuart-Fisher, and Gareth White for keeping me, in various ways, on track as I transitioned from saying I was writing this book to actually doing so. While at Central I have also undertaken research projects in collaboration with colleagues elsewhere. The thinking and writing I have done alongside Roberta Barker, Cass Fleming, and Caridad Svich has taught me a huge amount about how to work on this book, and meetings and presentations on anti-racism and decolonising theatre and performance studies alongside Roaa Ali, Jerri Daboo, Lynette Goddard, Victor Ladron de Guevara, Royona Mitra, Prarthana Purkayastha, and Pedro de Senna have radically shifted the ground upon which all of my work stands. I have also gained both insights and inspiration from my own PhD students: thank you to Bridget Foreman, Lucy Tyler, Evi Stamatiou, Sherrill Gow, Amber O’Connell, and Gavin Thatcher for keeping me on my toes and for the privilege of helping to shape your work. Last, and most of all, I am deeply indebted to those people who have read and provided feedback on individual chapters in the closing stages: thank you to Sally Baggott, Maria Delgado, Tony Fisher, Nadine Holdsworth, and the manuscript’s anonymous reviewer for their detailed feedback. With such support, mistakes and infelicities that remain are emphatically my responsibility. With such a long period of gestation, this book has been the subject of numerous conference papers, talks and lectures. These have included a key-note presentation at the 2019 ‘The Makings of the Actor’ conference in Athens, papers for the Performer Training, Directing and Dramaturgy, and Performance, Identity and Community working groups in the UK’s Theatre and Performance Research Association; a paper for the Training/Trans-session at the American Society for Theatre Research 2016 conference, and talks at the theatre research

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seminar at the University of Lincoln, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and the London Theatre Seminar. Thank you to all of the organisers and participants for these opportunities to share and develop my thinking. I have also given public lectures about this project at Shakespeare’s Globe, Arizona State University, Mary Baldwin College, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; thank you to Farah Karim-Cooper, Patrick Spottiswoode, Ayanna Thompson, Paul Menzer, and Andrew Hartley for making those possible, and particularly to Ayanna, whose faith and generosity at a crucial juncture both for this book and for me personally was transformative. Like all archival research, this project has depended upon the many people who catalogue and maintain the materials I have consulted. Thank you to Kate Dorney for her patient generosity in helping me to get to grips with archival research in the first place, and to the archivists and staff of the Manuscripts Reading Room in the British Library, the Dartington Hall Archive (as was), the Devon Records Office, the V&A Theatre and Performance Collections, the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds, the Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (where I was also fortunate to experience the unforgettable hospitality of James and Laurel Loehlin) and the archive of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. I am also grateful to the Society for Theatre Research who gave me the Stephen Joseph Award, which has contributed to the cost of securing images for this book. I have also been very fortunate to have a patient and imaginative editor in Ben Piggott, and the efficient support of Zoe Forbes. The long work of producing this book has given me many opportunities to wonder why I’m doing it. The answer is simple. I write for the future, that I may make some small contribution to what will not be mine to shape. I have learned the value of that project, and to face it with hope and with humility, from my three children, Bella, Jacob, and Nute. What’s more, they’re really lush—thanks dudes, I love you. Lastly, by far my greatest debt is to Anna Harpin, who kissed the sun right out of the sky for me and walks beside me all the long way home. Every word of this book was first a conversation with Anna; without her, it simply would not exist. This book contains extracts from the archived notebooks of Joan Littlewood. The Agreed Upon 455 Words from Joan Littlewood’s Papers Held at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, by Joan Littlewood. Copyright © The Estate of Joan Littlewood. Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN.

INTRODUCTION Ensemble theatre-making and the theatre studio tradition

In the late summer of 1965, a delegation of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) sent a lengthy ‘Memorandum on the Future Organization, Policy and Training of the Royal Shakespeare Company’, to its director, Peter Hall.1 It proposed ‘a challenging rededication [of the RSC] to the craft of the theatre’ following what it described as the company’s ‘history of high endeavour, continually compromised by expediency’. The actors suggested that the RSC could both save money and improve the quality of the company by committing to training from the ground up, and replacing walk-ons with students. These students would ‘form the nucleus of an R.S.T. School, the first stage in its realization’, with two voice teachers and one teacher each for movement and fencing, all of them on a permanent salary, so that training could also be ‘included in the daily routine of every actor in the company’. This could be achieved, the memo suggested, by holding rehearsals from 10am until 2.30pm, followed by a one-hour break, and a training period from 3.30 until 5.30pm. Since each actor’s contractual commitment could not exceed five hours per day plus performance (or half that on a matinee day), the memo suggested that one of those hours be dedicated to training. It added that, in return for this greater commitment from the acting company, it is ‘not unfair that we should in turn press you to streamline your central administration of this Company’. Apart from the provision of teaching staff, this was the only concession requested from the RSC’s management. The actors’ document was discussed at a meeting of the RSC’s Company Committee on October 25, 1965, where the idea of training students was rejected on the grounds that ‘in present circumstances, adequate training facilities could not be provided’.2 The suggestion of a daily two-hour slot for studio work was tentatively accepted, but with the proviso that it should consist mainly

2

Introduction

of activities to supplement rehearsals or maintain the standard of the repertoire, rather than training or experimental projects intended to develop the company and its future work. In the event, even this thoroughly compromised version of the actors’ plan was not, however, enacted. The minutes of the Company Committee meeting noted that ‘[f]urther examination of this area was necessary to decide how many of the above activities should be included both in terms of time and money’ and instructing the ‘Planning Committee to discuss’. The Planning Committee’s remit and membership was, inevitably, much more closely aligned with the concerns of the Company’s management than was the Company Committee (in which representatives of management and the acting company were more or less numerically balanced), and the proposal was kicked into the long grass. The context of this unsuccessful intervention was an imminent period of financial austerity at the RSC, announced in 1965 under the ‘Goodwin Plan’, named after its author, the company’s head of publicity, John Goodwin. Hall summarised this plan privately as a reduction ‘to ONE permanent company (rather larger than the normal Stratford company) which would play a slightly curtailed Stratford season, and then move to London annually to play a short 4½ month season at the Aldwych’.3 The plan also involved reducing the activity of the RSC Studio in order to save the company an estimated £7,000 (which was a little over 1 per cent of its projected total expenditure for the year of £590,000, or 5 per cent of its annual salary bill of £132,000).4 The plan, which allowed ‘no room for experiment’ and required actors to play fewer roles over longer periods and in a much higher proportion of revivals, was certainly radical but not sufficiently so to reduce projected expenditure as low as the company’s projected income of £551,000. Further cuts had to be made, and a memo from Peter Hall to the Arts Council from September 1966 reported that ‘studio and training activities have had to be abandoned through lack of finance’.5 It is the contention of this book that this episode, a non-event in the overall history of the RSC, should nonetheless be considered by theatre historians as a dog that didn’t bark. Although, from the vantage point of theatre production fifty-five years later, the actors’ proposal appears utopian and obviously doomed to fail, there were good reasons, at the time, for its authors to be optimistic that it might be adopted. For a start, the words ‘Royal Shakespeare Company’ were mainly used at the time to refer not to a brand or commercial entity, but to the company of actors. The RSC, then, was its actors, in a way no actor employed by the company now would consider it to be. Second, many of those actors were on very long contracts by today’s standards, and were not simply represented by an Equity deputy but sat on an RSC committee. Third, both of Hall’s associate directors at the time—Peter Brook and Michel Saint-Denis—were openly committed to the combination of training and experimental practice to which the actors’ delegation sought formally to commit the company. In 1964, Brook had established the Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group

Introduction

3

with Charles Marowitz, which went on to present a season of ‘shots in the dark’ (to use Brook’s term) at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, before, famously, producing Adrian Mitchell’s adaptation of Peter Weiss’ Marat/ Sade, which opened at the Aldwych in August 1964.6 Saint-Denis had founded the RSC Studio in 1962, and had previously been the primary force behind the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–52), which aimed to combine a school with two acting companies along similar lines to those proposed by the RSC actors. Furthermore, Hall’s head of design, since 1964, John Bury, had learned his trade with Theatre Workshop—who had also attempted to establish a school alongside its permanent company and was defined by its commitment to training and experimentation—and the leading actor in Hall’s 1965 production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, Paul Rogers, had trained at the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall, another enterprise dedicated simultaneously to training and the development of a permanent ensemble company. On the face of it, then, the actors’ intervention came at an opportune moment for the revival of the studio tradition of theatre organisations that combined training and experimental practice, and sought to establish permanent companies, which is the subject of this book. What the actors either did not see or refused to be deterred by, however, is that although Hall’s RSC—and the wider subsidised theatre establishment—was substantially indebted to the studio tradition, by 1965 that tradition was dying out. As if to reinforce the fact, that year Saint-Denis—who more than anyone else in the UK had pioneered the studio as a model of theatre-making—suffered a stroke that severely reduced his ability to work. In 1965, as John Bull has shown, the RSC, National Theatre, and English Stage Company at the Royal Court received ‘the vast majority of funding for drama’.7 When Saint-Denis died in 1971, Hall said at his funeral that these theatres, as well as the Sadler’s Wells Opera, ‘all owe something of their way of working to him’.8 In fact, the emergent, subsidised establishment of the 1960s owed a wider debt to the studio tradition which had trained many of its leading artists and developed many of the approaches to theatre-making that it deployed. None of these theatres, however, either acknowledged this debt to studios or sought to emulate their practices. The English Stage Company was run by George Devine between 1955 and 1965; he had worked more closely with Saint-Denis than any other English director, but it was no more structured as a studio than was Hall’s RSC. Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre (NT) was based upon a more or less permanent company, but it did not pursue the studio model of grounding its practice in collective training. Far from being revived in the practices of these companies that were deeply indebted to it, the studio tradition was extinguished by them. Theatre studios should not, however, be considered significant primarily because they contributed to the development of the subsidised UK theatre establishment that began to take the form it retains to this day during the early 1960s. They also developed techniques that were profoundly influential in

4

Introduction

shaping the discipline of actor training. Saint-Denis’ approach to training has been particularly significant in shaping the practices of English drama schools, and he was instrumental in establishing the École supérieure d’art dramatique du Théâtre National de Strasbourg (the national theatre of Strasbourg’s academy of dramatic art) in 1953, the National Theatre School of Canada in 1960, and the Julliard Drama Division in 1968. Michael Chekhov did not establish drama schools in the same way, but his acting technique is now taught across the world in dedicated studios and in the curricula of more acting schools than could be mentioned here. The East 15 Acting School was founded in 1961 by Margaret Bury to provide a training rooted in the practice of Theatre Workshop, which has also been widely influential in the field of politically engaged theatre-making. Finally, theatre studios also represented practical experiments in social organisation and collective creative practice that predated the proliferation of ensemble companies in the post-1968 era, and which—as I will argue—offer important lessons for our understanding of the politics of theatre-making and its practices now. Before addressing these points of significance, however, there are basic questions to answer: what were theatre studios, where did this tradition come from, and how did it develop?

The emergence and development of theatre studios For contemporary theatre-goers in the UK, a ‘studio’ means a small theatre, often described as a ‘black box’, probably with flexible seating, which is usually appended to one or more larger auditoria within a subsidised theatre building: the Dorfman (previously the Cottelsoe) at the National Theatre, the Other Place across the road from the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare and Swan Theatres, the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, the Leeds Playhouse’s Courtyard Theatre, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre’s Studio, and so on. These studios generally have a remit to house more experimental productions with smaller budgets than their theatres’ main houses. This phenomenon is not unique to the UK—the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis has the 200-seater Dowling Studio, for example—but in North America the word ‘studio’ is more widely used to mean a private space in which actors train and take classes, thanks to the worldwide renown of the Actors’ Studio in Manhattan, which was founded in 1947. These two meanings of the word both emerged, however, from the same tradition, which can be traced back to Russia in 1905. The term ‘studio’ seems to have been coined by the Russian actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold to describe the small, experimental theatre which he was invited by Konstantin Stanislavsky to run, in 1905, as a satellite of the Moscow Art Theatre, of which Stanislavsky was co-director. Meyerhold had begun his career as an actor at the Art Theatre under Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and, in its 1898 opening season, had originated the role of the aspiring writer Konstantin Treplev in Stanislavsky’s production of

Introduction

5

Chekhov’s The Seagull. That famously realistic production was so instrumental to the establishment of the Art Theatre’s reputation that, when the company moved to a permanent home in 1902, an image of a seagull was sewn onto the theatre’s front curtain. In the same year, however, Meyerhold left the company, having been dissatisfied with the Art Theatre’s work for some time, rejecting, above all, Stanislavsky’s autocratic approach to direction, which, he argued, rendered the actors more or less mechanical: ‘are we to do nothing but act? We also want to think while we’re acting’.9 It would have surprised Meyerhold, at that time, to discover that Stanislavsky shared his concerns. He justified his autocratic direction to himself only on the grounds that actors ‘lacking in experience and knowledge’, require intervention from the director ‘both to cover their faults and hand over the main responsibility for our common endeavours elsewhere’.10 But he did not exclude his own acting from this critique. He described his struggles by analogy with a musician ‘who is forced to play on a broken-down, out-of-tune instrument’,11 and was determined to develop the company’s artistic capacity, writing in his notebook during 1902 that just as ‘the author writes on paper’, so ‘the actor writes with his body on the stage’.12 Furthermore, Stanislavsky refused to accept that actors must be ‘compelled for ever and ever […] to serve and convey crude reality and nothing more’ and sought to develop techniques which—like those of the painter, musician, dancer, and gymnast—would enable actors to discover the means of ‘expressing the abstract, the noble, the elevated’.13 Although Stanislavsky and Meyerhold took very different approaches to experimenting with the possibilities of performance, it is clear that in 1902—just as the Art Theatre was committing itself to the methods and style of its realistic Seagull—both of their explorations were leading elsewhere. Three years later, Stanislavsky had begun to recognise the potentially productive relationship between his dissatisfaction and the ‘new ways and techniques’ that Meyerhold had begun to develop since leaving the Art Theatre.14 He offered his former colleague a group of actors and a converted barn in Pushkino for the summer of 1905, followed, in the autumn, by a theatre on Povarskaya Street in Moscow. This was the venture to which Meyerhold gave the title ‘studio’: ‘not a proper theatre, certainly not a school, but […] a laboratory for new ideas’.15 It would contain elements of both theatre and school in that it would both train its actors and produce plays, but, unlike the theatre and the school, neither of these would constitute its goal. Instead, it aimed to produce ‘new ideas’, or, as Stanislavsky put it, ‘the rejuvenation of dramatic art with new forms and techniques of staging’.16 In the event, the combination of the coincidence of the October Revolution with the studio’s return to Moscow and Stanislavsky’s diminishing confidence in the abilities of Meyerhold’s actors led him to cancel its work before it was shown to the public. Stanislavsky justified this decision on the grounds that it was too important to be compromised: ‘to demonstrate an idea badly’, he wrote, ‘is to kill it’.17 After this abrupt cull, however, the idea of the studio seems to have begun to regrow in the back of Stanislavsky’s mind with renewed vigour.

6

Introduction

After the Art Theatre’s 1911/1912 Hamlet, conceived by Edward Gordon Craig, Stanislavsky decided that ‘the actors of the Art Theatre had mastered some new inner techniques and had used them with notable success in the contemporary repertoire, but we had not found the appropriate ways and means to communicate plays of heroic stature’.18 As a direct result, Stanislavsky decided to form the 1912 First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Stanislavsky’s decision to form this studio had consequences far beyond the sphere of his direct influence. Jonathan Pitches and Stefan Aquilina have demonstrated the truly global reach of the system Stanislavsky first developed comprehensively at the First Studio,19 complementing the more widely known narrative of its legacy in the USSR and the United States, which was analysed in detail by Sharon Carnicke.20 The First Studio—rather than the technique it produced—also served as a model for the French director Jacques Copeau, who referred to Stanislavsky as the ‘father’ of his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, which was founded the following year.21 Copeau had begun his career as a critic, but felt increasingly compelled to intervene in a theatre which he saw as lifeless and clichéd. His proposed reforms were founded upon pedagogy: ‘nothing will exist’, he wrote, ‘as long as a school does not exist’,22 and he therefore set out to create a parallel theatre-and-school, where he aimed ‘to try to give back brilliance and grandeur to this art’ of the theatre,23 by ‘a radical remedy, a purgation’, rendering the stage ‘naked and neutral’.24 The resulting tréteau nu (bare stage) was flexible (allowing the rotation of productions in a wide variety of genres) and projected beyond the proscenium arch (enabling direct contact between the stage and auditorium). It was a place for the art of the playwright to ‘join with’ the art of the actor.25 In order to develop the latter, prior to the theatre’s opening in 1913, the company spent ten weeks at Copeau’s country house, training intensively in gymnastics, improvisation, and reading dramatic texts.26 At this time, Copeau had never acted, so his approach was rather intellectual, and it was left to the actor Charles Dullin to help him to find, in John Rudlin’s words, a ‘synthesis of the verbal and the physical’.27 This early work at Le Limon would define key aspects of Copeau’s practice. He brought, for instance, the study of texts together with the practice of improvisation, blending a consciousness of form with the ability to be spontaneous. This endeavour required both flexible and expressive bodies and alert and imaginative minds, which could create performances such as Copeau’s portrayal of Molière’s Scapin, described by the critic Ramon Fernandez both as a ‘very lively dance’ and ‘a re-birth of the ideas of Molière’.28 Copeau’s work also aimed to generate an ensemble of actors who would be capable of creating new forms of performance, or, in his words, of ‘a recasting of the means of expression corresponding to the thing which they proposed to express’.29 To this end, Copeau, along with the actress Suzanne Bing, used the Vieux-Colombier school to experiment further with actor training, incorporating mime and animal exercises to enable ‘intellect and poetic

Introduction

7

invention’ to be ‘slipped into purely physical exercise’.30 Copeau also used the school to experiment with alternative forms of theatre, such as Commedia dell’Arte and Japanese Nō, which was explored—apparently with notable success—in a student production of the play Kantan, directed by Bing.31 These experiments were not intended to imitate or revive lost or foreign forms but to reinvent them and thereby to renew the contemporary theatre. The overall effect of Copeau’s remodelling of the Vieux-Colombier stage and the training of its actors was recalled by his nephew and assistant Michel Saint-Denis, who described a symbiotic relationship between the space and performances that were ‘constantly animated from within yet magnetized by the audience and the surrounding air […] body and voice translating physically the poetic contents of the play’.32 Stanislavsky’s experiments also profoundly influenced the English theatrical polymath Harley Granville Barker. Barker visited Moscow in 1913, later recalling that ‘it was when I saw the Moscow people interpreting Chekhov that I fully realized what I had been struggling towards and that I saw how much actors could add to a play’.33 The following year, Barker had a similar revelation on seeing Copeau’s Twelfth Night, which he announced was better played than by any company in England.34 When Barker and Stanislavsky met, they devised a scheme for English actors to go and work in Stanislavsky’s studio as apprentices, which would begin with Barker ‘send[ing] over two pupils’, though the outbreak of hostilities in Europe the following year prevented this.35 Nonetheless, Barker’s experience of both Stanislavsky and Copeau’s work shaped a theoretical model of practice that he elaborated in his 1922 book The Exemplary Theatre, which proposes ‘a playhouse company for whom performances will not be the one and only goal […] a theatre as school, part of an institution intended for the study of dramatic art and only incidentally for its exhibition’.36 Barker was unlike both Stanislavsky and Copeau in that he never established a studio to explore these ideas in practice. In the 1904–7 Barker-Vedrenne seasons at the Court Theatre, he had come close, working with a single company over a series of plays with considerable success. The critic Desmond MacCarthy recalled that the company’s acting was of a uniquely high standard: At the Court the acting pleased from the first. People began to say that the English could act after all, and that London must be full of intelligent actors, of whom nobody had ever heard. Yet, strange to say, these actors, when they appeared in other plays on other boards, seemed to sink back to normal insignificance.37 MacCarthy concluded that ‘the Court Theatre has been practically the only theatre where it has been worth the actor’s while to play a small part, and where the playwright’s intentions have been absolutely respected’.38 This combined dedication to the arts of playwriting and acting connected Barker’s work to Stanislavsky and Copeau’s, as did his commitment to rooting his practice in

8

Introduction

training. In his Exemplary Theatre, Barker wrote that the acting company would ‘remain students, fellow-students with their juniors […] but students also in their own occupation of the theatre as playhouse’.39 Barker believed that this approach was the surest means by which the art of the theatre could be developed: ‘the matured actor’s best chance of developing his art and observing its progress’, he wrote, ‘lies less in the performances he gives than in his opportunities for study, and especially for the co-operative study […] involved in the rehearsing of a play’.40 Such study depended upon collaboration, Barker wrote, because the material of performance is, in itself, collaborative: ‘the text of a play is a score awaiting performance, and the performance and its preparation are, almost from the beginning, a work of collaboration’.41 Theatre studios were seen, in the first three decades of the twentieth century, as a means of extending theatre artists’ understanding of such collaborations and their collective skill in developing them. In spite of their roots in three very different cultures, Stanislavsky, Copeau, and Barker had a great deal in common: their approach to making theatre emphasised the creativity of the actor, the crucial function of collective training for the process of theatre-making, and the importance of experimentation with alternative styles and traditions in order to reinvigorate the contemporary theatre. The implicit politics of their work also intersected because their commitment to collaboration and to a process of continually revising their work through experimentation entailed some willingness to displace their own authority and to make at least theoretical concessions to more egalitarian and democratic approaches than those of their peers. Such commitments were often extremely limited or compromised, but they remained implicit to the idea of the studio, even when they were not borne out in practice, a tension that can be seen throughout the case studies explored in this book. In spite of the close parallels between their work, Stanislavsky, Copeau, and Barker only seem to have all met once. In December 1922, the Moscow Art Theatre company was performing in Paris, en route to New York. On the night of December 21, Stanislavsky was given a reception at the Vieux-Colombier by Copeau, which was also attended by Barker. Afterwards, over dinner in a nearby restaurant, the three men discussed the possibility of creating an international theatre studio, an idea which received ‘unanimous approval’.42 Stanislavsky and Copeau had already corresponded on this subject, and Stanislavsky had hoped that it ‘would unite all the most interesting workers in the world of theatre’.43 Like Barker and Stanislavsky’s planned exchange of student actors a decade earlier, however, this idea for an international studio would become the victim of geopolitics: the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR was signed just over a week after Stanislavsky, Barker, and Copeau met, and the division of the communist East from the capitalist West which would dominate international relations for the next seventy years began. At a more modest level, however, international studios were formed from the three strands of the experimental theatre-making tradition represented by these

Introduction

9

men. In 1912, one of the first of the Moscow Art Theatre’s actors to sign up for the First Studio was Michael Chekhov, where he began what he later called ‘prying behind the curtain of the Creative Process’.44 Only six years later, in 1918, Chekhov opened a studio of his own in Moscow, where he taught a version of his teacher’s system. By 1924, however, when Chekhov became the director of the Second Moscow Art Theatre (as the First Studio had become), he was already developing approaches of his own: ‘I was able to develop my methods of acting and directing and formulate them into a definite technique’, he wrote.45 The ideas that formed the basis of Chekhov’s technique at this time proved quickly, however, to be unacceptable to the authorities. Whereas the Soviet government insisted upon the materialist doctrine of socialist realism, Chekhov was exploring the spiritual ideas of Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophists.46 He was therefore identified as part of the General Political Agency’s (a forerunner of the KGB) campaign against exponents of religious ideology, received a letter from Narkrompos (the ministry governing education and culture) telling him to stop spreading his ideas, and was threatened with arrest.47 As a consequence, Chekhov left Russia speedily in 1928 and went into self-imposed exile in Europe. Writing to his former colleagues at the Second Moscow Art Theatre from Germany in 1928, he declared that [i]t is impossible for me to stay in the theatre just as an actor who merely plays a number of roles […] Only the idea of a new theatre in general, a new theatre art can fascinate me and stimulate my creative work.48 Consequently, in 1930 Chekhov was directing again, first creating a production of Twelfth Night with the Jewish Habima Theatre49 and then working on Hamlet with a group of Russian emigré actors. By the end of 1930, he was in Paris, where the following year he formed Le Théâtre Tchekoff and an associated school of acting with his friend and colleague Georgette Boner. The Paris initiative collapsed in 1932 due to a lack of funds, and Chekhov travelled to Riga, Latvia, and Kaunas, Lithuania, where he acted, directed, and taught in leading theatres, until a military coup in Latvia in the spring of 1934 forced him to leave. In 1935, Chekhov was playing the part of Khlestakov in The Inspector General on Broadway when he was introduced to the then aspiring actress Beatrice Straight, whose mother and stepfather, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, had established Dartington Hall in Devon as an experimental centre for agriculture, education, scientific research, and the arts and crafts. At Straight’s request, Chekhov was invited to form a studio at Dartington, which opened in 1936. At almost exactly the same time as Chekhov arrived in Devon, Copeau’s nephew, Michel Saint-Denis, moved to London from France. Saint-Denis had worked as his uncle’s general secretary at the Vieux-Colombier, rising through a series of responsibilities (box office management, administration, publicity) to become a stage manager and then a rehearsal assistant. He also had his debuts

10

Introduction

both as an actor (Curio in a 1922 revival of Twelfth Night) and as a director (with a 1923 student production of Amahl et la lettre du roi (Amahl and the King’s Letter)).50 It was Copeau’s sudden disbanding of the Vieux-Colombier in 1924, however, that gave Saint-Denis his opportunity to establish himself as more than just an assistant. Immediately after closing his theatre and school, Copeau took a group of young actors with him to Burgundy, where he proposed to undertake a ‘conscientious examination of the principles of their craft’.51 They created characters and scenarios from training exercises, and whereas they had—until this point—seen the script as a kind of diagrammatic representation of performance, waiting to be revived by the actors, now scripts were evolved from performances improvised by actors in the studio.52 This group became known as ‘Les Copiaus’ (‘the little Copeaus’ or ‘children of Copeau’) by the locals and functioned much more as a collective, with SaintDenis as their artistic director when Copeau was absent (as he frequently was). Eventually, in 1929, Copeau broke the company up, and the ensemble reformed under the leadership of Saint-Denis as La Compagnie des Quinze (the company of fifteen). Les Quinze trained, made theatre, and toured together— finding particular success in London—until 1934, when the departures of some original members of the group and their perennial financial difficulties began to take their toll. Faced with these difficulties, Saint-Denis attempted to capitalise on the past successes of Les Quinze in England by seeking funding there. When he realised that he would not be able to accumulate enough money to maintain the company, but that there was significant interest in London in his work as an individual, he decided to disband Les Quinze and move to England, where he developed plans to open the London Theatre Studio in 1936. At the same time as Chekhov and Saint-Denis were arriving in England, Joan Littlewood was turning twenty-one and living in Manchester with the performer and writer Ewan MacColl, with whom she had formed Theatre of Action in 1934. The next year, they created Theatre Union, a politically radical company that was deeply indebted to the expressionist aesthetics of Meyerhold’s postrevolutionary period and to Stanislavsky’s acting technique, both of which Littlewood and MacColl had discovered through reading and then by teaching their techniques to their fellow actors. Later, Littlewood would also observe classes at Rudolf Laban’s Art of Movement Studio in Manchester. Therefore, although she could not claim to have had direct involvement in the studio movement as did Saint-Denis or Chekhov, Littlewood was no less formed by it, and was a more avid student of its practices than either Saint-Denis or Chekhov could claim to be. The studios led by these three directors are the subject of this book, which is deeply indebted to the many academic accounts of their work, too numerous to mention here. This study builds upon its forerunners to create an account not of these artists, but of the organisations they led—further iterations of the international studio tradition that had faltered with the failure of Stanislavsky,

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Copeau, and Barker’s 1922 plan to bear fruit. The examples I have chosen are not the only ones from this period in England. The Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by Rupert Doone and Robert Medley, was likewise committed to the experimental development, through training, of new theatre forms, but it did not pursue the structural model of the studio in the ways that the organisations led by Saint-Denis, Chekhov, and Littlewood did. Likewise, in the post-war period, Stephen Joseph’s Studio Theatre Company has much in common with the studio tradition, but did not thoroughly develop a model of practice that combined training and experimentation. The studio theatres now commonly to be found within the buildings of the subsidised theatre establishment might, in fact, be considered in part the result of what seems to have been Joseph’s strategic decision to translate some of the actor-centred, experimental, and democratising practices associated with studios into the architectural form of the theatre-in-the-round. This book also does not offer any consideration of the numerous projects which can be seen to have emerged in the wake of the tradition it explores, such as the RSC’s Theatregoround project, which was created in 1966 and combined educational and experimental theatre-making; the Royal Court’s Young People’s Theatre, also created in 1966 and the forerunner of its Young Writers’ Programme; and the National Theatre Studio, which was founded in 1984. Theatre Studios has not, in short, been conceived as a comprehensive study of experimental, ensemble theatre-making even in England, where all of its case studies are based, but as a detailed analysis of three parallel examples of a particular kind of organisation that formed part of that wider tradition. It is therefore to the question of the relationships between theatre studios and the broader histories of ensemble theatre-making that I will now turn.

Theatre studios and ensemble theatre-making The history of theatre studios based in England is offered here not only as an alternative history to that of the gradual emergence, in the UK, of a mainstream, subsidised, and self-consciously artistic theatre in the midtwentieth century. It is also intended to contribute to wider histories of the theatre ensemble. ‘Ensemble’, in French, is both an adverb and a noun. It is, therefore, both a way doing something and an entity: a group of people working together. It is, as Duška Radosavljević observes, a term used ‘more frequently’ in music than theatre, and musical ensembles are often—though not always—leaderless.53 Musical ensembles are also usually distinguished by playing music written for a group rather than an accompanied soloist—the words ‘trio’ or ‘quartet’, for example, denote both the music and the ensemble which plays it. In the theatre, the idea of an ensemble is a phenomenon of what could be seen as the long twentieth century. It began to emerge in the latter part of the nineteenth century and has continued into the twenty-first, albeit principally among artists whose roots remain in the twentieth. Initially, an ensemble

12

Introduction

described a group that resisted the entrenched hierarchies that tended to characterise companies led by actor-managers, which were often organised in an ad hoc manner. That is not to say, however, that these early ensembles were democratically structured. In fact the ensemble emerged, paradoxically, at the same time as what we might consider its opposite: the figure of the authoritarian director. Early directors fulfilled principally administrative functions, but gradually assumed artistic responsibilities. Totemic among those who rose to a position of artistic recognition was Ludwig Chronegk (1837–91), who was employed to direct the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s touring company, which was widely influential, not least in shaping Stanislavsky’s early artistic vision. As Michael Booth observes, the Duke ‘laid great stress on ensemble’, requiring his actors to commit to ‘[l]engthy rehearsal periods’ and to agree to play a wide spectrum of roles, in both size and significance.54 As a result of these policies, the Duke’s company was relatively consistent and skilled, and Chronegk was therefore able to achieve stagings that became internationally renowned for their realistic effect, combining the movement of large crowds with detailed portrayals of individual characters. In the late nineteenth century, Chronegk’s stagings offered an example of the possibilities of an approach to theatre production that emphasised the company as a totality rather than as a background for the performances of leading actors, that troubled conventional hierarchies, that valued the creative process of rehearsal, that invested in the training of artists, and that committed to experimentation rather than pursuing tried and tested formulas. In various combinations, these commitments would all shape the practices of ensembles in the twentieth century, as both Radosavljević and John Britton have shown.55 In Britton’s terse formulation, ensembles were characterised by their attention to: ‘Organisational structure. Longevity. Prior training. Common purpose’.56 These features of ensembles have shifted in significance and interpretation substantially over time, so that it is a problem endemic to their study that, as Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva puts it, ‘it is polyphony, not consensus, that is the norm’.57 It is, for example, obvious but crucial to observe that leftist groups such as Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel’s Berliner Ensemble (founded in 1949) or the Living Theatre (founded in the States in 1947 by the actress Judith Malina and the painter and poet Julian Beck) developed a very different approach to the organisational structure of their companies compared to, for example, Stanislavsky. We should also not assume that the fairly close political alignment of these two ensembles led them to adopt similar structures; what David Barnett describes as Brecht’s ‘strategic withdrawal from openly directing the actors in favour of input from the cast as a whole’ did not go nearly so far as the Living Theatre’s attempt, in Marianne DeKoven’s words, to rid themselves of ‘all traditional theatrical structures that establish hierarchies of separated functions and entities: play, playwright, producer, director, actors, crew, performance’.58 Furthermore, even these accounts cannot necessarily be taken at face value.

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Practices are rarely easily filed into stable and singular categories, but shift and blur quickly into paradox and contradiction, terms which recur frequently within academic studies of ensembles.59 Scholarly accounts of the history and practice of ensemble theatre have responded to this challenge mainly by embracing it. They have often gathered what Syssoyeva describes as a ‘montage of […] different perspectives and experiences’,60 as in hers and Scott Proudfit’s collections A History of Collective Creation,61 Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, and Women, Collective Creation and Devised Performance.62 The self-selective principle followed by such studies, which analyse the various practices of companies who define themselves collectively, rather than applying external criteria to their case studies, is also Radosavljević and Britton’s approach in The Contemporary Ensemble and Encountering Ensemble respectively. Radosavljević notes, for example, that her interviewees were selected primarily because of their capacity to speak ‘not only on behalf of themselves as individuals, but on behalf of an artistic entity which depends upon the contribution of other—often long-term—collaborators as constituent parts’.63 This book differs from these wider histories of ensemble theatre in part because the studio is a more clearly defined entity, comprising, as we have seen, commitments to ongoing and collective training, to sustaining a long-term company, and to experimental forms of practice. The three case studies gathered in this book therefore have the benefit of clear comparability: the differences between them are not simply a consequence of differences of emphasis in the terms with which they defined themselves, or of historical or geographical differences. Instead, they represent a spectrum of possibilities within the same model of practice as it was developed in broadly the same historical circumstances. Studios constitute one strand in what Syssoyeva identifies loosely as the first wave of ensemble theatre in ‘the first half of the twentieth century, […] arising from an often contradictory array of impulses: aesthetic, political, and social’, and often from ‘a directorial/choreographic sensibility’ that saw the theatre as a site for works of collective art, requiring collaboration between multiple disciplines.64 This vision was characteristically modernist as was the fondness of studios for producing artistic manifestoes and their interest in the reinvention of traditional, popular forms of theatre. The frequency with which studios chose to spend time in the countryside, developing their craft, was likewise not so much a rejection of modernity as a commitment to an alternative version of it that was as dependent upon industrialisation as it was resistant to some of what studio members saw as that process’s destructive effects. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold’s 1905 studio, for example, was, according to Jean Benedetti, ‘subsidized almost entirely by Stanislavsky’, to the tune of ‘over 20,000 roubles’, money which was available thanks to Stanislavsky’s family’s cotton mill.65 Even when the Art Theatre’s projects were not directly supported by their wealthy codirector, they were dependent upon income from his class, whose numbers

14

Introduction

were swelling in cities thanks to industrialisation. Both Copeau and Stanislavsky’s companies also depended upon income from touring, which was only possible because of international railway and shipping networks that were likewise generated by industrialised economies. The growth of these networks and the industrial cities which they connected also left rural economies increasingly depleted, leaving spaces like the barn at Mamontovka used by Stanislavsky’s 1905 studio, and the rural sites in Kanev and Evpatoriya where the First Studio spent its summers, as well as the rural properties acquired for Les Copiaus and the Compagnie des Quinze, and Dartington Hall and Ormesby Hall—that housed two of the studios explored in this book—available for conversion and re-use. Even in its apparent resistance to modernity, then, the impulse to create studios was characteristically and structurally modern. Because of these complex and paradoxical features of the studio phenomenon, this book adopts a fundamentally materialist approach to analysing its subject. Again, Stanislavsky’s studios offer an example. The ‘spirit’ of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre was sustained, as Bryan Brown has shown, by two key concepts: the kruzhok (circle) and obshchina (commune).66 Kruzhki developed in the 1830s as spaces for discursive resistance to Tsarist rule and consisted of ‘informal domestic gatherings’ of strictly limited groups.67 These gave rise to obshchina, a form of rural social organisation based on shared work, which was the model for the First Studio, according to Stanislavsky’s principal collaborator, Leopold Sulerzhitsky, who sought to establish, as he wrote, ‘a theatre-obshchina with its common governance, with its great tasks of a theatre-temple, […] with common labour, with equal participation in profits’.68 Evidently this vision underpinned many of the studio’s practices, devised—as Brown notes—to ‘reinforce and perpetuate’ its spiritual goal.69 A materialist analysis also exposes, however, that the studio was not, in fact, owned and governed in common, but remained under its parent organisation’s purview. Studio members were therefore expected to serve two masters: the Art Theatre as their employer, and the studio as their temple. The studio was not, therefore, only a circle, closed to outsiders and dedicated to developing and sustaining bonds between its members. It was also bound to the larger project of the Art Theatre, and to resolving what Stanislavsky saw as a crisis in its production processes: namely, the capacity of its actors to respond to the aesthetic demands of their director’s vision. Thus, Sulerzhitsky’s attempt to establish the studio as a form of commune was also unavoidably tethered to the external interests of his and the other studio’s members’ employer. It does not follow, however, from a materialist analysis of this situation that the First Studio’s practices should be considered simply hypocritical or fundamentally compromised by the wider relations of power that encompassed it. A materialist approach does, however, insist that analysing a studio and its practices should not involve their excision from wider social relations and historical and material contexts. Practices of training and rehearsal are inevitably shaped by

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15

societies and their institutions and organisations, and by the material realities and cultural contexts in which their participants exist. This is, if anything, even more significant for examining the work of an ensemble than it is in the case of companies that are openly committed to conventional, hierarchical models of practice, because ensembles are more likely to generate simultaneous but conflicting models of interaction. This book therefore seeks to analyse its case studies as organisations, rather than through the biographical lens offered by the lives of their assumed leaders, or the methodological framing of the techniques they developed. This is the sense in which Theatre Studios offers a ‘political history’. It is not a history of the politics of the artists whose work is its subject, nor is it—primarily—a political analysis of the performances they produced, though it does sometimes offer politically inflected readings of them. Rather, it seeks, first and foremost, to analyse the political relations of theatre-making processes: the ways in which those processes structured and were structured by power relations that were both intrinsic to the rehearsal room (such as the relationships between directors and actors) and extrinsic to it (most notably—in this study—relations shaped by gender). Theatremaking processes are therefore considered, by this book, in two senses. First, the term refers to the totality of ways in which theatre productions are created—not only rehearsal processes, but those of writing and editing, and design and fabrication, for example. Secondly, it is used to mean the creation of theatre organisations. Consideration of the theatre-making process in its entirety is of particular significance for understanding the studio tradition, which sought a more expansive conception of it than was possible within the constraints of conventional production. As the critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in praise of Joan Littlewood in 1967: ‘[o]thers write plays, direct them, or act in them; she alone “makes theatre”’.70 It is an important contention of this book that Littlewood—and other studio practitioners—were able to generate this aesthetic effect because they also ‘made theatre’ in my second sense: they created theatre organisations and thus re-shaped the social and material relations and cultural norms of theatre production. The term ‘theatre-making’ has recently begun to be used in a further sense, as the critic Lyn Gardner noted in a 2010 interview with Duška Radosavljevič about ensemble practice, which she saw particularly in ‘devised work and the work of what I would call the theatre-makers rather than actors’.71 Radosavljevič has elaborated upon Gardner’s meaning by emphasising the implicitly collaborative nature of such practices. In ‘theatre-making’, she argues, ‘the creative process seems to be more important than the formal division of labour’ and ‘the work’s relationship with the audience seems to be more important than any previously pursued hierarchies of text and performance’, meaning that ‘an allinclusive collaborative process’ takes the place of a model of production featuring ‘clearly delineated, playwrights, directors, designers, producers and actors’.72 Radosavljevič identifies Tim Crouch, who worked initially as an actor before beginning to write, direct, and often perform his own work, as an example of a ‘theatre-maker’ and observes that ‘although he is not associated with an

16

Introduction

ensemble as such, he […] works with permanent collaborators’.73 In an interview with the actor Patrick O’Kane, Crouch offered a telling account of the ‘clearly delineated’ process to which Radosavljevič opposes the practices of ‘theatre-making’: I never felt that I was anything other than a three-dimensional being who was needed to flesh out the stage space. […] The writer and director would […] have their meetings and their discussions—discussions that I was desperate to be involved in, that I had lots of thoughts and ideas about—and at no point did I ever feel my input would have been welcome. […] It was our job to physically manifest the ideas that had been tussled over by the director and the writer. […] That was the creative team and it’s interesting how that phraseology is used; the creative team does not include the actor.74 Crouch’s critique exposes the extent to which the conventional hierarchies of theatre production are founded upon the assumptions of dualism, both of mind and body and—relatedly—text and performance. As, for the dualist, the mind is the arena in which the actions of the body are conceived and the position from which they are directed, so in conventional theatre production the pages of scripts and directors’ books are the site of the conception and direction of performances. Ric Knowles has analysed the translation of this hierarchy into ‘temporal terms’, characterised by production schedules that move from creative and conceptual beginnings involving a creative team of producers, directors and designers, through to drawings and embodiments on the part of theatrical craftspeople, before moving on to the final stage and level that is understood as technical application by workers.75 Syssoyeva notes that ‘notions of collective creation’ in theatre tend to ‘emerge in response to some prior mode of theatre-making felt […] to be aesthetically, interpersonally and/or politically constraining, oppressive or in some manner unethical’, and this process and the perceived constraints of the model of production analysed by Knowles have served as a common reference point for theatre studios to react against.76 The history of theatre-making offered by this book is therefore, in a sense, also a pre-history of this more recent use of the term to describe an early twenty-first-century iteration of what Stanislavsky and subsequent studio practitioners called ‘the actor as artist’.77 It does not, however, follow from studios’ opposition to conventionally delineated models of production that they were concerned, as Knowles’ analysis is, with the ‘ideologically coded’ nature of this process.78 We will see that Theatre Workshop certainly was engaged with this political question, but the London Theatre Studio and

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the Old Vic Theatre Centre, for example, were much more concerned with developing the technical capacity of ‘theatrical craftspeople’ than in liberating them from their subservience to the creative and conceptual vision of their superiors. The Chekhov Theatre Studio fell somewhere between these two examples in that it was much more concerned than the latter with the liberation of craftspeople such as actors, whom Chekhov pointedly described as ‘creative artists’, but sought that liberation within a spiritual and ethical framework that was, for the most part, ideologically conservative.79 Whether or not they were concerned with reforming theatre-making at an ideological level, however, all studios sought to trouble the model of what Lev Dodin refers to as ‘production line theatre’,80 and did so, at the most fundamental level, by spatialising its temporal sequence. This was, in part, a literal process, in that studios brought the various creative practices of theatre-making under one roof, but it was also figurative and conceptual. Space, as Doreen Massey observes, is the ‘dimension of a dynamic, simultaneous multiplicity’, and this is the dimension within which studios conceived of their practices.81 Most obviously, they viewed training as an ongoing commitment, interacting with creative work, rather than a precondition to be completed in advance of professional practice. Studios likewise rejected the assumption that writing should precede production and experimented with adaptation and other creative processes rooted in improvisation like those that would come to be called ‘devising’, in which performances, scenography and text are produced interactively and—if not always simultaneously—then certainly in overlapping timescales. When working on extant texts, studios typically placed great emphasis on the contemporaneous and interactive nature of their creative processes, rather than marshalling them into an order of priority. Finally, studios’ commitment to experimentation required, in theory at least, that they spatialise even the temporal sequence of their own development, by continually subjecting its discoveries to renewed interrogation. The Polish director Jerzy Grotowski discussed the establishment in 1959 of the Teatr Laboratorium in Opole, Poland, in these terms, writing that it was shaped by the ‘ideal’ of Stanislavsky’s ‘systematic renewal of the methods of observation, and his dialectical relationship to his own earlier work’.82 Grotowski’s commitment to Stanislavsky, therefore, was not to Stanislavsky’s technique, but to ‘the technique of creating your own technique’, which refuses to consign the past to the past, but keeps it in the room, and subjects it, continually, to the rigours of the present.83 Studios, therefore, represent an example of theatre-making’s attempt to engage what Massey calls the challenge of our constitutive inter-relatedness—and thus our collective implication in the outcomes of that inter-relatedness; the radical contemporaneity of an ongoing multiplicity of others, human and non-human; and the ongoing and ever-specific project of the practices through which that sociability is to be configured.84

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This book attempts to rise to the subsequent challenge of generating an adequate account of the constitutively inter-related practices that configured the sociabilities of theatre studios by drawing throughout—both explicitly and implicitly—on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s related concepts of ‘life-lines’ and the ‘meshworks’ they create. For Ingold, life is lived ‘along lines’,85 which become knotted and entangled in a ‘meshwork’, ‘where many lines of becoming are drawn tightly together’.86 Studios are conceived here, accordingly, as entanglements between human and non-human existences—parts which are not ‘elementary components’ but ‘movements’, which produce the entanglement by which a studio is —always only temporarily—bound together.87 Thus, Ingold’s model provides us with spatial conception of time, in which a studio appears like a basket or rope woven from the life-lines of its members. When viewed at a distance, the studio will therefore appear as an entity, but when considered in detail, it will reveal itself to be an occurrence, manifested by the interweaving of its relational processes.

Remnants, practices, models: the organisation of this book This book is divided into three sections, each dedicated to a case study from the studio tradition in England between 1935 and 1965. The first section focuses on the London Theatre Studio (1936–9) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–52), both led by Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine. The second explores the Chekhov Theatre Studio at Dartington Hall (1936–8), led by Michael Chekhov, which then transferred to Ridgefield, Connecticut, and travelled within the United States until its closure in 1942. The final section concentrates on Theatre Workshop, led by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl, and Gerry Raffles, which was founded in 1945 and gradually dissipated across the 1960s. The focus of this study, then, is from 1935—when Saint-Denis and Chekhov both arrived in the UK—to 1965—when Peter Hall dismissed his actors’ proposal to re-shape the RSC into a studio. At this time, the practices associated with studios were taken up variously by the new theatre establishment, the growing drama school sector, and the ‘fringe’ and ‘alternative’ theatre companies that began to emerge, particularly after 1968.88 The case studies chosen span the full period of theatre studios’ prominence in the UK, and include their most influential incarnations for theatre-making in Britain: the studios led by Michel Saint-Denis and Joan Littlewood. Both Saint-Denis and Littlewood’s work has been well documented in memoirs and interviews with their collaborators, in archival materials, and in scholarship, offering rich scope for its re-evaluation. Chekhov’s work is now best known within the discipline of actor training, where it has been extensively explored. By contrast, his brief period of residence in the UK means that he is rarely considered significant in the context of British theatre history. While that position is certainly justified, Chekhov’s work is extremely significant for this study because of the unique level of insight we have into the daily practices of

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his studio. This is thanks to the seemingly tireless labour of his student, assistant and then collaborator, Deirdre Hurst (later Hurst Du Prey), who recorded in shorthand a huge number of classes and rehearsals throughout the existence of the Chekhov Theatre Studio. These transcripts were typed up by Hurst and her fellow students and collected by Hurst into a ten-volume typescript under the title ‘The Actor is the Theatre’, a copy of which is held by the Dartington Hall Trust at the Devon Records Office in Exeter. In short, this book’s case studies were chosen both for their significance for wider practices of theatre-making in the UK and for the availability of material they offer for illuminating the particular practices of studios. Each of these case studies is explored in three chapters. These deliberately resist chronological organisation in order to avoid falling into a teleological conception of each studio’s historical narrative, in which what they ended up doing is narrated as the consequence of deliberate design and what they became well known for doing is given greatest significance. Instead, I seek to explore the tensions between what a studio sought to do and what it was able to achieve, and to balance those aspects of their practices that became influential and those that have been occluded. For these reasons, the first chapter in each section is titled ‘Remnants’ and explores some important parts of each studio’s practices that can be seen to have held together after the studio as a whole had come apart. I have deliberately avoided terms such as ‘influence’ or ‘legacy’ because it is my aim to focus on concrete instances of practices that remained, rather than more intangible and indirect connections to the subsequent practices of others. The second chapter in each section is called ‘Practices’, and focuses on the work of each studio as a whole organisation. Here I attempt to form an account of the ways in which each studio was shaped by the particular forms of entanglement to which its practices gave rise. Each account therefore focuses on the structuring of relations between the studio’s members and the material contexts of their work. The final chapter in each section is titled ‘Models’ and attempts to elaborate theoretical lessons from each studio’s practices, and thereby to answer the question ‘what were the models of collective creative practice developed by this studio?’ I do not do this in order tacitly to assert that practice becomes significant by being elevated to a theoretical plane, but to focus on what can be learned from each studio’s practice for other contexts, and to offer an account of their work that is distinct from their own rhetoric, and that arises, instead, from the analysis of the meshwork of practices developed in the previous section. The theoretical apparatus used in these accounts of the models that can be deduced from each studio’s practices is diverse and responsive to each case. It begins with the work of the American Pragmatists, in particular John Dewey, whose conception of ‘pragmatic intelligence’, which ‘is a creative intelligence, not a routine mechanic’ and ‘develops within the sphere of action for the sake of possibilities not yet given’, was closely aligned with the studio project.89

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Dewey was also a central figure in the development of progressive education in the early twentieth century, whose commitment to the experiential development of habit likewise underpinned the development of studios. Dewey also influenced the studio movement by teaching Dorothy Elmhirst (then Whitney, who co-founded—and financed—Dartington Hall), when she was at university. Dewey’s account of the development of an alternative intelligence to ‘the faculty of intellect honored in text-books and neglected elsewhere’, which encompasses ‘the sum-total of impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries’ does not, however, adequately capture the political dimension of each studio’s practices.90 The book therefore shifts, as it develops, to draw upon the materialist frameworks offered by the writings of Antonio Gramsci and of the standpoint feminists who emerged as a loosely connected movement in the 1970s. I introduce these perspectives in the text as they are called upon, and reflect in more detail upon their significance for the project of this book and the wider consideration of the politics of creative practices in the concluding chapter. In summary, Theatre Studios charts a series of far-sighted but ultimately failed attempts to establish creative collectivities. Through analyses of the material and social relations and processes by which theatrical art is made, it interrogates the political commitments of its makers and their systems—how these were sustained, compromised, adapted, abandoned. It does so in order to illuminate a tradition of counter-hegemonic approaches to cultural production that were variously exploited, marginalised, and suppressed in their own time by the centres of cultural power. In the years since it faded, that tradition has also been commonly occluded by dominant approaches to history and criticism. Conventional emphasis on either the individual artist, artwork, or cultural institution as the primary unit of analysis, I propose, has served to obscure the structural politics at the heart of the endeavours I explore here. This book takes, therefore, a different approach. Theatre Studios is rooted in an understanding of the theatre as a relational, processual, and collective undertaking. Its units of analysis are consequently the relations between and among collaborating artists, their processes of making, and the forms of organisation so produced. The theatre analysed in the following chapters is therefore not a series of commodifiable products made available for critical evaluation, but rather a place of work whose practices and relations are produced both by and in tension with the wider cultures from which they emerge. This approach, I contend, opens the theatre, as an exemplary site of cultural production, to a broader audience than only theatre historians. Theatre is emphatically the social art. Like society, it is a creative undertaking, produced in common and never completed. Theatre Studios charts this collective endeavour in one of its most politically radical and artistically ambitious forms. In so doing, it argues for a radical re-evaluation of the tenets, structures, and practices of making art, and thereby society, together as one. This book, then, reveals studios not as spaces but as political encounters and offers new paradigms for considering theatre-making as an exemplary site of both cultural and social production.

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Notes 1 Memorandum to Peter Hall from the RSC Actors’ Committee and the Repertory Stage Manager, after Consultation between Clifford Williams, John Barton and Tony Church, undated: British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 81191. 2 Minutes of a Meeting of the Company Committee held in the Manager’s Office at the Aldwych Theatre, Monday October 25, 1965, 10.30am: BL, Add. MS 81191. 3 Peter Hall, Memorandum addressed to all members of the Royal Shakespeare forum, undated 1965: Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive (hereafter SCLA), Maurice Daniels Collection. Hall does not commit himself to a figure for the size of the company referred to in this document, but the minutes of the meeting of the Company Committee on October 25, 1965 (see note 2) mention a single company numbering about seventy. 4 The saving of £7,000 to be made by reducing studio activity represents about £116,000 in 2020, the figure of £590,000 for the RSC’s total expenditure represents about £9,780,000 in 2020, and its annual salary bill of £132,000 translates to £2,188,000 in 2020 (these figures are arrived at by using CPI as a measure of inflation since 1965). 5 Peter Hall, Memorandum to the Arts Council, September 3, 1966: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 6 C. Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 153. 7 J. Bull, British Theatre Companies: 1965–1979 (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 54. 8 The text of the address is in BL, Add. MS 81103 and is reproduced, with a few necessary changes, as the Foreword to M. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises (London: Heinemann, 1982). 9 J. Benedetti, The Moscow Art Theatre Letters (London: Routledge, 2013), 45 (emphasis original). 10 K. Stanislavski, My Life in Art, ed. and trans. J. Benedetti (London: Routledge, 2008), 185. 11 Ibid., 243. 12 J. Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life and Art (London: Methuen, 1988), 124. 13 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 244. 14 Ibid., 245. 15 R. Leach, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), 51. 16 E. Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (London: Methuen, 2006), 30. 17 Stanislavski, My Life in Art, 249. 18 Ibid., 297. 19 J. Pitches and S. Aquilina, eds, Stanislavsky in the World: The System and Its Transformations Across Continents (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 20 S. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, Second edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). 21 J. Rudlin and N.H. Paul, eds, Copeau: Texts on Theatre (London: Routledge, 1990), 216–18; M. Evans, Jacques Copeau (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 29–30. 22 Rudlin and Paul, Copeau: Texts on Theatre, 35. 23 A.M. Katz, ‘The Genesis of the Vieux-Colombier: The Aesthetic Background of Jacques Copeau’, Educational Theatre Journal 19, no. 4 (December 1967): 434. 24 D. Paterson ‘Two Productions by Copeau: “The Tricks of Scapin” and “Twelfth Night”’, The Drama Review: TDR 28, no. 1, French Theatre (spring 1984): 40. 25 Rudlin and Paul, eds, Copeau, 117. 26 Evans, Jacques Copeau, 10. 27 J. Rudlin, Jacques Copeau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13. 28 Paterson, ‘Two Productions by Copeau’, 42. 29 J. Copeau, and L.C. Pronko, ‘Once Again: Style’, The Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 4 (summer 1963): 187.

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30 Rudlin and Paul, eds, Copeau, 49. 31 Evans, Jacques Copeau, 79–80; Rudlin, Jacques Copeau, 49. 32 M. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style & Other Writings, ed. J. Baldwin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 28. 33 E. Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), 102. 34 Paterson, ‘Two Productions by Copeau’, 45. 35 J. Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life and Art (London: Methuen, 1999), 220. 36 H. Granville-Barker, The Exemplary Theatre (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1922), 144–5. 37 D. MacCarthy, The Court Theatre 1904–1907: A Commentary (London: A.H. Bullen, 1907), 2. 38 Ibid., 5. 39 Granville-Barker, The Exemplary Theatre, 144–5. 40 Ibid., 149. 41 D. Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37. 42 Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life and Art, 282. 43 Rudlin and Paul, eds, Copeau, 216. 44 M. Chekhov, To the Actor (London: Routledge, 2002), li. 45 Ibid. 46 Anthroposophy was an esoteric philosophy developed by Rudolf Steiner in the early twentieth century, with a particular focus on educational, spiritual and creative development. 47 M. Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, ed. B. Merlin (London: Routledge, 2005), 136. 48 Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, 219 (emphasis original). 49 E. Levy, The Habima, Israel’s National Theater 1917–1977: A Study of Cultural Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 107. 50 J. Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (London: Praeger, 2003), 19, 22. 51 Rudlin and Paul, eds, Copeau, 37, 169. 52 On the script as a ‘performance diagram’, see Paterson, ‘Two Productions by Copeau’, 45; on the development of Les Copiaus’ practice, see Rudlin, Jacquues Copeau, 35 and Evans, Jacques Copeau, 35. 53 D. Radosavljević, ed., The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 3. 54 M.R. Booth, ‘Nineteenth Century Theatre’, in J.R. Brown, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 336. 55 Ibid., 2–4; J. Britton, ed., Encountering Ensemble (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3–10. 56 Britton, ed., Encountering Ensemble, 7. 57 K.M. Syssoyeva and S. Proudfit, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5. 58 D. Barnett, ‘The Berliner Ensemble: Bertolt Brecht’s theories of theatrical collaboration as practice’, in Encountering Ensemble, ed. Britton, 138; M. DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (London: Duke University Press, 2004), 144. 59 See, for example, Britton, ed., Encountering Ensemble, 4; Syssoyeva and Proudfit, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, 8. 60 Ibid. 61 K.M. Syssoyeva and S. Proudfit, A History of Collective Creation (New York: Palgrave, 2013). 62 K.M. Syssoyeva and S. Proudfit, Women, Collective Creation and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

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63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

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Radosavljević, ed., The Contemporary Ensemble, 11. Syssoyeva and Proudfit, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, 8. Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life and Art, 156. B. Brown, ‘The Emergence of Studiinost: The Ethics and Processes of Ensemble in the Russian Theatre Studio’, in Encountering Ensemble, ed. Britton, 51–8. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 55. K. Tynan, Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events (London: Longmans, 1967), 317. Radosavljevič, ed., The Contemporary Ensemble, 86. D. Radosavljevič, Theatre-Making: Interplay Between Text and Performance in the Twenty-First Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 23. Ibid. P. O’Kane, ed. Actors’ Voices (London: Oberon, 2012), 90–1. R. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29 (emphasis original). Syssoyeva and Proudfit, Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance, 6. S. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, Second edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 206. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 28. Chekhov, To the Actor, 22. Britton, Encountering Ensemble, 10. D. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 61. J. Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (London: Methuen, 1969), 16. J. Grotowski and K. Salata, ‘Reply to Stanislavsky’, The Drama Review: TDR 52, no. 2 (2008b): 39. D. Massey, For Space (London: SAGE Publications, 2005), 195. T. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 116. T. Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 132. T. Ingold, The Life of Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 7, 11. Bull, British Theatre Companies: 1965–1979, 49–120. J. Dewey, Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Holt, 1917), 63–4. Ibid., 67–8.

SECTION 1

The London Theatre Studio (1936–1939) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–1952)

1 REMNANTS OF THE LONDON THEATRE STUDIO AND THE OLD VIC THEATRE CENTRE

The two studios explored in this section, the London Theatre Studio (1936–9, hereafter LTS) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–52, hereafter OVC), were both run jointly by Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine. Devine was Saint-Denis’ assistant director at the LTS, principally responsible for administration, but the two men collaborated with increasing equality across the two enterprises, with Devine taking joint responsibility for the planning of the OVC in the run-up to its opening in 1947, and becoming its co-director, alongside Saint-Denis and the actor and director Glen Byam Shaw. The ‘three boys’, as they became known, ran the OVC until entrenched disagreements with both the Old Vic Theatre Company management and the Old Vic’s governors led to the announcement, in 1951, of the resignation of Byam Shaw, Devine, and Saint-Denis, and of the OVC’s immediate closure, with the Old Vic Theatre School remaining open until the end of 1952 so that its current students could complete their courses. The last act of the OVC, then, was the Old Vic Theatre School’s 1952 ‘School Show’, after which Saint-Denis seems to have given a speech from the theatre’s stage. Scribbled notes in his archive suggest that he took this opportunity both to note the centre’s achievements and to insist that its work was far from over: ‘We can feel happy and grateful’, he wrote, ‘6 years = 300 people [the number of students trained]’, and he thanked ‘students, staff, friends’ and ‘George and Glen’ for ‘heroic work in adverse circumst[ances]’, observing that ‘I asked them for [the] best show ever’ and that they provided it. He also thanked ‘public and friends’ for ‘a fortnight packed’ and said that although ‘people are sad’, ‘they should not be’. He made reference to attempts to ‘save the school’, but observed that ‘if it disappears = Young people to fight for their convictions = to pursue the work’, which, he reassured his supporters, ‘will not disappear’.1

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Privately, however, Saint-Denis was less optimistic about the future of ‘the work’ of the LTS and OVC. On August 4, 1952, he wrote to George Devine from Paris (having left England in July). He was ‘exhausted’ and ‘bewildered by my own feelings’, and his letter was defiant, but less confidently so: I swear it is not the end. I know it cannot be: something infinitely strong binds us. Perhaps we needed this provisional end, this break to realise it: the way in which it has taken place is so strange […], that it contains the certainty of a future, otherwise it would be the unnatural destruction of life.2 Saint-Denis and Devine had many influential friends, including their long-time collaborator, Michael Redgrave, who gave the Rockefeller Foundation Lectures in the Department of Drama at Bristol University in 1952–3. In the second of his four lectures, Redgrave praised Saint-Denis’ achievements and echoed his belief in ‘the certainty of a future’ for his work, arguing that he had trained and developed ‘in many actors and actresses, designers, producers, authors, here amongst us, now, the seed, the flower and fruit of some of the best theatre of today and tomorrow’.3 This analysis of the aftermath of the LTS and OVC will show that Redgrave was right: we can see remnants of the work of these studios littering both what was identified at the time as the ‘best theatre’ of the 1950s, and the new theatre establishment that emerged in the 1960s. I have borrowed Redgrave’s horticultural analogy to examine, first, the seeds of that new establishment (which can be seen as early as 1953); second, its flowering in the tradition of English acting that this new establishment both supported and depended upon, and, third, the fruit that it bore in the form of short-lived studios established at the Royal Court and the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).

1953: the seeds of a new theatre establishment Following his 1952 prediction of Saint-Denis’ influence providing ‘the seed, the flower and fruit’ of the future English theatre, in 1953 Michael Redgrave went to Stratford. There, Glen Byam Shaw had joined Antony Quayle as director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre and was developing, alongside George Devine, larger-scale productions of the Shakespeare plays they had directed at the OVC with the Young Vic company.4 In 1953 Byam Shaw directed what would be seen as a landmark production of Antony and Cleopatra with Redgrave as Antony, Peggy Ashcroft as Cleopatra, Marius Goring as Caesar, and designed by Motley, all of whom had been active in the LTS and OVC. Redgrave also played Shylock to Ashcroft’s Portia, with LTS graduate Yvonne Mitchell as his daughter Jessica, and was directed as Lear by Devine, with Mitchell as Cordelia. Mitchell was also Katherine in Devine’s production of The Taming of the Shrew and Lady Anne to Goring’s Richard III. The continuity between the OVC and

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Stratford was also visible off-stage, not only in the employment of Motley as designers, but in the appointment of Peter Streuli, from the Old Vic Theatre School’s staff, as stage director, a role which included a wide range of responsibilities including stage management, lighting, and rehearsing understudies.5 From this foundation of LTS and OVC networks, Byam Shaw’s 1953 season broke Stratford’s box office records, playing to more than 360,000 people. That box office success would certainly have pleased the outgoing chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1953, Ernest Pooley. Two years earlier, at the height of the public outcry over what was seen as the forced resignation of the Old Vic Centre directors, Pooley had written to Lord Esher, chair of the Old Vic governors, expressing the view that ‘The Old Vic business is very tiresome—the only sensible comment I have seen is in the Economist’.6 The article to which he referred claimed that it will be a great pity if so much talent is irrevocably lost to the Old Vic; but if financial [pressures] should make necessary some curtailment of its activities, it must not be the main theatre company which suffers. The Old Vic is the nearest approach to a British national theatre, and the public looks to it for first-rate performances of the English classics. And it is the public which pays the piper.7 In 1953 Ernest Pooley might well have still assumed that the Old Vic was still ‘the nearest approach to a British national theatre’, and the foremost venue for ‘first-rate performances of the English classics’, but several events that year might have given a more astute observer pause for thought. First, there was the success of Quayle and Byam Shaw’s Stratford season. Second, in that year Guthrie handed leadership of the Old Vic over to Michael Benthall, who pursued a policy of producing Shakespeare’s entire body of work, frequently under the balletic direction of Robert Helpmann and with designs by Leslie Hurry, that harked back to nineteenth-century pictorialism. This policy was in marked contrast to Stratford under Quayle and Byam Shaw, where a series of dynamic Shakespearean productions were created that would come to define their era rather than recalling an earlier one (among these, Byam Shaw’s 1955 Macbeth, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, is discussed below). Furthermore, when Byam Shaw took over sole direction of the Memorial Theatre in 1956, he offered Peter Hall his first production there, leading, in 1959, to Hall’s ascent to the position of director, and subsequently to the creation of the RSC, confirming that within a decade the ‘nearest approach to a British national theatre’ had shifted from the Old Vic to Stratford and the Aldwych. Nineteen fifty-three was also the year in which Devine began work on what would become the English Stage Company at the Royal Court. This enterprise was catalysed by the director Tony Richardson, who wanted to run a theatre that would be a home for contemporary, international plays: ‘Devine knew all

30

London Theatre Studio and Old Vic Centre

about the organisation side, and I knew the plays’, he reportedly said.8 True to form, and to the policy of both the LTS and OVC, Devine ‘prepared a ninepage memorandum’.9 While he produced this plan, Devine was also attempting, as Taryn Storey has shown, to establish the Royal Court as the London hub of a ‘grid’ of theatres, envisaged by the Arts Council’s secretary general, William Emrys Williams, as a ‘national infrastructure’ whereby ‘middle-weight’ provincial theatres would be linked to larger ‘number one’ theatres, sharing productions and developing other forms of ‘practical co-operation’.10 Evidently, this approach was intended to align Devine’s plans with Arts Council strategy, and possibly to distract somewhat from the fact that his proposal for a ‘studio theatre’, which Williams greeted with ‘warm interest’,11 closely resembled the recently closed OVC. Alongside the Royal Court’s proposed ‘ten productions a season by a small permanent company’ to be performed on ‘a permanent setting’, Devine planned ‘an audience-building organization, and training courses for writers and actors’.12 The complicated series of deals and compromises that finally gave rise to the founding of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court have received detailed attention elsewhere,13 so I will not rehearse them here, except to note that Devine relinquished the ‘studio’ elements of his plan with reluctance. In 1957 he wrote to Saint-Denis with mixed feelings about the Court’s evident success: I have made a plan for myself which I intend to keep to. I shall work on here [the Royal Court] for another two years—roughly till April ’59 and then take a long break, at least six months, when I shall have a long holiday, go abroad, produce abroad, etc. and try to renew myself. When I come back I shall attempt to concentrate more on the training and development side of the organisation, more experimental work, maybe a school etc. Hoping that by then Tony [Richardson] will be able to take the bulk of the work at the theatre.14 Devine did make some limited progress ‘on the training and development side’, which is charted below, but he never involved Saint-Denis directly in his work at the Royal Court, possibly because his co-director, Tony Richardson, was against it.15 Nonetheless, Saint-Denis was acknowledged as a ‘tremendous influence’ in a letter addressed to him from his former pupil, the Court’s most prominent designer and LTS graduate Jocelyn Herbert.16 In spite of this influence, it is clear that the story of the excision of studio practice from the RSC told in the introduction to this book can be substantially generalised across the emergent theatre establishment of the mid-1960s. Laurence Olivier managed to sustain a permanent National Theatre Company from 1963 and committed to offering training in the form of movement classes with Yat Malmgrem and voice classes with Kate Fleming. Olivier’s planned acting studio (which Kenneth Tynan had

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suggested would offer ‘constant practice in a sort of acting gym’) was, however, never securely established; there was only, as Simon Callow remembers, ‘a more conventional gymnasium, with bar-bells and weights, in the [Old Vic] basement’.17 The company were offered training, in other words, in a constrained, athletic sense; there was no more a collective, experimental practice at the heart of Olivier’s National Theatre (NT) than at Hall’s RSC or Devine or William Gaskill’s Royal Court, in spite of the studios they attempted to establish, which are discussed below. In short, by the time a decade or so had passed since they had been sown in 1953, it was clear that the seeds of this new theatre establishment had not come true to their parents in the studio tradition. That is not to say, however, that they did not flower, or bear fruit; they certainly did, as we will see.

‘Transforming themselves from role to role’: the flowering of English acting after the LTS and OVC The over-arching argument of this section—that remnants of the studios led by Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine littered the emergent theatre establishment of the 1960s—is vulnerable to the charge of circularity. As Chapter 2 will show, the studios led by Devine and Saint-Denis depended for their existence upon the support of a new wave of theatre artists who were making names for themselves in the 1930s, and that success meant that they would—almost by definition—become the senior figures of the theatre establishment twenty-five years later. Those artists—Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, and Michael Redgrave, who were associated with both the LTS and OVC—featured prominently at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in the 1950s and later in the RSC and NT of the 1960s. The question, therefore, is: to what extent can these artists meaningfully be considered to constitute a group? The critic Kenneth Tynan, for example, described Alec Guinness (a close associate of all of them) as ‘[springing] from no tradition’.18 Close association between artists does not automatically entail alignment in terms of their practice. Furthermore, even if aesthetic connections can be established between them, can the work of these artists, taken collectively, be considered a remnant of the aesthetic practices developed at the LTS and OVC? In this section, I will argue that the practices of these actors were indeed closely aligned, and can be seen to derive from their experiences at the LTS and OVC. Setting out the agenda of his RSC Studio in 1962, Saint-Denis argued that actors must learn to understand and appreciate ‘style, considered as a reality in itself, artistically bound to the expression of reality as a whole’, an aim that would require each actor to ‘develop his imaginative power as well as the strength and variety of his means of expression’.19 Style was a key term for Saint-Denis, and we shall see in Chapter 2 that it was central to the work of both the LTS and the OVC. Saint-Denis’ explication of this core aspect of his

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practice in his proposal for the RSC Studio characterises artistry as a balancing act between imagination on one side and reality on the other. For Saint-Denis, the capacity to work in a given style is an ‘imaginative power’ that creates its own reality, which must never be allowed to become detached from ‘reality as a whole’. We can find an example of this balancing act in the work of the actor Laurence Olivier. Olivier starred in Glen Byam Shaw’s 1955 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre production of Macbeth, for which he also collaborated with Roger Furse to create the design. This production is widely considered to have featured, as the critic J.C. Trewin stated, ‘much the best performance of the [leading] part in our time’,20 and Michael Mullin has shown that its design was ‘anticipated’ by Motley’s design for Saint-Denis’ 1937 Old Vic production, which also starred Olivier.21 That production had been preceded by a ‘course in staging Macbeth’ run by Saint-Denis at the LTS, whose classes were ‘followed’ (that is, observed) by Olivier.22 Their Macbeth became notorious, largely because of the coincidence of the death of the Old Vic’s manager, Lillian Baylis, the day before its (delayed) opening, which was followed by a critical response that was widely disparaging of the production’s highly stylised approach. It featured make-ups that Olivier remembered as ‘mask-like’, which was not problematic in itself, but these were masks that the actors could not successfully inhabit; Olivier described the feeling of having ‘a huge false face on’.23 In spite of this, Audrey Williamson (admittedly a critic more predisposed than most to Saint-Denis and the Old Vic) remembered the production as ‘the best Macbeth before the war—though it was by no means perfect’.24 She acknowledged ‘defects of intellectual subtlety and range’, as well as Olivier’s vocal shortcomings, but praised what she called ‘the spirit of darkling imagination […] in Michel St. Denis’ blood-boltered production’ which ‘crashed onwards to the final wolfishness with a tingling virility’. Olivier concluded, nonetheless, that ‘I was not good in such a theatrical production’.25 If we consider the 1937 Macbeth in the context of Olivier’s developing career, it seems to have been the second of two crucial early failures with Shakespeare. The first had been his 1935 Romeo, in John Gielgud’s production, in which the two young stars later swapped roles, with Olivier taking over Mercutio from Gielgud. As Abigail Rokison notes, ‘Olivier insisted on making his performance as Romeo […] realistic and natural and would not bow to Gielgud’s advice to the contrary’.26 Public opinion was, predictably, divided along similar lines, as encapsulated by W.A. Darlington’s memorable description of a balcony scene in which the possibility never seemed far away that [Olivier’s Romeo] might swarm up a pillar and cut the play short by an act or two by having his desire there and then instead of hanging about in the garden talking imperishable verse.27

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Although Olivier would go on to narrate this story to his own credit, describing Gielgud ‘giving the familiar tradition fresh life, whereas I was completely disregarding the old in favour of something new’, his completely different approach to Macbeth, only two years later, tells another story. Recalling his own difficulties playing the title role in Saint-Denis’ 1935 production of André Obey’s Noah, Gielgud asserted that, as an artist, he learned as much, if not more, from his failures than his successes.28 Olivier’s recollection of working with Saint-Denis on Macbeth shows a related process of attempting to learn from the failures of his Romeo: When I was working with him on Macbeth, he said, ‘It must be absolutely true, and you must find the truth through the verse, […] you must not discard the verse and pretend it’s prose, and you mustn’t be carried away by the verse into utter unreality; therefore, you must find the truth through the verse’.29 This is the balancing act of ‘style’ that Saint-Denis would later urge the RSC to develop in its training, but Olivier could not find it in 1937: ‘I “made up” to play Macbeth, instead of letting Macbeth play through me. I had everything outwardly and not enough inwardly’.30 By contrast, in 1955, Olivier’s performance of Macbeth was celebrated precisely for his capacity to achieve what he called ‘the right mixture of style and down-to-earth reality’.31 Gareth Lloyd Evans described Olivier’s capacity to ‘seek out, and invariably succeed in finding, phrases, half-lines, apparent debris on the great tide of Shakespeare’s iambics’, and then to ‘synthesise all elements in [the text …] to the end of intensifying the dramatic impact of a character’.32 Olivier also successfully incorporated imagery from the text into his performance. Bernice Kliman’s detailed analysis of reviews highlights ‘the fluid and sinuous grace’ of his movement, echoing The Birmingham Post reviewer’s reference to Macbeth’s own description of a murderer who, ‘with Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design, moves like a ghost’.33 Kliman also notes ‘the pushing movement he made when speaking of being pushed from his stool’, and quotes Harold Hobson’s evocative description of Olivier’s delivery of the line ‘this my hand shall rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ as ‘greasy and slippery with an immense revulsion’.34 Hobson also highlighted the significance of this moment for Olivier’s schematic vision of the role: ‘as distress and agony enter into him, the actor multiplies in stature before our eyes until he dominates the play’.35 This climactic conclusion to Olivier’s portrayal completed a pattern established by earlier cruxes in his performance. First, a commanding but deliberately restrained opening, with Macbeth appearing ‘astride a rock’ with ‘the full light of the setting sun […] on his face’,36 which the critic Kenneth Tynan admiringly described as ‘perilously low-key’,37 and second the shattering realisation, immediately following Duncan’s murder, of the dire consequences of

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Macbeth’s guilt, which Hobson described as ‘the heart’ of Olivier’s portrayal.38 Olivier’s Macbeth thus traced what his fellow actor Maxine Audley described as ‘a long, straight line upwards’ contrasting with the falling line of Vivien Leigh’s Lady Macbeth, which is ‘up’ at their first meeting and then ‘goes completely the other way’ so that ‘they completely change over. […] they cross at the end of the Banquet Scene’.39 Thus, whereas Leigh concluded her performance sleepwalking in what the critic Stephen Williams called ‘entranced horror’,40 Olivier’s Macbeth died, in Michael Redgrave’s description, ‘violently, convulsively’.41 That description of Macbeth dying is taken from Redgrave’s superb analysis of Olivier’s capacity to do what Saint-Denis called ‘approach[ing] a role through physical images’:42 If we did not know Olivier to be a great actor by other tests, we would know it from the manner of his deaths. Each one is in character. His Macbeth died violently, convulsively, as he had lived, but in spite of his last words we knew that he had lost heart. His Richard III had no heart to lose and fought on and on, his muscles still twitching when all sense had left them.43 The creation and embodiment of such ‘physical images’ is described by the actress and LTS graduate Yvonne Mitchell thus: No actor can convince merely by his outward appearance. Make-up is the final touch in conveying his imagination to the audience. During rehearsals the type of actor who loses himself in other characters, will gradually imagine the outward appearance of the part he is playing. By the third week of rehearsal, when he has already accepted himself as that character, he would be surprised if a mirror were placed in front of him. His belief that the hooked nose or the greasy hair of Shylock already belonged to him would be shattered by seeing instead his familiar self.44 Mitchell offers not Olivier but Alec Guinness and Michael Redgrave as exemplary exponents of this approach, and her reference to Shylock here suggests that she may be thinking specifically of Redgrave, as she played Jessica opposite his Shylock at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1953. Like Mitchell, Redgrave had first-hand experience of learning the process she describes above from Saint-Denis. He had written, in 1938, to his actress mother of playing Tusenbach in Saint-Denis’ production of Three Sisters that ‘I can see clearly that to achieve anything really good in art, one must lose oneself in it and this is why I know Tusenbach is the best thing I have done. I can completely lose myself in him’.45 The paradoxical balance between active creation and passive acceptance in Mitchell and Redgrave’s accounts of the process of embodied imagination that

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underpins Saint-Denis’ conception of approaching a role through physical images echoes Saint-Denis’ paradoxical description of ‘style’ as an imagined reality. It also challenges a simplistic account of the nature of British—as opposed to North American—acting that persists even today. Lecturing at Bristol University in 1952, soon after the collapse of the OVC, Michael Redgrave was keenly aware of the differences between the profile of actor training in Britain and in the USA. He lamented the absence of ‘classes’ for professional actors in the UK, which, he observed, had been ‘offered here at St. Denis’ London Theatre Studio before the war’ but not since. By contrast, he wrote that ‘[i]n New York some of the best young actors and actresses under Elia Kazan have formed the Actors’ Studio where they practice physical movement and voice exercises and where great store is set on improvisation’.46 This tradition of actor training within what I term ‘studio-schools’ is explored in Chapter 4 in relation to its shaping influence on the teaching of Michael Chekhov’s technique. For the moment, the crucial point is that the global transfer of geo-political power from British imperialism to American capitalism in the post-war period was reflected in the sphere of acting by an increasingly disparaging attitude of actors and actor trainers in the USA towards what the Actors Studio’s guru, Lee Strasberg, called ‘outdated’ English acting, which was presented as formal and deliberate, by contrast to the assumed spontaneous freedom of American realism: There is an English tradition in acting, but the English theatre now only holds on to the externals of that tradition. What is now created on the English stage is not humanity, not people, not reality, not even conviction. It is acting. It offers the best that acting has and therefore also the worst.47 The idea that ‘external’ acting is to be avoided at all costs is exemplified by the actress and acting teacher Uta Hagen, who even went so far as to divide approaches to acting into ‘outer’ and ‘human’ techniques,48 leading to a division of actors into the opposed camps of ‘realist’ and ‘formalist’. Her own ‘realist’ approach is described as a process of putting one’s ‘own psyche to use to find identification with the role, allowing […] behavior to develop’ and ‘trusting that a form will result’ from ‘a moment-to-moment subjective experience’. By contrast, the ‘formalist’ is described as an actor who ‘objectively predetermines the character’s actions, deliberately watching the form as he executes it’.49 Both Hagen and Strasberg offered Olivier as an exemplary case of the English tradition of ‘outer’ technique, and Strasberg offered him the back-handed compliment that his work is ‘marvellously clear’, revealing ‘an actor’s mind, fantastic in its scope and greatness, working and understanding the needs of the scene’ and ‘the character better than I ever will’. Strasberg asserts that such clarity of understanding will inevitably hinder Olivier: ‘I think it is his understanding that almost stops him from the completeness of response’, he said, so that he can

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only produce ‘the outline of a performance’.50 Returning to the careful dramaturgical patterning of Olivier’s Macbeth, it is possible to see a basis for Strasberg’s description of his ‘actor’s mind […], working and understanding the needs of the scene’, but Redgrave’s description of ‘the manner of his deaths’ strongly suggests that Olivier’s performances went far beyond an ‘outline’. Furthermore, Olivier’s own reflections on his approach to acting demonstrate that he was aware of this potential shortcoming and sought actively to overcome it. Speaking to Kenneth Tynan in 1966, Olivier described himself (along with Alec Guinness) as ‘what we would call a peripheral actor’, but not in the sense that he was only concerned with ‘the outline of a performance’. Instead, he argued that such an approach enables an actor to ‘find the parts in himself’ rather than ‘find[ing] himself in the parts that he plays’. He offered the example of his 1944 Richard III, for which he says he imitated ‘old actors imitating Henry Irving’s voice’ to produce ‘a rather narrow kind of vocal address’ and imagined ‘the Big Bad Wolf’, who was said to be based upon the Broadway director ‘Jed Harris, […] under whom I’d suffered in extremis’.51 Olivier describes these stimuli with the paradoxical phrase ‘extraneous essentials’, and summarises his approach as ‘collect[ing] a lot of details’ in order to ‘find a creature swimming about somewhere in the middle of them’.52 Olivier’s description of his approach suggests, then, that far from being merely extraneous to his experience, the physical images he created were essential to his capacity do what Hagen describes as putting one’s ‘own psyche to use to find identification with the role’. ‘I paint for myself a portrait of a man’, Olivier said, ‘in my mind’s eye as if I was oilpainting it, and I say to myself that’s this man’.53 Olivier’s description of ‘a portrait […] in my mind’s eye’ transcends the essentialist conception of ‘inner’ technique asserted by practitioners of the American Method, by claiming that a character’s appearance may be simultaneously both ‘extraneous’ and ‘essential’, just as his portrayal of Macbeth may be read (as it was), in Hagen’s terms, as both realist and formalist: both a series of ‘moment-to-moment subjective experiences’ and a deliberately executed ‘form’. The close correlation between accounts of Redgrave, Guinness, and Olivier’s work in this regard suggests that Redgrave was not quite right in asserting that post-war Britain had ‘no art of acting’. He was more accurate in saying that the British had ‘an ingrained prejudice against any analysis of the art of acting’.54 Even this, however, was not quite true: he, Gielgud, and Olivier all agreed, at one time or another, to analyse acting in public, and even committed similar analyses of their work to publication, though often somewhat defensively. They all also acknowledged a significant debt to Saint-Denis. Even the much more recalcitrant Guinness wrote privately to Saint-Denis that my debt to you, dating from [the mid-1930s], is quite colossal … You really illumined acting for me one afternoon […] when you indicated, very lightly, an approach to Epihodov in The Cherry Orchard for some

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young would-be actor. It was a new world, […] though I doubt if I gave you the credit for it until long after.55 It’s probable that Guinness is referring here to Saint-Denis demonstrating either to Marius Goring or a student actor a way of playing the squeaking shoes that Chekhov gives to his luckless, awkward clerk.56 That example closely echoes Olivier’s idea of an ‘extraneous essential’ as Epikhodov’s squeaking shoes are both a minor detail of his portrayal and a clear physical expression both of his anxiety and his social inferiority, which are crucial to an understanding of the character. It is a typical example of the process of ‘transformation’, taught by Saint-Denis, which generally began with the student selecting ‘a person whose nature, temperament and physique are as far removed from his own as possible, and […] giving a convincing impression of this specific physical type’.57 In Saint-Denis’ approach, the student ‘then chooses various moods and exterior circumstances which would be meaningful for the chosen physical type and works on the transformation under those conditions’.58 This process generated the same two-way traffic between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ technique noted in Redgrave, Olivier, and Guinness’ approach to acting. Saint-Denis was evidently happy not to resolve the contradiction between ‘two opposed ways of accomplishing the transformation: sometimes starting from the physical … sometimes starting from an inner feeling’.59 Although he described ‘an ideal school of theatre’ where ‘the work is done from the inside out, rather than the outside in’, his own methods tended to ‘give priority, temporarily, to the physical’ because ‘everything starts from the body or passes through it’.60 Saint-Denis evidently prized actors’ capacity for transformation very highly. He admired Redgrave’s ability to work ‘as if possessed by his characters’, and described Guinness’s ‘great powers of transformation’ and Olivier’s ‘astonishing facility, and skill, of transforming himself from role to role’.61 It also appears that these actors’ shared facility for transformation was indeed honed through their interactions with Saint-Denis. It is, however, both obvious and important to note that an actor’s capacity to transform is not always evidence of their ‘power’, or agency. Saint-Denis was equally well-known for his willingness to require that his actors transform themselves so as to fulfil his vision. Recalling his 1938 Three Sisters, John Gielgud wrote that Saint-Denis ‘brought very full notes to rehearsal. Every move and piece of business was prepared beforehand on paper, and the play was placed very quickly in consequence’.62 Gielgud added that the actors also ‘became daily more involved in the subtleties which [Saint-Denis’ plans] enabled us to develop in such harmony’, but it is clear that this harmony was tightly constrained by Saint-Denis’ over-arching vision.63 In her analysis of Saint-Denis’ collaborations with designers, Sophie Jump emphasises the significance of the ‘ground plan’ of the stage in the development of Saint-Denis’ productions. According to Margaret Harris, one of the trio of designers known as Motley, with whom Saint-Denis collaborated at the LTS

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and OVC, his work with student designers was based ‘tremendously on the ground plan, because he used to say that unless the plan is right, you can’t [direct] it and you can’t evolve the set’.64 The designer Jocelyn Herbert recalled a more authoritarian approach: ‘he used to make the most detailed ground plan himself and then give it to the designer and you had to build something on that’.65 Indeed, Saint-Denis advised that ‘a director must evolve a ground plan’ before the designer ‘has proceeded independently’ so that he is not ‘limited to the plan the designer has devised’, but he also cautioned that ‘a director who is too rigid in imposing his ideas might find that true collaboration is difficult’.66 These insights into the politics of theatre production complicate valorising accounts of leading actors’ capacity to transform themselves, in Saint-Denis’ description of Olivier, by ‘sheer physical control’, because they expose the unequal distribution of the power to control.67 Although, for example, it seems that Olivier did moderate his interpretation of Macbeth to give focus to the dominant moments of Vivien Leigh’s Lady Macbeth, his performance also increasingly placed her in a subordinate position. Likewise, Saint-Denis’ (female) designers were evidently subjected to (male) directorial control. The tacit operation of gender and class in these hierarchies (and in my examples of the overwhelmingly male British tradition of acting that emerged from the LTS and OVC above) raises the wider question of who is credited with the capacity to transform and who is expected to be capable of being transformed by the actions of others. It is central to my argument here that, in spite of Saint-Denis’ rhetoric of ‘true collaboration’, all of these problems of hierarchy are as much remnants of the LTS and OVC as the tradition of acting charted here. Fortunately, there is a detailed archival record of the development of Saint-Denis’ most significant contribution to the British theatre in the 1960s, his 1961 RSC production of The Cherry Orchard, in the form of rehearsal notes taken by his assistant Stephen Aaron. Reading Aaron’s account against the 1962 televised version of the production (directed for the screen by Michael Elliott on an adapted version of its set), it is possible to see both Saint-Denis’ process of evolving, through rehearsal, physical images and staging patterns to capture the style and central ideas of the play as he saw them, and the ways in which his approach also reinforced hierarchies of privilege, class, and gender.

Patterning behaviour: Saint-Denis’ Cherry Orchard (RSC, 1961) Rehearsals for Saint-Denis’ production of The Cherry Orchard, which was designed by Abd’El Kader Farrah with sound by Roberto Gerhard, music arranged by Brian Priestman and lighting by John Wyckham, began on October 17, 1961. They were scheduled to run for seven weeks (although with evening performances and matinees taken into account, they only occupied a total of twenty-two and a half hours per week).68 On the first morning, according to Stephen Aaron’s notes, the director ‘asked the actors not to be

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frightened of this long rehearsal period’. He ‘explained that often, after the first four weeks of work, new aspects of the role, which had been missed previously, suddenly come to light’.69 To support his case, Saint-Denis recalled the concerns of the actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies about the length of rehearsals for his 1938 Three Sisters at the Queen’s Theatre and ‘her final realization that it suited that kind of play’. From the outset, then, SaintDenis’ production was framed for its actors as an exercise in developing an approach that would be appropriate for Chekhov. This was important because the only actors in the company with any professional experience of performing his plays were Peggy Ashcroft (Ranevskaya) and John Gielgud (Gaev), who had also played leading roles (Irina and Vershinin) in the 1938 Three Sisters, and even their experience was not extensive. Saint-Denis’ decision to begin rehearsals in this way was also, however, unquestionably an attempt to establish his authority not only over the play’s interpretation but over the rehearsal process. Beginning with Gielgud’s portrayal of Gaev, it is easy to see in Saint-Denis’ production the process of ‘approaching the role through physical images’ analysed above. Gielgud was initially resistant to the design for his costume, which, according to Jonathan Croall, ‘Saint-Denis wanted to be faded, like Gaev’s life’.70 Gielgud had wanted more stylish clothes, but when Saint-Denis was insistent, he agreed, and the resulting performance entirely captures SaintDenis’ vision of Gaev as ‘hollowness inside an elegant shell’.71 Gielgud orchestrates the melodic lines of Gaev’s text with meticulously constructed business that both creates the impression of spontaneity and communicates artful resonances and ironies. His playing of Gaev’s promise to Anya (Judi Dench) in Act One that ‘the estate shall not be sold’ exemplifies this effect (see Figure 1.1). Gielgud uses a tender yet condescending tone, suggesting (along with his faded clothes) that Gaev is living in the past and speaking to his memory of the girl Anya rather than the young woman who stands in front of him. He also gives the line very pointed emphasis (‘the estate shall not be sold’), underscored by a percussive movement of his right thumb and forefinger, which are holding a sweet that he has just taken out of the tin he holds in his left hand. This realistic detail pointedly undercuts the apparent sincerity of Gaev’s promise with a reminder of his self-indulgence and frivolity. It will come as no surprise that when this man who has measured out his life in little sweets attends the auction for the estate, he will be outbid by the starting-price. Gielgud’s playing of this moment does not, of course, exist in isolation. It also exemplifies the detailed patterning of Saint-Denis’ staging. He divided the characters early in rehearsals into those representing ‘the dying past’ (Ranevskaya, Gaev, Firs, Charlotta), the future ‘in which lies all hope and promise’ (Anya, Trofimov, and, ‘most important of all’, Lopakhin) and those who were ‘damned’ (Varya and Yasha, the latter being, in Saint-Denis’ eyes, ‘genuinely evil’ and ‘irredeemable’).72 The stage picture created by Gaev’s promise, which is

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FIGURE 1.1 John Gielgud as Gaev declaring ‘The estate shall not be sold’ in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:36:01).

converted into a single shot in Michael Elliott’s screen version (Figure 1.1), is, therefore, of ‘the dying past’ making a promise to the hopeful future, which the dark figure of the ‘damned’ Varya (Dorothy Tutin) seems to see that it cannot keep. Unlike Gielgud’s Gaev, Peggy Ashcroft’s portrayal of Ranevskaya did not fit quite so easily into her director’s scheme. A month into rehearsals, on November 23, Ashcroft was reportedly ‘still worried about her second act speech, still trying to hurry it too much’ and ‘glanc[ing] at Saint-Denis during her scenes all the time—apparently trying to read his reactions’. Disagreements between SaintDenis and Ashcroft had, in fact, started before rehearsals began. On seeing the drawings for her costume, Ashcroft wrote to Saint-Denis to request some changes: I would like more to have seen a conception of Ranevsky that I could transform myself into […] I must present physically a very feminine woman—not a French fashion plate or a Romantic Lady, I don’t mean that—but a woman who wants to be elegant and is extravagant but who finally is a bit untidy; but never formally smart—alluring but not emphatically so.73

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Saint-Denis disagreed: Ranevsky is a bourgeoise and she is provincial. Her behaviour does not fit with the way she looks: she looks like a mother, like a serious woman. She is not ‘untidy’, but a little extravagant in details … Her real, generous temperament must not affect the way she dresses.74 Saint-Denis’ strong sense of theatre history seems to have guided him to insist on this assessment of the character. He remembered Olga Knipper in the original Moscow Art Theatre production of the play as ‘not […] an elegant woman, but […] a mother, […] a bourgeoise’, and this, rather than ‘the very feminine woman’ that she had first imagined, is the impression created by Ashcroft’s costume. As can be seen in Figure 1.2, Ashcroft also resolved the contradiction of ‘behaviour’ and ‘looks’ presented by Saint-Denis’ direction through her use of the costume over whose design she could exert no direct control. Here, in Act Two, her shawl is disarranged and she fiddles absent-mindedly with her hat. She likewise created the impression of a woman described to her by Saint-Denis as ‘sensual’ and ‘able to change moods at a moment’, with a performance of untidily expressive gestures, uneven tempo, and an indirect, wandering quality of movement and gaze, which is particularly notable in moments of tension.

Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevskaya in Act Two of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:04:28).

FIGURE 1.2

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This was not, as Jane Baldwin has observed, the only time in the production’s development, where Saint-Denis’ memory of the Moscow Art Theatre’s Cherry Orchard led him to insist upon a particular interpretation of the play.75 In Stanislavsky’s production, Alla Tarasova’s Anya had entered in Act One and jumped onto the nursery sofa in a combination of ‘exhaustion, happiness, youth and tenderness’. Judi Dench’s repeated attempts to recapture this moment in her portrayal of Anya to Saint-Denis’ satisfaction made her, she said, ‘completely hysterical’, though she did eventually achieve it.76 In Act Four, Saint-Denis chose to borrow another piece of business directly from his memory of the Moscow Art Theatre production. He replaced Chekhov’s stage direction in which Ranevskaya wipes her eyes with a handkerchief and, in doing so, accidentally drops her lover’s telegram on the floor, with the old servant Firs accidentally spilling tea on Ranevskaya’s hand while she is distracted by the noise of the party (see Figures 1.3–1.5). As the hot tea splashes onto her hand, she leaps up, knocking over the cup and causing her lover’s telegram to fall from her décolletage. It is picked up and given to her a few moments later by Trofimov.77 Thus, Saint-Denis emphasises Firs’ developing weakness and exposes both Ranevskaya and the estate’s vulnerability as the characters await news of its sale. The broken cup also foreshadows George Murcell’s Lopakhin drunkenly breaking a vase after returning from the sale as

Roy Dotrice as Firs spills tea on Peggy Ashcroft’s Ranevskaya and she drops her cup in Act Three of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:22:27–1:22:33).

FIGURES 1.3–1.5

FIGURES 1.3–1.5

(Cont.)

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the estate’s ‘new master’ while Ashcroft’s Ranevskaya sobs over the loss of the orchard. These are both effective and eloquent pieces of business, certainly, but they are not examples of the protean capacity for transformation ascribed by Saint-Denis to Olivier. Instead, they represent the actors’ capacity to be transformed by a directorial schema. It would be naïve to consider Saint-Denis’ willingness to impose these aspects of the production upon his actors as merely evidence of his commitment to theatre history. Clearly, gender played a significant role in discriminating between those whose capacity for transformation he valorised and those he expected to accept being transformed. Dench, who was new to the RSC, had spent four years at the Old Vic, where, by her own admission, acting technique was hardly mentioned, and she was repeatedly made so frequently aware, during Saint-Denis’ rehearsals, of her technical shortcomings that she reportedly almost winced at every note.78 As a result, Dench reportedly developed ‘a nervous stomach condition’ which she put down to ‘her problems with the role’. On one occasion, Saint-Denis noticed her reading a newspaper during rehearsals, and ‘stopped and asked her to watch Ashcroft carefully’, expressing himself ‘amazed that the younger members of the company do not take advantage of the opportunity to watch experienced professionals at work’.79 According to Dench, even before this incident, Peggy Ashcroft told her that ‘I recognise you’ve become the whipping boy’ and advised her to ‘Never let him see you cry’.80 The private solidarity between these two women emphasises their public exposure to male control. These gendered power dynamics were also visible in the operation of SaintDenis’ stated commitment, in this production, ‘to teach the younger members of the company a new technique’.81 On the one hand, Saint-Denis argued that the company’s ‘impulse is to jump to conclusions’ and aimed to help them to resist it,82 by spending time on ‘careful detailed analysis of the text’, its ‘moods’, the ‘key points within each act’, and the overall tempo.83 On the other hand, by the fourth day of (part-time) rehearsals, the actors were expected to walk ‘through the moves as [Saint-Denis] either described them or illustrated them’.84 The technique required by this process was ‘new’ insofar as Saint-Denis did not expect the actors simply to fix the moves they were given. He expected that ‘each time’ a scene was rehearsed ‘the actors must bring […] something new’, and he complained that they were accustomed to ‘working too quickly: they set Shakespeare in one week and never change’.85 The changes that Saint-Denis envisaged, however, certainly didn’t constitute challenges to the authority of his interpretation. He had spoken on the first day, for instance, of the ‘significant development of Anya’ from ‘the young girl—sleepy and passive’ through ‘her conversation and relation to Trofimov’ to ‘a woman with her own convictions and purpose’.86 This process was embodied in Dench’s portrayal by a series of embraces at the ends of Acts One, Two and Three (Figures 1.6–1.8). In the first, Anya is ‘sleepy and passive’ on Varya’s shoulder, then optimistically full of ‘convictions’ in the arms of Trofimov, and finally purposefully supporting her collapsing mother, confident of her ability to provide for the future.

Judi Dench as Anya with Dorothy Tutin as Varya (Act One), with Ian Holm as Trofimov (Act Two), and with Peggy Ashcroft as Ranevskaya (Act Three) in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:40:01, 1:10:40, 1:39:17).

FIGURES 1.6–1.8

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FIGURES 1.6–1.8

(Cont.)

Saint-Denis set down similar patterns for the whole play in advance of the process of staging it. By the end of the third day of rehearsals, for example, he had already defined the play’s ‘moods’ as follows: Act One: ‘a mixture of tiredness and rediscovering old friends’ Act Two: ‘andante, leisurely and quiet’ Act Three: gathering pace towards ‘the climax at Lopakhin’s entrance’ Act Four: ‘the golden glow after a convalescence. Time has passed since the end of Act Three—giving Ranevskaya and Gaev a chance to be brave at first, even though their emotions are at the top’.87 The process of staging was intended to generate Saint-Denis’ rhythmic sequence in detail, ‘from one pause to another, so the patterns have this framework, in a musical way’,88 and to find specific justifications for it, so that—in SaintDenis’ words—‘pace is something internal in the scene and not based on a director’s instruction to “hurry up”’.89 It is equally true, however, that SaintDenis’ descriptions of each desired tempo and mood pre-existed the process of exploring those factors that may influence pace from within each scene, and therefore Saint-Denis’ approach to rehearsal did not so much displace ‘the director’s instruction’ as disguise it.

Lopakhin (George Murcell) presents his plan for the orchard (Act One) and announces its sale (Act Three) in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 0:19:45, 1:34:37).

FIGURES 1.9 AND 1.10

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Similarly, Saint-Denis’ process of mapping the ‘circulation of action in the play’ onto the ground plan for the set he had developed with designer Abd’El Kader Farrah offered his actors a constrained form of freedom. This involved what Saint-Denis called ‘floating furniture’, which, as Aaron observed, he ‘continually repositions until the actors are comfortable with it’,90 and until ‘the visual, upright elements of the set’ occurred at rhythmic intervals so as to frame the play’s action effectively.91 One example is Saint-Denis’ staging of George Murcell’s Lopakhin presenting his plan for the orchard in Act One separated from the other characters who are all engaged in a flurry of business around the coffee at the table (see Figure 1.9). This image was echoed in what Saint-Denis saw as the play’s climax: Lopakhin’s announcement that he has purchased the orchard. This was staged, as it is shown in the televised version (Figure 1.10), ‘pushed way down stage on the apron’, again isolating Lopakhin from his audience in spite of their evidently rapt attention.92 The image of an isolated figure was echoed in Lopakhin’s rejected offers of money and champagne in Act Four (Figures 1.11 and 1.12), and, throughout the production, in the repeated image of characters calling to people they have lost, such as Varya looking for Anya in Act Two (Figure 1.13), and Ranevskaya calling Trofimov back after he has departed angrily in Act Three (Figure 1.14). These isolated figures multiply until, at the play’s close, the stage is littered with them as the characters await

Lopakhin’s (George Murcell) offers of champagne and money in Act Four of in The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:40:04, 1:43:09). FIGURES 1.11 AND 1.12

FIGURES 1.11 AND 1.12

(Cont.)

Varya (Dorothy Tutin) calls out to Anya (Act Two), and Ranevskaya (Peggy Ashcroft) calls Trofimov back after he has angrily left her in Act Three of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grabs from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:11:47, 1:25:56).

FIGURES 1.13 AND 1.14

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FIGURES 1.13 AND 1.14

(Cont.)

their departure (Figure 1.15), exposed by the now absent furniture. These figures also echo ‘the visual, upright elements of the set’: a pair of telegraph-poles, rising jaggedly behind the action in Act Two and the cold and monolithic stove that dominated the upstage area in Act Four. Saint-Denis’ Cherry Orchard can be seen, then, to be a remnant of the practice of the LTS and OVC in two important senses. First, it exemplifies an approach to acting in which physical portrayals are deliberately constructed from, to borrow Olivier’s phrase, ‘extraneous essentials’: details of behaviour that offer both performer and spectator a psychological key to each character and which offer the director dynamic material with which to shape their interpretation of a play. Second, it exposes the extent to which this approach reinforced hierarchies of gender and class, since—despite its collective nature—there is never any doubt that this behavioural script is authored primarily by the male director. Furthermore, it is evident that the transformative capacity of leading male actors in portraying, almost invariably, upper-class characters also entails the willingness and capacity of other actors to allow themselves to be transformed, in order to generate a coherently patterned whole. Both of these attributes were, as we shall see, characteristic of the LTS and OVC. Performers and performances were not, however, the only remnants of SaintDenis and Devine’s studios in the emergent theatre establishment of the 1960s. Peter Hall wrote to Saint-Denis on New Year’s Day of 1962, after the opening of The Cherry Orchard in London, to say that ‘our association has got to gather

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FIGURE 1.15 The assembly before departure in Act Four of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, dir. Michel Saint-Denis, Royal Shakespeare Company, 1961 (screen-grab from 1962 BBC TV production, dir. Michael Elliott, 1:58:34).

all of the riches of your work in England in the past and hand it on to the future’.93 Hall was not explicit at the time about how he envisaged this happening, but just over a month later The Times reported that ‘M. Michel Saint-Denis has accepted the newly created post of General Artistic Adviser to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company. He will be mainly concerned with basic planning and artistic development in collaboration with Mr. Peter Hall’.94 SaintDenis’ employment began on March 1, 1962, and he was immediately given particular responsibility for the development of an RSC Studio.95 The last remnants of the LTS and OVC to be explored in this section, therefore, are the studios created at Devine’s Royal Court and Hall’s RSC, attempts to ‘gather all of the riches’ of Saint-Denis and Devine’s work: the fruits of their earlier studios.

The fruits of the LTS and OVC: the Royal Court and RSC studios Having written to Saint-Denis in 1957 that he wanted to ‘concentrate more on the training and development side’ of the Royal Court, George Devine began using Sunday evenings to stage experimental new plays without scenery. Then in 1958, he started a writers’ group to offer playwrights an opportunity to test ideas in private, though it seems that it was not until the group was reconvened

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under the leadership of William Gaskill and Keith Johnstone in the early 1960s that it achieved regularity and success.96 Gaskill decided that since earlier meetings had ‘usually drifted into theoretical discussion’, he would insist that they were kept active and practical: The only idea in my head when I started the group was that we would not discuss each other’s work or read passages from it. The class would be an acting class in which everyone would take part. We would learn what we wanted to find out about the theatre by doing it.97 The group used exercises from Étienne Decroux (who had worked with Copeau and taught Gaskill mime) as well as ‘Stanislavsky improvisations with objectives’.98 The result was, according to Irving Wardle, that every Wednesday for two years, writers including Jellicoe, Wesker, Wole Soyinka, Edward Bond and David Cregan turned up for these workouts, and passages in their subsequent plays … arose directly from improvisation. Devine’s mask classes … stimulated Arden to write The Happy Haven, and Johnstone to form his mask troupe Theatre Machine.99 This is confirmed by David Cregan, who recalled ‘a lot of improvisation, and mask work’, and Ann Jellicoe remembered bringing a scene from her play The Knack to the writer’s group when she was ‘blocked’,100 and setting up an improvisation with Gaskill and Harriet Devine, which then went directly into the play.101 Devine also formed a Royal Court actors’ studio, based at the Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre and shared with the National Theatre, where he and Keith Johnstone both taught, but it was short-lived.102 There was also an Actors’ Rehearsal Group at the Royal Court, created by Lindsay Anderson and Anthony Page. Page had trained with the American actor and teacher Sanford Meisner, and used the sessions to pass on the techniques of the American Method to the actors, but—like all of the Court’s other ‘training and development’ initiatives— this was always considered a peripheral activity in a theatre that was still far from financially secure. Then, in October 1963, Devine was forced to reduce his work-load by cardiac spasms which signalled the heart disease of which he would die in January 1966, having resigned as the theatre’s director the previous year. After Devine’s death, Bill Gaskill attempted to sustain the idea of the Court as a studio, but without success: Like George Devine, I still nursed dreams of what the Court might have: a permanent group of actors, a studio attached to the theatre exploring new ways of working and a committed but popular audience. The ensemble of my first season had folded and though we had returned to groups of actors for

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the Bond and Lawrence seasons we could no longer afford a full-scale company on regular salary. The studio work disappeared because we were all too busy running the theatre and directing plays to teach.103 Unlike Gaskill’s Royal Court, Peter Hall’s RSC needed to sustain an ensemble (albeit one whose membership changed relatively frequently) in order to remain viable as an organisation. It also had the advantage—in terms of establishing a studio—of many actors living in Stratford-upon-Avon, and playing in rep with relatively little to do once the year’s productions had opened, who needed training to sustain their work. Hall said as much when he wrote to Saint-Denis after seeing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Court in 1962 which, he said, ‘exposes the need for classical training, and our Shakespeare study group, in the clearest way imaginable’ and ‘shows the importance of what you want to do most clearly’.104 What Saint-Denis wanted to do, in essence, was to revive the OVC in Stratford, and over the next few months he set out a plan to do so. In July 1962, Saint-Denis prepared a document entitled ‘Stratford Studio’, outlining his vision for this aspect of the RSC’s work.105 The ‘main purpose of the Studio’ would be ‘to evolve the ways and means, to find out the kind of work and to conduct the experiments through which a contemporary way of producing Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, and perhaps other styles, as a consequence, can be prepared’. In order to achieve this, the document proposed technical training in movement, voice, and music as well as acting training including ‘improvisation with and without masks’, ‘theoretical and practical work on acting of dramatic poetry of varied styles’, and discussions ‘about the Elizabethan theatre and all modern currents’. Saint-Denis further proposed a series of ‘experiments’ to ensure that the company’s directors would be able to benefit fully from these improvements to the actors’ technique: • • • •

Production of typical scenes and acts from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Poetry, singing, dancing. Production of selected pieces from the Far-Eastern theatre, from Brecht and from modern dramatists. Technical experiments on the ‘space-stage’ in scenery, costumes, lighting, sound, make-up, with elements of scenery and a transformable costume, to be used for style plays.

The facilities envisaged for this work were similar to the home of the LTS off Upper Street in London: [an] empty volume, about the size of the Conference Hall [the RSC’s rehearsal room, in the shell of the old Memorial Theatre, now redeveloped as The Swan auditorium], in which a ‘space-stage’ with apron

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and dispositions for public seating in amphitheatre shape can be tried, on a reduced scale.106 This experimental theatre would also require ‘facilities for hanging above stage and apron’ as well as lighting, sound, and control for both. There is also mention of an ‘auditorium for about 200 people’, as well as dressing-rooms and two ‘small workshops’, one for costumes and one for ‘props, masks, painting’ as well as three studios: one each for movement, voice, and rehearsals. It is not clear to what extent Saint-Denis was aware that these proposals were unrealistic in a company which, if Peter Hall’s memos are to be believed, was constantly in the process of averting financial crisis. However, the necessary shift from this idealistic conception of the studio to its pragmatic reality began as Saint-Denis started to produce more concrete and detailed plans in the subsequent weeks. In a memo dated September 10, 1962, to Peter Hall, his fellow associate director, Peter Brook, and the theatre’s general manager, Patrick Donnell, Saint-Denis announced that Clifford Williams had agreed to assist him in running the RSC’s proposed studio. Williams, who had been both a dancer and an actor before the war, had been taken on as a staff director following his successful productions of Lorca’s Yerma (1961) and Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten (1962) at the Arts Theatre and after running his own mime company in the Midlands. He and Saint-Denis proposed the following programme for the studio’s work: We believe there should be two sides to the Studio work: permanent basic training in voice and movement, verse-speaking and some kind of improvisation. This basic work […] should take place during the whole of the Stratford season and be suspended only during the most hectic periods of work from February to April. […] On top of this permanent training, the Studio would flare up into more active and exciting experiments of a limited duration every time a producer is available to do work.107 Saint-Denis and Williams proposed a ‘flare-up’ ‘between November 12th and December 8th’ before the company moved to London, where ‘basic training’ would resume. Before October 19, 1962, a timetable was published for this period, listing subjects to be studied, staff, and times.108 All studio members were to have classes in the ‘theory of voice and speech’, ‘voice exercises’, and ‘limbering’. Selected members would also have tutorials on ‘voice, speech, poetics, acting’, as well as movement and dance, mask, fencing, discussion and make-up. Selected members of the studio would also rehearse either Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule with Saint-Denis, or ‘an act from an Elizabethan play’ with Clifford Williams (he eventually chose Dr Faustus). The document listed the following members of staff, including Geraldine Alford (voice teacher from the Old Vic School):

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MICHEL SAINT-DENIS CLIFFORD WILLIAMS SURIA SAINT-DENIS JOHN BARTON GERALDINE ALFORD COMPANY MEMBERS PETER HALL, PETER BROOK

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Rehearsals, Masks, Discussion Groups. Rehearsals, Limbering, Movement, Discussion Groups. Rehearsals, Masks. Tutorials, Fencing. Voice Theory, Voice Tutorials. Limbering, Voice Exercises. As available—for discussion.109

The timetable also offered a breakdown of the total amount of time to be spent on each area of the studio’s activity:

All members receive the following tuition during the course of the month: Theory of Voice and Speech 1 ¼ hours Voice Exercises 8 Limbering 7¼ Discussion (2 x 1 hour) 2 Selected members receive in addition: Further Voice Work 1¾ Movement and Dance 5½ Mask Work 8½ Fencing 3¾ Makeup (if required) 2 Plus the following tutorial sessions: Voice, Speech, Prosody, etc. 4 Acting 2 MSD, PH, PB ?110

That final question mark against the availability of Saint-Denis, Peter Hall, and Peter Brook spoke eloquently of the compromised position of the RSC Studio even at its outset. Saint-Denis had envisaged permanent training, yet this plan provides for very little outside the studio’s ‘flare-up period’ at the end of the season. ‘Flare-ups’ were proposed for every time a producer was available so that the company’s permanent training could be built upon and expanded in the process of developing ideas for future production, making the studio the company’s creative engine room. In reality, however, the single annual ‘flare-up’, confined to a brief period at the end of the season, substantially undermined the ability of the studio to fulfil its proposed creative function. There was also a degree of constructive ambiguity regarding the main purpose of the studio’s training. In an address to the company in 1962, Peter Hall said that verse is ‘a craft that you can learn very quickly’, and that ‘in our new studio … we want to tell you about line-structure, alliteration, rhyme and

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counter-rhyme and the meaning of imagery’.111 This aspect of the studio’s work was already an established practice in the company, who were used to individual and small-group tutorials with John Barton on Shakespeare’s language taking place in any space that could be found, including dressing-rooms. These were referred to in programmes from before the studio’s inception in 1962 that credit Barton with ‘verse training’, and Barton himself recalled that he was hired in the first place ‘solely to work on text and help the actors’ because, when he was offered the position of director of the Memorial Theatre, Peter Hall ‘wasn’t very sure of himself with Shakespeare’.112 As well as this textual focus, Hall also envisaged that the studio would ‘train and develop each individual actor’s potential to its utmost and to explore continuously all forms of staging and dramatic presentations’.113 The difference between knowledge, which can be communicated ‘quickly’ in individual tutorials, and technique, which must be developed gradually by an ensemble training together, seems not to have been seriously considered, and, in the RSC’s 1962 studio, the only training provided to all members of the company was vocal. Classes in movement, mask, and acting were only available to selected members of the studio. Additionally, as Clifford Williams noted in presenting his plan, improvisation was ‘deleted as an individual subject’. This was one of what Williams called his ‘last-minute, late-night decisions’, taken for pragmatic reasons, but the result was that improvisation and movement (which were always at the heart of Saint-Denis’ work) were given distinctly low priority, confirming that, in spite of Saint-Denis’ employment, the RSC remained, in Peter Brook’s words, ‘a theatre dominated by the obsession with spoken language’.114 The timetable for the studio’s 1962 ‘flare-up’ period shows that it had use of the Conference Hall in Stratford as well as Room 16 (an adjoining stage management room), and the circle foyer, which were used for training, tutorials, and to rehearse The Exception and the Rule and Faustus. These experimental stagings were intended to transform the relationship between training and production in the company. Previously, the company’s ‘teaching staff’ had been employed simply to ensure that the actors had the technical resources to deliver complex texts in a large auditorium. Saint-Denis’ vision for the studio, by contrast, involved both training and experimentation. Neither he nor Williams had worked on Brecht and Marlowe before, yet both subsequently created productions that emerged from these studio experiments: Saint-Denis’ Squire Puntila and his Man Matti (1965), and Williams’ Faustus (1968). The 1962 studio was conceived, therefore, as a training ground for Saint-Denis and Williams as well as the company, and a space to develop the RSC’s future work. We can only conjecture as to the content of the single performance of Faustus presented by Williams in the Conference Hall on December 7, 1962, but it seems likely that it was the genesis of his subsequent production, in which masked performers played the Seven Deadly Sins, and Eric Porter’s Faustus literally fought off damnation—‘matching the mental torment with a physical struggle’—until it arrived

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in the form of a coup de théâtre: ‘the looming black wall at the back falls down to reveal the flames of Hell, and the devils swarm out to claim their prey’.115 The significance to this production’s success of areas of training, such as movement and mask, that had been down-graded in the planning of the 1962 studio in order to fit its activities to the time and resources available, suggests a degree of tension between the studio and the RSC as a whole that would only increase. This ambitious opening of the RSC Studio was not achieved without difficulty. After the first week of its ‘flare-up’, a group of younger actors complained that they were being overlooked and that their understudy work had gone unrewarded. The older actors, by contrast, were concerned about being overworked at the end of a long season. The result was that Williams’ work on Faustus was opened to the entire company except those working on Brecht with SaintDenis (perhaps this was the source of his ‘swarm’ of devils in 1968), and the training was relaxed.116 Despite these problems, however, the 1962 studio established an important precedent for training and experimentation as an official part of the RSC’s regular programme. As a consequence, the governors agreed, in principle, to the construction of a permanent home for studio activities and understudy rehearsals next to the costume store on Southern Lane in Stratford. Plans for that building were not approved, however, until early 1965.117 So, in 1963, the studio was housed in ‘a large tent […] on the lawn at Avonside’, as announced in the ‘Royal Shakespeare Staff News-Sheet’ of May 20, 1963: ‘members of the company will attend classes in speech, movement, dance, acrobatics, wrestling etc., and experiment in new forms of staging. Sandy Black is Studio Manager, and classes are being taken by Geraldine Alford (voice) and Molly Kenny (movement)’.118 A Studio Report dated August 27, 1963, records that despite ‘great demands on the company’s time’ being made ‘by the very complex Histories rehearsals’, studio work was maintained through the summer of 1963 and involved fivesixths of the company. Particular achievements were reported in the area of voice work, and the reports of assistant directors are mentioned as evidence that ‘these improvements are being used in performance’. Nonetheless, it is clear from the reports of voice and movement teachers that this work was predominantly either basic or remedial, and directed at the individuals rather than undertaken by the company as a whole. Geraldine Alford reported that ‘it is only by having [tutorials] alone that I am able to establish the necessary confidence’ and that ‘the lack of any sound basic training or understanding of the use of voice’ meant that ‘the first few tutorials are usually spent in removing misconceptions and getting over a few simple, but essential principles and related exercises’. Despite ‘trying to impress upon the younger actors […] that the tutorials are wasted unless they follow up with regular limbering’, Alford confessed to ‘a strong feeling only a few do this regular practice at all’. The situation was the same in the teaching of movement. Molly Kenny had left the company during

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1963 to travel to America, and her teaching was taken on by John Broome, whose summary was no more encouraging than Alford’s. He reported a lack of ‘any feeling for working together with sensitivity and warmth’, ‘any real surety of expressive gesture and a live awareness of the sense of touch’, ‘a firm sense of shape, the use of space as volume, and space-direction’, and ‘an experienced understanding of movement qualities’. Broome insisted that ‘movement is the exercise of a hidden power not a callisthenic frolic’, and that this power ‘can be caught and controlled, given a rhythm, a shape and an inflexion of meaning’ through group training requiring nothing more than ‘a room and floor-space to be conquered, a sympathetic and unsuspicious group, a responsive musician reflecting or leading the action’.119 It is clear from Broome’s appeal that these basic necessities were not in place. Despite these less than encouraging reports, Peter Hall wrote to Saint-Denis in September 1963 that the company were ‘ready and willing to participate in Studio activities’ with two provisos: ‘Studio work should give a) a break from Shakespeare, b) should enable actors from the middle and lower regions of the company to develop themselves’. Hall adds that any actors ‘completely left out’ after casting has been decided for the studio’s work ‘can be given then to John Barton […] to get up some test scenes’.120 This letter suggests that the argument made by Saint-Denis in a 1963 typescript headed ‘Article for the Stratford Book’ that exercises and training alone are not sufficient to constitute a studio and that ‘experimental shows must be organized’ had held little sway. Hall acknowledges in his letter to Saint-Denis that the principle that ‘everybody should get a chance’ is ‘not strictly in the spirit of the studio’, but he was evidently more concerned with morale than with the value of experimental productions to the company’s future. Nonetheless, experimental work continued in the 1963 ‘flare-up’ and included Chekhov (Saint-Denis worked on the story ‘On the High Road’), Brecht (Sandy Black directed The Wedding Party), Sophocles (Martin Jenkins directed Oedipus), Jonson (Garry O’Connor directed Catiline) and Genet (Frank Evans directed Death Watch).121 There was also an improvised dance-drama, a project on Lorca and choral singing.122 This programme was reminiscent of the LTS and OVC in its placing of improvised and movement-based material and music on the same platform as the theatrical canon, but the most significant change from 1962 was that, apart from SaintDenis, all of the directors involved were staff directors. Hall’s association of studio activities with the ‘middle and lower regions of the company’ was drifting towards becoming policy. After the 1963 ‘flare-up’ the studio began to suffer a change of fortunes. This may have been initiated by a financial crisis in the company which forced Hall to write what he called ‘an appeal letter to the influential in the land’ at the very end of the year.123 He told an ‘over-worked and over-strained’ organisation in early 1964 that the company needed a further £50,000 by September if it was to survive.124 He also wrote that he intended to ‘do less big work in the harsh

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glare of the spotlight and more small, experimental and studio work, etc. where we can have the freedom to breathe and develop’. The insertion of ‘and’ between ‘experimental’ and ‘studio’ is telling, because at this point the separation between the training and experimental strands of the RSC’s work was becoming formalised. In 1964, Saint-Denis’ fellow associate director, Peter Brook, assisted by Charles Marowitz, took a small group of RSC actors to LAMDA to work on a season based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. A press release, announcing the formation of this ‘Royal Shakespeare Experimental Group’ describes its work in terms very close to those proposed initially by Saint-Denis for the studio: The programme will involve the audience in a public session of work-inprogress—improvisation, exploration and a re-examination of accepted theatre forms—by a group of ten actors and actresses […]. After this first public session has ended, the experimental work will continue, mainly in private, so that the ideas raised whilst playing to an audience can be followed up. The climax, after further public performances at LAMDA in the spring, will be a full-scale production of Genet’s The Screens at the Aldwych Theatre in June.125 Brook stressed that this experiment was primarily theatrical as opposed to literary: ‘we have not aimed at presenting new forms of theatre-writing, we are exploring theatre-language’, he said.126 The historic significance of this group’s Theatre of Cruelty experiments and their consequences for Brook’s later work are well known, but this initiative also altered the company by effectively stealing the experimental clothes of its studio. At the same time as the studio lost its experimental remit, a memo from General Manager Patrick Donnell announced that ‘the responsibility for the organising of all understudy rehearsals will be that of the Studio in Stratford in direct liaison with the Stage Management’.127 The decision was also recorded, in a memo of May 22, 1964, that all studio work was to be organised ‘on a strictly voluntary basis’, and that the ‘top priority for the Studio for this season is to maintain the life of the actors in the company’, meaning that it should focus on ‘tutorials and acting opportunities for members of the company’.128 Memories of the dissatisfaction of junior company members in 1962 and Hall’s concern for morale had trumped the artistic imperatives of Saint-Denis’ project. The studio’s next priority was identified as ‘the improvement of the vocal equipment of the Company’, and it was decided to make investigations as to the possibility of Geraldine Alford doing more group work on voice and speech. It was also decided in principle to reserve Saturday mornings for group work on verse to be led by John Barton or another member of the company. Less emphasis was placed on movement, and there was no mention of acting or improvisation work of any kind except for in the flare-up programme, which was planned for

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the six weeks from September 21 to November 1, with showings during its last two weeks. In a memo dated September 16, 1964, the staff director, Sandy Black, who was also studio manager, expressed concerns about the implementation of these plans, which entailed rehearsing thirty understudy scenes and thirteen duologues (for junior members of the company employed principally as understudies). He wrote that ‘the voluntary nature of Studio work is difficult to define—especially in understudy work’, which was clearly not voluntary, though the further development of understudies through duologue rehearsals evidently was. Black also pointed out that its supplementary and voluntary nature had caused ‘a feeling that Studio work is not important from some other departments’, which was exacerbated by the lack of ‘sufficient time, facilities or inclination’ for understudy development work, which he therefore suggests ‘can only damage the company’s attitude to the work and to the whole concept of the Studio’.129 Pressure on the studio increased still further in the flare-up period, as the Studio Report for May 1964–March 1965 explained: The extremely heavy 1964 season at Stratford forced the Studio into a very difficult position. Because of the frantic pressure of work and the general lack of time, it was practically impossible to plan any co-ordinated work or to consolidate the substantial gains we had made with the company during 1963.130 The directors’ reports on the 1964 flare-up period almost unanimously cited shortage of time as a crucial limiting factor. There were mentions of occasional classes in improvisation, but there was no opportunity to develop this experimental aspect of the studio’s work, and, as the assistant director, William Davis, put it: ‘two classes are only slightly better than no classes’. It seems that what Sandy Black called ‘a general feeling of frantic improvisation from all the members of staff, coupled with a determination to carry on […] because of the importance of the work’ prevailed. The flare-up period was cut to five weeks, and during this time John Barton co-ordinated ‘40 separate acting exercises (5–15 minutes in length) involving 133 acting parts, 4 imported directors and 10 company members directing (and sometimes acting!)’, which ‘were rehearsed during 3½ weeks (simultaneously in 9 rehearsal rooms flung all over the town) and all presented in 1½ days’. It is important to note the studio’s geographical dispersal: plans for its building had still not been approved. All of these factors created a widespread feeling that studio work was ‘an extra-curricular activity’ (in Michael Rudman’s phrase), and the company’s lowest priority. The 1964 report recommended that ‘long range planning’ and ‘the planning of rehearsals’ both needed to involve the studio ‘if the company is to benefit fully from the facilities of the Studio’. There was also a request that ‘clearer directives must be

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given to the company as to the function of Studio’ by its directors’.131 In short, by 1964 the studio was threatening to lapse into informality and become an officially sanctioned but low-priority festival of activities to sustain the company’s engagement towards the end of a long season. In 1965, however, the studio’s temporary building in the Paddock was constructed. As a result of both his poor health and his responsibilities as an associate director, Saint-Denis was forced, at this crucial moment, to pass the running of the studio on to John Barton, and his involvement was much more limited. The ‘flare-up’ that year was focused on Barton’s interest in ancient Greece and resulted in the studio’s new tin hut being called ‘The Greek Faculty’. Most significantly, however, 1965 saw Peter Hall’s announcement of significant cuts to the company’s work, discussed in the Introduction.132 The plan proposed reducing studio activity ‘to essential voice and movement work, and to a flare-up period on the lines of the 1962/3/4 Seasons’, in order to save the company an estimated £7,000.133 In the event, as we have already seen, Peter Hall wrote to the Arts Council, alongside his budget for 1967–8, to explain that ‘studio and training activities have had to be abandoned through lack of finance’.134 For three years, then, the RSC Studio represented the possibility (albeit slim and fading) that the work of the LTS and OVC would be revived at the heart of England’s new theatre establishment by placing the combination of training and experimentation at the core of one of its flagship companies. However, the story told in the introduction to this book, of this new establishment’s leaders divesting themselves of the studio tradition, for both pragmatic and ideological reasons, is the dominant narrative of this period. Nonetheless, it is clear from this survey of their remnants that the achievements of the LTS and OVC, as well as their values —their explicit commitment to the development of skill and of acting companies as collaborative entities, as well as their more tacit commitment to sustaining hierarchical relations in theatre production—substantially shaped that new establishment. The roots of these values in the practices of the LTS and OVC are explored in the next chapter.

Notes 1 M. Saint-Denis, undated notes: British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 81180. 2 M. Saint-Denis, Letter to George Devine, August 4, 1952: BL, Add. MS 81091. 3 M. Redgrave, The Actor’s Ways and Means (London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, 1995), 32. 4 Byam Shaw directed As You Like It for the Young Vic in 1949 and in Stratford in 1952, and Devine directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Young Vic in 1949 and in Stratford in 1954. 5 For more information on Streuli, see the papers in the Peter Streuli Collection, held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. 6 E. Pooley, Letter to Lord Esher, May 29, 1951: BL, Add. MS 81187.

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7 The Economist, May 26, 1951, cutting: BL, Add. MS 81187. 8 I. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 160. 9 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 161; a copy of Devine’s document, titled ‘The Royal Court Scheme: Why It Is Important and Why Arts Council Money Should Be Spent on It’ (1953) is held in the Jocelyn Herbert Archive: JH/1/36. 10 T. Storey, ‘Devine Intervention: Collaboration and Conspiracy in the History of the Royal Court’, New Theatre Quarterly 28, no. 4 (November 2012): 366. 11 Quoted in Storey, ‘Devine Intervention’, 372. 12 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 161. 13 The fullest account can be found in D. Rebellato, 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (London: Routledge, 1999). 14 G. Devine, Letter to Saint-Denis, May 19, 1957: BL, Add. MS 81091. 15 There is a note in the Saint-Denis papers (presumably by Also Scott who began work on a biography in the 1970s) stating: ‘Suria [Saint-Denis] and Jocelyn [Herbert] both indignantly deny that Michel wanted George to employ him at the Royal Court after he left Strasbourg and was wandering, and was bitter when he was never asked. On the other hand, Michel’s letters to George put out some pretty strong hints. I suspect Tony Richardson was the main influence—it appears he disliked Michel and anything to do with the Old Vic Theatre Centre (except for George)’: BL, Add. MS 81091. 16 J. Herbert, Letter to Saint-Denis, July 26, 1959: BL, Add. MS 81094. 17 S. Callow, The National: The Theatre and Its Work 1963–1997 (London: Nick Hern Books in association with the Royal National Theatre, 1997), 16. 18 K. Tynan, Alec Guinness (London: Theatre Book Club, 1953), 17. 19 M. Saint-Denis, Typescript: ‘Stratford Studio’, July 1962: BL, Add. MS 81192. 20 The Birmingham Post, June 15, 1955. 21 M. Mullin, Design by Motley (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 65; the Olivier/Byam Shaw Macbeth was at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1955. 22 M. Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, The Texas Quarterly 4, no. 3 (autumn 1961): 36. 23 L. Olivier, On Acting (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1986), 72. 24 A. Williamson, Theatre of Two Decades (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Ltd., 1951), 271. 25 Olivier, On Acting, 72. 26 A. Rokison, ‘Laurence Olivier’, in Great Shakespeareans, Vol. 16: Gielgud, Olivier, Ashcroft, Dench, ed. Russell Jackson (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 68. 27 W.A. Darlington, Laurence Olivier (London: Morgan Grampian Books, 1968), 11. 28 J. Gielgud, Early Stages (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), 150. 29 M. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style & Other Writings, ed. Jane Baldwin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 192 (emphasis original). 30 Olivier, On Acting, 72. 31 Ibid., 75–6. 32 Quoted in B. Kliman, Macbeth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 75. 33 Ibid., 52; The Birmingham Post, June 9, 1955. 34 Ibid., 52, 51. 35 The Sunday Times, June 12, 1955. 36 Kliman, Macbeth, 50, 43. 37 The Sunday Observer, June 12, 1955. 38 The Sunday Times, June 12, 1955.

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39 This description, from a review in the periodical Truth, Issue 155 (June 17, 1955): 770, is quoted in A.R. Braunmuller, ed. Macbeth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 80. 40 The Evening News, June 8, 1955. 41 T. Cole, Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times as Told in Their Own Words (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 389. 42 M. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises (London: Heinemann, 1982), 157. 43 Cole, Actors on Acting, 389. 44 Y. Mitchell, Actress (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 19–20. 45 A. Strachan, Secret Dreams: The Biography of Michael Redgrave (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 137. 46 M. Redgrave, The Actor’s Ways and Means (London: Nick Hern Books Ltd, 1995), 66; five years later Redgrave declared himself ‘one of [the] more halfhearted champions’ of the Actors’ Studio and expressed concern about its ‘distortions of Stanislavski’s precepts’, but he remained a whole-hearted champion of the principle that actors must train regularly, throughout their careers: M. Redgrave, Mask or Face: Reflections in An Actor’s Mirror (London: Heinemann, 1958), 50. 47 L. Strasberg, Strasberg at the Actors Studio: Tape-Recorded Sessions, ed. Robert Hethmon (New York: Theatre Communications Group Inc., 1965), 379. 48 U. Hagen, A Challenge for the Actor (New York: Scribner, 1991), 37–50. 49 Ibid., 42. 50 Strasberg, Strasberg at the Actor’s Studio, 380; see also Hagen, A Challenge for the Actor, 47. When Strasberg is writing, rather than speaking live to a presumably captive audience at the Actors Studio, he is not so damning: ‘There is in Olivier’s most distinguished performances more than just technique and skill’, he admits: L. Strasberg and E. Morphos, A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown & Co., 1987), 177. 51 Jed Harris (1900–79) directed Olivier in The Green Bay Tree (1932) and was almost universally detested. 52 L. Olivier and K. Tynan, ‘The Actor: Tynan Interviews Olivier’, The Tulane Drama Review 11, no. 2 (winter 1966): 88–9. 53 Laurence Olivier: A Life (London Weekend Television, 1982). 54 M. Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983), 203. 55 A. Guinness, Letter to Saint-Denis, September 4, 1952: BL, Add. MS 81094. 56 P.P. Read, Alec Guinness (London: Simon & Shuster, 2003), 52. 57 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 157. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 79, 149–50. 61 Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, 164. 62 J. Gielgud, Stage Directions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), 90. 63 Ibid., 91. 64 Quoted in S. Jump, ‘The Convergence of Influences on and Evolving Praxis of Mid-Twentieth-Century British Theatre Design (1935–65) Through a Close Study of Selected Works by Motley and Jocelyn Herbert’ (PhD Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2016), 92. 65 Ibid. 66 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 235. 67 Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, 164.

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68 The actors’ contracts allowed for five hours of rehearsal on a full day and half that on the three matinee days each week. A rehearsal schedule is held in BL, Add. MS 81193. 69 Stephen Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 17, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. Subsequent quotations from these rehearsal notes are all taken from a copy of the staff director Stephen Aaron’s notes, which he sent to Suria Magito Saint-Denis on January 3, 1968. 70 J. Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life (London: Methuen, 2000), 424. 71 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 18, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 72 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 17, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 73 This letter from Peggy Ashcroft to Saint-Denis is only dated ‘Tuesday morning’, and was written while Ashcroft was in rehearsals for Othello. Presumably it dates from early October 1961: BL, Add. MS 81195. The emphases are Ashcroft’s. 74 M. Saint-Denis, Letter to Peggy Ashcroft, October 4, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81195 (emphasis original). 75 See J. Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (London: Praeger, 2003), 89. 76 Ibid.; Dench may, ultimately, to have approved this piece of business. However, when she played Ranevskaya at the Aldwych Theatre in Sam Mendes’ 1989 production, Miranda Foster as Anya repeated it. 77 This is an alternative to Chekhov’s stage direction in which Ranevskaya removes her handkerchief to wipe away tears (caused by the memory of her son’s death), which causes the telegram to fall. 78 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 31, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 79 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 24, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 80 C. Zucker, ed., In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting (London: A & C Black Ltd, 1999), 52. 81 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 18, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 82 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 19, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 83 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 18, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 84 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 20, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 85 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 28, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 86 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 17, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 87 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 18 and 19, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 88 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 23, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 89 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 30, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 90 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 27, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 91 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 28, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 92 Aaron, rehearsal notes, October 19, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81194. 93 Letter from Peter Hall to Saint-Denis, January 17, 1961: BL, Add. MS 81192. 94 The Times, February 8, 1962. 95 There is a contract letter dated June 2, 1962, for ‘a minimum of two years and six months from 1st March 1962’ at a rate of £5,000 per annum ‘pro rata with the amount of time spent in your active duties with this theatre’: BL, Add. MS 81192. 96 W. Gaskill describes the work of the writers’ group in A Sense of Direction (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 36–9; see also K. Johnstone, Impro (London: Methuen, 1989), 25–6. Johnstone is also at pains to stress the importance for his work of a break with Devine’s approach, which he considers to have been overly dry and academic (Keith Johnstone Teaches Trance Masks, DVD, 2008). 97 Gaskill, A Sense of Direction, 36. 98 Ibid., 37. 99 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 199–200.

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100 H. Devine, Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court: 1956–2006 (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), 74, 177. 101 Harriet Devine is the daughter of George and Sophie Harris of Motley. She became literary manager of the Royal Court between 1968 and 1969. 102 See Johnstone, Impro, 26–7. 103 Gaskill, A Sense of Direction, 131. 104 P. Hall, Letter to Saint-Denis, January 26, 1962: BL, Add. MS 81192. 105 The document is in BL, Add. MS 81192. 106 See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the LTS’s facilities. 107 Memorandum from Saint-Denis to Peter Hall, Peter Brook, and Patrick Donnell, September 10, 1962: Shakespeare Centre Library and Archive (hereafter SCLA), Maurice Daniels Collection. 108 The timetable is referred to in a memorandum from Clifford Williams to SaintDenis, Peter Hall, Peter Brook, Patrick Donnell, John Roberts, Maurice Daniels, Abd’Elkader Farrah, October 19, 1962: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 109 ‘Studio—Stratford, Nov. 12th to Dec. 8th, 1962. Notes and Timetable’, undated document: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 110 Ibid. 111 M. Greenwald, Directions by Indirections: John Barton of the Royal Shakespeare Company (London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985), 35. 112 My source here is an interview with Barton, conducted by Carol Rutter for the ‘Becoming the RSC’ research project at Warwick University’s CAPITAL Centre from 2008 to 2010. Barton was, however, also hired to direct The Taming of the Shrew (1960) with Peggy Ashcroft and Peter O’Toole as Kate and Petruchio, but Hall had to take over the production when Barton’s controlling direction caused controversy in the company, see Greenwald, Directions by Indirections, 36–7. 113 Ibid., 36. 114 R. Schechner, M. La Bardonnie, J. Jouanneau, G. Banu, A. Husemoller, ‘Talking with Peter Brook’, The Drama Review: TDR 30, no. 1 (spring 1986): 54. 115 Quoted in M. Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 183. 116 My source for this information is C. Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company: Creativity and the Institution (London: Routledge, 2004), 148–9, but he does not give primary sources and I have been unable to confirm this narrative with archival evidence. However, as he was the RSC’s literary manager, Chambers has inside knowledge of the building and this version of events makes sense of some subsequent comments, so I have no reason to mistrust it. 117 Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company, 149. 118 Royal Shakespeare Staff News-Sheet’, May 20, 1963: BL, Add. MS 81190. 119 Memorandum from Sandy Black to Peter Hall, Saint-Denis, Peter Brook, Patrick Donnell, John Roberts, Clifford Williams, John Wyckham, Maurice Daniels, Kenneth Parrott, Abd’El Farrah, Hal Rogers, ‘Studio Report—First Phase, May 6– August 3, 1963’, August 27, 1963: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 120 Peter Hall to M. Saint-Denis, September 3, 1963: BL, Add. MS 81190. 121 There is a list of studio productions for 1963 in BL, Add. MS 81192. 122 Chambers, Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company, 149. 123 He mentions this in a memo of December 30, 1963: BL, Add. MS 81190. 124 Letter addressed ‘To all members of the Stratford and Aldwych Companies and others within the organisation’, 1964: BL, Add. MS 81190. 125 Press Release: ‘Royal Shakespeare Experimental Group at LAMDA Theatre: “Theatre of Cruelty” directed by Peter Brook’, December 2, 1963: BL, Add. MS 81190. 126 Ibid. 127 Aaron, rehearsal notes, January 21, 1964: BL, Add. MS 81194.

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128 ‘Studio 1964–5’: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 129 Ibid. 130 ‘Royal Shakespeare Studio, Studio Report, May 1964–March 1965’, undated document: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 131 Ibid. 132 For more details, see Introduction, 2. 133 Details of the Goodwin Plan to reduce RSC expenditure are taken from an undated 1965 memo from Peter Hall to all members of the Royal Shakespeare forum, in which the planned changes are described in some detail: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection. 134 Memorandum dated September 3, 1966: SCLA, Maurice Daniels Collection.

2 PRACTICES OF THE LONDON THEATRE STUDIO AND THE OLD VIC THEATRE CENTRE

This chapter explores the practices of the studios established by Michel SaintDenis and George Devine in London either side of the Second World War: the London Theatre Studio (1936–1939, hereafter LTS) and the Old Vic Theatre Centre (1947–1952, hereafter OVC). It draws upon archival sources, principally the Michel Saint-Denis Archive (held in the British Library) and the papers of George Devine (held in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds), as well as interviews and the published biographies and memoirs of the key figures involved. Saint-Denis’ own books Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises and Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style offer comprehensive accounts of his approach to actor training, but they do not constitute the subject of this chapter for two reasons. First, studios are not, by definition, solely places for training. Instead, they seek to develop practices whereby training and experimentation are imbricated with each other in order to develop an ensemble and reinvent processes of theatre-making. Second, although Saint-Denis was the most significant architect of the LTS and OVC, he was by no means the only source of their practices. I have therefore avoided a biographical approach, focusing instead on the work of these studios as organisations. My intention, in so doing, is to avoid absorbing into the structure of this study the assumption that organisations are formed from the top down. I am equally concerned, however, to steer clear of the opposite assumption that studios’ commitment to collectivity equates to an egalitarian reality in their practice. A brief account of Saint-Denis’ career before he came to England in 1935 will serve to illustrate the importance of navigating between these positions and charting the development of studio practices from multiple influences—which are obscured by accounts that assume hierarchical organisation—but nonetheless exposing hierarchies where they are to be found.

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Visionary paternalism: Copeau and Saint-Denis Saint-Denis first came to England in 1928 with the touring production l’Illusion, directed by his uncle, the reforming director Jacques Copeau, with his ensemble company Les Copiaus. The company’s name, given to them by the local people in Burgundy where they lived and worked, meant ‘the little Copeaus’ or ‘children of Copeau’ and suggested, accurately, that their practices were inherited, for the most part, from their ‘patron’. In spite of the presence of Copeau’s daughter with Agnes Thomsen, Marie-Hélène, in the company, there was no doubt that it was Saint-Denis who assumed the position of Copeau’s heir, rising gradually to the position of Copeau’s assistant at the Vieux-Colombier theatreand-school in Paris.1 When Copeau left the Vieux-Colombier, he travelled to Burgundy with a group of actors including Saint-Denis, where he proposed to undertake a ‘conscientious examination of the principles of their craft’.2 They created characters and scenarios from training exercises, and began to evolve scripts through a process of improvisation,3 which according to the actor Jean Villard would ‘depart from the beaten path and put to use mask, mime, chorus, song’.4 With Copeau regularly absent securing funds, Les Copiaus functioned increasingly collectively, albeit with Saint-Denis as their leader, until Copeau decided to re-instate himself, writing the scenario of L’Illusion from which the group created a performance for which Villard composed the music, MarieHélène Copeau made the costumes, and the actors made their own masks and improvised and choreographed sequences of action and dance. The production was seen at Terence Gray’s Festival Theatre in Cambridge by Michael Redgrave (then an undergraduate), who recorded its powerful effect: It was […] as if a great craftsman, having made the perfect crystal vase, had deliberately shattered it by letting it fall to the ground, and then, with one swoop of his hands, had reassembled the beautiful object in a new and yet more perfect form—the truth, as seen by the illusionist, becoming the truth, at that moment, for the spectator. Actors came forward inviting the audience to a game: ‘We can make you believe in anything—and show you it’s only an illusion’.5 Redgrave’s reference to the ‘great craftsman’ blurs the figures of Copeau the author-director and Alcandre, the magician whom he played, who conjures the performance, a play-within-a-play in which a man is reconciled to his son by watching him perform a story about a father and son with a company of actors he has joined to escape from his father’s anger.6 The performance’s deliberate association of Alcandre’s magic with Copeau’s company’s technique—both of which were able to blur and merge reality and illusion—obscured as much as it revealed. It concealed, for example, the crucial role of Suzanne Bing, who played the Spirit of Comedy in L’Illusion and whose ‘pedagogy and theatremaking techniques’, along with the contributions of ‘the other women’ in Les

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Copiaus were substantially erased, as Mark Evans and Cass Fleming have observed, both by Copeau’s assertion of his own primacy and by Saint-Denis’ account of the work of this period.7 This pattern, as we shall see, would go on to characterise both the LTS and OVC. In 1928, Saint-Denis followed Copeau’s example, writing and directing Danse de la Ville et des Champs in Dijon, which was described by critic Phyllis Aykroyd as ‘an intimate collaboration of authorship, acting and production’ in which no person was allowed to predominate in any way […] emphasised by a Prologue in which the members of the company were presented to the audience, displayed their tricks and their properties, and announced that there were no stars among them.8 Paradoxically, this impression that ‘no person was allowed to predominate’ artistically in the work of Les Copiaus was also the basis of Copeau’s assertion of control over the company, which he presented as a guarantee of its continued collectivity, a mantle that was taken up by Saint-Denis when, the following year, Copeau finally disbanded Les Copiaus and Saint-Denis became the leader of an ensemble of fifteen of its former members, known as the Compagnie des Quinze. Saint-Denis’ paradoxical position at the head of this ensemble became more strained in 1931, when he and Les Quinze’s writer-in-residence, André Obey, cast an outsider, the well-known actor Pierre Fresnay, as the eponymous hero of Obey’s play Noé. The Quinze production of Noé was received in London that year with praise that echoed English enthusiasm for Les Copiaus. SaintDenis recalled a ‘mad crush’ backstage during their first visit in June 1931 as ‘our dressing rooms were literally invaded by a mob of people we were seeing for the first time […]. All of a sudden, a famous name would burst unannounced and informally upon us’.9 Those famous names included John Gielgud, who wrote that Les Quinze ‘are making people realise the power and potentialities of simplicity’,10 and praised their ‘superb teamwork’;11 Peggy Ashcroft, who admired their work’s ‘pattern, all orchestrated and timed to perfection. […] They seem unable to make a mistake’,12 and Tyrone Guthrie, who described ‘a delightful ballet, only it had fifty times more content than any ballet ever had’.13 Four years later, after the break-up of Les Quinze, who could no longer support themselves financially, these memories meant that Saint-Denis was able to mount an English version of Noé at the New Theatre (where the French version had also played), starring Gielgud and backed by the West End producer Bronson Albery. Thus, just as Copeau had presented the collective creativity of Les Copiaus as an extension of his power, Saint-Denis deliberately created the impression that the ‘superb teamwork’ of Les Quinze was a function of his direction, occluding the contributions of other company members to the practices he claimed for himself.

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Unsurprisingly, given the patriarchal nature of the bond between Copeau and Saint-Denis, those marginalised by Saint-Denis’ achievement of individual success were often—though not exclusively—women. Apparently, for example, Saint-Denis ‘considered jobbing in’ the original designer Marie-Hélène Dasté’ (née Copeau) to work on Noah, but was persuaded against it by his new designers, Motley.14 He did, however, call upon the services of Dasté’s contemporary at the Vieux-Colombier school and another performer and designer with Les Copiaus, Marie-Madeleine Gautier, to help to make the masks and advise Motley.15 The roles of designer, mask-maker and movement teacher were commonly gendered female and obscured behind those of the (male) writer, director, and leading performer, and a great deal of other off-stage work was similarly gendered, not least domestic labour. Saint-Denis had three children between 1924 and 1930—two with his wife, Marie Mroczkowski-Ostroga, and one with Gautier (with whom she travelled to London to work on Noah). Artistic, romantic and familial bonds commonly overlapped in Copeau’s circle, so this was not unusual, but whereas Gautier evidently had to balance her work with childcare, Saint-Denis did not. Disavowed female labour was not only artistic and domestic, however. The English actress Vera Poliakoff (who had been a member of Les Quinze alongside the English actor Marius Goring) remembered that the company commonly depended upon patronage which often meant, in practice, being answerable to ‘the whims of rich ladies’.16 In London, Poliakoff and Goring became principally responsible for introducing Saint-Denis to influential theatre people. Poliakoff also later claimed, in an interview, that she and her then husband, the actor Basil Burton, sold their country house and used the money to buy a London flat with a room for Saint-Denis, donating the remainder to the LTS.17 Poliakoff, who seems to have had an affair with Saint-Denis at the time, also claimed that she researched and wrote his first lectures on classical theatre.18 It is therefore notable that, while Saint-Denis recorded his indebtedness to Guthrie (for the sum of ‘thirteen hundred pounds’ towards the LTS), to Devine and Goring (for their contributions to ‘the plans of the school’), and to the LTS ‘governing board’: ‘[Bronson] Albery, Ian E. Black, Gielgud, Guthrie and Olivier’ (all of whom had also contributed financially), he did not acknowledge Poliakoff.19 She seems to have been justified in her subsequent description of ‘the visionary but paternalistic methods of Michel’, a point to which we shall return in more detail in Chapter 3.20 The combination of collective vision and paternalistic operation that Saint-Denis inherited from Copeau extended to the London studios he led, as did his dependence upon patronage and networks of (sometimes unacknowledged) support. In London, he both developed the work he had begun in France and collaborated with English actors, directors, designers, and choreographers to shape the practices of the LTS and OVC studios he led. I therefore focus in this chapter on the structures and practices of these studios in the context of the theatre-making

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communities of their day and of society at large. I ask how they came to take the forms they did, what kinds of practices they supported and developed, and how power was distributed within them. Finally, I address the question of why, within a space only sixteen years (six of which were dominated by the war), these studios would go from the British theatre establishment’s consummation devoutly to be wished, to a memory never to be repeated on the same scale.

The London Theatre Studio: ‘genuine theatre productions’ Opposite the cast list in the programme for the 1935 Group Theatre production of Jean Giono’s play Les Lanceurs de Graines (translated by Joliffe Metcalfe as The Sowers of the Hills), there appeared a full-page advertisement for the ‘London Theatre Studio’ (Figure 2.1), which was described, like the production, as ‘under direction of Michel Saint-Denis’. The advertisement described the studio by breaking it down into constituent parts: ‘A School of Acting’, ‘a permanent Company’, ‘specialists in every branch of the theatre’. It also promised that ‘this School will provide material for the Company’ and that the training it offered would therefore ‘be in constant touch with the professional theatre’ and would ‘improve the material available for genuine theatre productions’. The influence of Copeau on Saint-Denis, sketched above, gives some indication of what he may have meant by ‘genuine’: genuinely theatrical, genuine in their simplicity, genuinely created by the performing company, genuine in their reliance upon the work of highly skilled performers. Saint-Denis’ collaboration with Motley introduces a further aspect of his theatre that could be called ‘genuine’: costumes that emphasised their own materiality, and three-dimensional scenery instead of painted flats. Lastly, Saint-Denis’ connections with rising stars of the London theatre establishment suggest a final sense in which the LTS would produce ‘genuine’ theatre: rather than rejecting all tradition, the studio’s professionalism would enable it both to challenge and to conserve theatrical conventions. One account of the aims of the LTS is encapsulated by Piers Paul Read’s description of an image from the rehearsal of Saint-Denis’ 1935 Noah. It depicts the ‘young Merula Salaman in her bathing suit, crawling on her hands and knees up to John Gielgud, who was dressed immaculately in a dark suit and trilby hat, plac[ing] a paw on his shoulder and then roar[ing] in his face’.21 I will argue here, however, that rather than embodying a shockingly assertive, youthful avant-garde set against the conventions of an older order, the LTS is better understood as a fulcrum, balancing contradictory forces within the London theatre of the 1930s. The fact that Gielgud’s Noah and Salaman’s tiger were costumed by Motley was also telling. Motley’s combination of traditional craft skills and modernist aesthetics reflected Saint-Denis’ approach to acting and directing. Likewise, the LTS’s claim to ‘genuine-ness’ depended upon balance: partly it was a vanguard movement, but ultimately it sought to offset new and experimental practices with a degree of deference to tradition.

FIGURE 2.1 Advertisement for the London Theatre Studio from the programme for The Sowers of the Hills (Westminster Theatre, 1935), author’s collection.

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‘A school of acting’: training at the LTS If the LTS has any claim to have been a radical organisation, then its approach to actor training is the most convincing evidence it could present. Saint-Denis made that claim himself, in his 1961 article ‘The English Theatre Through Gallic Eyes’, where he suggests that the LTS succeeded in ‘implanting in the English theatre hitherto unfamiliar notions’, particularly in the area of acting, ‘endowing it with varied means of expression’ and allowing it ‘to shake off routine’.22 Writing in 1978, the actress Yvonne Mitchell agreed, arguing that the LTS training ‘did nothing to prepare us for the theatre of our day, nor for the decade after the war’, adding, however, that ‘all our teaching would have been relevant to the theatre of today’.23 The geographical position of the LTS supported this idea. Following brief stints in what one of its first students, Pierre Lefèvre, described as ‘a little room above a Spanish restaurant’ in Kingly Court W1 (which had been Diaghilev’s rehearsal room),24 and in the Old Vic’s large, top-floor rehearsal room,25 it moved to a permanent home, a converted chapel in Providence Place, off Upper Street in Islington, which Lefèvre reminds us was at ‘le début de la banlieue’ (the beginning of the suburbs), off the beaten track (though near Sadlers Wells), and therefore frequented by ‘un public au courant de l’avant-garde’ (audiences who were aware of the avant-garde).26 The conversion of the chapel in Providence Place was orchestrated by the architect Marcel Breuer, and was intended to enable the double identity of ‘School and Company’, which advance publicity for the LTS had announced. It included rehearsal space and workshops as well as a stage that was big enough to allow productions to transfer direct to the West End, with a steeply raked auditorium of 190 seats and a control box at the back of the auditorium, a very unusual innovation at the time.27 In many ways the environment of Providence Place recalled both the Vieux-Colombier, upon which it was deliberately modelled, and the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, which also had a steep auditorium, holding somewhere between 50 and 150 people,28 whom its members considered a ‘third author’ of theatrical experience.29 Irving Wardle observed that the LTS stage ‘was an exposure machine: it demanded performances sufficiently large to fill the spatial volume, and also truthful enough to withstand scrutiny at point-blank range’.30 That exposure worked in two directions: the students’ technical resources were exposed by their training and their teachers used the process of training to expose new theatrical possibilities. The actor James Cairncross remembered that ‘Michel opened our young eyes and our imaginations and set our gaze on wider horizons’.31 If, as Yvonne Mitchell suggested, these ‘wider horizons’ didn’t exist in the theatre of that time, nor did the actors who could take advantage of them. Saint-Denis put it simply: ‘the kind of actor I wanted was not to be found ready-made’,32 so the LTS training was developed to ‘establish a habit’ upon which he could base a new breed of actor.33 The deliberate creation, at the LTS, of a platform from which to transfer productions to the West End, however, returns us to the fact that Saint-

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Denis ‘wanted’ actors to secure his own directorial career, from which perspective, his students and their ‘habits’ were reduced, in the words of the LTS advertisement, to ‘material’. I will explore Saint-Denis’ development of the idea of ‘habit’ in Chapter 3, but it should be noted here that Saint-Denis did not use the term to imply a form of technique that would be either unthinking or uncreative. In fact, the development of creative technique was central to the project of the LTS, as Saint-Denis recalled: The main objectives of the L.T.S. were to develop in the student initiative, freedom, and a sense of individual responsibility as well as the ability to merge his individual qualities into an ensemble. Although the acquisition of a strongly developed technique of body and voice was one of our basic aims, technique was never to be allowed to dominate or supersede invention.34 This aim influenced the practices of the LTS before its training had even begun, in that it seems to have led Saint-Denis and Devine to welcome somewhat unconventional students. Yvonne Mitchell (who became a successful actress and writer) recalled that a teacher from RADA suggested that she ‘might succeed in spite of RADA, but certainly not because of it’ and she was advised to ‘try for an audition with Michel St Denis’.35 Mitchell recalled an extremely inauspicious meeting and protested that she ‘can’t think what they saw in me’,36 but we do know what Saint-Denis was looking for: imagination and freedom from inhibition, and what he later described as ‘young talent that was not yet ossified, still free of theatrical bad habits’.37 Setting aside, for a moment, Saint-Denis’ apparent intention to use the LTS as a vehicle for the development of his own productions, it is clear that the studio’s curriculum was genuinely structured so as to develop the good habits of technique and creativity. This is particularly clear in relation to the teaching of movement. Each day began with acrobatics,38 and LTS-graduate Peter Ustinov recalled that the ‘physical suppleness’ taught by Gerda Rink made him ‘aware of the possibilities of physical co-ordination, and […] its importance for an actor’.39 These classes also gave the students a physical basis for more creative classes in dance and movement taught by Suria Magito, who came over from Paris, where her company had, as Saint-Denis recalled, combined forms experimentally: ‘mime, the use of splendid original Nō masks, speech, chanting and dance’.40 She performed one such show, called A Mad Woman, at the LTS.41 According to Yvonne Mitchell, she based her dance teaching on characters drawn from ‘Goya or Breughel paintings or bible stories, taken to performance standard with specially written music and specially designed costumes’.42 The characters from Breughel appear from photographs to have featured in The Fair (in March 1937), an acrobatic, ensemble performance directed by Magito and

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George Devine. The work on Goya developed his sequence of etchings Los Desastros de la Guerra to generate a danced response to the recent events of the Spanish Civil War and culminated in a performance entitled Juanita (1938). The development of Magito’s classes from the technical exploration of creative impulses to the creation of finished performances exemplified the studio principle of simultaneous training and experimental practice. Classes in improvisation, taught principally by George Devine, and mime, taught by SaintDenis, followed the same trajectory. Devine’s improvisation classes were ultimately directed towards the creation of full-length plays, in the manner of Les Quinze, though without a resident playwright to shape and guide that process.43 There was also no given starting-point, except that students should create a character of their own invention. Yvonne Mitchell described the instinctive development of characters through a process of thinking-throughmovement which resonates with Saint-Denis’ later observation that ‘the student should also learn that in whatever he does, however small the gesture he uses, a kind of current, life, must go through the whole body’:44 The first intimation I got of the dirty old gin-swigger I was to become, was a habit or a tic I developed, whilst still sitting, of clicking my tongue whilst throwing my eyes up to heaven, as if to express disapprobation of something my old self had seen or heard.45 Having begun in this way with the independent development of characters, Devine brought them into situations in which they could come into contact with each other, from which scenarios or études and subsequently brief plays could be devised, such as The Fair. Saint-Denis’ classes in mime were likewise designed to develop both physical expression and creativity, beginning with the observation and replication of simple movements, such as climbing stairs or picking up objects, and with visits to the zoo to study the movements of animals.46 However, the focus shifted quickly from the technical to the imaginative, as students were encouraged to invent scenarios which would require them ‘to conjure up scenery and props to the audience on a bare stage’. Saint-Denis described such an étude in Training for the Theatre, where a tightrope walker, in mid-course of his act, has a day dream and thinks himself a bird … he takes off from his tightrope … Flying around turning in the air, enjoying his freedom, he suddenly finds himself back on his tightrope.47 Such études were judged as performances, and Yvonne Mitchell remembers that Ustinov, for one, ‘thought the training arty’,48 both in that it was excessively theoretical (‘much given to analysis, making the smallest gesture the pretext for

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lengthy discussions’)49 and naively idealistic (encouraging students into ‘tiny temples of true art, making their own masks and coffee in chipped mugs, in the belief that, because money corrupts, poverty must therefore be equated with integrity’).50 Nonetheless, Ustinov acknowledged that it was effective: ‘when I applied what I had learned […], I showed great improvement […]. Even if the theatre had not been a vocation, at least it was becoming a profession’.51 The version of the profession for which the LTS was training its students, however, was still in its infancy. The first English drama school, Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s academy, which was founded in 1904, aimed to teach ‘voice production, elocution, blank verse, Shakespeare, dancing, fencing, acrobatics and mime, gesture appropriate to periods (minuets, the use of the fan) and the acting of plays’.52 It is perhaps coincidental that acting comes last on Tree’s list and voice production first, but as a prominent theatre manager, Tree was, as Michael Sanderson observes, ‘a major employer of the products of his own academy’.53 When we consider that the theatres that were being built at the time of Tree’s academy opening contained about 20 per cent more seats than those of twenty years earlier, the priority of voice and relegation of acting in his curriculum is easy to understand.54 That hierarchy within actor training also echoes Harley Granville Barker’s 1922 criticism of the industry: ‘the modern professional stage does not […] ask for recruits deeply studied in the art of acting—it has neither the time nor resource to indulge itself in anything so delicately complex’.55 Barker argued that these shortcomings were symptomatic of the ‘danger … that the capitalist, measuring the probabilities of success by the amount of money provided […] has been apt to demand immediate results, financial or artistic, preferably both’.56 Actor training did evolve in the 1920s in response to the emergence of a more naturalistic style, better suited to contemporary realistic plays, but actors like John Gielgud and Alec Guinness who were influenced by Saint-Denis commonly contrasted his teaching to the inadequacy of their own previous training. Gielgud recalled attempting to impersonate the actor Claude Rains while at RADA: ‘I strained every fibre in my efforts to appear violent and emotional and succeeded only in straining my voice and striking strange attitudes with my body’.57 Despite being miscast by Saint-Denis both as Noah and Vershinin in The Three Sisters (1938), Gielgud remembered that ‘I learnt more from acting in these two plays than from others in which I have made a greater personal success’.58 Aside from acting, there was a course in production, which we would call directing, and, as Sophie Jump has observed, the LTS’s course in décor, which was run by Motley, was the first design course to be housed ‘within the main body of a drama school’.59 There was a degree of overlap between actors and designers, with the latter observing and sometimes taking part in acting classes and the actors assisting designers with end of year shows.60 Nonetheless, for the most part, the courses ran in parallel, and Motley’s relationship to Saint-Denis in the running of the school echoed their relative positions in the hierarchy of

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theatre production. As Margaret ‘Percy’ Harris—the most engaged of the Motley trio in the training—recalled, Saint-Denis ‘knew what he wanted the design course to be […] he made the arrangements […] and then left us to do it’.61 In summary, then, the LTS was true to the letter of its advertisement and its subtext: it was ‘a practical effort by a man of the working theatre to improve the material available for [his] genuine theatre productions’, and it is to those productions—and thus to the other element in the LTS plan, its ‘permanent company’—that we now turn.

LTS Productions: ‘a permanent company’? As Barker’s critique of the limits placed by a capitalist theatre system on the ambition of actor training suggested, it would be naïve to consider approaches to training outside of the industrial contexts they are intended to serve. In the case of the LTS, its 1935 advert twice describes the studio’s aim as the provision of ‘material’ for the professional theatre, unmistakably signalling a desire not to reconstruct the process of production, but to create new opportunities for those who control the means of theatre production by providing them with new material, in the form of alternately skilled performers. Saint-Denis was open about this: We were setting up a school only in order later to form a company, probably after three years. This company would be led by a few wellknown actors […] but it would find its core and the basis of constant renewal by engaging the best products of the school from year to year. We wanted to serve contemporary theatre, but needed to prepare actors capable of interpreting all styles without letting style deflect us from truth. We needed to strike a balance between a solid technique for the body and the voice, between the study and practice of texts … and the proper means of ensuring a modern actor’s creative freedom. Devoted primarily to interpretation, the school, with student actors working near young directors, set designers, and—we hoped—new dramatists, would be organised like a studio, with a theatre for performances. Experimentation and the quest for new forms were among our foremost preoccupations.62 Saint-Denis’ recognition of the aims of the LTS here, and the pragmatic characterisation of it, in its own marketing, as a ‘practical effort by a man of the working theatre’ stood in fairly stark contrast to the LTS’s closest English parallel, the Group Theatre, formed in 1932 by the dancer Rupert Doone and artist Robert Medley. Doone’s 1935 manifesto for the Group Theatre (Figure 2.2) began with the objective of ensuring that no single person or aspect of the production process should be able to ‘dominate’, argued that ‘society must be changed if we

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want a living theatre’, and concluded in an egalitarian spirit that likewise extended beyond the stage: Theatre art is the art of co-operation. I want the theatre to be a social force, where the painter and the author and the choreographer and the machine and the business man and the actor and the illusionist and the stage producer combine with the audience to make realism fantasy and fantasy real. The Group Theatre’s attempt to turn theatre-making into a ‘social force’ had begun in August 1932, when membership subscriptions paid for a small group of performers to undertake a ‘summer study’ at a school in Suffolk for a fortnight, intended as an embryonic version of the more sustained training upon which they intended to base their practice.63 However, by 1935, the actor and Group Theatre member Ormerod Greenwood wrote to Edward Gordon Craig that an appeal the previous year ‘for a few hundred pounds to enable us to take a farmhouse, and train a company of young actors’ was dismissed as the notion of ‘lunatics’, whereas funding ‘a season of plays in London without any preparation or knowledge’ was achieved ‘without difficulty’.64 The first Group Theatre season, of which Saint-Denis’ The Sowers of the Hills was a part,

FIGURE 2.2 Rupert Doone’s 1935 Manifesto for the Group Theatre from the programme for The Sowers of the Hills (Westminster Theatre, 1935), author’s collection.

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therefore opened in October 1935 at the same time as a flyer announced that the ideal of establishing a permanent company had been deferred, ‘for this can only be formed by long search and special training’.65 Saint-Denis and his collaborators knew the history of the Group Theatre, of course, and the emphasis on practicality at the LTS suggests an attempt to distance their project from Doone’s idealism. The generation of income through charging fees to students similarly set the LTS apart from the Group Theatre, though it was also inherited from Saint-Denis’ final plans for the Compagnie des Quinze, which proposed a four-month period each year in which the company would suspend touring in order to train together, develop new productions, and offer courses to students, some of whom would also become involved in the company’s work.66 The LTS developed this idea of selective integration of students into the company as well as retaining Saint-Denis’ controversial compromise, with Les Quinze, of casting well-known actors from outside the company in leading roles. Thus, Saint-Denis sought to resolve the tension between artistic and commercial success in his plan by remaining (conservatively) in the service of contemporary theatre and (radically) in the vanguard of ‘the quest for new forms’. The first two of Saint-Denis’ productions after the opening of the LTS were The Witch of Edmonton starring Edith Evans (1936), and Macbeth starring Laurence Olivier (1937), both at the Old Vic. They were both designed by Motley and included actors closely associated with Saint-Denis such as Goring and Guinness in The Witch of Edmonton, and Poliakoff alongside LTS students Genevieve Jessel, Pierre Lefèvre, and Hereward Russell in Macbeth. However, apart from the origins of Saint-Denis’ Macbeth in an LTS course on staging the play (see Chapter 1), both productions were incidental to his work at the studio. Next came Saint-Denis’ highly acclaimed Three Sisters at the Queen’s Theatre (1938). Unlike the Old Vic productions, this was built upon an ensemble that included star actors, but it was not a company of Saint-Denis’ making. It was led by John Gielgud as actor-manager and Peggy Ashcroft, and represented a compromise between the commercial logic of Gielgud’s appeal to what he called ‘a sort of matinee-idol public’, and on the artistic basis of ‘a permanent company’, which is to say that the actors were engaged to perform in four plays over a period of ‘forty-three weeks’.67 Programmes for the season opened with full-page portraits that positioned Gielgud and Ashcroft clearly as actor-manager and leading lady, but Ashcroft recalled that, in spite of this concession to convention, ‘John really wanted to form a genuine company’.68 Gielgud envisaged that company with ‘two sides’: ‘very enthusiastic young people […] who were just beginning’ and ‘highly experienced people’ so that ‘the young people matched with their youthful enthusiasm what the older ones had in experience’.69 Among the ‘young people’ employed by Gielgud were LTS students Alastair Bannerman, Genevieve Jessel, Hereward Russell, and Merula Salaman. Though these junior cast

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members were mainly walk-ons, Jessel played Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, the company’s final production. Gielgud’s choice of plays was also comparatively egalitarian. The season began with Shakespeare’s Richard II, Gielgud’s most dominant role with the company, and obviously intended to capitalise on his success in Richard of Bordeaux at the New Theatre three years earlier. It continued with The School for Scandal, directed by Guthrie, a play which, despite offering the star-vehicles of Joseph Surface and Lady Teazle, requires ensemble acting. Then, after ‘five months of playing together’, Gielgud’s company began what was, to them, an unprecedented seven weeks of rehearsal in their first thoroughly ensemble endeavour, The Three Sisters.70 The cast were initially concerned about the length of rehearsals, thinking, according to Saint-Denis, that it would ‘render their acting mechanical, dry and sterile’.71 However, Saint-Denis used the time to immerse his actors in character and situation more deeply than many felt they had ever previously achieved. Lengthy improvisations in rehearsal established the changing atmospheres of the play, so that, reviewing the production, Audrey Williamson ‘felt the town […] and its stifling impact’,72 and, looking back, Peggy Ashcroft recorded that, in the years since, she had ‘never seen a production […] where you sensed so vividly the change of the seasons’.73 Gielgud was justifiably proud of the production’s ‘teamwork’,74 which resulted in a staging which Ivor Brown, reviewing the production in The Observer, called ‘well-nigh flawless’: a restatement of an exquisite play made not only with exquisite sensibility, but also with the technical power to express in grouping, lighting, and intonation, all the comedy and pathos of the frustrate family and its military visitors. One could particularly notice how all the players seemed, on this occasion, to be above their usual best. Those who happen to have mannerisms, little tricks of voice or laugh, which can become irritating by repetition, either kept them under strict control or dropped them altogether […] this lovely presentation of Chekhov may fairly be described as an all-star cast in a no-star play.75 This balance between the ensemble and individual performances arguably depended, to a certain extent, on the LTS. Motley designed the production, it featured Devine and LTS student Merula Salaman in the cast, and Saint-Denis used his work at the school as a means of preparing for it. He remembered ‘emerging from a thorough study of An Actor Prepares’ at the time,76 which had been partly facilitated by directing the first act of Three Sisters with his students at the LTS in 1937, which Gielgud had seen.77 The LTS was not, however, the only source of the technique upon which Saint-Denis’ production depended. Other members of the company were familiar with Stanislavsky: Gielgud had enthusiastically reviewed An Actor Prepares in 1937;78 My Life in Art had apparently been Ashcroft’s ‘Bible’ while she was at

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the Central School,79 and Redgrave had ‘stumbled on a copy of […] An Actor Prepares’ in a bookshop in May 1937, a book which, he remembered, ‘was to light my way for many nights to come’.80 The successful ensemble effect of the production, which was described by Audrey Williamson as a ‘perfectly patterned whole’, may, then, have been an effect of the enthusiasm of Saint-Denis and key members of the company for Stanislavskian acting technique and the extra rehearsal time they had to implement it.81 However, we should be wary of assuming that an ensemble effect is necessarily a consequence of ensemble practice. Saint-Denis’ archive contains evidence that, as Gielgud recalled, ‘every move and every piece of business was prepared beforehand on paper’.82 There are sketches of ground plans, lists of the sequences of events in the play’s action, and detailed notes in French of how scenes are to be blocked, including instructions for movement—‘vient à elle en silence’ (comes to her in silence), expression—‘en place souriant tristement’ (still, smiling sadly), and voice—‘autre ton’ (different tone).83 This level of planning offers an important context within which to consider, for example, Michael Redgrave’s enthusiastic report of playing Tusenbach to his actress mother: ‘I can completely lose myself in him […] I have had a peep of the real thing, the living creation which breathes its own breath’.84 Saint-Denis seems to have used the production’s lengthy rehearsals gradually to evolve a production that was unusual in its depth, but he did so—as we have seen he would later in his RSC Cherry Orchard—while retaining tight control. The immediate consequence of Saint-Denis’ success with Gielgud’s company was the establishment at the Phoenix Theatre, albeit temporarily, of London Theatre Studio Productions. This joint venture between Saint-Denis and Bronson Albery opened in 1938 with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard (adapted by Rodney Ackland). Its programme announced that Albery and Saint-Denis had ‘taken the Phoenix Theatre with a view to running a series of plays, with a permanent company to which additions will be made’.85 The permanent company were named (in this order) as Peggy Ashcroft, Michael Redgrave, Stephen Haggard, Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine, William Devlin, Vera Lindsay [Poliakoff], and Basil C. Langton, ‘together with several of the most promising of the students who have completed their two years’ course at the London Theatre Studio’. These included Mary Alexander, Alastair Bannerman, James Cairncross, James Donald, Pierre Lefèvre, Merula Salaman, and Peter Whitehead. The programme promised further plays that were ‘under consideration’, including The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, The Wild Duck, Twelfth Night, and adaptations of Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme and Hugo Von Hoffmannsthal’s Christina’s Journey. It also advertised that actors including Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Marius Goring, George Hayes, and John Rae had ‘promised their cooperation’, and that Edith Evans would be appearing in Lorca’s The Marriage of Blood in a translation by John Langdon-Davies, one of a number of ‘experimental plays’ planned for matinees and Sundays (Evans was under contract to H.M. Tennent at the time, but would be able to perform at the Phoenix on her day off).86

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This was the closest the LTS would come to the ‘permanent company’ it sought to establish. The White Guard was another critical success for Saint-Denis, many of the reviews echoing their praise for The Three Sisters’ detailed evocation of mood, while noting the comparative ‘thinness’ of Bulgakov’s play.87 Nonetheless, it faltered at the box office, which Eric Keown has suggested was due to the Munich crisis threatening war at the same time as it opened. It was followed by Twelfth Night, which was a failure with both critics and the public, though Redgrave’s Andrew Aguecheek was enthusiastically received. Photographs show a figure reminiscent of Louis Jouvet in the part, which is no surprise, since Saint-Denis seems to have taken the decision to more or less replicate Copeau’s 1914 staging of the play, in which he had performed in 1922. The critics were dismissive of Saint-Denis’ staging and Albery pulled out of LTS Productions. LTS Productions was, then, a ‘permanent company’ in name only. Its success with The White Guard was, in effect, an extension of that of Saint-Denis’ Three Sisters, with Ashcroft, Byam Shaw, and Devine from that company being joined by Stephen Haggard, who was also a student of Stanislavsky in his own right.88 When it came to Twelfth Night, Saint-Denis exposed the weakness of his ensemble, both artistically and commercially. Ashcroft and Vera Lindsay played Viola and Olivia respectively, and Esmond Knight joined the company to play Orsino, but Saint-Denis’ failed attempts to secure Oliver, Richardson, and Edith Evans meant that he had gone from the ‘all-star cast in a no star play’ that Ivor Brown had described in Three Sisters to what was virtually a no star cast in an all-star play. The significance of star actors for the commercial viability of LTS Productions should not be underestimated, and their absence from Twelfth Night clearly contributed to the company’s downfall. However, it is therefore also true that the presence of star actors in Saint-Denis’ proposal for the company contributed to its vulnerability. In spite of the rhetoric of permanence and experimentation in the marketing of LTS Productions, it is striking that much more weight is given in Saint-Denis’ plan to commercial success than to artistic excellence and the sustainability of the company. The strong leaning towards late nineteenthcentury realism in the company’s proposed plays weighed Saint-Denis’ success with Chekhov more heavily than his experience (Three Sisters was the first play of its kind that he had directed). The drafting-in of actors from outside the field of the LTS likewise valued the practices of commercial production more highly than the sustained collaboration of the studio model. The result was that the company created by the LTS was never arranged, as Saint-Denis had hoped, around a ‘core’ of graduates from the school, and never could be. It was an opportunistic, commercial venture, structured to suit the short-term focus of West End production. Records of company salaries confirm this view. At the top, Peggy Ashcroft and Michael Redgrave were earning thirty pounds per week, followed by Stephen Haggard who earned twenty pounds, and the rest of the company in gradual steps from fifteen down to three or four pounds per

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week for recent LTS graduates such as Merula Salaman and Pierre Lefèvre.89 Furthermore, these performers, whose pay was only a tenth of their most senior colleagues, were the lucky ones: in an interview with Jane Baldwin, Merula’s younger sister and fellow LTS student Chattie recalled that the other students, who felt ‘excluded’ from LTS Productions, ‘were angered and hurt’.90 SaintDenis’ decision to establish LTS Productions as and when he did demonstrated that, for him, the endeavour to remain, as the LTS advertisement had it, ‘in constant touch with the professional theatre’ always took preference over the aim to create ‘a permanent company’. After the closure of LTS Productions, Saint-Denis returned to freelance directing alongside his teaching. In 1939, his plan to direct Lorca’s Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding) for LTS Productions came to fruition as a Sunday night Stage Society production at the Savoy Theatre, and he staged a new play by Stephen Haggard, Weep for the Spring, starring Haggard and Ashcroft. He also began work on a production of The Cherry Orchard for H.M. Tennent at the Queen’s Theatre that was to feature Edith Evans as Ranevskaya, Ralph Richardson as Lopakhin, Ronald Squire as Gaev, Ashcroft as Anya, and Guinness as Trofimov.91 Rehearsals were interrupted, however, by Chamberlain’s announcement of war, and, according to Irving Wardle, Saint-Denis left for France immediately after being given a farewell lunch by the company, and the LTS was wound up.92 Perhaps because of this abrupt ending, Saint-Denis left behind a powerful sense of what might have been. The day after his departure, Gielgud wrote to Noel Coward to ask him to ‘use his influence’ to divert Saint-Denis from active military duty, saying that ‘Michel is one of the few people who have something important to give in the theatre, and who ought to be looked after’.93 Stephen Haggard agreed, writing in 1940 that when he began working with Saint-Denis, the ‘theatre seemed to me to be a real thing at last, [an] artistic venture run on a co-operative basis, not for personal profit but for love’.94 There were attempts, in the early part of the war, to keep the vision of the LTS alive among those who had been involved in it. Devine, Guinness, and Vera Lindsay created the Actors’ Company in late 1939, mounting an adaptation by Guinness of Great Expectations at the Rudolf Steiner Hall, with the help of a cheque from Edith Evans for £700.95 The adaptation was narrated, as the Quinze’s Viol de Lucrèce had been, by male and female voices: Guinness and Merula Salaman (who had become his wife), and the company featured Guinness as Herbert Pocket, Marius Goring as the grown-up Pip, and Vera Lindsay as the grown-up Estella, with LTS graduate Yvonne Mitchell as her younger self. The cast also included Kay Walsh, and although it went on heavily to influence her husband David Lean’s 1946 film adaptation of the novel, it did not make enough money to sustain the Actors’ Company. Devine went on to direct The Tempest at the Old Vic (1940) with Marius Goring (who also played Ariel),96 and a company that included Alec Guinness

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(Ferdinand), Vera Lindsay (Iris), LTS graduate James Donald, and Peggy Ashcroft, who took over the part of Miranda mid-run.97 The production closed, however, just as France declared defeat to Germany, as a result of which SaintDenis returned to England via the evacuation of Dunkirk, but not to make theatre. He spent the rest of the war broadcasting the programme Les français parlent aux français (the French speak to the French) from the BBC to occupied France. With the pressure of the war escalating after the fall of France, Devine joined the army in November 1940 and was sent to India and later Burma. While Saint-Denis and Devine were taken away from the theatre, however, significant changes were taking place within the UK’s arts establishment. The Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) was established in January 1940 and funded by the state from April of the same year. In 1946, CEMA became the Arts Council, which was funded annually directly by the Treasury. This created the first possibility of sustained subsidy for artistic enterprises in Britain, and it made Saint-Denis’ dream of creating a sustainable theatre organisation along the lines of the LTS much more realistic. It became a much more concrete possibility when, in June 1945, the directors of the Old Vic Theatre Company (Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier, and John Burrell), which had been the largest recipient of Arts Council support for theatre, asked Saint-Denis, Devine, and Glen Byam Shaw to join them in developing the company’s work.98 Two clear, related narratives have emerged from this history of the LTS: one financial, the other structural. The first suggests that the LTS failed to be fully realised because its dependence upon a combination of patronage and commercial income necessitated a business model that conceded too much to conventional production to allow an alternative approach to be developed. The second suggests that the LTS was always too committed to hierarchy to allow an ensemble company to emerge. We might argue that the end of establishing a permanent company justified the means of short-term compromise with commercial production and that the LTS was merely unlucky that this tactic proved unsuccessful. Alternatively, it is possible that compromises with commercial production were always tacitly endemic to the model of the LTS, and the aim of creating a permanent company is better understood as an artificial horizon that attracted the artists Saint-Denis and Devine needed to generate interest in LTS Productions. The extent to which these arguments hold sway will be revealed, to a great extent, by what they did next.

The Old Vic Theatre Centre: ‘wedding cake’ or arch? The Old Vic Theatre Centre (OVC) was designed as a ‘Centre for Training and Experiment’,99 and described in a press release dated September 7, 1946, as the nearest approach this country has had to a complete theatrical organisation […] for training, research and development in all forms of theatre activity

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around a THEATRE SCHOOL, a THEATRE for CHILDREN, and, later on, a THEATRE in the CENTRE, open to the general public.100 The plan for the centre was developed by Devine and Saint-Denis, with SaintDenis responsible for the theatre (usually described as the ‘experimental theatre’ or ‘EXP’), Devine for the ‘theatre for children’ known as the ‘Young Vic’, and Glen Byam Shaw running the school. Byam Shaw was known to both his fellow centre directors, but, as Devine acknowledged in a letter to Saint-Denis, he was the most conventional of the three: until he came to your production classes, he was always in good theatres, but could never be accused of avant-gardism or experimentation, good quality without being daring. […] he has never been faced with the kind of life he is likely to meet now.101 Saint-Denis was fond of the image of a ‘wedding cake’ to describe the OVC’s structure. The wedding cake’s bottom tier was the school, the idea being that what Saint-Denis called ‘the best elements of the school’ would be able to graduate from the school to join the Young Vic’s touring company (the middle tier).102 The Young Vic was intended both to further train its actors and to develop audiences, building upon what Irving Wardle called the ‘new performance circuit’ developed by the Old Vic’s CEMA tours.103 Saint-Denis emphasised this point in 1947: the Young Vic’s work must ‘be devised without any condescension to provide the right appeal to young audiences’ so that they may ‘become later on enthusiastic supporters of the living theatre’.104 Saint-Denis’ ideal of a ‘living theatre’ was embodied by the top tier of the cake, the ‘Experimental Theatre’ (EXP). This was to be experimental in the constructively ambiguous terms of a 1947 memo from the centre directors to the Old Vic governors: ‘it would try to evolve the practical organisation to give scope to new talent in every field’.105 Earlier notes of private meetings record the centre directors’ commitment to ‘the laboratory side of the enterprise— research in and presentation of all aspects of traditional theatre which can be of value in modern methods of presentation’,106 as well as their decision to open the EXP ‘to anyone who wishes to enter it’ so as to avoid it becoming ‘a closed shop like the L.T.S.’.107 In a press release from September 1946, they also sought to allay anxieties around the use of the word ‘experimental’ in ‘preliminary press announcements’, which they described as ‘alarming’, and to reassure the public that it referred to ‘the need for the planning of new theatres to replace those damaged by war’ and the ‘desire to provide the modern dramatist, actor and producer, with a freer and more flexible type of stage’.108 The anxiety of the centre directors in relation to the experimental theatre reflects the fact that it was the only part of their plan without precedent at the Old Vic. Both the school and Young Vic company already existed embryonically.

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The December 1941 ‘Report on Recent Activities of the Old Vic and Sadlers Wells Companies’ stated that the Old Vic Drama School was evacuated by its principal, Greta Douglas, to Warwickshire in November 1940, where a barn was converted into a small theatre for performances, and where Douglas ‘conducted a brilliant experiment in communal living; the students being responsible, under her direction, for the domestic economy of the farm’.109 There was also a Young Vic company active at this time, offering ‘theatre for young audiences’ which opened with Esme Church’s production of a play called Start It Yourselves.110 These ventures had never been envisaged as part of a single centre and seem to have been run more or less independently of each other, but when Saint-Denis and Devine’s plan was first put first to George Chamberlain, clerk to the governors of the Old Vic, in December 1945, Chamberlain reported, having spoken to his chairman, Lord Lytton, that there was ‘no doubt’ that the proposal for the Children’s Theatre and School would be approved and that authorisation would be given for George Devine’s salary while he worked on the detailed proposals and estimated budgets.111 Lytton did not, however, express the same confidence about the EXP, which was only approved—after consultation with the rest of the governors—in May 1946. The decision to support the EXP may well have been prompted by the news, officially communicated to representatives of the Old Vic committees on May 22, that the Arts Council, which had previously only offered guarantees against loss, would soon be able to provide capital grants. On July 3, the Old Vic asked the Arts Council for £28,000 as a Foundation Grant to the centre, and guarantees against losses of £2,000 and £6,000 for 1947 and 1948, rising steeply to £16,300 per year between 1949 and 1951. It was also noted that the centre would require ‘a Building Grant of an unknown sum’.112 Direct funding of £9,500 per annum was secured from the Arts Council from the beginning of 1947, but was only guaranteed for two years, and in the autumn of 1946 the school’s first applicants (over 400 of them) were auditioned.113 Simultaneously, George Devine was launching the new Young Vic company, whose first show, The King Stag, opened on Boxing Day 1946 at the Lyric, Hammersmith. The school’s opening took place on January 24, 1947, in the abandoned Old Vic theatre, but its activities were housed at the Froebel Institute in Baron’s Court, a former Pickford’s packing depot, lent by the Royal Ballet School.114 At the same time, a licence was granted to make the minimum repairs necessary to house the school at the Old Vic, allowing it to move there in September 1947. The future of the experimental theatre, however, was still unclear. The image of the wedding cake embodied two significant aspects of the Old Vic Centre’s conception: the linear (upward) progression of a performer from the base to the top tier, and the idea that new movements in the theatre must be built on the secure foundation of training. However, the first memo to the Old Vic governors describing the OVC used a different metaphor to describe the EXP: ‘the building of this [experimental] theatre, and

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the artistic consequences of its existence, constitute the key-stone of the structure of this whole plan’.115 A wedding cake can have two or three layers and still be a wedding cake, but without a key-stone, an archway is incomplete: its other pieces are not locked into position, and it cannot stand without support. I will argue here that the analogy of the key-stone was prescient, and that the OVC was more an arch than a wedding cake: the failure of the centre directors to establish an experimental theatre did indeed leave the OVC crucially incomplete and unable to support itself. Furthermore, I will argue that the exclusion of substantial experimentation from the OVC’s practice, which was intended to make it a more sustainable proposition, was, in fact, its fundamental weakness.

The Old Vic Theatre School: ‘a firm technical basis’ On April 22, 1946, a meeting was held between Saint-Denis, Devine, Suria Magito, and Pierre Lefèvre on the subject of ‘Criticism of the LTS vis-a-vis Planning of New School’. They agreed the general principle that the ‘complete explanation of the training that was done at LTS should be kept and even elaborated’.116 In many respects, the Old Vic School (OVS) did indeed follow the pattern laid down by the LTS. It chose, for example, somewhat atypical students. Lesley Retey, a member of its first class, recalled that ‘people who apparently had everything going for them were dismissed as not very interesting’.117 The unprecedented availability of financial support for less privileged students after the war contributed to this: Saint-Denis claimed that two-thirds of the students were paid for by the education authorities.118 As a result, Lee Montague, the son of a Jewish tailor from Bow, was given the opportunity to train at the Old Vic School, but he did so in an environment he recalled as ‘a different world’, populated by ‘nymphs from the suburbs’ who made him ‘horribly aware of my cockney accent, my thick glasses and spiky hair’.119 Financial support may have lowered certain barriers to inclusion, therefore, but actor training remained riddled with class distinctions, and the discipline’s knowledge was—inevitably—produced by power. The knowledge developed at the OVS was not, however, simply conventional. There was an unusual emphasis on mime, which was a compulsory element of auditions, because of the curriculum’s emphasis on movement, which it considered ‘a more elementary and direct means of expression than speech’.120 As it had been at the LTS, then, movement was the principal foundation of actor training at the OVS because ‘physical movement helps invention, the life of the character you are portraying, and therefore the whole acting of your part’.121 Evidently this emphasis was clearly understood by students. Lee Montague recalled that ‘all the classes we had at the school, and all the teachers, were part of the same thing—cogs in the machine’: Our voices and bodies had to become instruments, reflections of the roles we were playing. One of the methods was the physical approach, getting

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rid of our body tensions from head to toes […] Litz Pisk was the lady in charge of loosening the knots […] We would start every day with threequarters of an hour of barre exercises, then go on to do the dance of different periods […] The movements of history, the movements of emotion; she taught us to express feelings in the way we moved, to make our bodies take a different shape […] From Litz we dragged our stretched limbs to Suria Magito […] who taught improvisation classes, then on to the Hungarian Jani Strasser who taught us voice production.122 This systematic progression was reinforced by overlaps between exercises used by the staff. Jane Baldwin notes that ‘where Strasser utilised physical exercises in conjunction with vocalising to free the voice, Pisk employed vocal exercise in combination with movement’.123 The OVS deliberately distanced itself from the LTS, however, in its resistance to the notion of experimentation. The directors decided, in April 1946, ‘to organise the new school on much simpler lines than the L.T.S.’, so that ‘although still avant-garde in methods and invention, the side of experiment will be absent’.124 Instead, the Old Vic School aimed to provide what Saint-Denis would later describe as an ‘absolutely necessary’ situation for training: ‘a more or less systematic basic plan, with some flexibility in the way of proceeding’.125 Diagrams in Saint-Denis’ archive illustrate this systematic approach. One, titled ‘Acting Course Outline’ (1947), is divided, initially, into two sections: ‘Technique’ and ‘Cultural Background’. ‘Technique’ is subdivided into ‘Body and Voice’, with a third category, ‘Interpretation’, sitting in the space between them. The prominence of ‘Technique’ on this chart reflects the initial plans for the Old Vic Centre, which state that: ‘the main principle of the school will be to equip students with a firm technical basis on which to commence their professional work in the theatre’.126 That training was not, however, conceived statically or monolithically. SaintDenis was keen ‘to maintain a constant flow of freshness in the instruction’ and suggested that this could be achieved in practice by having ‘a sort of log book and manual of instruction […] to be kept and handed down, as a record to be added to, reacted against, etc’. The meeting from which these notes are taken was itself a model of this kind of engaged, reflective practice that evolves by challenging its own tenets. Saint-Denis and his colleagues were most self-critical with regard to voice training, which they took to be the ‘greatest weakness’ of the LTS as ‘the real gymnastics of the voice as in movement was never found’. Saint-Denis suggested that it is very important to have a strong training in the gymnastics of different styles of text, cadence, form, etc. by reading much and often with the object of achieving a familiarity and skill with texts of different styles, expressed through the voice.127

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He attempted to resolve this challenge by introducing classes in ‘l’expression parlée’ (expressive speech), in which ‘we attempt to find a way of acting without doing: a complete expression of meaning through the use of the voice alone’.128 L’expression parlée trained, in other words, the ‘gymnastics of the voice’. The classes were taught principally by Marion Watson, who had been head of drama at Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. Her class plans show students exploring physical sensations, moods, situations, relationships, and genres in terms of their effects on vocal tone, phrasing, and tempo.129 Most of the speech in these exercises is improvised by a solo performer, but we also know that students read a variety of texts aloud using the same techniques. Nonetheless, George Hall (a student at the OVS who went on to run the acting course at the Central School of Speech and Drama) considered that, although the voice work at the Old Vic School was good, ‘the speech work wasn’t good enough’. He ‘spent years thinking about breathing and voice training after I left, because I didn’t get it there’.130 This criticism, however, reiterated Saint-Denis and his colleagues themselves, who felt in 1946 that, at the LTS, ‘breathing […] was not taught enough—as a conscious technique with a complete range of possibilities’, so it is quite possible that, given more than the five years for which the school ran, they would have found a solution to the problem.131 It is certainly true that the training at the OVS did adapt. Saint-Denis later divided the teaching of technique into three slightly different areas: ‘movement’, ‘language’, and ‘improvisation and interpretation’, and wrote that, at the start of the training particularly, the OVS placed ‘the main emphasis upon improvisation’.132 The reason for the weight given to the practice of improvisation was that it is, as Saint-Denis wrote, ‘the very fact of acting’: a ‘creative experience’ which contains the seeds of ‘the mental and physical transposition required by style’.133 Style was always ‘a central point of study and an opportunity for common work in the whole school’ because it combined elements from all strands of the training. For example, since movement and language are always culturally determined, their independent study in classes focused on acting technique was related, via the teaching of style, to the study of the cultural backgrounds of different periods and genres. Students studying direction (on what was known as the Advanced Course) and those studying design and production also worked on style in order that they could learn to relate their interpretation and staging of plays to the practice of the acting students. Saint-Denis devised what he called the ‘Central Class’, to achieve this, through three strands: 1. 2.

Acting: ‘the nature of acting, relationship between human reactions and characters, imaginative acting and technical means to achieve it’. Production: ‘nature of production, conception, scenery and costumes, how expression is obtained: relationship between reality or character and poetry. Part to be played by music, dance and mime’.

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3.

The relationship of both of these elements to the theatre-building and the play-text, which the document refers to as ‘stage architecture and convention: nature of the written play’.134

The purpose of this class was to teach directing students ‘how to obtain on the stage a dramatic life of the most human kind, and at the same time, of the most poetical sort’, which is the equivalent of Saint-Denis’ first goal for the acting students: ‘to bring reality to the interpretation of all theatrical styles’.135 The Central Class was therefore the place in which students learned to make style a reality. In spite of its evident practical use, from a political point of view, the use of training to assert the reality of ‘style’ is unquestionably deeply conservative, giving physical and habitual form to particular interpretations of authors and historical periods, not to mention genders, body types, and so on. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, this aspect of the OVS training sought to fix in the paradoxically malleable and dynamic form of the students’ bodies the distribution of the sensible—what it is permissible to see, hear, and represent; there was no allowance made in the training to trouble it. Nonetheless, the extent to which the OVC directors were able to master the resources of the stage in this endeavour was evidently impressive. Reviewing a 1948 school show in New Theatre, R.D. Smith wrote that Penthisilea, which was ‘written and devised by James Law Forsyth in collaboration with Suria Magito’, was a breath-taking three-quarters of an hour, in which all the resources of the theatre were used to the full, Music, mime, poetry, movement, lighting, skillfully co-ordinated left the audience exhausted but exhilarated. Since the show was a school show it’s necessary to emphasise that the total effect was superior to all but the rarest occasions in the normal theatre.136 The Times offered similar praise after the final Old Vic School show in 1952: In each production one was aware, not only of physical and vocal flexibility and a firm foundation of craftsmanship but of well-exercised imagination. It was clear that the students had been gaining a true insight into styles and that in the common building of moods, they had found out the complete interdependence of individual interpretations.137 Saint-Denis and his colleagues would have been delighted by the suggestion that they were blurring the distinction between a ‘school show’ and ‘the normal theatre’, and by the praise for their combination of ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘imagination’, both of which were always central to their plan. To both of these ends, in the early stages of negotiations with the Old Vic, Saint-Denis had written to the governors to stress his ‘intention to add to the school proper, certain

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advanced groups working on production, decor, stage devices, music and dance, together with a group of dramatists’. He added that ‘the backbone of the Experimental Theatre organisation would be formed’ by the ‘creative and inventive work of these groups’, whose members ‘should not be considered as students in the school sense of the word’.138 In order to facilitate this, the OVC directors introduced teachers known as ‘monitors’, who were graduates of the LTS, and whose role was to bridge the gap between the students and professionals, emphasising the continuous training and experimentation of an artist’s career. Whatever the intention, however, these monitors merely filled a gap in the OVC’s hierarchies, and this initiative amounted to a commitment to experiment that stopped short of disrupting hierarchies or redistributing power. This assessment of the Old Vic echoes numerous accounts of Saint-Denis’ character, which emphasise his enthusiasm for extending his understanding and skill, but never a willingness to displace his own authority. He went to Peggy Ashcroft for advice on the teaching of speech, for instance, before deciding on an approach to take at the Old Vic Centre,139 and we know from an exchange of letters between Litz Pisk and Gerda Rink (who taught movement at the LTS but not the Old Vic) that Pisk considered her lessons at the OVS to constitute ‘my method’.140 Like Pisk, Suria Magito—who had, by this time, married Saint-Denis—brought long experience of dance to her teaching. She was also an accomplished theatre-maker: many notes and cuttings in Saint-Denis’ archives relating to style are in fact Magito’s,141 and George Hall credited her as an extremely capable director, held back by Saint-Denis and Devine.142 The hierarchical and patriarchal operation of Saint-Denis’ studios will be explored in more depth in Chapter 3; for the moment, the question is whether the other parts of the OVC were more thoroughly committed to experimentation than the school, or whether they were similarly structured in order to develop technical excellence in the service of their directors’ objectives. The next part of this chapter explores these questions in relation to the Young Vic and the EXP.

The Young Vic and the EXP: the studio that never was The Young Vic company, led by George Devine, produced nine touring productions between 1947 and 1950. In 1947, Devine directed Carlo Gozzi’s commedia dell’arte play The King Stag and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, and Saint-Denis directed a further revival of Obey’s Noah. On April 25, 1947, the Young Vic held a London conference that aimed to share its planned season and ideas for the future with representatives of groups who would support its touring and help to generate audiences. The following year the company’s repertory shifted from the little-known plays of its 1947 season towards a more traditional repertory for young people of Shakespeare and popular tales: Saint Denis and Suria Magito adapted and directed Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and Glen Byam Shaw directed As You Like It. This focus

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seems tacitly to have become policy, and remained in place for the next two years, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Devine, 1949), The Merchant of Venice (dir. Byam Shaw, 1950), and an adaptation by John Blatchley from the OVS of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow (dir. Devine, 1950)—the only outlier being Francis Beaumont’s reliably audience-pleasing The Knight of the Burning Pestle (dir. Devine, 1950). During this period, on January 1, 1949, the Old Vic’s finance committee refused to continue to support the Young Vic company, announcing that it was ‘impossible to launch another experimental venture’.143 Inevitably, financial pressures seriously constrained the capacity of the Young Vic to fulfil its intended role within the OVC of serving as a bridge between the school and EXP, as it became increasingly bound up in ensuring its own survival. Nonetheless, as graduates of the OVS became available, from The Snow Queen onwards, they were indeed recruited into Young Vic companies. In 1949, John Blatchley was both directing OVS students in All’s Well That Ends Well and working on his adaptation of The Black Arrow, which would be performed alongside The Merchant of Venice by a company two-thirds of whom were graduates of the school. Blatchley had the role of ‘monitor’-teacher at the OVS, and his simultaneous engagement with the Young Vic offers the most concrete example of the ‘groups of inventors’, envisaged by Saint-Denis, who, ‘not being content with waiting for writers and dramatists of genius to spring out of the earth (or from their study desks), would form cellules de creation en vue de réalisations précises [creative groups with a view to making specific productions]’ within the OVC.144 Saint-Denis’ plans for the EXP were based on this principle of harnessing experiments from within the centre and bringing them to full production. This idea was fundamental to his thinking for the rest of his career. In Training for the Theatre, he proposed an ‘Advanced Studio devoted to specialised forms of improvisation’, in which ‘actors, who have finished the basic […] training’ would be ‘joined by especially gifted members of the profession (including dramatists, directors and designers)’ to ‘become the nucleus of […] an experimental ensemble’ and would also be ‘the best school for playwrights in their search for a style’.145 The principle underlying this combination of training and experimentation was remembered by Pierre Lefèvre as a process of auto-critique, whereby, for instance, the staff of the school would come together to draw a lesson from the phase of training which had just been completed.146 This process, which enabled the cyclical growth of the organisation and connected its two central activities of training and experimentation, is theorised in Chapter 3. For the time being, the important point is that this never happened. The centre directors all worked with the Old Vic Theatre Company: Saint-Denis directing A Month in the Country (1949) and Electra (1951), Devine directing Bartholomew Fair (1950) and Chekhov’s The Wedding (1951), and Byam Shaw directing Henry V (1951). These were not entirely disconnected from the OVC; Devine, for

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example, had directed The Wedding with OVS students in 1948, and his 1951 production featured graduates of the school, but none of these productions was created by anything like the ‘experimental ensemble’ that Saint-Denis had intended the OVC to produce. The collapse of the OVC in 1951 with the simultaneous resignation of its directors was something of a sensation at the time—George Devine’s daughter, Harriet, remembers journalists camped outside their London home, for example.147 Looking behind the scenes, however, it is clear that its causes can be traced back to the opening of the OVC in 1947. At that time, the OVC directors planned to create a home for the EXP in a redeveloped Old Vic auditorium, but those plans were delayed as ‘the seriousness of the financial situation’ faced by the Old Vic became clear during the 1947–8 season,148 which would go on to lose £9,000 in the absence of Olivier and Richardson (Olivier was on a tour of Australia and New Zealand, and Richardson was in Hollywood).149 Inevitably, the EXP, which had seemed risky to the governors even in a time of plenty, was the obvious target for cuts. As a result, by early 1948 the EXP was already being sidelined by the governors, who decided ‘that the time has come when the building should revert to its original purpose of presenting regular seasons of classical and new plays of outstanding interest, at cheap prices’.150 In other words, the theatre company would move back to the Old Vic, saving the expense of renting a West End theatre, and leaving Saint-Denis without his EXP. The associate drama director of the Arts Council echoed the Old Vic governors’ narrative after the centre had closed, describing the OVC as ‘a three-tier plan […] from which the top tier had been removed by force of circumstances’.151 Here, we return to the question of whether the OVC was a ‘wedding cake’ or an arch with the EXP as its ‘key-stone’. Without the EXP, the OVC was simply a school and a young people’s theatre company, with no necessary relationship between them, which could never hope to foster the ongoing collaborative relationships and development of new theatrical forms that the OVC was intended to achieve. Saint-Denis knew this. He wrote to Lord Lytton as chair of the governors in April 1947 that, since the plan was ‘a longterm effort’, the support given to it ‘at the beginning should be continued so that it may develop and blossom in the future’.152 His concerns were wellfounded. There was no reason for the centre directors to believe that the governors’ initial support amounted to a commitment to their plan in its entirety, and since entirety was one of the OVC’s defining features, this was a serious problem. The centre directors were not, however, blameless. One of the reasons for the governors’ ambiguous commitment to the OVC was the ambiguous nature of the plans for the EXP. The theatre’s reconstruction was already being planned in 1943, and it is inconceivable that the governors or the theatre company management would accept an alteration to these plans that would mean the Old Vic

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company handing over their own theatre to the EXP.153 The directors’ proposal therefore depended both upon the success of the Joint Council of the National Theatre and the Old Vic’s plans to build a new theatre on the south bank of the Thames, and upon the Old Vic company becoming the National Theatre company and taking up residence there, leaving the theatre on Waterloo Road available for the EXP. Saint-Denis and Devine tried to strengthen this narrative by arguing that although their architectural plans for the EXP ‘may be too avantgarde for a National Theatre’, they would nonetheless be of ‘instructional value’ to those charged with creating a new National Theatre building.154 This argument also served, however, to expose a weakness in the OVC plans as to how the EXP and Old Vic company could co-exist in the period of the National Theatre’s construction. Early memoranda relating to the OVC referred to ‘a search for the premises’ of the EXP, which ‘will be designed with an adaptable stage’, implying the creation of a new building altogether,155 and press reports announced a ‘New Vic’ as part of the centre: ‘a laboratory for the Old Vic, an Experimental Theatre where new forms of stage writing and presentation may be tested’.156 Subsequently the OVC directors softened this position, focusing instead on ‘the re-construction of the interior of the OLD VIC building’, including ‘a stage and auditorium, related to each other in a way which will enable a play of any period to be presented in its appropriate theatrical and architectural convention’ and ‘offer to dramatists a wider scope for the writing and presentation of modern plays’.157 This new rhetoric accepted that the EXP and Old Vic company would have to share the Old Vic in the short to medium term, and likewise diluted the experimental aims of the OVC: seeking new forms had become adapting existing forms to make them more flexibly appropriate for a conventional repertory. This compromised position was successful up to a point, and the Old Vic was indeed reconstructed, but the manner of its reconstruction highlights the deep divisions between the OVC and the Old Vic Theatre Company. The Theatres Trust record for the Old Vic describes the 1950 alterations to the theatre as ‘proscenium remodelled’, because the rest of the theatre was simply restored.158 The reconstruction of the auditorium was managed by Joseph Rowntree for the theatre company, and photographs of the work underway stress the careful repair of features such as plaster mouldings. By contrast, the adaptation of the stage was led by the French architect Pierre Sonrel under the guidance of the Centre Directors, with a result resembling the functional modernity of Marcel Breuer’s London Theatre Studio. Sonrel’s design also extended the stage to fourteen feet from the proscenium arch and, in the words of The Architect’s Journal’s reporter, resolved the difficulty of ‘the designing of forestage flanks’ so that they ‘would appear to be part of the scenery when the forestage was in use and yet form part of the auditorium when realistic plays were being given on the main picture-frame stage’.159 This required the boxes to the sides of the proscenium arch (added in 1926) to be removed, and the

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addition of lighting positions for the new forestage. Before and after photographs also show the dramatic, eighteen-inch, difference in height between the forestage and main stage, and a ‘stage lift’ which ‘can be set at main stage level, forestage level, or intermediately’. It was also ‘necessary to raise the levels of the auditorium floor to provide a good view of the forestage from all parts of the ground floor’. The remodelled stage resembled that of the Vieux-Colombier, but whereas Saint-Denis recalled that Copeau’s stage was ‘evolved […] over a period of time, as the result of many experiments’, the Old Vic’s reconstruction, with stage and auditorium awkwardly accommodating each other, was always a compromise between the conflicting agendas of the theatre company and OVC.160 These conflicting agendas dated back to 1948, when the Old Vic’s governors, led by their new chair, Lord Esher, decided to oust Richardson and Olivier as the theatre company’s directors.161 Esher took advantage of their absence and, on July 9, 1948, a ‘Private and Confidential Memorandum on Future Administration’ was sent to them, announcing that their contracts (which ran until 1949) would not be renewed. A report on the Old Vic’s financial position in November predicted that by June 30, 1949 its working capital would have plummeted from £21,700 two years earlier to £2,730, and that they should make allowance for the loss of a further £2,000, potentially leaving just £730 in the bank, with no provision for rebuilding and refurbishing the theatre.162 On November 4, the governors cancelled a North American tour. In early December, all of the directors were summoned in front of the governors for a dressingdown. An enraged Saint-Denis reportedly said upon leaving that ‘They treated us like schoolboys—telling us we spent a lot of money and had not quite got all of it back!’163 At the same time, Llewellyn Rees (who had been drama director of the Arts Council), was appointed administrator of the Old Vic, and in 1949, Hugh Hunt took over as the theatre company’s director.164 Hunt had been a near-contemporary of Devine’s at Oxford but had taken a different path, producing in the repertory system and gaining a reputation for running a tight ship. He was keen to move the Old Vic company back to the Old Vic theatre, remarking to Charles Landstone (Rees’ successor as drama director of the Arts Council) in the spring of 1949 that the claim of the OVC directors to the theatre was ‘Llewellyn’s worry. He will have to solve that one’.165 Hunt and Rees’s solution did not come immediately. The centre’s funding remained fixed at £9,500 (just covering the costs of the OVS and Young Vic), and the decision was taken in June 1949 to find a permanent West End home for the company, leaving the centre nominally in control of the Old Vic theatre. It was to be redeveloped thanks to a grant of £50,000 from the Arts Council to enable its participation in the planned 1951 Festival of Britain. But at the end of July 1949 the Treasury announced that the Arts Council’s promised grant could not be fulfilled.166 This financial crisis provided Hunt and Rees’ solution to the stalemate over the ownership of the theatre: the building would have to be

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shared and the greater part of its reconstruction would have to be paid for by a bank overdraft.167 The centre directors could do nothing but agree, though, as Jane Baldwin notes, in November 1949 Devine voiced the obvious concern that the presence of the theatre company at the Old Vic could ‘render the Centre Directors redundant before they had a chance to show their full worth’.168 With these concerns unresolved, in December 1949 the school was moved to the vacated premises of Dulwich High School for Girls. The Old Vic re-opened on November 14, 1950, with Hunt’s production of Twelfth Night, and only two or three weeks later he was telling the OVC directors ‘that he was to be appointed senior director’ above them.169 Early the following year, Llewellyn Rees made a financial case for promoting Hunt, reporting to Lord Esher that he had spoken to Ernest Pooley (chair of the Arts Council), ‘who intimated that the Vic’s grant from the Arts Council would not only revert from this year’s £44,500 to the previous scale of £27,500, but that an additional cut of £1,000 would probably be necessary’. By reducing SaintDenis’ salary (£1,830 16s 8d) to a new salary as head of the school (£1,050 16s 8d), and making the other OVC directors redundant (saving £3,141 13s 4d) along with one secretary (£372 9s 0d) and associated administration and travel costs, he told Esher that ‘we may reasonably estimate the total saving at £3,500 […] a considerable item when we are being cut to the bone’.170 Any doubts that Rees’ proposal was substantially motivated by antagonism towards the OVC directors are undermined by a letter of a fortnight later, which claimed that ‘I am continually hearing that the three ex-Centrics accuse me of being uncooperative’ and described ‘the growing antagonism of the staff they themselves selected and trained […] they are quite incapable of running an organisation such as ours’.171 On April 2, 1951, the governors proposed an alternative solution: Glen Byam Shaw would be made director of the theatre company at the end of Hugh Hunt’s contract; Devine would continue to head the Young Vic and Saint-Denis would run the school.172 But the following day, Hunt wrote to Esher to register that he was ‘very perturbed’ by this proposal: ever since I have served the Old Vic my objective has been the ultimate merging of the Old Vic into the National Theatre, which in my view should be a popular theatre, a view which is not at present shared by the three directors into whose hands it is proposed to hand over the theatre when I leave.173 On April 12, an addendum was added to the governors’ proposal stating that Hunt’s contract would run until June 1953.174 But Byam Shaw was not prepared to break solidarity with his fellow centre directors and refused to accept the demotion of Saint-Denis. Devine wrote to Lord Esher that the Old Vic had been overtaken by ‘an atmosphere of petty squabbling and jockeying for position’ and that since the governors seemed to have only ‘a sort of half

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conviction’ in the centre, he and his colleagues would ‘resign if these matters cannot be resolved’.175 Their resignations were accepted by Esher, and reported in the morning papers of May 10.176 On May 19, many papers carried statements from the centre directors citing the interference of the administrator and ‘a negative attitude and absence of a disposition to plan and work resolutely for the artistic entity which we had undertaken to create with the approval of the governors’.177 They also claimed that ‘here is no case of impractical artists being at odds with financial realists’, citing the success of the Young Vic which, ‘with no famous names and playing at half-price for children, took as much money in its one full week at the Old Vic as the senior company itself had made during the previous week’. There was also what Irving Wardle described as an ‘onslaught’ of letters and public statements written in support of the centre directors.178 As a result, Llewellyn Rees’ resignation was requested and Hunt and the general manager, Stephen Arlen, approached Tyrone Guthrie to become artistic director, with Hunt becoming administrative director. Guthrie agreed, and Byam Shaw recalled that he then took the centre directors out to lunch to tell them that the Young Vic would be scrapped because ‘it’s not worth the money being spent on it’, although he was embarrassed to have to admit to them that he had never seen any of its work.179 The school remained open to honour its commitment to its current students and the centre directors agreed to stay on for three terms while attempting to secure funding or other partnership arrangements to ensure the continued life of the school, including a proposal to connect with Anthony Quayle’s Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, but without success. The future of the school hung in the balance until the governors decided to sell its premises, when Devine wrote to George Chamberlain that it was ‘impossible for us to contemplate raising the necessary sum, as well as the £4,000 which would be the minimum required for the annual running of the school’.180 He also cited the appointment of Guthrie as director as a reason for not continuing and recorded that he and his colleagues were ‘deeply grieved that our misgivings have been proved to be right, and that, in one year, our whole principle of the organised development of young talent, at different levels, has been destroyed’.181 On May 19, 1952, a press statement announced that the Old Vic School ‘will have to be closed’ as a result of ‘financial crisis’, bringing to its final conclusion the story of a studio that did not, in fact, so much ‘close’ as fail to open.182 ****** On June 27, 1952, the day after the school’s closure, Esher wrote to Devine about ‘a letter from Mr. Saint-Denis which indicates that my last attempt to save the Old Vic School has failed’ and said it was ‘hard to believe that you will not consider the long-term life of the institution you and your colleagues have created worth some temporary tribulation’.183 Devine can only have been enraged

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by this letter’s addition of insult to injury, but, in concluding this account of both the LTS and OVC studios which both promised and crucially failed to transform theatre-making in London, we may reflect upon a revealing ambiguity that it contained. What exactly was the ‘institution’ created by Saint-Denis and his colleagues? Esher evidently meant the school, however the OVC directors did not set out to create a school but ‘an organisation for training, research and development’.184 This organisation, like the ‘permanent company’ Saint-Denis and Devine had planned for the LTS, failed before fully coming into existence. In both cases, repeated financial crises, a crucial ambiguity and mistrust surrounding the idea of ‘experiment’, and the hostility of the theatre’s establishment—in the form of both commercial managements and the Old Vic’s governors—were evidently to blame, but there were also wider and deeply ingrained cultural obstacles to the project of these studios that Saint-Denis and Devine never overcame. A brief anecdote will illustrate this pervasive cultural resistance. When the Old Vic’s chairman, Lord Esher, interviewed Kenneth Rae for the role of secretary of the British Centre of the International Theatre Institute, he reportedly asked him if he spoke French. Hearing that he did, Esher asked if Rae would ‘describe it as that public-school French, which instantly stamps you to everyone as an Englishman? Or is that very fluent French which at once makes you suspect to every Englishman?’185 To be culturally European, in other words, was to be suspected and, furthermore, Esher reportedly ‘could not understand St Denis’ broken English, and dismissed him accordingly as a foreigner, whose proper place was somewhere else’.186 The theatre critic T.C. Worsley questioned Saint-Denis’ training in similarly xenophobic terms in a 1951 article: the Latins are by nature a physically voluble and expressive people […] For them, mime is only the shortest of steps from their everyday behaviour. But for the withheld, inhibited, mooning English, it is quite another matter, and I feel it is a very dubious proposition that mime should be the basis of our acting […].187 Worsley presented, as evidence for this opinion, a disparaging account of the ‘semi-balletic crowd-work’ of Hugh Hunt’s Twelfth Night. This was fundamentally misguided: Hunt had no affiliation with Saint-Denis (far from it), and his production featured no actors trained by Saint-Denis and only one who was associated with him: Peggy Ashcroft (who played Viola). Establishment responses to Saint-Denis and Devine’s plans for the OVC did not have to be so openly prejudiced to be suspicious of them. After hearing them presented in May 1946, Sir Lewis Casson, speaking on behalf of the Arts Council, pronounced them ‘of great interest’ but was nonetheless ‘nervous of embarking on such an ambitious and costly enterprise at a time like this when the future of the theatre was so hazardous’. He also openly described the OVC’s

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projects as ‘sideline activities’ that must not be allowed to ‘put the Theatre Company itself in jeopardy’.188 Two years earlier, Guthrie had left his position as the Old Vic’s director, where, thanks to funding from CEMA, he had been the first British director to have both artistic and administrative control of a subsidised theatre, and had created, at CEMA’s request, a draft ‘Policy for Old Vic Drama’, intended to deliver CEMA’s aim of ‘the best for the most’. This policy detailed plans for the Old Vic company’s repertory, which would include ‘a Shakespearean or Elizabethan play’, a pre-twentieth-century British play, a ‘classical’ play in translation, ‘a modern and, where possible, a new play’, and for its staffing under a ‘Director of Drama’, leading a permanent company of actors, with others engaged flexibly.189 Guthrie’s plan was clearly focused on delivering CEMA’s requirement of value for money by employing a permanent company and director, and on fulfilling its expectation of excellence by employing star actors where possible, and sustaining a repertory that would create the impression of universality by planting stepping-stones in familiar places across Western theatre history and including enough international content (a classical and possibly a modern play) to disguise its fundamental Anglocentrism. Guthrie’s policy, which would later be reflected by the two leading, subsidised theatres of the 1960s (Peter Hall’s RSC and Laurence Olivier’s NT), was, however, fundamentally at odds with the project of the OVC, just as commercial theatre production had been in relation to the LTS. Where commercial theatre production would justify its decisions with reference to what the public were prepared to pay for, the subsidised sector did so in relation to what they needed but could not entirely afford. In essence, however, these amounted to the same thing and were inherently conservative arguments, promoting either what the public had already been shown to want or could already be considered—culturally—to need. By contrast, both the LTS and OVC were primarily committed not to the needs or desires of the public but those of artists, and not to conservatism, but— in a limited sense at least—to a form of radicalism that would challenge the status quo, albeit with the ultimate aim of establishing what would become a new one. Furthermore, neither the LTS nor the OVC could justify themselves in terms of value for money, because experimentation and the sustaining of collaborative relations are both necessarily wasteful of resources. Their appeals for financial support were therefore always predicated upon their fundamental unsustainability in financial terms. For a walk-on in LTS Productions to be a full company member, for example, they would have to be over-paid for walking-on in a production. Likewise, for the OVC’s EXP to be experimental, it would have—by definition—to support initiatives that would fail. Therefore any appeal from the LTS or OVC either to commercial producers or to the managers of state subsidy amounted—in these stakeholders’ terms—to a request for money to waste. The reverse, as SaintDenis and Devine discovered, was also true: any attempt to frame their studios in terms that would be acceptable to the models of commercial or subsidised production fundamentally undermined their project. That is not to say, however, that

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alternatives to the models of mainstream theatre-making cannot be elaborated from the practices of these studios. In the next chapter, I will develop a theoretical account of those models, which were—as we shall see—as compromised as the practices analysed here.

Notes 1 Colloquially known as Maiène, Marie-Hélène (1902–94) was a performer and designer who married another of Les Copiaus, the actor Jean Dasté. Their daughter, Catherine Dasté (1929–), was also an actress and director. For more detail on the events of this period, see J. Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor (London: Praeger, 2003), 26–38. 2 J. Rudlin and N. Paul, N., eds, Copeau: Texts on Theatre (London: Routledge, 1990), 37, 169. 3 On the script as a ‘performance diagram’, see D. Paterson, ‘Two Productions by Copeau: The Tricks of Scapin and Twelfth Night’, The Drama Review: TDR 28, no. 1, French Theatre (spring 1984): 45; on the development of Les Copiaus’ practice, see J. Rudlin, Jacques Copeau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35 and M. Evans, Jacques Copeau (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), 35. 4 J. Vilard, Mon demi-siècle (Lausanne: Payot, 1954), 117; quoted in J. Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 29. 5 M. Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1983), 109. 6 Rudlin, Jacques Copeau, 105. 7 M. Evans and C. Fleming, ‘Jacques Copeau’, in The Great European Stage Directors, Volume 3: Copeau, Komisarjevsky, Guthrie, ed. Jonathan Pitches (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 33. 8 P. Aykroyd, The Dramatic Art of La Compagnie des Quinze (London: Eric Partridge, 1935), 20–1. 9 Ibid., 29–30; the date of the first performances of Les Quinze in England is taken from Aykroyd, The Dramatic Art of La Compagnie des Quinze, 7. 10 J. Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life (London: Methuen, 2000), 193. 11 J. Gielgud, Early Stages (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), 154. 12 G. O’Connor, The Secret Woman: A Life of Peggy Ashcroft (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997), 27. 13 I. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 44–5. 14 Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 62. 15 Ibid., 62; for Gautier’s history see Rudlin, Jacques Copeau, 84, 88. 16 This is quoted from notes of a conversation with Marius Goring held in the British Library (hereafter BL): BL, Add. MS 81105. 17 This information is taken from notes of an interview with Vera Lindsay (as Poliakoff later became) on January 17, 1986: BL, Add. MS 81105. 18 These recollections are taken from notes of a conversation between Poliakoff and Marius Goring at 77 Hamilton Terrace in St John’s Wood, where Poliakoff (who was by then known as Vera Lindsay) was certainly living in 1977: BL, Add. MS 81105. 19 M. Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, in T.H. Cranfill, ed., ‘Image of Britain 2’, The Texas Quarterly 4, no. 3 (autumn 1961): 34–5. 20 Notes from Poliakoff and Goring’s conversation: BL, Add. MS 81105. 21 P.P. Read, Alec Guinness (London: Simon & Shuster, 2003), 50. 22 Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, 35. 23 M. McCall, ed., My Drama School (London: Robson Books, 1978), 81. 24 Julliard News Bulletin X, no. 2 (1971–2), 5: BL, Add. MS 81103.

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25 There are photographs of the end-of-term showings in Beak Street (March 1936) and at the Old Vic (July 1936) in BL, Add. MS 81251. 26 These quotations are taken from an interview with Lefèvre conducted by JeanBaptiste Gournel, accessed on March 24, 2011, http://michelsaintdenis.net/msd/ content/view/71/53/lang,en/. 27 The observation of the importance of the size of the LTS stage for transferring its productions was made in the News Chronicle of April 21, 1936 (see Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 65), information about the lighting control is from S. Jump, ‘The Convergence of Influences on and Evolving Praxis of Mid-Twentieth Century British Theatre Design (1935–1965) Through a Close Study of Selected Works by Motley and Jocelyn Herbert’ (PhD Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2016), 87. 28 Estimates can be found in J. Benedetti, Stanislavski: His Life and Art (London: Methuen, 1988), 211; R.B. Gauss, Lears’ Daughters: The Studios of the Moscow Art Theatre 1905–1927 (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 39; and L.C. Black, Mikhail Chekhov as Actor, Director, and Teacher (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1984), 15. 29 See Black, Mikhail Chekhov as Actor, Director, and Teacher, 16; this quotation, from Leopold Sulerzhitsky, is taken from Pavel Markov’s Pervaia studiia MXT (First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre), which was translated in 1934 by Mark Schmidt for the use of the Group Theatre. A typescript of this translation is held in the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. 30 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 55. 31 Letter dated October 8, 1976: BL, Add. MS 81105. 32 M. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style & Other Writings, ed. J. Baldwin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 47. 33 M. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises (London: Heinemann, 1982), 109. 34 Ibid., 46. 35 McCall, My Drama School, 79. 36 Ibid., 79–80. 37 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 46. 38 McCall, My Drama School, 85. 39 P. Ustinov, Dear Me (London: Arrow Books, 1998), 101. 40 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 48. 41 A photograph shows her in a Nō mask, performing alongside two students: BL, Add. MS 81254. 42 McCall, My Drama School, 86. 43 Ibid., 84. 44 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 104. 45 McCall, My Drama School, 84. 46 See McCall, My Drama School, 82; Y. Mitchell, Actress (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 8; and Ustinov, Dear Me, 100–1. 47 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 162. 48 McCall, My Drama School, 89. 49 Ustinov, Dear Me, 114. 50 Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 76. 51 Ustinov, Dear Me, 106. 52 M. Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession in England 1880–1983 (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), 42. 53 Ibid., 46. 54 The theatres built in London’s West End between 1903 and 1907 had, at 1,018 seats, an average of almost 170 more seats than those built in the 1880s: Sanderson, From Irving to Olivier, 33.

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55 H.G. Barker, The Exemplary Theatre (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1922), 39. 56 Ibid. 57 D.J. Skal, Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2008), 47. 58 J. Gielgud, Backward Glances (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), 158. 59 S. Jump, ‘The Convergence of Influences’, 90. 60 Ibid., 76. 61 Ibid., 90. 62 Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, 34; he reiterated this rationale in the opening of the section on the LTS in Training for the Theatre, 45. 63 M.J. Sidnell, Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 53. 64 Ibid., 122. 65 ‘Programme Announcement for Group Theatre’, October 1935, quoted in Sidnell, Dances of Death, 130. 66 ‘Technical training and the development of future shows’; this plan (which agrees with the description laid out in Aykroyd, The Dramatic Art of La Compagnie des Quinze, 60) is archived in the Michel Saint-Denis Archive at the British Library: BL, Add. MS 81091. 67 R. Eyre, Talking Theatre: Interviews with Theatre People (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009), 7. 68 M. Billington, Peggy Ashcroft (London: John Murray, 1988), 77. 69 J. Gielgud, Gielgud: An Actor and his Time (London: Sidgwick & Jackson Ltd., 1979), 109. 70 A. Williamson, Theatre of Two Decades (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Ltd, 1951), 57; Gielgud did need to add to his company for The Three Sisters: the American actress Carol Goodner was brought in to play Masha and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies to play Olga. Both, however, knew Gielgud and others in the company well. 71 Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, 38. 72 Williamson, Theatre of Two Decades, 58. 73 Billington, Peggy Ashcroft, 93. 74 J. Gielgud, Stage Directions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1963), 91. 75 The Observer, January 30, 1938. 76 Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, 39. 77 Ibid., 37. 78 J. Gielgud, ‘Review of An Actor Prepares’, Theatre Arts Monthly (January 1937): 31–4. 79 Billington, Peggy Ashcroft, 19. 80 Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye, 128. 81 Williamson, Theatre of Two Decades, 59–60. 82 Gielgud, Stage Directions, 90. 83 These notes are taken from Irina and Tusenbach’s final scene in Act Four: BL, Add. MS 81142. 84 A. Strachan, Secret Dreams: The Biography of Michael Redgrave (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 137. 85 Theatre Programme for The White Guard (London: Phoenix Theatre, 1938), author’s collection. 86 Ibid. 87 Eric Keown, Peggy Ashcroft (London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation, 1955), 60. 88 Christopher Hassall remembers My Life in Art ‘ruling the roost’ on the actor’s bookshelves: C. Hassall, The Timeless Quest: Stephen Haggard (London: Arthur Baker Ltd, 1948), 16. 89 In the week ending December 10, 1938, Ashcroft and Redgrave earned £30 for playing Viola and Andrew Aguecheek, while Salaman and Lefèvre took home £4, and walk-ons were paid £3: BL, Add. MS 81141.

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90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128

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Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 74. See Billington, Peggy Ashcroft, 102. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 81. Letter dated September 5, 1939: R. Mangan, ed., Gielgud’s Letters (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2004), 57. S. Haggard, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon (Leeds: Morley-Baker, 1969), 45. See Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 82–3. A. Williamson, Old Vic Drama: A Twelve Year Study of Plays and Players (London: Rockliff, 1948), 148. Croall, Gielgud: A Theatrical Life, 287. Letter from Burrell, Olivier, and Richardson to Old Vic Governors, January 5, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. ‘The Old Vic Theatre Centre’, Theatre Newsletter, no. 20 (April 19, 1947). Press Release, September 7, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. Letter from Devine to Saint-Denis, May 19, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. Letter to Governors, April 18, 1946, Aix-en-Provence: Arts Council File, V&A Theatre and Performance Collections (hereafter V&ATPC), ACGB/34/76. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 121. ‘The Old Vic Theatre Centre’, Theatre Newsletter, no. 20 (April 19, 1947). Memo No. 3, ‘The Development of the Plan’, April 20, 1947: V&ATPC, ACGB/ 34/76. Note dated April 15, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. Notes of meeting on April 24, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. Press Release, September 7, 1946: BL, Add MS 81173. ‘Report on Recent Activities of the Old Vic and Sadlers Wells Companies’, December 1941: V&ATPC, ACGB/34/76. Programme for Start It Yourselves: V&ATPC, ACGB/34/76. Letter from George Chamberlain to Devine, December 17, 1945: BL, Add. MS 81173. These figures were agreed at an Old Vic sub-committee meeting on June 25, 1946, and communicated to the Arts Council in a ‘Memorandum from the Governors of the Royal Victoria Hall to the Arts Council of Great Britain on the Subject of Old Vic Expansion’, on July 3, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. The source for the figure of 400 applicants is a document titled ‘Annual Reports for Season 1946–1947 of The Old Vic and Sadlers Wells with Balance Sheets and Accounts for the Year Ending 30th June 1947’: BL, Add. MS 81173. This became the home of the Royal Ballet School and is now the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Old Vic Memo No. 1, ‘The Plan’, May 18, 1946: V&ATPC, ACGB/34/76. Ibid. Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 125. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 52. McCall, My Drama School, 141. Acting Course Outline, 1947: BL, Add. MS 81176. Ibid. McCall, My Drama School, 146–7. J. Baldwin, ‘Michel Saint-Denis: Training the Complete Actor’, in Actor Training, ed. A. Hodge (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 89. Notes of Meeting, April 16, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, ed. Baldwin, 111. ‘Draft for Consideration by Friday 16th August [1946]’ of ‘The Old Vic Theatre Centre’: BL, Add. MS 81173. Ibid. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 124.

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129 The exercises are reproduced in Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 199–200. 130 L. Susi, An Untidy Career: Conversations with George Hall (London: Oberon, 2010), 31. 131 Notes of a Meeting about ‘Criticism of the L.T.S. vis-a-vis Planning of New School’, April 22, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 132 Saint-Denis, ed. Baldwin, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, 89–90. 133 Ibid., 91. 134 Notes on ‘Advanced Technical Course; September 15, 1947: BL, Add. MS 81180. 135 Saint-Denis, ed. Baldwin, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, 88. 136 R.D. Smith, ‘New Life at the Old Vic’, New Theatre 5, no. 1 (July 1948): BL, Add. MS 81176. 137 Cited in a report by Stephen Maecht on the London Drama Schools: BL, Add. MS 81176. 138 Letter from Saint-Denis to Old Vic Governors, Aix-en-Provence, April 18, 1946: V&ATPC, ACGB/34/76. 139 There was a meeting with Ashcroft to discuss the teaching of voice and speech at the Old Vic School on December 9, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 140 Rink went on teach at the Central School of Speech and Drama, along with Oliver Reynolds, who was also on the staff of the LTS but not the Old Vic School; this quotation is from a letter dated September 28, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81176. 141 Notes on the subject of style in BL, Add. MS 81181 are in Magito’s handwriting. 142 Susi, An Untidy Career, 40. 143 Note in ‘Draft Plan for 1949/50 Season’: BL, Add. MS 81188. 144 This is quoted from the minutes of a planning meeting dated April 20, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 145 Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre, 168. 146 Gournel, Interview with Pierre Lefèvre. 147 H. Devine, Being George Devine’s Daughter (London: Barkus Books, 2006), 42. 148 ‘Draft: The Sonrel Forestage’: BL, Add. MS 81172. 149 G. Rowell, The Old Vic Theatre: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 140. 150 ‘Memorandum on Building Requirements for the Old Vic’, April 3, 1948: BL, Add. MS 81172. 151 C. Landstone, Off-Stage: A Personal Record of the First Twelve Years of State Sponsored Drama in Great Britain (London and New York: Elek Books Ltd, 1953), 169. 152 Letter from Saint-Denis to Lord Lytton, April 29, 1947: BL, Add. MS 81172. 153 A letter from the Clerk of the Old Vic to Miss Glasgow at the Arts Council, dated December 21, 1943, named Joseph Rowntree as ‘the architect for the Vic and Wells’ in the context of plans for re-building the theatre: V&ATPC, ACGB/34/76. 154 Notes of Meeting, April 16, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 155 Old Vic Centre ‘Memorandum No. 1’, May 18, 1946, and ‘Memorandum from the Governors of the Royal Victoria Hall to the Arts Council of Great Britain on the subject of Old Vic Expansion’, July 3, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 156 The Observer, April 14, 1946. 157 BL, Add. MS 81173; the wording of this press release is echoed by articles announcing the creation of the centre in the Evening Standard of September 11, 1946 (‘A Young Vic to start at the Old Vic’) and The Times of September 12, 1946 (‘Old Vic Theatre Centre: Plans for Acting, Training and Production’). 158 ‘Old Vic, Theatres Trust’, accessed on August 11, 2011, www.theatrestrust.org.uk/ resources/theatres/show/1037-old-vic. 159 Architects Journal, November 30, 1950: BL, Add. MS 81171. 160 Saint-Denis, Typescript: ‘My Years at the Vieux-Colombier’: BL, Add. MS 81138.

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161 Lord Esher succeeded to the post following the death of Lord Lytton in 1947. 162 ‘Report on the Old Vic’s financial position’, November 1948: V&ATPC, ACGB/ 34/76. 163 G. O’Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor’s Life (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), 158. 164 Hugh Hunt was director of the Bristol Old Vic since 1945 and of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, before the war. 165 Landstone, Off-Stage, 163. 166 Ibid., 164. 167 There were also ‘modest grants from the Carnegie and Pilgrim Trusts and the City Parochial Foundation’ (Rowell, The Old Vic Theatre: A History, 141). 168 Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 131. 169 Ibid. 170 Letter from Llewellyn Rees to Lord Esher, February 16, 1951: BL, Add. MS 81187. 171 Letter from Llewellyn Rees to Lord Esher, March 2, 1951: BL, Add. MS 81187. 172 Note of proposal from Old Vic Governors, April 2, 1951: BL, Add. MS 81187. 173 Letter from Hugh Hunt to Lord Esher, April 3, 1951: BL, Add. MS 81187. 174 Addendum to note of proposal from Old Vic Governors (April 2, 1951), April 12, 1951: BL Add. MS 81187. 175 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 136. 176 Some press cuttings are collected in BL, Add. MS 81187. 177 This and subsequent quotations are taken from numerous cuttings from unidentified newspapers gathered in BL, Add. MS 81187. 178 Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 137. 179 Ibid., 138. 180 Letter from George Devine to George Chamberlain, April 25, 1952: BL, Add. MS 81187. 181 Ibid. 182 Jane Baldwin, however, cites archival evidence that Saint-Denis was still writing to Esher in the school’s final week in an attempt to save it: Baldwin, Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Modern Actor, 139. 183 Letter from Lord Esher to George Devine, June 27, 1952; BL, Add. MS 81187. 184 Press Release, September 7, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 185 Landstone, Off-Stage, 145. 186 J. Elsom, and N. Tomalin, The History of the National Theatre (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 100. 187 ‘The New Old Vic’, Britain Today, no. 179: BL, Add. MS 81176. 188 Minutes of a Meeting with the Arts Council, May 22, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 189 R. Barker and T. Cornford, ‘Tyrone Guthrie’, in Great European Theatre Directors Vol. 3, ed. J. Pitches (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 136.

3 MODELS OF PRACTICE IN THE LONDON THEATRE STUDIO AND THE OLD VIC THEATRE CENTRE

As we have seen, Michel Saint-Denis’ close collaborator and lover Vera Poliakoff reflected, after his death, on what she called his ‘paternalistic, but visionary methods’, a characterisation that has been borne out by the previous chapters’ accounts of both the practices of the LTS and OVC and their remnants.1 From the time of his association with Copeau right up until his work with the RSC, Saint-Denis’ work can be seen paradoxically to combine a paternalistic assumption of authority and a visionary intent to challenge convention. In this chapter, I will draw upon the philosophical traditions of American pragmatism and standpoint feminism to argue that the same paradoxical combination of radical and conservative impulses can be seen to have characterised the models of practice developed at both the LTS and OVC.

Pragmatism and vanguardism at the LTS and OVC The designer Abd’El Kader Farrah, who worked with Michel Saint-Denis for many years, designing both his 1945 Old Vic production of Oedipus and his 1961 RSC Cherry Orchard, and teaching alongside him at the Centre Dramatique de l’Est in Strasbourg, offered a similar account of his colleague to Poliakoff’s, describing him as ‘an extraordinary mixture’: a ‘chairman type’ with a sharp eye for detail (he could always ‘put his finger on the weak point’) and also a man drawn to ‘the roots of life: wine, women, trees, cheese’.2 The painter Michael Salaman (Merula and Chattie’s brother, and therefore also both Alec Guinness and John Blatchley’s brother-in-law) recalled Saint-Denis as ‘intelligent, charming and dedicated’ but also ‘very egocentric and pretty overbearing’. He was, Salaman wrote, ‘full of his own ideas and not very interested in those of others’ and, at times, ‘cruelly ruthless even to the point of discarding loyal friends if by

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chance they happened to be impeding his immediate objective’.3 He cited the example of the other members of Les Quinze, some of whom felt ‘deeply embittered’ at their treatment when Saint-Denis left them for England. On the other hand, the writer David Garnett (who was married to Saint-Denis’ student Angelica Bell and a central member of the Bloomsbury group with whom Saint-Denis associated closely in the 1930s) remembered ‘a peasant, or a skilled craftsman’, suggesting that this was the quality that ‘made him at home with the English’. Unlike ‘Parisian intellectuals’, but ‘like the peasant or craftsman’, Garnett argued, ‘when faced with the abstract’, ‘we [the English] find our explanation in the concrete’.4 Garnett and Farrah’s accounts of Saint-Denis’ practicality are echoed in many descriptions of George Devine’s commitment to all aspects of the theatre. To begin with, he remained an actor alongside directing and running theatres. Sophie Jump has also shown that in 1937 he became the first lighting designer to be credited as such in the British theatre, and that he invested £4,000 of his own money in lighting and sound equipment for the LTS, which he subsequently used ‘as a full-scale model to experiment with lighting and its possibilities’, an experiment that continued to be developed, as we have seen, throughout the lives of the LTS and OVC.5 Nor did it conclude with their closure: Irving Wardle notes that ‘[v]irtually everyone in the production team [at the Royal Court] came out of the LTS or the Vic School’, and that Devine always ‘showed the proper respect due to the “artisttechnician”’ because ‘[h]e had done all the jobs himself’.6 He was equally keen that the writers, whose work the English Stage Company was committed to champion, should identify themselves with the theatre’s collective functioning, so he offered them a ‘writer’s pass’, giving free access to rehearsals and performances. He also deplored what he saw as the political posing of some younger artists at the Court, telling one of them ‘[y]ou wear a workman’s cap but you don’t work. You look like a workman but you despise people who work’.7 Work for Devine, however, often did not mean wearing a cap. He had become a skilled board-room operator and bureaucrat, and, more often than not, these were the means by which he kept the Royal Court alive. Likewise, the numerous drafts and iterations of plans and budgets for the OVC were his work, and he notes meetings, lunches, and other social engagements at which he made the case for the new centre, developed allies and identified opponents. As a result of this process, both Devine and SaintDenis repeatedly chose to find compromises that would keep the OVC alive, even when they seriously undermined its principles. This conclusion to my exploration of the studios run by Devine and Saint-Denis will argue that, like the men that led them, in whom the figures of urban bureaucrat and rural peasant were combined, the LTS and OVC were caught between hierarchical and egalitarian instincts. The result was that the vanguard movement represented by these studios quickly became a new conservatism.

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It is already abundantly clear that the LTS and OVC were pragmatic organisations, but in order to understand the models of creative collaboration that they developed, it is crucial to understand that, as well as being pragmatic, they were pragmatist. The philosophical tradition of American pragmatism had its roots in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), and William James (1842–1910), and argued that truth can only meaningfully be considered in terms of utility for a given purpose. Thus, Peirce proposed that ‘[t]he essence of belief is the establishment of a habit, and different beliefs are distinguished by the different modes of action to which they give rise’.8 Peirce argues that, because belief is ‘a habit of mind’ rather than ‘a momentary mode of consciousness’, it is ‘mostly (at least) unconscious’ and ‘(until it meets with some surprise that begins its dissolution) perfectly selfsatisfied’.9 Belief’s opposite, ‘doubt’, is also, for Peirce, the opposite of a habit: ‘the privation of a habit’, ‘a condition of erratic activity that […] must get superseded by a habit’.10 This pattern of resisting established habits of belief and the actions to which they give rise in order to inculcate new beliefs and forms of action is familiar from the practice of both the LTS and OVC, and their attempts ‘to improve’, in the words of the LTS advertisement, ‘the material available for genuine theatre productions’.11 These studios were therefore dedicated to a vision articulated by Peirce’s fellow pragmatist, the philosopher and educationalist John Dewey (1859–1952), as a commitment to ‘possibilities not yet given’.12 The realisation of such possibilities required, according to Dewey, an inclusive and embodied conception of intelligence: ‘not the faculty of intellect honored in text-books and neglected elsewhere, but […] the sum-total of impulses, habits, emotions, records, and discoveries’.13 In theorising the development of this form of intelligence towards ‘possibilities not yet given’, Dewey shifted Peirce’s focus on the necessary interplay of belief and doubt to the relationship between the modes of action and perception. Their interaction was exemplified for Dewey by the figure of the artist: the artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works […] As we manipulate, we touch and feel, as we look, we see; as we listen, we hear. The hand moves with etching needle or with brush. The eye attends and reports the consequence of what is done. Because of this intimate connection, subsequent doing is cumulative and not a matter of caprice, nor yet of routine. In an emphatic artistic-esthetic experience, the relation is so close that it controls simultaneously both the doing and the perception.14 Dewey’s elaboration, here, of the constant interrelation of active hand and perceptive eye in the development of creative work (which is limited neither by a capricious lack of interest in its consequences nor by thoughtless adherence to routine) offers a strong theoretical basis for the work of the LTS and OVC. The

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relationship between training and experimental practice in the over-arching plan for both studios and the productive tension between technique and improvisation in the training they developed are both captured by Dewey’s description of artistic practice. Dewey famously developed his theoretical model in the field of education, arguing that ‘it is [education’s] business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits’, rather than ‘unhindered, unreflective external activity’ which, he argued, ‘is to foster enslavement, for it leaves the person at the mercy of appetite, sense and circumstance’.15 He sought to resolve this tension in the concept of ‘experience’, which he differentiated from anything ‘rigid and closed’ such as ‘custom and routine’, but defined as ‘vital, and hence growing’, including within it ‘the reflection that sets us free from the limiting influence of sense, appetite and tradition’.16 The ambiguity of the term ‘experience’, which refers both to that which has been deliberately acquired and consciously processed and the unfiltered sense-impressions of our ongoing lives, is fundamental to Dewey’s theory. As he put it: ‘unconsciousness gives spontaneity and freshness; consciousness, conviction and control’.17 Dewey’s double sense of experience is also the basis for the cyclical progress of creative work proposed by the sociologist Hans Joas. He suggests that we perceive and act as we do according to given facts and successful habits, but that these are ‘repeatedly shattered’ at moments where we encounter a problem, when Peirce’s moment when belief ‘meets with some surprise that begins its dissolution’ is caught by Dewey’s attentive eye, or when the two senses of Dewey’s ‘experience’ collide. At these moments, Joas argues that ‘our habitual actions meet with resistance from the world and rebound back on us’, with two consequences.18 First, we must ‘come to terms with new or different aspects of reality’ and, second, ‘action must be applied to different points of the world or must restructure itself’.19 If such a restructuring is achieved, says Joas, then ‘a new mode of acting […] can gradually take root’.20 Joas’ model of creativity is therefore both adaptive and reconstructive. It requires training to acquire and hone successful habits, because without training, it would be impossible to distinguish between ‘resistance from the world’ and mere incompetence, and therefore impossible precisely to identify a problem. It also requires experimentation to develop the capacity to restructure habits of action to cope with such problems. Without experimentation, it would be impossible to develop or grow because habits could not be adapted to new conditions or challenges. Joas’ model of the development of creativity by restructuring action allows us to identify structural flaws in the models of creative practice that were developed at both the LTS and OVC. First, at the LTS, we can see a failure of training, specifically, a failure to cultivate Dewey’s ‘deep-seated and effective habits’ beyond the walls of the school. This is most clearly visible in the difference between the reception of Saint-Denis’ work with the Copiaus and Quinze companies and with actors in London. As we have seen, whereas responses to Saint-Denis’ French productions stressed the skill of individual performers and

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the companies’ collective assurance, reviewers of Gielgud as Noah, Olivier as Macbeth, and Saint-Denis’ 1938 Twelfth Night frequently highlighted both individual and collective deficits in performance. These failures could easily have been predicted based upon the LTS’s own publicity, which had promised ‘a permanent company, trained to act together’, a much longer-term goal than could have been achieved in the less than two years between the LTS’s founding and the creation of LTS Productions.21 That difficulty was exacerbated, as I have already argued, by the decision to commit immediately to West End production, which actively worked against the possibility of establishing a trained, permanent company because of the commercial pull towards well-known actors and insecure contracts. Saint-Denis’ London casts were notably more successful when working on Chekhov and Bulgakov. The evidence suggests, however, that these successes were only partly attributable to the LTS. Saint-Denis, Devine, and Motley seem all to have used the LTS as a space to develop the direction, design, and lighting for Three Sisters before creating the production with Gielgud’s company. However, most of the actors in Gielgud’s company were not directly active in the LTS, and had been working together for five months when they began rehearsals for Three Sisters. They were also relatively well-versed in Stanislavskian acting both as a result of reading him and encountering the practice of similar approaches through Theodore Komisarjevsky’s famous productions of Chekhov in the 1920s. There is evidence that, in the course of rehearsals, some did experience what Joas describes as their ‘habitual actions meet[ing] with resistance from the world and rebound[ing] back’. For example, Michael Redgrave remembered that Saint-Denis ‘gestured at me impatiently with his pipe-stem, bringing me to a halt’ and corrected him: ‘No, no, my friend. You speak as if the lines were important. You speak as if you wanted to make it all intelligible, as if it all made sense.’ ‘Isn’t that what an actor is supposed to do?’ I asked, somewhat tartly. ‘No,’ said Michel. I thought, to hell with it, and read the speech again, throwing it all away. At once it came to life. Michel’s reaction was immediate: ‘There! You see? You ’ave eet!’22 The combination, in this anecdote, of Redgrave’s conscious assumption about the purpose of his work (‘to make it all intelligible’), and his perceptive alertness to what Dewey described as ‘the consequences of what is done’ (‘it came to life’) offers a microcosm of the cast’s movement from concern (recalled by Saint-Denis) that a long rehearsal period would ‘render their acting mechanical, dry and sterile’, to a production in which, as we have seen, the critic Ivor Brown thought that ‘all the players seemed […] to be above their usual best’.23 Brown also noted the absence of certain performers’ ‘mannerisms, little tricks of voice or laugh, which can become irritating by repetition’.24 When this observation is combined with

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the actors’ reported assumption that repeated rehearsal would lead to sterility, it makes a compelling case for Saint-Denis’ Three Sisters as an example of Joas’ model of the development of creative practice: skilled artists with successful habits discovered that some of those habits and their related assumptions met with resistance in this new context and rebounded upon them, thereby enabling the artists in question, with Saint-Denis’ guidance, successfully to restructure their habits of action. This practice took place, however, mostly outside the LTS, and therefore although it can be considered partly to vindicate its model, it cannot meaningfully be claimed as evidence of its success. At the OVC, however, the situation was somewhat different. As with the case of LTS Productions, Saint-Denis’ productions for the Old Vic Theatre Company were only tenuously related, in practice, to the OVC: the actors had not trained with him and were not directly involved in the centre’s work. However, whereas the LTS had suffered as a result of its attempt to build a ‘permanent company’ on the shifting sands of West End production, the creation of the Young Vic under Devine’s leadership provided a more effective means, at the OVC, of ensuring the movement from training to ensemble theatre-making upon which the studio model depends. The Young Vic company featured students and collaborators of Devine and Saint-Denis’ from both the LTS and OVC as performers as well as other creative roles. While its work was never intended to be thoroughly experimental, the Young Vic did offer a space within which new plays could be created collaboratively, and the work of the Old Vic School extended gradually into professional practice. The problem, therefore, of creating a company that could genuinely be considered to have established successful, collective habits of action (but was not, as Saint-Denis and Devine put it, ‘a closed shop’) was beginning to be solved at the OVC. However, as I have argued above, the OVC’s crucial vulnerability was its failure to establish the ‘experimental theatre’ that would draw all of its other activities together and generate what Dewey called the ‘possibilities not yet given’ that were its quarry. This failure was not, however, merely circumstantial. The OVC was vulnerable in relation to experimentation because the model of practice it developed was always caught between contradictory commitments to experimentation and authority. We have already seen that Devine and Saint-Denis’ plans for the OVC were immediately challenged by both the Old Vic governors and the management of the Old Vic Theatre Company, in respect of their plan to develop an ‘experimental theatre’. This unsurprising challenge is less significant, however, to an understanding of the model of practice developed by the OVC than the response it provoked. Devine and Saint-Denis quickly capitulated to a great extent in respect of the significance of experiment for their plans, describing it, in a subsequent press release, as ‘an alarming word’. They added the caveat that ‘experiment’ is ‘perhaps, the only word which adequately describes the nature of the work which will be carried out’.25 Saint-Denis went on, however, to frame

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that work merely as an endeavour ‘to speak the language of our times’ as, for instance, Benjamin Britten had done for opera in Peter Grimes, which had been a huge success for the Old Vic’s sister theatre, Sadler’s Wells, in 1945. In a 1947 article, Saint-Denis seems to have been imagining, and advocating for, a Britten of the theatre, not an ‘independent genius’ but an author ‘in constant touch with the stage’ and the ‘collective effort’ of ‘producer, stage designer, musician, choreographer and actors’. This conjunction would, Saint-Denis argued, give rise to new theatre-forms. The author, imagining ‘the possibility of the actors playing in four different places at once, all in full view of the audience’, would develop a new ‘mode of composition’. The actor, ‘allowed to come forward once more right out amongst the public’, ‘will become more expressive plastically’, with a correspondingly greater ‘impact […] on the public’, ‘a lesser expenditure of vocal effort, and with an increased subtlety of delivery’.26 This theatre, Saint-Denis imagined, would thus have ‘broken the conventions which held it prisoner’, and the experimental project of the OVC was the advancement of this aim.27 In pragmatist terms, the OVC can therefore be said to be experimental. ‘The object of experimentation’, wrote Dewey, ‘is the construction, by regular steps taken on the basis of a plan thought out in advance, of a typical, crucial case, a case formed with express reference to throwing light on the difficulty in question’.28 The critic T.C. Worsley, for example (no supporter of the OVC), praised George Devine’s ‘splendid production’ of Bartholomew Fair (Old Vic, 1950) for ‘clearly marking the pattern that might so easily get lost in the confusion, and bringing the crowd bustle and hubbub of the fair vividly alive’.29 The director’s twin responsibilities to communicate a play’s environment and narrative in plastic form were explicit concerns of the ‘Advanced Course’ at the Old Vic School. A list of questions for ‘Producers 2nd Interviews’, for example, asks applicants to identify the ‘dramatic climaxes’ of a text and key aspects of its setting.30 Devine’s ability to solve the difficulty of how to give dramatic form to the particular challenges of Jonson’s play may well have been the direct consequence of studio experimentation. In March 1937, he had directed a performance entitled The Fair at the LTS, and, while at the OVC, he made field-trips with students to Docklands pubs and dog tracks, which formed the basis of short devised dramas that he would subsequently direct.31 As well as this experimental thread, however, whereby ideas could be gradually developed over a longer period than commercial production would allow, there was also a countervailing, conservative logic in the OVC’s practice, which sought to uphold certain conventions and was therefore anti-experimental. This conservative strain is visible, for example, in the fact that, in 1947, Saint-Denis returned to Obey’s Noah with the Young Vic company, a play ostensibly written specifically for and with Les Quinze, but of which he was now directing his third full production. In a typescript titled ‘Notes on the Production of “Noah”’, Saint-Denis suggests that Obey’s play seeks to

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demonstrate ‘that this drama of a wicked, corrupt mankind whom God decides both to destroy in the flood and to save through one good man might very well have a parallel in mankind today’, and thereby explains his decision not to set the play ‘in prehistoric times’ or costume the characters ‘as primitive savages’.32 Thus, Saint-Denis reads Noah’s story as a parable of regeneration that is dependent upon the heroic figure of the civilised, white man. Noah’s final proximity to God, in Saint-Denis’ reading of the play, is evidence of his superiority over, and estrangement from, not only those sacrificed in the flood, but his own family (even, to some extent, his wife), and from the animal kingdom: God and Noah hope that […] a new world will come to life, wherein goodness, kindness and honesty will replace the wickedness and corruption that has existed before. But, alas, […] man is incapable of changing his nature; he is free to choose a good or evil course. Already, during the voyage on the ark, Ham started to rebel against Noah, and even the Mother, weak and weary, let herself be influenced by the children and began to doubt. At the end, we find Noah on Mount Ararat, alone: Ham, Shem and Japhet, together with their wives—they will people the world with the black, yellow and white races—go off to lead their own lives, leaving behind their old father, and the mother whose mind now begins to wander a little: the bear too, savage once more, attacks Noah and almost succeeds in strangling him. Yet, in the face of everything, Noah has kept his faith in God.33 Here, the racism of Saint-Denis’ reference to ‘primitive savages’ is deepened by his reading of the figure of the rebellious Ham, who was destined in racist, biblical narratives of pre-history to become (as Saint-Denis’s ordering of ‘races’ implies) the father of the Black race. The paternalism that Poliakoff described in Saint-Denis is also visible in his account of Mrs Noah’s vulnerability to being influenced by her children and of her mental infirmity, as well as in Noah/ God’s commanding view of the future of humanity. This commanding, paternal view was clearly associated, for Saint-Denis, with the figure of the writer, whose primacy he asserted in his introduction to the play-text of Noah: ‘the pattern of the action on the stage, its rhythm, the sequence of events form a tangible structure in [the writer’s] mind’.34 SaintDenis argued that, in order both to serve the ‘tangible structure’ of existing plays and to extend the imaginative scope of contemporary playwrights, ‘dramatic action must get back its rhythm, its musical and choreographic quality’.35 This statement frames the apparently radical attempt to break the theatre free from convention in conservative terms and within a hierarchical vision of theatrical production, which exists to serve the writer as the primary source from which ‘the pattern of action’, ‘rhythm’, and ‘events’ on stage are assumed to

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spring. Almost a decade later, developing his plans for the Royal Court, Devine echoed this vision: the stage manager has to discover what the author is saying […] and to exercise his knowledge and his craft to translate these into living terms through the actors principally, the use of the space of the stage, the decors, the costumes and the lighting.36 For this reason, Devine chose, initially, to adopt at the Royal Court a version of the ‘permanent set (as at the LTS and the [Old Vic] school)’, as ‘a sort of return to the tréteau nu [bare platform] of Copeau’.37 He justified this planned permanent set on the grounds that it would be ‘frankly of the stage’, and would therefore emphasise that ‘the reality [of each play] comes from the words and from the acting, not hiding behind visual aids to reality and style’.38 The Royal Court’s proposed permanent set was therefore a ‘reaction against the producer and designer dominating the theatre’, which Devine described as one of ‘the soft homo-sexual tendencies that dominate the commercial theatre’,39 and an assertion, to the contrary, that all theatrical ‘pretence’ must be ‘specifically inspired by the dramatic action’ as notated by the author.40 Devine and Saint-Denis’ association of the playwright’s supremacy with heterosexuality and paternity respectively exposes a deeply patriarchal conception of authorship and theatre history within their plans for the OVC. Repeatedly, they tacitly identify the playwright as father and historical theatrical conventions as mother in the creation of plays. Their justification for adapting the stage of the Old Vic, for example, was the enhancement of the theatre’s capacity to ‘enable a play of any period to be presented in its appropriate theatrical and architectural convention’.41 Underpinning this argument was Saint-Denis’ conception of the maternal relationship between stage and play: ‘the reality of a play derives first of all from the country and period where and when it was written’, he argued, and ‘depends upon the original scenic disposition with which the play is naturally, umbilically connected’.42 The play does not, however, depend solely upon this ‘disposition’, but upon its figurative impregnation by the author’s idea, which Saint-Denis described in essentialist terms as a play’s ‘true and inner character’ of which its style is ‘the perceptible form’.43 For both Saint-Denis and Devine, then, a play’s truth is to be found by what Saint-Denis described as an act of ‘active submission to the text’.44 Saint-Denis’ favoured term ‘style’ was, he argued, the ‘instrument’ for such active submission, ‘whose intelligent and sensitive use must lead to what is the most secret, the most essential quality of what the author has to say’.45 The implication that the truthful interpretation of a play may be securely established on the twin bases of historical convention and authorial intention, to which historical and textual records are assumed to be a transparent guide, is, of course, anti-experimental. In this respect, the OVC’s project ran counter to that

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of pragmatism, which explicitly rejects the notion that any source of knowledge might take priority over any other, except insofar as it might be shown better to serve a particular and transitory purpose. Dewey rejected the dualistic conception of knowledge that underpins any assertion of the ‘true and inner character’ of anything. He explicitly set himself against what he called ‘the notion […] that the office of knowledge is to uncover the antecedently real, rather than, as is the case with our practical judgements, to gain the kind of understanding which is necessary to deal with problems as they arise’.46 For Dewey, ‘the object of knowledge’ is always ‘prospective and eventual’.47 He did not intend by this that ‘previous knowledge is not of immense importance in obtaining new knowledge’, but that ‘the conclusions of prior knowledge are the instruments of new enquiries, not the norms that determine their validity’.48 Saint-Denis’ conception of ‘style’, then, which he both describes as an ‘instrument’ of enquiry and asserts as a norm determining the validity of such an enquiry, is exposed, by Dewey’s articulation of ‘[t]he experimental practice of knowing’, as contradictory. As well as highlighting this contradiction in Saint-Denis’ theoretical articulation of practice, Dewey’s pragmatism directs our attention to its roots: over and above the sources of misbelief that reside in the natural tendencies of the individual […], social conditions tend to instigate and confirm wrong habits of thinking by authority, by conscious instruction, and by even more insidious, half-conscious influences of language, imitation, sympathy and suggestion.49 Elsewhere, he offers a more comprehensive list of the sources of these ‘insidious, half-conscious influences’: ‘[i]f intelligent method is lacking’, Dewey writes, ‘prejudice, the pressure of immediate circumstance, self-interest and classinterest, traditional customs, institutions of accidental historical origin are not lacking, and they tend to take the place of intelligence’.50 We have seen the ways in which the OVC’s model of practice was shaped by the prejudices of the various groups and individuals who were responsible for its formation, by the pressure of the particular circumstances in which it came to be formed, and by the self-interest of its directors and those whose positions were threatened by it. These factors were by no means insignificant, but far more significant for the model of practice developed at the OVC were the class interests, traditions and institutions that both underpinned and were sustained by all of these local factors: the interests, namely, of a ruling, male, intellectual class. Fundamental to the project of Dewey’s pragmatism was his assertion that ‘under the disguise of dealing with ultimate reality, philosophy has been occupied with the precious values embedded in social traditions’.51 Any claim to identify an ‘ultimate reality’ was, for Dewey, merely representative of the interests of the class whose interests were served by the attachment of ‘prestige’ to

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‘those who use their minds without participation of their body and who act vicariously through control of the bodies and labor of others’.52 In the twentiethcentury theatre, of course, the interests of this managerial class, as Simon Shepherd has argued,53 were made manifest in the figure of the director, a shift in power of which Saint-Denis was well aware: The director is the centre of the organization, he is the link connecting together all of the elements which are involved in a modern production […]. He stands for unity, he is the guarantee of intelligence, of efficiency, of quality. I am a director myself! During the last fifty years theatrical conditions have raised the director to an intoxicating position. Hated, flattered, beloved in turns, he has enjoyed so many privileges that one is hesitant to speak about them.54 In Saint-Denis’ account of the director’s work, one such privilege is the capacity to convert even submissiveness into authority, by representing (and thereby assuming the power of) the only figure who is positioned above him in the hierarchy of creative functions: ‘if he is to succeed in being both faithful to the work and efficient in his treatment of it, the director has to substitute himself for the dead dramatist and recreate the play’.55 Thus, although Saint-Denis advocated experiment as a means of challenging the aesthetic accretions of theatrical custom, he did not seek to overthrow customary hierarchies, but rather to use them as a means for his experimental ends. Both experimental and hierarchical, the model of practice developed at the LTS and the OVC is best understood as a form of vanguardism. The vanguard has its origins in medieval warfare, and denotes the head of an advancing force of troops. It was espoused as a form of revolutionary organisation by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto and later, most famously, by the Russian Bolshevik party under Lenin, which was formed as a group of revolutionaries seeking the violent transfer of power in the interests of the working class. The vanguard therefore represents an elite formed to pursue a set of goals on behalf of a larger group they claim to represent. The OVC directors made reference to this term in justifying their plan to remodel the Old Vic stage. They argued that it would secure for the Old Vic a ‘position of leadership […] in the vanguard of theatre development’.56 The vanguard form of these studios explains their swift movement from radical intent to the formation of a new establishment, because a vanguard movement is, by definition, shaped not only by its conscious ends but by its unconscious commitment to the interests of its hierarchical form, which is necessarily resistant to its own dissolution or dispossession. That unconscious resistance places a limit on the capacity of a vanguard movement sustainably to serve experimental ends, which require, according to Dewey, a degree of temporary displacement from a position of authority:

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[i]n the suspense of uncertainty, we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.57 The vanguard movement of the LTS and OVC was too committed, in both the context of its emergence and the structuring of its practice, to hierarchy as a means of fulfilling its aims to embrace ‘the suspense of uncertainty’.

Gender and hierarchy at the LTS and OVC Dewey’s use of the term ‘standpoint’ in articulating the benefits of intellectual displacement for the pursuit of knowing alerts us to a related critique of the ways in which, to quote Patricia Hill Collins, ‘knowledge remains central to maintaining and changing unjust systems of power’, known as standpoint theory.58 This set of ideas is not directly connected to American pragmatism, but emerged from feminist, Marxian and social justice movements in the 1970s and 80s. Like Dewey, however, standpoint theorists tend to assert, in the words of Sandra Harding, that ‘there is no single, transcendental standard for deciding between competing knowledge claims’,59 and argue, in the words of Donna Haraway, for ‘situated and embodied knowledges and against various forms of unlocatable, and so irresponsible, knowledge claims’.60 Haraway proposes that we aim ‘to see from below’, to adopt ‘the standpoints of the subjugated’, not because they represent ‘“innocent” positions’, but ‘because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge’ and ‘promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world’.61 Similarly, bell hooks argues not for a subjugated standpoint, but a marginal one, for deliberately sustaining a position of ‘marginality’ because it ‘offers to one the possibility of a radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds’.62 Building upon these arguments, Sandra Harding has developed the epistemological standard of what she calls ‘strong objectivity’. She opposes this approach to what she calls the ‘objectivism’ of empirical knowledge claims which avoid ‘the task of critically identifying all of those broad, historical social desires, interests, and values, that have shaped […] human affairs’.63 For Harding, ‘strong objectivity requires that the subject of knowledge be placed on the same critical, causal plane as the objects of knowledge’, and therefore ‘[t]he subject of knowledge—the individual and the historically located social community whose unexamined beliefs its members are likely to hold “unknowingly,” so to speak—must be considered as part of the object of knowledge’.64 If we apply the standards of strong objectivity to the models of practice developed at both the LTS and the OVC, then, predictably enough, one unexamined belief is immediately clear: the assumption of male supremacy.

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The unreflective use of the male pronoun to designate a person of unspecified gender may have been grammatically unremarkable at the time of SaintDenis’ and Devine’s writing, but it cannot be considered politically neutral. The repeated use of the words ‘he’ and ‘his’ to identify the playwrights and directors to whom their models of practice assign authority expose the fundamentally gendered division of labour in these studios. If we follow Harding’s suggestion and analyse the Old Vic School (the subject of knowledge) as an object of knowledge, asking what might be the correlation between gender and function, we get the following result: Director-in-Chief of the Centre: Male Co-Director of the Centre and Director of the Young Vic: Male Co-Director of the Centre and Director of the School: Male Head of Stage Design: Female Director of Voice: 1 Male, 1 Female Director of Movement: Female All of the directors (with the exception of one director of voice and the director of movement) were male, and all of their assistant directors were also male. However, this imbalance is not repeated at all levels of the hierarchy: assistant teachers were balanced in terms of gender, and instructors in movement and voice were twice as likely to be female as male. All of the school’s lecturers, however, whose knowledge formulated its objects of study such as its canon of plays and theatre histories, were male. Whether or not this was deliberate policy is beside the point, it demonstrates that what we have already seen to be a hierarchical and gendered model of practice was correlated with a hierarchical and gendered organisational structure. Women were by no means, however, excluded from the school. They played a crucial role in three key areas: design (led by Margaret ‘Percy’ Harris), movement (led by Suria Magito, Saint-Denis’ wife), and voice (led by Marion Watson). If we consider what unites these functions, and distinguishes them from those gendered male, we might observe that those roles gendered male not only involve the exercise and distribution of power, but also tend to the abstract and conceptual. Those roles gendered female are more likely to involve knowledge and ongoing maintenance of either the body or material objects, or both. Where, for example, voice technique becomes more abstract, as in the teaching of speech, the teacher is male, whereas teachers of the more embodied and maintenance-focused areas of voice—diction and elocution—are female. Likewise, where the body is the object of study and speech is absent (except in the masculine areas of acrobatics and fencing), the teachers are also female. These distinctions reflect sociologist Dorothy E. Smith’s observation that ‘[i]t is a condition of a man’s being able to enter and become absorbed in the conceptual mode that he does not have to focus his activities and interests upon his bodily existence’.65 Thus, Smith argues:

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[t]he place of women […] in relation to this mode of action is that where the work is done to create conditions which facilitate his occupation of the conceptual mode of consciousness. […] They do those things which give concrete form to the conceptual activities. […] women mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of action and the actual concrete forms in which it is and must be realized, and the actual material conditions upon which it depends.66 Smith’s argument is clearly borne out in the model of practice developed at the LTS and OVC, and we can also see the consequences for some of these studios’ most gifted (female) artists, who were actively excluded from the conceptual mode of action by its structures. I will close this chapter, then, with two anecdotal accounts of this phenomenon, whose central characters are, perhaps not coincidentally, the wives of two of the actors whose careers featured prominently at the start of this section: Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness. The first of these anecdotes concerns Joan Plowright, later Lady Olivier, who described what was known at the Old Vic School as ‘the tunnel’, a stage in the training in which nothing seemed to go well and out of which the student felt they would never escape. Plowright remembered emerging from this phase with her performance of the courtesan in Devine’s production of The Comedy of Errors (1951): As I came off stage after the performance I met Michel Saint-Denis and George … Michel said, ‘You are now out of the tunnel. Do you know what you did? Can you remember how you did it? Can you do it again?’ This nearly sent me back in again. George slapped me on the bottom and roared, ‘There you are, you see!’ and strolled on, smoking his pipe.67 It is striking in this anecdote that Plowright’s skill as an actress is identified, by Saint-Denis, as precisely the capacity, in Smith’s terms, to ‘mediate for men the relation between the conceptual mode of action and the actual concrete forms in which it is and must be realized’. Plowright’s fear of returning to the tunnel is associated with Saint-Denis’ demand that she be able, immediately, to mediate between the tacit knowledge of her performance and its explicit codification in conceptual terms: ‘[d]o you know what you did?’68 Plowright does not remember Saint-Denis helping her to mediate between these forms of knowledge, and this absence is characteristic of Old Vic School students’ recollections. In a 2007 interview, for example, the actress Rosalind Knight recalls ‘the sheer going-on’ of Saint-Denis’ teaching about ‘finding the truth of the character’, but cannot recall in more concrete terms how this was achieved.69 On the one hand, Plowright’s recollection of Devine’s response perhaps demonstrates a more comradely concern with allowing tacit knowledge to remain tacit, in that he merely notes the development of Plowright’s skill, without requiring her to think

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further or differently about it. The slap on the bottom, however (no matter how unremarkable at the time or ‘innocent’ in intent), is both deeply gendered and hierarchical, tacitly reasserting Devine’s (male) authority and his ‘occupation’, as a teacher, to borrow from Smith again, of a different, ‘conceptual mode of consciousness’. Plowright was one of the relatively few Old Vic School graduates whom Devine would go on to employ at the Royal Court, and who would go on to have a successful career both at the Court and in the National Theatre company throughout the 1960s, when it was under the directorship of her husband, Laurence Olivier. Plowright was very unusual among actresses of her generation in that she also had three children during this busy working period. No doubt, not only Plowright’s talent but also Olivier’s position and personal wealth played their parts in enabling her to do this, but the scarcity of roles for women and the expectations of marriage made it very difficult for others to replicate her achievement. Chattie Salaman, writing to SaintDenis probably in 1940, describes herself and Ann Heffernan as the only unmarried women from her group of students (who had only graduated a year or two earlier).70 Evidently, for many of these women marriage signalled an end to their careers as performers, even before they had properly begun. In another letter, Salaman describes the situation of her sister, Merula, who had married Alec Guinness in 1938 after being one of the more successful students at the LTS. According to Salaman, Guinness ‘seems quite determined not to let Merula act, the beast. She was offered to play Titania at Oxford […] and Alec made the excuse of her not being well enough to stop her taking it’.71 The reference to Mrs (later Lady) Guinness’s health probably relates to her pregnancy (she gave birth to a son, the actor Matthew Guinness, in 1940). Lady Guinness did work after her son’s birth, joining the Young Vic company in 1947, for example, but very little. In spite of her own wealthy background and Guinness’s success, marriage for Lady Guinness clearly meant (to borrow from Smith again), releasing her husband from the obligation ‘to focus his activities and interests upon his bodily existence’. Guinness admitted as much: ‘I did warn her from the beginning […] that it might be a bit lonely for her some of the time […] with the house to look after and the dogs’.72 Lady Guinness’s sister, Chattie, also spent her life in the shadow of her husband, the director and teacher John Blatchley. Blatchley trained at RADA, not the LTS, but went on to be assistant director for acting courses at the Old Vic School, and later assisted all of the OVC directors: Devine at the Royal Court, Saint-Denis at Stratford, and Glen Byam Shaw as opera director at Sadler’s Wells, where Blatchley went on to direct numerous productions.73 Blatchley also taught at the Central School of Speech and Drama and co-founded Drama Centre with Christopher Fettes and Yat Malmgren. By contrast, his wife, despite also teaching at both the Old Vic School and the RSC Studio, never gained access to these networks

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of power to which, having trained at the LTS, we might expect her to be admitted. In this history, gender seems, ultimately, to overwrite other claims to authority. ****** This analysis of the models of practice developed at the LTS and OVC has used the theoretical frameworks of American pragmatism and standpoint theory to show that, as studios, these organisations were deeply constrained in their capacity to develop a new form of theatre by two main factors. The first was their commitment to produce change from within existing models of production, whether commercial or subsidised. The first, commercial model was too focused on the short-term and too hierarchically structured to allow a trained ensemble to emerge and could not even countenance the possibility of experiment. This led, inevitably, to the dispersal of the trained body of collaborating artists that the LTS had sought to create. The second, subsidised model did provide a more secure basis for a sustainable company to emerge, but its commitment to tradition and authority, as well as its hierarchical structure, mitigated strongly against experimentation. It also, crucially, worked to further marginalise those whose social position excluded them from power, consigning them to inferior positions and disregarding their perspectives. The following two sections explore the work of two further studios, both of which largely resisted collaboration with the centres of theatrical power and were more deeply committed both to collectivity and to experimentation. The analytical approach deployed here will be extended to consider, in the work of the Chekhov Theatre Studio, a more comprehensively experimental approach to theatre-making, and, in the case of Theatre Workshop, a model of practice that has, at least, a strong claim to challenge unjust systems of power.

Notes 1 Notes of a conversation between Vera Poliakoff and Marius Goring: British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 81105. 2 Quoted in G. O’Connor, The Secret Woman: A Life of Peggy Ashcroft (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1997), 65. 3 Letter to his sister Susan Salaman, June 9, 1976, forwarded to Suria Magito SaintDenis: BL Add. MS 81105. 4 Undated notes: BL, Add. MS 81105. 5 S. Jump, ‘The Convergence of Influences on and Evolving Praxis of Mid-Twentieth Century British Theatre Design (1935–1965) Through a Close Study of Selected Works by Motley and Jocelyn Herbert’ (PhD Thesis, University of the Arts London, 2016), 70, 89. 6 I. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 173–4. 7 Ibid., 209. 8 C.S. Peirce, ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, in Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, ed. H.S. Thayer (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1982), 85. 9 C.S. Peirce, ‘What Pragmatism Is’, in Pragmatism, ed. Thayer, 108.

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10 Ibid. 11 See Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2 above. 12 J. Dewey, ed., Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude (New York: Holt, 1917), 63. 13 Ibid. 14 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 50–1. 15 J. Dewey, How We Think (Boston, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1910), 27–8, 67. 16 Ibid., 156. 17 Ibid., 217. 18 H. Joas, The Creativity of Action, ed. and trans. Jeremy Gaines and Paul Keast (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 128. 19 Ibid., 129. 20 Ibid. 21 See Figure 2.1 in Chapter 2. 22 M. Redgrave, In My Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson, 1983), 113. 23 M. Saint-Denis, ‘The English Theatre in Gallic Eyes’, The Texas Quarterly 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1961): 38; The Observer, January 30, 1938. 24 The Observer, January 30, 1938. 25 Press Release, September 7, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 26 ‘Towards a “Realistic” Theatre’, typescript, 1947: BL, Add. MS 81239. 27 Ibid. 28 Dewey, How We Think, 91 (emphasis original). 29 T.C. Worlsey, ‘The New Old Vic’, Britain Today, no. 179 (March 1951), cutting: BL, Add. MS 81176. 30 List of questions for ‘Producers’ 2nd Interviews’, undated: BL, Add. MS 81176. 31 Photos of The Fair at the LTS are in BL, Add. MS 81251; for reports of Devine’s teaching at the OVS, see Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 114. 32 Typescript: ‘Notes on the Production of “Noah”’, August 1947: BL, Add. MS 81175. 33 Ibid. 34 A. Obey, Noah (London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, 1967), ix, xi. 35 Ibid. 36 ‘The Stage of the Royal Court’, Typescript, September 26, 1956, Papers of George Devine: Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, uncatalogued. 37 ‘First Notes on New Theatre’, Typescript, January 6, 1955, Papers of George Devine: Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, uncatalogued. See Jump, ‘The Convergence of Influences’, 131–53 for a more detailed account of the ways in which the Court was influenced by design practices at the LTS and OVC. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. See D. Rebellato, 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Drama (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), 156–92 for a detailed account of the workings of homophobia in the Royal Court’s early artistic policies. 40 ‘The Stage of the Royal Court’, Typescript, September 26, 1956, Papers of George Devine: Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, uncatalogued. 41 Press Release, September 7, 1946: BL, Add. MS 81173. 42 M. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style & Other Writings, ed. J. Baldwin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 58. 43 Ibid., 61. 44 M. Saint-Denis, Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises (London: Heinemann, 1982), 186. 45 Ibid., 187. 46 J. Dewey. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (New York: Capricorn Books, 1960), 14.

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73

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Ibid., 181. Ibid., 186 (emphasis original). Dewey, How We Think, 25. Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, 265 (emphasis original). J. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, The Middle Works of John Dewey (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), Vol. XII, 94. Dewey, Art as Experience, 21. S. Shepherd, Direction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 83–9. Saint-Denis, Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style, ed. Baldwin, 70. Ibid., 74. Typescript, ‘Draft: The Sonrel Forestage’, undated: BL, Add. MS 81172. Dewey, How We Think, 11. P.H. Collins, ‘Comment on Hekman’s “Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited”: Where’s the Power?’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding (London: Routledge, 2004), 247. S. Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, ed. Harding, 131. D. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, ed. Harding, 88. Ibid. b. hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Site of Radical Openness’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, ed. Harding, 157. Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology’, 136. Ibid. D.E. Smith, ‘Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, ed. Harding, 26. Ibid. Quoted in Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine, 110. The term ‘tacit knowledge’ is taken from Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: University of Chicago Press, 1966). For a more detailed consideration of the function of skill and tacit knowledge in acting in this period, see T. Cornford ‘Acting, Skill and Artistry’, Shakespeare Studies 43 (2015). Interview with Alec Patton, November 6, 2007: Theatre Archive Project, British Library, Shelfmark C1142/192. Letter from Chattie Salaman to Saint-Denis, dated November 16, contained with a bundle of letters that all seem to come from 1940: BL, Add. MS 81097. Letter from Chattie Salaman to Saint-Denis; the letter is undated but contains a reference to Alec Guinness being in a play by Clemence Dane opposite Edith Evans, which was presumably Cousin Muriel, in which they both starred, and which opened at the Globe Theatre in March 1940: BL, Add. MS 81097. ‘Obituary: Lady Guinness’, The Daily Telegraph, October 24, 2000. E. Forbes, ‘Obituary: John Blatchley’, The Independent, September 14, 1994.

SECTION 2

The Chekhov Theatre Studio (1936–1942)

4 REMNANTS OF THE CHEKHOV THEATRE STUDIO

The Chekhov Theatre Studio (CTS) was formed when the actor, director, and teacher Michael Chekhov met Beatrice Straight and Deirdre Hurst (later Deirdre Hurst du Prey) in New York in 1935 and agreed to lead the studio that they proposed with the support of the Dartington Hall Trust at Dartington Hall in Devon. Chekhov subsequently travelled to England in 1936, publicity materials were produced, students enrolled, and the studio opened in October of that year. The teaching was led by Chekhov, though he was by no means the studio’s only teacher, and he was closely assisted in its day-today running and development by Hurst and Straight, as well as a group of associates who were either already resident at Dartington or invited there to join the studio. At the end of 1938, the studio was relocated to Ridgefield, Connecticut, and in 1939 it opened its first full production, an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed by George Shdanoff, directed by Chekhov, on Broadway. The Possessed did not meet with critical approval, but was followed by a tour of Twelfth Night and an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth to American university theatres, and a Broadway run of Twelfth Night (1940–1), which was more successful. Nonetheless, by 1942 the draft of young men into the military following America’s entrance into the war and the difficulties of sustainably financing a touring ensemble combined to close the studio. Its members dispersed, and Chekhov relocated to Hollywood where he worked in films and continued to offer training for actors. The fragments of this brief but significant enterprise can be divided into three groups: representations of Chekhov’s technique, organisations dedicated to Chekhov’s approach to theatre-making, and performances by members of the CTS. This section explores these remnants of the CTS in that order, asking what they tell us about the consequences of its existence.

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From making theatre to training actors: Chekhov’s technique after the CTS The most obvious remnants of the CTS were published accounts of the technique that Chekhov developed there, by which its key ideas and practices were widely disseminated in English for the first time. This technique was not only a product of the CTS, as Chekhov had been developing many of the approaches used by the CTS for at least twenty years in studios based in Russia, Germany, France, Latvia, and Lithuania. Nonetheless, Chekhov’s approach to theatremaking was considerably refined and extended by the collective work of the studio. It is also axiomatic to this book that, in the case of studio enterprises, technique is never an end in itself, but a means of generating an ensemble that is capable of collaboratively creating performances. Chekhov, in other words, did not form studios in order to develop his technique; he developed his technique in order to form studios, and further developed it in the process of those studios’ ongoing formation. Therefore, once the CTS had closed, the approaches to acting and theatre-making it had employed remained as a byproduct of its work, available to be represented in a codified form that could be communicated in classes, lectures, and writing. Such representations included Chekhov’s books Lessons for Teachers of his Acting Technique,1 and Lessons for the Professional Actor,2 the 1955 lectures by Chekhov later released as cassettes and CDs under the title Michael Chekhov On the Art of Acting,3 and, most significantly, the 1942 manuscript of Chekhov’s book on acting (later published as On the Technique of Acting),4 which was subsequently edited to become the book To the Actor (1953), the most widely read articulation, in English, of Chekhov’s technique. As the titles of these publications suggest, the techniques represented by them all focus primarily on the art of acting. Lessons for Teachers contains some material that shifts the focus onto the role of the teacher of acting, and the lectures collected in Michael Chekhov On the Art of Acting take, at times, a broader, more explicitly philosophical approach to the subject of artistry, but it is nonetheless true to say that acting is the primary focus of the representations of Chekhov’s technique that were produced as a result of his work at the CTS. The centrality of acting in these representations of Chekhov’s technique is partly a result of the fact that the actors in the CTS were almost all entirely untrained, whereas Chekhov’s other associates (who included the writer and director George Shdanoff and the designer Mstislav Dobuzhinsky) were professionals who had already worked and developed alongside him. Primarily, however, it was a consequence of Chekhov’s belief that, in his words, ‘the actor is the theatre’. This was the phrase used by Deirdre Hurst as the title for the collection of transcripts that she and other members of the CTS typed up from her shorthand notes of classes and rehearsals. Chekhov justified this belief by asserting the actor’s uniquely essential function in the theatre-making process:

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I think the theatre consists of the actor and that is all. Nobody else is important in the theatre, from my point of view. If the actor is not there, then there is no theatre. All that the director, the author, the designer will do will not make a theatre.5 This statement was not intended for publication and needs some contextualising to be fully understood. Chekhov was not advocating for a theatre without directors, authors, or designers. He was, in fact, particularly committed to the position of the director, but used it, as I have argued elsewhere, to further his goal of refocusing the theatre on the art of acting.6 Chekhov’s argument is simply that acting is the most crucial function in the theatre because, at its most essential, the theatre consists of the relationship between actors and audiences. Because of this, as we shall see, Chekhov commonly used the figure of the actor as a metaphor for the theatre as a whole, which he believed could only function and be understood as a collective body. Therefore, according to Chekhov, directors, authors, and designers can only fulfil their functions effectively by working with and through actors. For these reasons, the technique developed at the CTS and represented and disseminated thereafter always centred on the actor. As a result of his focus on the art of acting as the central and definitive activity of theatre-making, Chekhov has become primarily known, in the early twenty-first century, as a theorist of actor training. Indeed, he has retrospectively become one of the five fathers of the disciplinary formulation of European actor training, alongside Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Copeau, and Saint-Denis.7 This understanding of Chekhov’s significance is not without basis in his practice and that of the CTS, of course, but it has also been profoundly shaped first by the commercialisation of actor training as a discipline (which began in what I term below the ‘studio-schools’ of the post-war United States) and later by the wider expansion of actor training internationally, first as a formalised vocational training, and later also as a subset of the academic discipline of Theatre and Performance Studies. The expanding field of American actor training after the Second World War created the context in which the 1953 version of Chekhov’s book To the Actor was edited by his friend, Charles Leonard, a Hollywood producer. As a result of Leonard’s intervention, the book became, as Mel Gordon has observed, ‘a streamlined and ahistorical approach to non-Method actor training’.8 Gordon’s edition of Chekhov’s On the Technique of Acting is based upon the 1942 manuscript, prepared by Chekhov with the help of Deirdre Hurst and his former students and collaborators Paul Marshall Allen and Hurd Hatfield, which was rejected by potential publishers.9 In spite of the focus on acting in the title, this book addresses ‘the artist’ before it does the actor,10 and is organised so as to elucidate the over-arching principles of ‘Imagination and Concentration’ (chapter 1), ‘The Higher Ego’ (chapter 2), and ‘Objective Atmosphere and Individual Feelings’ (chapter 3) before arriving where To the Actor begins, with the ‘The Actor’s Body’ (chapter 4). The book also concludes

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with a chapter on ‘Four Stages of the Creative Process’, omitted from To the Actor, in which we are asked to ‘imagine that a group of actors has become interested in the practical elaboration of the method we have suggested, and that they begin working on a play’ with a director, who ‘embraces the various techniques described in this book’.11 This is, of course, exactly the situation of the CTS, and the stages of the creative process laid out in the text can, indeed, be mapped onto those developed by Chekhov with his students in 1936. The removal of this imagined ‘ideal situation’ from the 1953 version of Chekhov’s book demonstrates the extent to which his technique had been repackaged: no longer an approach to theatre-making as a whole, it had become a method of actor training. Actor training, then, was the context in which the actress Mala Powers, who became Chekhov’s literary executrix, first encountered Chekhov and his work in 1949, when she took his ‘classes for professional actors’ in the home of the actor Akim Tamiroff, and private sessions at Chekhov’s home.12 Powers went on to write introductions for both the 2002 edition of To the Actor and On the Technique of Acting, in both cases framing Chekhov’s technique as a method for training actors. She was also more willing than Chekhov had been to commercialise his technique by association with stars. She stressed that Chekhov ‘never advertised nor traded on the names of those whom he coached or worked with’ before going on to name a series of ‘Oscar, Emmy or Tony Award winners’ who ‘have either spoken glowingly about him or have written of their experiences with using the Chekhov Techniques’.13 Likewise, Powers acknowledges that ‘[m]uch that Chekhov deplored about the theatre of his day, including commercialism, is even more prevalent now’,14 and that he deprecated the situation of the ‘television and motion picture actor’ who is ‘denied’ the opportunity to work over a lengthy period in an ensemble.15 Nonetheless, Powers frames Chekhov’s techniques primarily within the context of the demands of acting in such highly commercialised contexts, for which ‘young actors are finding that the training methods they have been exposed to do not fully prepare them’.16 Powers stresses, for example, in her account of the work of actors who will benefit from Chekhov’s technique, the ‘demand […] for immediate feeling responses’ in conditions determined by the requirements of ‘[h]i-tech special effects’ and constrained budgets that leave actors ‘in front of a blue screen’ or performing a ‘close up’ while being fed cue-lines ‘by the script supervisor or a non-actor’.17 The positioning of Chekhov’s work as a means for addressing contexts that he explicitly ‘deplored’ was not, however, a pattern for which either Charles Leonard or Mala Powers should bear sole responsibility.18 The adaptation of Chekhov’s technique to such ‘adverse circumstances’ was begun, reluctantly or not, by Chekhov himself.19 In his ‘Concluding Notes’ for Leonard’s 1953 edition of To the Actor, he described his book as ‘another effort in the direction of a better theatre through better acting’, and an attempt to bring ‘some order and inspiration to our professional work’.20 Thus, the training of

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individual professional actors, which had been a side-line for the CTS, gradually became the main focus of Chekhov’s technique after its closure. Chekhov’s decision to re-frame his technique in this way was a response to the circumstances in which he found himself, not only as a teacher giving classes to actors outside of the context of a studio, but also in a field that was dominated (then as now) by what he considered to be the only other ‘method expressly postulated for the actor—that of Konstantin Stanislavsky’.21 Chekhov explicitly distinguished himself from Stanislavsky in three principal ways. First, he observed on numerous occasions that whereas Stanislavsky intended an objective to be taken ‘with our brain, with our thinking abilities’, in Chekhov’s technique it is essential ‘to imagine that you are doing this’ and thus to ‘fill your whole being with the action’.22 This difference is legible in the first chapter of the 1953 To the Actor, ‘The Actor’s Body and Psychology’, which begins with the statement ‘It is a known fact that the human body and psychology influence each other and are in constant interplay’, and Chekhov counselled actors against finding themselves with ‘wonderful thoughts and emotions […] chained inside […] undeveloped bodies’.23 Recalling his final meeting with Stanislavsky, Chekhov focused on two further areas of difference between their approaches: the use of personal feelings in performance and the approach to developing a character. Chekhov understood Stanislavsky to require actors to draw on their ‘personal, intimate life’ in order to call up feelings, and to discover characters by placing themselves in similar situations. Chekhov argued, therefore, that these two differences between their approaches, ‘are in essence one’, which he summarised with the following question: ‘do the personal, untransformed feelings of the actor need to be eliminated from, or engaged in, the creative process?’24 Chekhov’s interpretation of Stanislavsky’s technique harked, inevitably, back to the period in which they worked most closely together, between 1912 and 1916, when Chekhov was an actor in the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. Sharon Carnicke has observed that this was ‘Stanislavsky’s most Tolstoyan period’, in the sense that he was deeply committed to ‘self-expression, the recall of emotion, and the artist’s use of personal experience’, a commitment which he later tempered substantially.25 Carnicke also observes, however, that the figure of Stanislavsky became yet more closely associated with these ideas as a result of his representation by the American actor and teacher Lee Strasberg, one of the pioneers of the American Method and therefore, in Carnicke’s words, ‘the living embodiment of [a] Stanislavskian tradition’ that ‘emphasized Stanislavsky’s early work’ with respect to both emotion and characterisation,26 and sought to erase ‘difference between the actor and character’.27 In the post-war period, the American Method rapidly became so ubiquitous as an approach to actor training in the States that, in 1961, the actor Geraldine Page could call it ‘what all actors do anyway’, only allowing that ‘people who study Method do it a little more consciously and deliberately’.28 Strasberg was the American Method’s most influential teacher, and the most dogmatic

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advocate of engaging ‘the personal, untransformed feelings of the actor […] in the creative process’. Given the Method’s dominance, Chekhov’s opposition to one of its core principles unavoidably positioned his technique as a challenge to it. Indeed, Chekhov explicitly opposed the way in which practitioners of the Method sought to suture the actor’s personal feelings and memories to the character’s situation through, for example, Strasberg’s technique of ‘emotion memory’, Meisner’s ‘emotional preparation’, and Uta Hagen’s ‘substitution’. ‘When we are possessed by the part’, Chekhov told an audience of actors in 1941 (many of whom were students of the Method), ‘and almost kill our partners and break chairs, etc., then we are not free and it is not art but hysterics’.29 Chekhov proposed, instead, that an actor should cultivate a divided consciousness, including the capacity to be ‘filled with feelings’ which are ‘artistic’ rather than personal, and which can therefore be used by the performer from a partially detached position which he usually described as ‘higher consciousness’. Likewise, rather than seeking similarities between actor and character, Chekhov argued that ‘every talented actor is possessed by the desire to transform himself, that is: to play each part as a character part’,30 and sought to train actors to transform themselves through a process of imagining and incorporating images, the subject of the second chapter in the 1953 To the Actor. Thus, the post-war American context of the dissemination of Chekhov’s technique reframed his distinction from Stanislavsky into the opposition of his technique to the Method. It is clear, then, that representations of Chekhov’s technique after the closure of the CTS were increasingly formulated as a method for actor training rather than theatre-making, and in contradistinction to the culturally dominant approach of the American Method. In spite of this opposition between Chekhov’s technique and the Method, however, both approaches were shaped, both explicitly and tacitly, by professional contexts that were increasingly determined in the post-war period by film and television. In these contexts, actors functioned as individuals, struggling to secure increasingly brief periods of employment in an industry where jobs were extremely scarce. Even in the theatre, where periods of employment could be measured at least in weeks rather than days, actors habitually began their work, as Ric Knowles has observed, long after a production’s guiding ideas had been fixed, ideas which therefore had only to be ‘worked out and applied’ in rehearsal rather than created, explored, or developed.31 Inevitably, this situation shaped the discipline of actor training by encouraging actors and teachers of acting to prioritise techniques that could be practised alone and would serve swiftly to address logistical or technical problems likely to arise in production. There are, for example, seventeen explicitly articulated acting exercises in the 1953 To the Actor, of which the vast majority are designed for individuals and only two require a group (though Chekhov notes that, for example, ‘Exercises on Atmosphere can be done most successfully by a group’).32 The scope of the individualised problems for which such acting

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techniques were offered as solutions was, furthermore, tightly constrained, as Knowles argues, by ‘the frame of pre-show publicity and the audience expectations that it creates’, by ‘conceptions of […] characters’ and ‘the confines of a pre-designed floor-plan’ that had been decided in advance of the actors’ employment, and, of course, by the ways in which the actors’ training had already anticipated such conditions and shaped their conception of their function accordingly.33 Proponents of Chekhov’s technique would argue that, in many respects, it seeks to oppose this process, and Chapter 5 will offer considerable justification for that argument. It is nonetheless true, however, that, in seeking to represent the technique developed at the CTS for a wider audience, Chekhov and his collaborators were forced to adapt it to fit the expectations of a system of employment and an ideological context for which it was not primarily intended.

Studio-schools: Learning and teaching Chekhov after the CTS The second collection of remnants of the CTS is a group of organisations dedicated to the teaching and development of Chekhov’s technique by studio members. Given the studio’s move to the United States, these organisations were all based there. As Jerri Daboo notes, ‘there was no continuous transmission of [Chekhov’s] work in Britain in the aftermath of the Studio’.34 Charles Marowitz reports that ‘[t]oward the end of the war, a small nucleus of Chekhov actors […] created the High Valley Players in Ojai, California’.35 However, like the ‘various studios’ at which Chekhov was reportedly teaching while living and working in Hollywood, most of these organisations were small and informal groups of actors who met regularly to develop their craft.36 Joanna Merlin, president of the American Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA) recalls, for example, classes in Chekhov’s Beverley Hills living room in 1949, which were relocated to ‘a renovated garage’ as student numbers grew to between 25 and 30 and the group began to call itself the Michael Chekhov Drama Society.37 The pattern of activities that Merlin describes, combining lectures by Chekhov, classes on technique and improvisation, directed scenes, and play readings, is familiar from the CTS, but the Drama Society was a ‘mixed group’, never an ensemble, and was purely a vehicle for Chekhov’s teaching.38 When he died, it ‘ended’.39 Merlin describes the following twenty-five years as ‘the dark ages’ for Chekhov’s technique, a situation which she attributes primarily to the dominance of the Method. This period came to a close with Beatrice Straight and Robert Cole founding the Michel Chekhov Studio New York in Garfield, 1980. Here, classes were taught by three former members of the CTS, Eleanor Faison, Deirdre Hurst du Prey, and Felicity Mason, none of whom, as Merlin notes, had acted professionally and who ‘did not align with the New York scene’.40 That ‘scene’ had been dominated, since 1947, by the Actors’ Studio, where Strasberg taught from 1950, rising to become artistic director and the studio’s sole teacher

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from 1951 until his death in 1982.41 New York-based actors could also learn versions of the Method from Stella Adler at the Erwin Piscator Workshop and then the Stella Adler Theatre Studio (founded in 1949), from Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen at the HB Studio (founded in 1945), and from Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre (where he became head of the acting program in 1940). Though not all of these organisations had the title of ‘studio’, their similarity and common use of that term combined to redefine it as a private organisation focused on the ongoing training of professional actors. Although there were debates about whether or not the Actors’ Studio should produce plays (and in 1964 Strasberg famously directed an Actors’ Studio production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters),42 these organisations generally focused on training to the exclusion of production. They also did not seek to create ensembles. The Actors’ Studio did have a membership, but, as Sharon Carnicke observes, it was ‘a special kind of club where members could perfect their acting without pressures of production, exercise their skills and test their limits’ in order to ‘help them succeed in a difficult and insecure profession’.43 I will therefore term these organisations ‘studio-schools’. The actor Maureen Stapleton offered a frank account of the difficulty and insecurity of her profession: ‘actors are expendable, like cattle, because so few jobs are available. Actors spend years and years being treated like dirt. They’re constantly in a state of debasement, making the rounds of casting directors and having to look happy and great’.44 This was the context that gave rise to the New York studio-schools: they offered artistic sanctuary to actors who ‘lived’, as Elia Kazan (director and co-founder of the Actors’ Studio) recalled in more romantic terms than Stapleton, ‘like the longshoreman on the waterfront […] on the curb’, always seeking work.45 In Geraldine Page’s memory of her early career that debasing experience was implicitly offset by the pride she took in training: ‘I took acting lessons with Uta Hagen and made the rounds asking for work’.46 Furthermore, although the Actors’ Studio managed to secure enough charitable support to remain free to join for those who passed the audition, most actors making the rounds were also paying for their classes. After all, their teachers were either making the rounds too or otherwise dependent upon an income from teaching that only a regular flow of students could guarantee. Therefore, just as actors’ insecure employment made every job also an audition for the next, their teachers’ insecure employment made every class also an advertisement for the next. It is therefore no surprise that, with the exception of Strasberg (who had made the Method his own), successful teachers began increasingly to develop exercises and techniques that were identifiably theirs, which they also recorded in books, to develop distinct brand-like identities. This is true of none more than Sanford Meisner: the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre now sells itself as ‘the home of the Meisner Technique’.47 Consequently, there was a gradual but marked shift in the training of actors in studio-schools: increasingly teachers of acting did not exactly teach acting,

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they taught acting techniques. Like the exercises recorded in the 1953 To the Actor, the acting techniques taught at these studio-schools focused predominantly on developing the skills of the individual performer. In the process, studio-schools fragmented the work of acting into a set of technical challenges to be solved by the application of particular techniques, and fragmented play-texts into separate parts and scenes. The actor Kim Stanley recalled working at the Actors’ Studio on ‘a part’,48 for example, and it is clear from records of courses taught by Meisner and Uta Hagen that the unit of study towards which student actors would work in this context was the scene.49 This process of fragmentation was, no doubt, significantly influenced by working practices in film, where rehearsal was rare and scenes were invariably shot out of order with actors present only when they were required. As a result, whatever technique was taught in any given studio-school, it needed to enable actors to create a performance without rehearsal and on demand, but not necessarily to develop a performance in collaboration with other actors, much less to reflect more widely on what the artistry of an actor might entail, and how it might relate to other aspects of the entire theatre-making process. The organisations dedicated to Chekhov’s technique in the States since the 1980s have all adopted the model of the studio-school. They emerged from Cole and Straight’s Michael Chekhov Studio and the Michael Chekhov Studio in Los Angeles, run by Chekhov’s former student Jack Colvin,50 both of which enabled former members of the CTS and students of Chekhov to pass his technique to new generations of actors and teachers. The second generation included Lenard Petit, Ted Pugh, and Fern Sloan, who are now faculty members of the leading American organisation currently devoted to Chekhov’s legacy, the Michael Chekhov Association (MICHA). MICHA was incorporated in 1999 and runs annual two-week courses in Chekhov’s technique. These aimed, initially, to provide a community for Chekhov practitioners and ‘to add a much-needed dimension to current methods of acting training, creating a new generation of practitioners that will incorporate Chekhov’s psycho-physical approach’.51 That mission has since been adapted slightly to become: connecting Chekhov’s legacy with future generations by cultivating an international community of performers, teachers, scholars and directors; researching approaches and providing opportunities to artists interested in a comprehensive teacher training in the Michael Chekhov Acting Technique. […] to be a support to and global resource for those engaged in practice and research as it relates to Chekhov’s psycho-physical approach and its many forms of application.52 In spite of the acknowledgement of the ‘many forms of application’ of Chekhov’s techniques, MICHA’s ‘mission’ is characteristic of current organisations dedicated to Chekhov’s work in its focus on training actors and teachers of

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acting. Other examples include Lenard Petit’s New York-based Michael Chekhov Acting Studio, which offers short courses and workshops, as well as a fuller, 24-week ‘professional actor’s training in the Michael Chekhov Technique’.53 Marketed and taught in this way, a technique cannot set its own objectives. It must emphasise its capacity to serve needs that exist beyond its purview. Thus, Petit makes what he evidently considers the uncontroversial statement that ‘[t]he actor develops his skills in order to be capable of everything demanded of him’.54 The extent to which the anticipated demands of professional work can shape the understanding of Chekhov’s technique is evident from a 2007 series of DVD masterclasses in Chekhov’s technique led by the MICHA faculty. In these classes, Joanna Merlin says that Chekhov’s techniques ‘are all intended to open the door to the emotions’,55 and, later, that ‘the challenge for the actor is to bring life to the words of the playwright’,56 assumptions about the purpose of actor training that owe more to the American Method than they do to the work of the CTS, where exercises intended to release emotion and work on extant play-texts were both relatively unusual. Reflecting on the usefulness of the masterclasses, the participating actors do not emphasise emotion as much as they do the process of finding a character. However, these two aims come together in what has become Chekhov’s most famous technique, the Psychological Gesture (or PG), upon which Merlin has focused in most of her teaching because ‘it consistently unlocks a deep, rich, primal core in the character’,57 and ‘leads you to the emotion’, making it ‘a great tool’.58 In fact, the PG (which is created by an actor to give expansive, physical form to their interpretation of a character’s over-arching objective) is only one of the uses of gesture developed by Chekhov at the CTS, and represents an elision of Chekhov’s explorations of gesture and of the objective. Thus, the rise to prominence of this conception of the PG is representative of the ways in which studio-schools have accommodated Chekhov’s technique to an understanding of dramaturgy that is dominated by characters’ objectives and a conception of the actor’s function as the fleshing out of existing scripts with realistic emotional life. This framing of Chekhov’s technique aligns its aims (somewhat ironically) with those of the American Method, and echoes the way in which the American Method accommodated Stanislavsky’s system to the industrial conditions and cultural values of post-war America. It is not my purpose here, however, to criticise any particular teachers of Chekhov’s techniques, or to detract from their achievements in keeping his ideas and practices alive. Nor do I intend to offer a detailed analysis of the intersections between their teaching and the operations of cultural hegemony, which would be to focus unduly on one aspect of their practice to the occlusion of others. I am simply asserting that studio-schools cannot help but serve the interests of the culture of acting and actor training that produced them. Therefore, regardless of the technique they set out to teach, studio-schools have tacitly reinforced an aesthetically conservative view of acting which is inevitably also

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ideologically deeply bound up in the dominant values of their culture. In the case of the American Method, for example, Rosemary Malague has comprehensively demonstrated that its exercises have frequently incorporated the values of patriarchy: [t]he woman who offered herself as a victim or sexual object surely was […] the most marketable actress. […] Just as the women of the class were rewarded for their figures and fragility, so were the men rewarded for their muscles and masculinity.59 Likewise, the actor Harold Scott, who was African-American, noted that, in spite of the stated aim of actor training to produce versatile performers, versatility was not a requirement of the industry: ‘no one wants it. Everyone wants types’, he said.60 He described the way in which the process of ‘auditioning for parts’ leads actors to ‘form a kind of audition-interview personality’. Scott was equally clear-sighted about the racist values that governed the demand for such personalities: ‘[m]y particular difficulty is that I’m not dark enough to play an African or light enough to play a white. Not many of the good parts are designed as Negro roles’.61 These are the realities underpinning the possibilities of training in any acting technique in studio-schools, which are established to serve the theatre of the present rather than the ‘theatre of the future’ at which Chekhov aimed, and are unable to intervene meaningfully in the culture for which they prepare their students. Unavoidably, therefore, these limitations prohibited studio-schools from using Chekhov’s technique as a basis for reforming the theatre, which had been his central ambition at the CTS.

The CTS and mainstream acting: Paul Rogers in The Homecoming (1965) and Beatrice Straight in Network (1970) In spite of the limitations of conceiving of Chekhov’s techniques primarily as a means of training actors for mainstream theatre, film, and television, they have undeniably been successful in those fields. The two principal examples from the CTS are the actors Paul Rogers and Beatrice Straight, both of whom went on to extremely successful careers in the UK and USA respectively. Paul Rogers left the Chekhov Studio when it transferred to America at the end of 1938 so that he could marry his fellow student Jocelyn Wynne and begin an acting career. He did so despite what he recalled was the British theatre’s ‘overwhelming disinterest’ in the CTS: ‘they had actually got as far as accepting Michel Saint-Denis,’ he said, ‘and that was revolutionary enough’.62 Nonetheless, a description of the CTS in Audrey Williamson’s 1956 study of Rogers’ career63 and an interview with Rogers, recorded by television director Martin Sharp in August 2000, demonstrate that the actor drew on his training throughout his working life.64 After making his debut with three small parts at the Scala

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Theatre, London, in 1938, and then working as an assistant stage manager, understudy, and walk-on in the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre’s 1939 season, Rogers joined Colchester Repertory Company in 1939. The war brought service in the Royal Navy until 1946, when he returned to Colchester. In 1947, he began to make a name for himself in the Bristol Old Vic Company and then joined the Old Vic Company at the New Theatre, London in 1949, where he remained, gradually ascending to leading parts, and with occasional contracts elsewhere, until 1957. He then moved on to what Michael Coveney described as his ‘golden period’ at the RSC in the mid-1960s, and joined the National Theatre Company in the 1970s.65 The emphasis placed by Chekhov on transformation in his technique seems powerfully to have influenced Rogers, who was well known for his versatility. Cecil Wilson wrote of his Old Vic performances that ‘one of these nights, Paul Rogers will walk onto the stage … looking something like himself and nobody will recognize him’.66 This quality was also recognised by Michael Redgrave, who inscribed an edition of Don Quixote, given to Rogers as a Christmas present in 1949, ‘To Paul Rogers—the only actor I can think of who could conceivably play both Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’.67 Partly as a result of this talent, and partly because he had, as he said, ‘the wrong shape of face altogether’ for leading juvenile roles, Rogers gradually became known, as Audrey Williamson wrote, ‘as a character actor in the widest sense of that definition’.68 Rogers was most successful in character parts such as Shylock (Old Vic, 1953) and Falstaff (Old Vic, 1955; RSC, 1966), but he was best known as the ageing patriarch Max in the first production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, directed by Peter Hall (RSC, 1965). In 1967, the production transferred to Broadway, where Rogers’ performance won him a Tony Award. Beatrice Straight remained central in the CTS until its closure, but then moved to New York, joining the Actors’ Studio when it opened, and beginning a successful Broadway career, winning a Tony Award for her portrayal of Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible (1953). Straight also worked in television, but infrequently in film. However, she is probably now best known for a very brief role in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network, for which she won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Despite its extreme brevity (she appears twice, her only full scene being just under four and a half minutes long), Straight’s performance is a revealing example of Chekhov’s technique at work. Straight plays Louise Schumacher, the wife of William Holden’s central character, Max Schumacher, a television executive forced out of his job running the news division of a major network, who then has an affair with Diana Christensen, a younger and intensely ambitious executive, played by Faye Dunaway. The film’s subject is the now-common oxymoron ‘reality television’. Max’s news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) is lured by the promise of this new genre and reborn as a kind of millenarian prophet inveighing against television culture (and vastly improving the network’s viewing figures in the process). He lives and ultimately

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dies by television, assassinated on air in a publicity stunt and becoming, in the film’s final line, ‘the first man to die because of bad ratings’. Beale’s absurd, satirical narrative is a counterpoint to the realist plot described by Max, who is caught between the terms of the film’s guiding idea: his wife standing for reality, and his lover for television. Max makes the contrast explicit, telling Louise that Diana is one of the ‘television generation’ who ‘learned life from Bugs Bunny’. Almost the entire film is set in the world of television, so the pressure on Beatrice Straight’s performance is high: anything less than a powerful, sobering dose of ‘reality’ and the ‘real feelings’ of which Max suspects his lover is incapable, would leave the film unbalanced, and its central character without a crisis. That challenge was heightened by the role’s brevity: Straight must give the impression of a whole character in a single, short scene. The role’s challenge may have reminded Straight of an exercise on the ‘Feeling of the Whole’ set for her and Deirdre Hurst by Chekhov in May 1936: ‘try to convey this “whole” through very short movements and speeches’, Chekhov had said.69 For a performance to feel ‘whole’, it must have a clear composition, which is principally achieved, in Chekhov’s technique, by following the principles of ‘polarity’ and ‘triplicity’. Straight’s main scene in Network, which marks the event of her separation from her husband, is composed of two polarities which we might think of as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. The ‘outer’ polarity is from marriage to separation, mapped by the scene’s movement from the domestic space of the kitchen to the semi-public space of the living room. The scene’s ‘inner’ polarity, however, travels in the opposite direction, from separation to unity. The characters begin in silence, separated by the kitchen table (Figure 4.1) and end face-to-

FIGURES 4.1 AND 4.2 William Holden and Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:14:59, 1:19:32).

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FIGURES 4.1 AND 4.2

(Cont.)

face, Louise telling her husband that ‘You’re in for some dreadful grief, Max’ (Figure 4.2), and Max nodding: ‘I know’. The progression from the scene’s beginning to end falls (as Chekhov says any scene ‘inevitably’ will) ‘into three sections: the plot generates, unfolds and concludes’.70 It begins with Straight’s Louise having just been told of Max’s affair (Figure 4.3). She has been rocked by the news and is moving very slightly from side to side with a quick inner tempo. Her outer tempo is slow, however: she is concealing or controlling her feelings. The section in which the scene’s plot ‘unfolds’ begins when Max tells

FIGURES 4.3 AND 4.4 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1976 (1:15:31, 1:16:18).

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FIGURES 4.3 AND 4.4

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(Cont.)

Louise that he’s in love with Diana. At this point, her quick inner tempo bursts out and she becomes openly aggressive (Figure 4.4). The ‘concluding’ section begins when she tells Max that ‘I hurt badly’ and asks him to speak to her (Figure 4.5). In it, they reconcile themselves to the situation and to each other. These sections in Straight’s performance are also marked by a movement through three different centres. Chekhov’s technique makes use of three archetypal centres, connected to the three ways in which he proposes that human beings interact with the world, through ‘ideas, thoughts’, ‘feelings and emotions’, and ‘will impulses’:71 ‘around your head is the feeling of space and power, the power of thought. Around your chest will be the power of feeling, and around your feet the power of will’.72 Figures 4.3 and 4.4 show Straight’s performance of Louise moving from the thought centre (as she tries to understand Max’s confession) into the will centre (as she attacks him for what he has done). The movement is marked by a sudden cut from the close-up in which we have viewed Straight’s Louise to a full-length shot which allows her to stride around the table behind Max, out into the hallway, into the living room and back into the hallway. She does so following will-impulses, berating her husband and telling him to ‘get out’, and her movements break both the frame of her close-up and the boundaries of the rooms in the apartment. Her expansive gestures also originate lower in her body. In the final section, she moves into the centre of her feelings, which she addresses directly for the first time, and her voice moves into the chest register, where her movements also originate (Figure 4.5). As well as using these movements between centres to underscore the development of the scene and create the feeling of a whole character (composed of thought, will, and feeling), Straight uses distinct directions of movement to

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Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1976 (1:17:37).

FIGURE 4.5

score the scene. In the first section, she recoils and contracts down and to her left (Figure 4.6), while her objective (to make Max reveal the truth) is characterised by a forceful movement towards him, led by her right side (Figure 4.7). In the second section, this polarity of moving laterally away from and towards Max is expanded as are the inner movement of falling when Straight moves away (note the downward movement of her head in Figure 4.8) and rising when she moves towards him (Figure 4.9).

FIGURES 4.6 AND 4.7 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1976 (1:15:53, 1:16:02).

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FIGURES 4.6 AND 4.7

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(Cont.)

FIGURES 4.8 AND 4.9 Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1976 (1:16:38, 1:16:54).

In the final section, by contrast, Straight is outwardly very still. There is one slight move to the left, away from Max, which breaks their embrace (Figure 4.11), but otherwise the dynamic of Straight’s performance has settled onto the vertical axis: falling as she accepts the situation (Figure 4.10), and rising calmly as she calmly insists that Max must leave (Figure 4.12). The inner and outer movements with which Straight builds her performance in this scene thus generate both an admirable clarity of form and what

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FIGURES 4.8 AND 4.9

(Cont.)

Beatrice Straight in Network, dir. Sidney Lumet, Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1976 (1:18:00, 1:18:03, 1:18:15).

FIGURES 4.10–4.12

Chekhov calls the feeling of entirety or wholeness. In fact, Straight’s performance exemplifies Chekhov’s instruction to his students to ‘appreciate every movement … otherwise it would be a small picture and not part of the whole’.73 Furthermore, Straight’s detailed use of inner movement to communicate the depth of her character’s ‘real feelings’ creates a successful polarity in the wider film. In Faye Dunaway’s performance, Louise’s opposite, Diana, is all surface. Her physical attitudes are reminiscent of the blank

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FIGURES 4.10–4.12

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(Cont.)

and studied composure of a fashion model, and when the ‘real feelings’ of which Max suspects she’s ‘incapable’ do intrude, they are swiftly dismissed. Therefore, Straight’s performance is not only whole in itself, but resonates crucially beyond its confines to contribute to the wholeness of the wider film. Artistry grounded in Chekhov’s acting technique is equally but differently in evidence in Paul Rogers’ performance of Max in The Homecoming, which can still be seen thanks to the 1973 screen version, directed by Peter Hall for Ely Landau’s American Film Theatre series. Interviewed about the production, Peter Hall recalled his leading actor’s intuitive grasp of Pinter’s character, which chimed uncannily with his own experience of visiting Hackney with Pinter to undertake research for the production:

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as we walked past a house, an old man came out, with a walking stick and a cloth cap and a cardigan, wearing sneakers […] and said ‘Harold, my boy, how are you? Come in and have a drink’ […] I was introduced, and Harold said ‘And how is Moishe?’ And we heard how Moishe was, and he was a professor of literature at a Canadian university […] And I said to Harold afterwards ‘is this how it all started?’ and he said […] ‘some of the triggers, certainly’ […] But what really shook me was that I don’t remember a moment when we said to Paul Rogers ‘why don’t you wear tennis shoes and a hat and carry a stick and wear a cardigan night and day?’ […] but there he was: the same Max that we met in Hackney.74 This is, indeed, the Max we first see in Hall’s film version, scrabbling in the kitchen drawer for a pair of scissors before walking into the living room, in a slight alteration to Pinter’s stage directions: MAX:

MAX:

comes in, from the direction of the kitchen. He goes to the sideboard, rummages in it, closes it. He wears an old cardigan and cap, and carries a stick. He walks downstage, stands, looks about the room. What have you done with the scissors? Pause. I said I’m looking for the scissors. What have you done with them?75

In June 1936, Chekhov had told Beatrice Straight and Deirdre Hurst, when training them to act as his assistants, that ‘the “how” is much more important than the “what” … Actors are always playing “what” and never “how”; therefore they are all so dry, so clever, so mechanical, so without soul’.76 For Chekhov, then, the question for an actor given Pinter’s detailed instructions for what he must do is how he should do it. How does Max go to the sideboard? How does he rummage, walk, stand, ‘look about the room’? How does he carry his stick? To answer these questions, Chekhov proposes that the actor must take her image of a character and incorporate it: The actor imagines with his body […]. The more developed and stronger the image, the more it stimulates the actor to physically incorporate it with his body and voice. On this natural ability of the actor we base our principle of Incorporation […]. The first step [the actor] must take is to imagine, as it were another body for himself […] But he must imagine this within his real, visible body, occupying the same space.77 This process is visible in Rogers’ opening movement as Max, particularly in his choice to carry his stick more or less horizontally at hip level, in a gripped fist (Figures 4.14 and 4.15). This action takes the external signifiers of character

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described by Hall (‘tennis shoes […] hat […] stick […] cardigan’)78 and transforms them into a dynamic image of Max’s forceful will, his domination of the domestic space he cuts across, and of the sudden violent aggression that attempts to mask an uncertainty which rattles inside him, like his hand, scrabbling in the drawer (Figure 4.13). Rogers’ portrayal of Max does not only incorporate this image of his costume into his performance, it also absorbs aspects of his scenic environment (as designed, for both stage and screen, by John Bury). Principal among these is the armchair which is the film’s centre-piece and was similarly prominent in the

Paul Rogers as Max and Ian Holm as Lenny: ‘What you have you done with the scissors?’ in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:01:56, 0:02:06, 0:02:31).

FIGURES 4.13–4.15

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FIGURES 4.13–4.15

(Cont.)

stage production. Rogers often uses the chair as a throne, expanding into it and incorporating its weight into his hanging elbows and slack jaw, and its imposing authority into the superior gestures of the hand that holds his cigar (Figures 4.16 and 4.17). The chair is not, however, only large and imposing. It is also squat, grey and seedy, coming apart at the seams and with its legs apparently ready to buckle at any moment. This may be considered simply to be symbolic, a parallel to be noticed by the observant viewer, but Rogers’ performance goes further than that: he regularly undermines his expansive forcefulness, scratching in his

FIGURES 4.16 AND 4.17 Paul Rogers as Max in his armchair in Act One of The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:11:15, 0:11:28).

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FIGURES 4.16 AND 4.17

149

(Cont.)

cardigan pockets and bowing under his own weight. He acts, therefore, with his clothing, and with the furniture and the setting, incorporating their forms and qualities into his performance in ways that, as we shall see, were integral to the practice of the CTS. Rogers’ capacity to move ‘in harmony with this construction’ [the play’s setting],79 as Chekhov requested of his students at the CTS, and to ‘incorporate’ the play ‘through chairs and tables and objects’ is an essential aspect of the film’s attempt, in Hall’s words, to ‘create a surrealistic style’ to fit Pinter’s play.80 Revealingly, however, Hall only discusses this style in relation to the design and cinematography. He recalls that the set had ‘the longest staircase of any house in London’, for example, and consisted of ‘a very bare and extraordinary room’, and that ‘the way that it’s shot is […] slightly stylized’.81 He did not, however, reflect on the ways in which the style is manifested in his actors’ performances. That absence is revealing because the performances are not consistent in style. They do all succeed in capturing the economy of Pinter’s play, an aspect stressed by the writer: ‘the key word is economy, economy of movement and gesture, of emotion and its expression, both the internal and the external in specific and exact relation to each other, so that there is no wastage and no mess’.82 The film’s ‘economy’ borders, in fact, on a complete absence of ‘movement and gesture’, and indeed of ‘emotion and its expression’. At Teddy and Lenny’s first meeting, for example, there are no manual gestures at all except Ian Holm’s Lenny folding his arms which had been clasped behind his back (Figures 4.18 to 4.20). This fixing of characters’ bodies in particular attitudes is typical of the film, and has the effect of throwing emphasis on their speech, in line with Hall’s stated intention for them to bring ‘down the performance to the right level for camera’ without ‘losing the verbal and cruel intensity of what they’re saying’.83

Michael Jayston as Teddy and Ian Holm as Lenny in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:26:33, 0:27:01, 0:27:12).

FIGURES 4.18–4.20

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The emphasis on speech is typical of Hall’s direction, but Rogers is unique among the cast in his ability to give the writing physiological substance. In this, he echoes Chekhov, who told his students at the CTS that: ‘in every part of your body the style, like blood, must run through you’.84 The dominant theme in the play’s style is its uncompromising masculinity, which stems primarily from the patriarchal figure of Max, described by Hall as a ‘violent, retired butcher’, ‘male, sarcastic, belligerent’ (see Figure 4.22), living in ‘a house [from] which he’s expunged all softness, all femininity, because his wife has betrayed him’, ‘nearing the end of his life and still fighting like a great resentful bull’ (Figure 4.21).85 Rogers does not, however, limit his performance to the heavy, blunt, bullish quality that Hall describes in his character. Possibly his most striking achievement is the way in which he subtly adapts his character to the style of Pinter’s text. Centering on domestic relationships, marriage, and infidelity, the play is more closely allied to comedy than Hall’s description suggests, and Rogers’ Max knows it. He tells anecdotes lightly while sipping coffee as though in a drawing-room comedy (Figure 4.23), for example; he grins grotesquely like a bleakly comic death’s head (Figure 4.24), and he strides in, stick jauntily over his shoulder as though in an end-of-the-pier sketch (Figure 4.25), to ask ‘Where’s the whore?’ Rogers’ performance is likewise successful in its incorporation of Pinter’s notorious pauses, rendering them, in Chekhov’s phrase, ‘spiritually awake and physically quiet’.86 By filling each pause with ‘inner’ movement, in this way, Rogers was responding to Hall’s direction ‘to have the courage to allow the inner life to go on inside you so that the pauses and the silences are filled with something’.87 In attempting to articulate what that ‘something’ might be, Hall reached, characteristically, to verbal content: ‘the pause is there because it actually is a line, and you may not say anything, but you have to express something,

FIGURE 4.21 Cyril Cusack as Sam and Paul Rogers as Max in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:12:59).

FIGURES 4.22–4.25 Paul Rogers as Max in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:18:25, 0:59:47, 0:52:59, 1:32:25).

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FIGURES 4.22–4.25

153

(Cont.)

and our task is to find out what that expression is’.88 Chekhov would have agreed that a pause must ‘express something’: ‘the strongest inner activity is a complete Pause’, he wrote, ‘[t]he Pause as emptiness, as a full stop, does not exist on the stage’.89 For Chekhov, however, a pause is not ‘actually […] a line’, but a glimpse of the continuous stream of inner life which runs through every play, but is often concealed by ‘outer action’: From the Point of View of Composition and Rhythm, where everything becomes a kind of ‘music,’ where everything moves, fluctuates, interweaves, we always experience a Pause on the stage. The Pause disappears only when the outer action is complete, when everything becomes outwardly expressed.90 Chekhov developed this idea of the pause’s relationship to outer action to elaborate two distinct kinds of pause: One … appears before a certain event takes place. It foretells what is to come … it awakens the audience’s anticipation. Through it the onlooker is prepared for the approaching scene. […] The other kind of Pause, quite opposite in character, appears after the action is fulfilled, and is a summing up of all that has happened before.91 Chekhov’s two pauses can be seen bracketing both the central action of The Homecoming, and the key polarity in Rogers’ portrayal of Max. The play’s anticipatory pause marks the moment when Max, Joey, and Sam first see Ruth and Teddy coming down the stairs in their dressing gowns (Figure 4.26). Here, Rogers’ Max expands into Hall’s ‘resentful bull’, before the

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Joey (Terence Rigby), Sam (Cyril Cusack), and Max (Paul Rogers) first see Ruth (Vivien Merchant) and Teddy (Michael Jayston) in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (0:48:31).

FIGURE 4.26

silence gives way to outer action, and he squares up to his eldest son, firing questions and accusations. The play’s ‘summing up’ pause is, in fact, a series of silences following Teddy’s departure (Figure 4.27): TEDDY:

RUTH: SAM: JOEY:

MAX: LENNY: MAX: MAX:

goes, shuts the front door. Silence. The three men stand. sits relaxed on her chair. lies still. walks slowly across the room. He kneels at her chair. She touches his head, lightly. He puts his head in her lap. begins to move above them, backwards and forwards. stands still. turns to LENNY. I’m too old, I suppose. She thinks I’m an old man. Pause. I’m not such an old man. Pause. (To RUTH.) You think I’m too old for you? Pause.92

Contrary to received wisdom about both Pinter and Hall’s meticulous insistence on the playing of pauses, Rogers does not play these strictly. Nor does he precisely

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Max (Paul Rogers) is ignored by Lenny (Ian Holm, right of frame) while Ruth (Vivien Merchant) strokes the hair of Joey (Terence Rigby) in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (1:47:26).

FIGURE 4.27

observe the pauses that punctuate his subsequent speech that concludes the play. The notated silences are not the only silences in his speech, they are not of equal length, and some of them he hardly observes. Nonetheless, his performance of the play’s ending is suffused with the quality of a pause, as opposed to the quality of outer action: the aggression that had erupted gradually from his opening pause seeps away in this haltingly confrontational sequence. In other words, Rogers does not simply play Max line-by-line, carefully marking pauses and silences, but creates a performance whose last moment communicates its entirety by embodying polarity: an old man, clinging onto his stature as life falls from him, both begs and struggles to dominate the woman whom he both desires and despises and who has displaced him from the centre of his domestic kingdom (Figures 4.28, 4.29, and 4.30). Both Rogers and Straight’s performances make, therefore, an eloquent case for the value of the training offered to actors by the CTS. The practical vocabulary that it generated can be seen to have been strikingly effective in enabling Rogers and Straight both theoretically to shape and practically to realise performances that are not only technically excellent but artistic expressions in their own right. Performances by Rogers and Straight should certainly, therefore, be considered significant remnants of the practice of the CTS in post-war AngloAmerican acting. Their success notwithstanding, however, these actors’ careers should not be considered as culminations of the work of the CTS in the way that Yvonne Mitchell, Joan Plowright or even Michael Redgrave’s could be argued to be for the LTS and OVC. Chekhov’s vision for ‘the theatre of the future’ to which the CTS was intended to contribute, was that it ‘must write its own plays’.93 Although Rogers and Straight can be seen here skilfully to have

Paul Rogers as Max collapsing after the line ‘she won’t be adaptable’, and telling Ruth (Vivien Merchant) to ‘kiss me’ in The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, dir. Peter Hall, American Film Theatre, 1973 (1:45:41, 1:47:33, 1:47:57).

FIGURES 4.28–4.30

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written their own performances, they did so within the tight constraints of hierarchically organised processes that located their artistry securely in the service of their writers. Although Rogers takes more liberties with Pinter’s script than theatrical lore would suggest was possible, there was never any question of active collaboration between the playwright and his actors. Network’s screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, exercised similar control over the creation of his scripts, saying that his scripts were ‘precise’, and that ‘I know what I want my characters to say’.94 Receiving her Oscar, Straight praised this quality in Chayefsky’s script, which, she said, captured ‘things that we all feel but can’t express’.95 In the imagination and precision with which Rogers and Straight respond to Pinter and Chayefsky’s scripts, they eloquently demonstrate the artistry of the actor that the CTS sought to develop. However, like the articulations of Chekhov’s technique and the studio-schools dedicated to training actors in its practice explored above, these performances fall, unavoidably, short of the complete art of the theatre that was the central aim of Chekhov’s studio. The project of the CTS was, in short, a great deal broader and more far-reaching in its intention to re-create the theatre than any of the remnants of the CTS enumerated here could be. It is to that project that Chapter 5 will turn.

Notes 1 M. Chekhov, Lessons for Teachers of his Acting Technique, transcribed with an introduction by Deirdre Hurst du Prey (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000), 9. It comprises transcripts of lessons taught by Chekhov to Hurst and Straight at Dartington in the spring of 1936, in advance of the studio’s formal opening. 2 M. Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, ed. D. Hurst du Prey (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1992). It comprises transcripts of Chekhov’s 1941 classes and lectures for Broadway actors and members of the Group Theatre (for a complete list of participants in the classes, see p. 19). 3 These lectures were recorded in Hollywood under the auspices of a group which was known as Michael Chekhov’s Drama Society: M. Chekhov, To the Actor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), xlii. The cassettes were published by Applause Theatre Books, and the CDs by Working Arts Library, 2004. 4 M. Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, ed. M. Gordon (New York: Harper Collins, 1991). 5 The Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio Deirdre Hurst du Prey Archive (hereafter MCTSDHPA), held for the Dartington Hall Trust at the Devon Records Office, Exeter, UK, MC/S9/2. 6 T. Cornford, ‘Michael Chekhov: Directing an Actor’s Theatre’, in Russian Theatre in Practice, ed. A. Skinner (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 98. 7 See A. Hodge, ed., Actor Training (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), xviii; she uses the term ‘early pioneers’ to describe this group. 8 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, xxxiii. 9 Ibid., xxxii. 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Ibid., 146. 12 Ibid., xxxv. 13 Chekhov, To the Actor, xxvi–xxvii. 14 Ibid., xliii.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

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Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 159. Chekhov, To the Actor, xxvii. Ibid., xxvii. Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 159. Ibid. Chekhov To the Actor, 160. Ibid. References to Chekhov’s classes and rehearsals are taken, unless otherwise indicated, from the transcriptions collected by Deirdre Hurst (later Deirdre Hurst Du Prey) under the title ‘The Actor Is the Theatre’, and now held in MCTSDHPA, MC/ S1/7–12. This is from September 30, 1937 (emphasis original). Chekhov, To the Actor, 1. M. Chekhov, ‘Life and Encounters’, trans. David Ball (unpublished full translation: courtesy of Michael Chekhov UK), 39. S. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus: An Acting Master for the Twenty-First Century, Second edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 142, 133. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 146. L. Ross and H. Ross, The Player: A Profile of an Art (New York: Limelight Editions, 1984), 427–8 (emphasis original). Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, 102. ‘Mask of Character’, in Michael Chekhov On the Art of Acting (CD, Working Arts Library, 2004). R. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 32. Chekhov, To the Actor, 58. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre, 31. J. Daboo, ‘Michael Chekhov and the Studio in Dartington: The Re-membering of a Tradition’, in Russians in Britain: British Theatre and the Russian Tradition of Actor Training, ed. J. Pitches (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 62–85, 632. C. Marowitz, The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov, the Legendary Actor, Director & Theorist (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2004), 194. Marie-Christine Autuant-Mathieu and Yana Meerzon, eds, The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 406. J. Merlin, ‘The Legacy of Michael Chekhov: Then and Now’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autuant-Mathieu and Meerzon, 89–98, 389–90. Ibid., 390. Ibid., 391. Ibid., 393. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 55. The production opened at the Morosco Theater on June 22, 1964, and a film version directed by Paul Bogart was released in 1966. Carnicke, Stanislavsky in Focus, 53. Ross and Ross, The Player, 303. David Garfield, A Player’s Place: The Story of The Actors’ Studio (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 46. Ross and Ross, The Player, 426. Accessed December 18, 2018, http://neighborhoodplayhouse.org/home. Ross and Ross, The Player, 14. S. Meisner and D. Longwell, Sanford Meisner on Acting (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012b) and Uta Hagen’s Acting Class DVD (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 2004). Merlin, ‘Legacy’, 393. Ibid., 394.

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52 ‘Our Story’, American Michael Chekhov Association, accessed December 20, 2018, www.michaelchekhov.org/our-story/. 53 Accessed December 19, 2018, http://michaelchekhovactingstudio.com/programs.html. 54 L. Petit, The Michael Chekhov Handbook: For the Actor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 11. 55 ‘Masterclasses in the Michael Chekhov Technique: Introduction and Teacher Conversation’, accessed December 20, 2018, www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/col lections/micha-michael-chekhov-association/teachers. 56 ‘Masterclasses in the Michael Chekhov Technique: The Psychological Gesture’, accessed December 20, 2018, www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education/collections/ micha-michael-chekhov-association/class7. 57 Merlin, ‘Legacy’, 390. 58 ‘Masterclasses: The Psychological Gesture’. 59 R. Malague, An Actress Prepares: Women and ‘the Method’ (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012b), 5. 60 Ross and Ross, The Player, 326. 61 Ibid., 331. 62 Ibid. 63 A. Williamson, Paul Rogers (London: Rockliff, 1956), 22–35. 64 M. Sharp, Interview with Paul Rogers, August 1, 2000. 65 M. Coveney, ‘Obituary: Paul Rogers’, The Guardian, October 14, 2013. 66 Williamson, Paul Rogers, 13. 67 Ibid., 57. 68 Ibid., 14. 69 Chekhov, Lessons for Teachers of His Acting Technique, 45. 70 Chekhov, To the Actor, 94. 71 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 28. 72 October 5, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7–12. 73 October 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7–12. 74 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’, The Homecoming DVD (American Film Theatre Collection, 1973). 75 H. Pinter, Plays: 3 (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 15. 76 Chekhov, Lessons for Teachers of His Acting Technique, 69–70. 77 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 95–100. 78 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’. 79 October 4, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7–12. 80 March 16, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7–12. For more information about Chekhov’s approach to enabling actors to work with scenography, see S. Rushe, ‘Feeling Space, Making Space: Michael Chekhov’s Approach to Theatre Design’, in Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways, ed. C. Fleming and T. Cornford (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 81 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’. 82 H. Pinter, Plays: 3 (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 11. 83 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’. 84 November 24, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7–12. 85 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’. 86 D. Hurst Du Prey, ed., ‘The Training Sessions of Michael Chekhov’, Arts Archives: Theatre Papers, The Third Series 1981–2, Arts Documentation Unit, University of Exeter,2004, 54. 87 ‘Interview with Peter Hall’. 88 Ibid. 89 Chekhov, To the Actor, 118. 90 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 137. 91 Ibid., 138. 92 Pinter, Plays: 3, 88.

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93 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 1936, 18; for a specific account of Chekhov’s experiments in collaborative playwriting at the CTS, see T. Cornford ‘Actor-Dramaturgs and Atmospheric Dramaturgies: Chekhov Technique in Processes of Collaborative Playwriting’, in Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Fleming and Cornford. 94 J. Brady, The Craft of the Screenwriter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 55, 61. 95 Beatrice Straight, ‘Oscar Acceptance Speech, 1977’, accessed January 2, 2019, www. youtube.com/watch?v=o3g7kclmm0I.

5 PRACTICES OF THE CHEKHOV THEATRE STUDIO

The CTS curriculum: technique, artistry, and social purpose In July 1936, publicity copy was agreed by the managing committee of the Chekhov Theatre Studio (CTS), announcing its opening later that year at Dartington Hall, and setting out the organisation’s aims: Through the Chekhov Theatre Studio, Mr. Chekhov desires to build a new theatre, intelligible to every spectator, regardless of language or of intellectual content. For such a theatre it will be necessary to have a new technique, re-scrutinized and revitalized. Mr Chekhov will endeavour to evolve a new type of actor, producer, author and designer, through whom all the elements of theatrical expression will be welded into one harmony, establishing a closer link between stage and audience. The Chekhov Theatre Studio’s work will be introduced to the outside world at the end of the three years training period, through the resultant permanent touring company.1 This document also states that Chekhov would refuse any interview with the press, having ‘found from the past that much harm can be done by ill-informed reporters, and statements can be imputed which were never made’. Interested parties were therefore directed to a publicity ‘booklet’, which ‘states [Chekhov’s] ideals very clearly’, and would be distributed, among others, to the president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic, the actress Sybil Thorndike, the director Tyrone Guthrie, and Anmer Hall, manager of the Westminster Theatre. The studio’s booklet did indeed offer a detailed summary of the ways in which the CTS proposed to ‘build a new theatre’, by developing ‘a new technique’ and, thereby, ‘a new type of actor, producer, author and

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designer’, who would be capable of the kind of harmonious ‘theatrical expression’ that, Chekhov believed, would create ‘a closer contact between stage and audience’.2 It laid out its curriculum in the following sections: ‘Exercises’, ‘Dramatic Studies, Improvisations and Extracts from Plays’, ‘Production’, ‘Laws of Composition, Harmony and Rhythm’, ‘Stage Design, Lighting, Make-Up etc.’, ‘Co-ordinated Experimental Work’, ‘Lectures on the History and Development of the Theatre and Playwriting’, and ‘Appearances before a Selected Audience’. These can be grouped into three areas of Chekhov’s vision for the CTS: the development of ‘a new technique’, the generation of a new breed of theatre artists, and the inculcation of the social purpose of generating ‘a closer link between stage and audience’ into all aspects of its work. Technique was to be developed through ‘Exercises’, ‘Dramatic Studies, Improvisations and Extracts from Plays’, and ‘Production’. ‘Exercises’ would focus on four areas: the inner powers of ‘concentration and use of the imagination’; the body as ‘an instrument of the dramatic artist’, and two areas of study drawn from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, by whom Chekhov was profoundly influenced: ‘Eurhythmy’ and ‘speech-formation’. The skills developed in these disciplines would be applied to ‘Dramatic Studies, Improvisations and Extracts from Plays’, and then to ‘Production’, so that students would ‘learn the technique of studying whole productions with special reference to the methods necessary for a thorough approach to the main idea of the play’. As this description suggests, Chekhov conceived of the relationship between technique and production dialectically, telling his students that ‘we need special study for each play’.3 Consequently, working on improvisations and extracts from plays did not simply involve the application of techniques learned in ‘exercises’ to different contexts, but the expansion of those techniques by a process of adapting them to what Chekhov called the ‘special world’ of each play.4 This process of adaptation was achieved, in practice, by moving back and forth between aspects of the curriculum that were focused on acting technique and areas of study that shifted the focus to the development of artists of the theatre more broadly conceived. Foremost among these was the study of ‘Laws of Composition, Harmony and Rhythm’, in which students would ‘acquire a feeling for composition, harmony and rhythm, not in a specific musical sense, but in a form adaptable to the uses of the theatre’. The historical development of these ‘laws’ was to be explored through ‘Lectures on the History and Development of the Theatre and Playwriting’. These are known to have been given in 1936 and 1937 by Georgette Boner,5 a Swiss German artist and scholar who is accurately described by Crista Mittelsteiner as Chekhov’s ‘most intimate interlocutor’.6 After their first meeting in Paris in 1931, Boner attended Chekhov’s rehearsals and performances, offered him financial support, and between 1932 and 1934 worked with him on what she described as ‘a book about the art of dramatic acting’.7 As Mittelsteiner observes, however, Boner ‘remained limited to the role of observer’, and a source of ‘unconditional acceptance’ for

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Chekhov’s ideas.8 We can therefore reasonably assume that Boner’s lectures at the CTS were designed so as to offer historical justification for Chekhov’s ideas, just as her role in the development of his 1934 manuscript was ‘to find complementary practical examples and/or extracts from dramatic texts to illustrate his statements’.9 These theoretical subjects were combined with the more explicitly practical study of ‘Stage Design, Lighting, Make-Up etc.’, to generate ‘Coordinated Experimental Work’, offering the opportunity for students ‘to bring together in practical form all the elements of instruction in the studio’ and ‘to express original artistic ideas, whether as actors, producers, playwrights, scene painters or costume designers’. This ‘experimental work’ developed as an extension of the studies, improvisations, and extracts that were usually referred to as ‘sketches’. Material first explored in sketch-form by the students in October and November 1936, for example, was developed gradually across the studio’s first year by incorporating further ‘elements of instruction in the studio’ (such as direction, design, and writing) and performed in front of an audience in July 1937.10 The following September, Chekhov asked his returning students to prepare ‘a little library’ for the ‘new students’ comprising ‘a lot of small one-minute sketches which contain very expressive texts’ and would serve as exercises ‘for awakening certain abilities in the souls of our students’.11 Crucially, such sketches did not only serve, at the CTS, to awaken the students’ abilities in respect of the material they contained, but also as exercises in performing in public. At the CTS, ‘Appearances before a Selected Audience’ were not intended to be a culmination of the students’ training, but part of the process of what the studio booklet called ‘developing in students a proper relationship to spectators’.12 These appearances were distinguished from ‘Production’, in that they were intended to be ‘demonstrations of the year’s work’, including rehearsal exercises, rather than complete performances. In the final year of the course, however, the booklet stated that ‘several complete plays will be presented to the public’, presentations which were intended to segue into the work of ‘the Studio’s professional Group’ whose touring productions students would be eligible to join ‘should they qualify and should they desire to do so’. The studio’s publicity confirmed that this ‘permanent group’ would alternate between touring and ‘returning to the studio from time to time to prepare new material’, thereby sustaining the dialectical relationship between training and experiment that characterised the curriculum for the studio’s initial period.13 Finally, in spite of the closed nature of the organisation as conceived by Chekhov and of its remote location in the Devon countryside, it was crucial to Chekhov’s plan that the ‘new language’ of the theatre that the CTS would create should not exist in artistic isolation.14 Its ‘theatre language’ was not only conceived as a means of communication within the studio but of enabling the studio’s productions to communicate with spectators ‘regardless of language or of intellectual content’,15 and thereby to address ‘some of the social problems

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besetting the modern world’ and ‘to present personal problems not as an end in themselves, but in relation to their social background’.16 An awareness of the theatre’s social purpose was also explicitly woven into the students’ training. For their holiday work in the Easter break of 1937, for example, students were asked to write about ‘The Function of Theatre in Regard to the Social Life of Our Times’, and their responses commonly expressed some version of the student-teacher Alan Harkness’s observation that ‘the first essential for theatrical co-operation is group work’.17 The essay submitted by Paul Rogers for this assignment included the sub-heading ‘The Individual who can be a Member of this Group’, who was described by Rogers thus: One who has learned or is capable of learning that service to art and to fellow man is more profitable than service to self; who realizes the beauty of individualism operating in harmony with and for the benefit of the group, who realizes his supreme importance and responsibility as a member of the group.18 It will be a central concern of the following analysis of the practice of the CTS whether such idealistic sentiments were justified by the reality of its working methods and structures. The CTS aimed explicitly to model, in miniature, the kind of holistic society to which it sought to contribute through its artistic practice. As Chekhov said to his students and collaborators, it was essential to the studio’s project that they were ‘able to work as a social group, as an organism’, and that, to do so, they had to ‘feel each other’, and thereby accept their mutual responsibility: ‘[w]e will all suffer if one makes a mistake’.19 At the CTS, we can therefore see that a broadly imagined social purpose was as inseparable from the development of technique and artistry as those aspects of the studio’s work were from each other. In all, the curriculum laid out in the studio’s publicity materials was an extension of the guiding idea of the CTS, that, through its practice, ‘will attempt to weld into one harmony all the elements of theatrical expression’.20 There was, therefore, no absolute distinction between the teaching and learning of technique and the development of performances, or between the studio’s artistic and social purposes: the same material and exercises were intended to serve all of these ends simultaneously. Thus, the organisation of the studio was intended to produce what is known in Chekhov’s technique as a sense of entirety or wholeness, which was one of the ‘Four Brothers’ (along with the senses of ease, form, and beauty) that, Chekhov argued, should characterise any work of art.21 Like that concept, which temporarily separates out aspects of an art work in order to study the detail of their interdependence and ultimately to reaffirm the inseparable fluidity of their connection, the analysis of the practices of the CTS in this chapter is divided into the three elements of exercises, sketches, and performances that, in reality, all overlapped with each other. It asks how these aspects of

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the studio’s work combined to produce the organisation that, albeit briefly, achieved Chekhov’s goal of establishing a touring company that was bonded by the ‘new technique’ that he developed with them. This main source for this chapter’s exploration of this ‘new technique’ is the collection of classes and rehearsal transcriptions notated in shorthand by Deirdre Hurst, and then typed up by her and her fellow students under the title ‘The Actor is the Theatre’, which are now held, for the Dartington Hall Trust, at the Devon Records Office in Exeter. In spite of the overwhelming size of this resource, it is by no means comprehensive: classes led by teachers other than Chekhov, for example, are almost never included, and Hurst’s capacity to take notes was, inevitably, constrained by her active participation in the studio’s work. Where possible, therefore, I have used other sources to fill gaps in the record in order to produce an account in which the studio, rather than Chekhov’s technique, remains the object of study. Readers unfamiliar with Chekhov’s approach to actor training may therefore wish to supplement this account by consulting the wide and growing corpus of work focusing on Chekhov’s technique by both scholars and practitioners. Here, I have tried, as far as possible, to follow the principle articulated in Paul Rogers’ student essay. Although the studio carried his name, Chekhov’s ‘supreme importance and responsibility’ within it was the same as everyone else’s: to be ‘a member of the group’. The extent to which Chekhov can be considered to have succeeded in remaining ‘a member of the group’, and to have used his technique to form a genuinely creative ‘social … organism’ is, therefore, central to what follows.

‘Art must be based on technique’: exercises at the CTS The opening of the Chekhov Theatre Studio on October 5, 1936, was marked by a performance by the Indian dance company led by Uday Shankar. Chekhov and Shankar had already met in Paris in 1930 while Chekhov was beginning to develop support for his short-lived Parisian studio of 1931. At this time, Shankar was developing what Jerri Daboo calls ‘his version of Indian dance performance’, prior to returning to India to train and create his own company.22 Shankar’s Western-inflected form of what it described in Europe as ‘Hindu dance’ counted among its influences the German choreographers Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder.23 Shankar had encountered Jooss and Leeder’s Expressionist style and technique when his company performed at Dartington in May 1934, as the Jooss–Leeder School had moved to Dartington in April of that year, with the Ballets Jooss company following in 1935.24 Shankar’s company’s 1936 performance at the CTS was doubtless, in part, a result of the happy accident of their presence at Dartington when the studio was due to open, but Chekhov’s decision to foreground their work on this significant occasion is also revealing in relation to the training developed at the studio. First, it underlines the significance of the patronage offered by the Dartington Hall Trust for Chekhov’s

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enterprise. Chekhov observed to his students that ‘nowhere in the world is there such an opportunity as we have been given at Dartington’,25 and without it, there simply could have been no studio; with it, Chekhov had the luxury of a house provided for him, accommodation for his actors (some of whom, such as Paul Rogers, were offered full scholarships), a dedicated work-space, and other funds to enable other teachers and collaborators to join the CTS at Dartington. Second, Dartington expanded the circle of Chekhov’s potential colleagues. While there, not only could the CTS draw on the expertise of, for example, Alice Crowther, its dedicated Steiner speech teacher, and later George Shdanoff and Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Chekhov’s associates who worked as scriptwriter and designer for the studio respectively, but of artists in other disciplines who were also resident on the estate. They included the dance teacher Lisa Ullmann, artist Mark Tobey, and sculptor Willi Soukop who taught the CTS students at Chekhov’s request, and other artists and craftsmen such as the painter Cecil Collins, the potter Bernard Leach, and Jooss’s collaborator, the designer Hein Heckroth, whose influence on the CTS seems to have been more indirect.26 Third, the brief period in October 1936 in which Shankar and Chekhov took ‘the opportunity to exchange ideas on the theatre to which they were both devoted’ suggests the extent to which Dartington, a project developed by an Englishman, Leonard Elmhirst, inspired by the Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, and funded by the heiress and widower of prominent American financiers, Dorothy Elmhirst, provided a universalist form of intercultural environment for the CTS.27 The dependence of the CTS on patronage, the interdisciplinarity of its practices, and the universalist approach it took to cultural exchange in many ways set the conditions for its work, and these themes will all recur through this analysis of it. The most directly significant aspect of Shankar’s company’s performance for the practice of the CTS, however, was articulated by Chekhov to his students immediately after it finished, when he asked them to note Shankar’s company’s ‘understanding that art must be based on technique’: We aim to be actors and more than actors—artists. What does this mean? It means that we are going to study, to learn how we can have our inspiration at our command. That is our most difficult task, but we shall have a Method which will make it possible […].28 In many respects, the ‘method’ deployed at the CTS, in order to develop the ‘technique’ upon which Chekhov insisted artistic work must be based, pre-dated the studio’s formation. Before its opening, in the spring of 1936, Chekhov gave lessons to Deirdre Hurst and Beatrice Straight at Dartington, which included exercises on rhythm and creative imagination.29 These were similar to those that he taught to Lithuanian students in Kaunas in 1932.30 These classes were, in

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turn, underpinned by the ‘spiritual logic’ of Chekhov’s approach to the theatre that formed the basis of similar exercises that he developed as early as 1923 in rehearsals for the Second Moscow Art Theatre’s Hamlet.31 In spite of the long gestation of his approach before 1936, however, while at the CTS Chekhov seems to have refined his technique in two particular respects. First, he combined his ideas about rhythm and imagination with earlier explorations of gesture, undertaken while he was in Russia, in the exercise that has become known as the ‘psychological gesture’, but which Chekhov also referred to, while at Dartington, as the ‘rhythmical gesture’. Chekhov proposed that such gestures would form the basis of a ‘language of gestures’, a development of the ‘language of images’ that he had envisaged in his Lithuanian studio, which would enable collaborating theatre artists to communicate with each other more effectively than they could through words alone.32 The second particular refinement to Chekhov’s technique at the CTS was the development of approaches to working with atmospheres, a notion to which he referred in a 1933 letter to the members of his Lithuanian studio but does not seem to have developed substantially with them in practice.33 By contrast, while working with the CTS, Chekhov gave particular emphasis to the ways in which, in his technique, atmospheres both serve as a means for a performance to communicate ‘what we, as the audience, have to feel’,34 and as the basis for what he called ‘the world of the play’: its cultural and aesthetic qualities.35 Rhythmical gestures also played a crucial role in the development of performances, serving as an embodied means of scoring their action and articulating their central ideas. Developed initially as exercises, then applied to sketches, and finally used in the development of productions, more than any others, these were the techniques upon which the art of the CTS was based.

The rhythmical gesture: ‘our fundamental form’ As well as hosting Shankar’s company’s performance at the opening of the CTS, Chekhov asked his student actors to do an exercise that he called ‘the Actor’s March’: March around the room following a leader. You are strong, you are healthy, your hands and arms are free and beautiful, your legs are strong. Imagine yourselves in three parts—around your head is the feeling of space and power, the power of thought. Around your chest will be the power of feeling, and around your feet the power of will. These must be in beautiful harmony as you march.36 This tripartite conception of the form of the human body recalls Stanislavsky, whose fictional teacher Tortsov drew on what he called ‘the psychological inner drives’ of ‘the mind, the will, and feeling’.37 Chekhov was also referring, here, however, to the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), the polymath

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philosopher, teacher and educationalist, painter, playwright, architect, and founder of the ‘spiritual science’ of Anthroposophy, whose ideas were a crucial influence on the development of Chekhov’s approach to acting and to artistry.38 Chekhov wrote that, while still in Russia, he ‘became convinced of how practical the principles of Anthroposophy are, how firmly this science stands on the earth’.39 The most essential of these principles is described by Monica Cristini as ‘the tripartite nature of the human being: the division into a physical body, an etheric body (made up of energy and vital force), and an astral body (made up of sensations and feelings)—all of them guided by the ego’.40 At the CTS, Chekhov usually referred to these three ‘bodies’ as the body, spirit (etheric body), and soul (astral body). They were made manifest, for Steiner, in three systems in the human being. These were the ‘metabolic system through which […] the will finds its physical instrument’, the ‘system of nerves and senses’ enabling ‘sensible representations and thought’, and the ‘rhythmic system’ enabling ‘feeling and sensation’.41 These correspond, in the Actor’s March, to Chekhov’s division of the body into the ‘power of thought’ in the nervous system centred in the head, the ‘power of feeling’ in the rhythmic respiratory system centred in the chest, and the ‘power of will’ driven by the metabolic system that fuels the muscles that move the limbs (the largest of which, of course, move the legs and feet). The Actors’ March may, therefore, be considered as a purely physical exercise in enabling students to appreciate the form and possibilities of the human body, so that, as Chekhov would later say, they could begin to ‘get a new feeling for your body […] that I, as an actor, an artist, am sitting in my body and from there, from inside myself, I am able to move my body, am able to use my body’.42 However, such a reading of the Actor’s March would neglect the crucial instruction for students to ‘[i]magine yourselves in three parts’ (my emphasis). In fact, it is an exercise in both sides of the dialectical relationship between imagination and incorporation, which continually interact in Chekhov’s technique: When you try to see the movement in your imagination, then at the moment when you try to make the movement, you will be able to incorporate something more with your imagination […]. Don’t allow your images to be embodied only with the body.43 Therefore, in the Actor’s March, Chekhov was asking his students not only to experience the physical forms of their bodies, but also to imagine a form for their bodies and then, as it were, to project it onto their physical body. Thus, the exercise is, as Steiner insisted all performances should be, ‘imaginative despite its reality’.44 Crucially, Steiner did not consider such a pairing of imagination and reality as the yoking together of two opposites. He insisted, in fact, that the faculty of imagination could, and should, be used in order to enable his followers to

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achieve what he called ‘clairvoyant perception’, by which they would be able ‘to move from the figure we perceive to the actual being’, and thereby enter an objective ‘spiritual realm’.45 Chekhov records realising, upon leaving Russia, that the insight he had achieved at that time had only led him to ‘random creations’,46 and thereafter he began to practise, for instance, meditation exercises from Steiner’s book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, And Its Attainment, which offers a guide to spiritual training through a process which begins with what Steiner calls ‘Preparation’.47 This involves ‘directing the attention of the soul to certain happenings around us’: ‘on the one hand, life that is growing, budding, thriving, and on the other, all phenomena of fading, decay, withering’.48 At the CTS, Chekhov adapted these meditation exercises to train his students’ ‘powers of conscious concentration’ and thereby expand their ‘creative imagination’. He began with ‘exercises which help us to contact and communicate with physical things and feel their “spirit”’, then exercises in which students would ‘imagine objects of the physical world’, enabling them finally, according to Chekhov, to ‘pass into the vast world of creative imagination’.49 Thus, through exercises that developed the powers of concentration, imagination, and bodily awareness, Chekhov taught his students, in his words, ‘what it means to live in a world of form—psychological or physical form. Everything must have a form for us—inner or outer actions both must have form’.50 Chekhov sought to embed this appreciation for form in his students’ work in a number of ways. During the studio’s planning phase, he reportedly requested ‘that the students have a short course in drawing, because he wishes them to know what it means to draw and develop a feeling for “form”’.51 This wish resulted in the students’ classes with the American artist Mark Tobey, who had come to Dartington in 1931 from the Cornish School in Seattle to teach at the then recently established School of Dance-Mime. Like the Actor’s March, Tobey’s teaching of drawing and painting was grounded in movements of the entire body. Huge pieces of paper were pinned up in the studio and the students were taught, as Paul Rogers recalled, ‘to experience the whole being making marks with chalk to music’.52 Chekhov reminded his students of this in a later class: Remember when Mark Tobey tried to get you to dance before the paper, what was he aiming at? To develop the whole body for painting, and for us as actors, it is not enough to develop one part of the body only. The whole body must be made receptive for all these things. We must produce with our bodies and our spirits; and we are able to understand our spirits if our bodies are responsive.53 The connection between body and spirit was as essential to Tobey’s painting as it was to Chekhov’s teaching. While at Dartington he developed a technique he called ‘white writing’ in which, he said, ‘my way of working was a performance in that my pictures should be accomplished in one go or not at all’, using

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movements like the ‘dance before the paper’ that Chekhov described.54 This technique emerged from Tobey’s desire not merely to ‘look at’ a painting, but to ‘experience it’, and thus to search not ‘for fine draughtsmanship, nor fine colour […] but directness of spirit’.55 Tobey was influenced in this attitude by the Chinese painter Teng Kwei, with whom he had studied techniques of calligraphy and wash, and discovered ‘that a tree is no longer solid, but a rhythm, a growing line’.56 Tobey’s focus on the appreciation of natural forms as dynamic, rhythmic experiences would have been echoed by the CTS students’ classes with the dancer Lisa Ullmann. She had come to Dartington with Jooss and Leeder from the Folkwang Tanzstudio in Essen, Germany’s leading expressionist dance company, which Jooss had created in 1928. Like his mentor Rudolf Laban, Jooss aimed to develop an approach to choreography that would break the formal constraints of classical ballet, and follow instead the principle that dance should grow from the natural movements of the body. The writer A.V. Coton paraphrased Jooss to summarise this project: The medium of dance is the living human body with the power to convey ideas inherent in its movement […] the intention is to give an image of the various forces of life in their ever-changing interplay; that is, a manifestation of Nature […]. The process of reflecting these forces through the body consists in first experiencing and studying them within ourselves in body, mind and soul, then in externalising by corresponding movements, all that is happening within us.57 The first phase of the process described by Coton here resonates deeply with the artistic approach developed by Chekhov at the CTS. The second phase, however, indicates a distinction between the media of theatre and dance. As Chekhov explained to his students, ‘[d]ancers […] are able to study movements, which they can repeat’, whereas ‘we, as actors, have not the same possibility’. For Chekhov, the actor’s movement training ‘must bind together our feeling with our body. We must train ourselves to ask our body, by taking new positions, which feeling is arising in us’.58 Therefore, whereas Ullmann’s dance training would have focused on giving the ‘forces’ that students experienced and studied in their own bodies a clear, repeatable form, Chekhov asked his students to use this training to develop their capacity to explore and create dynamic, rhythmic forms that would be invisibly or intangibly present in their performances. Chekhov’s conception of such inner movements was substantially shaped by his exploration of Steiner’s esoteric philosophy. Therefore, as well as teaching his own Steiner-inspired exercises, Chekhov insisted that his students take classes both in the Steiner speech method and in Steiner’s eurythmy. Daron Oram’s study of the voice training undertaken at Dartington has shown that ‘there was

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a disparity between the aims of the acting work and the speech work’ at the CTS.59 Oram quotes Beatrice Straight’s opinion that ‘one of the weakest aspects of training was the speech’, and Deirdre Hurst du Prey’s that ‘[h]ad we had a teacher who was trained by Michael Chekhov or trained as an actress and also in speech, I think it would have been different’.60 As it was, the use of Steiner’s method of speech formation without Chekhov’s personal oversight seems to have created performers who, in Straight’s words, ‘rather intoned’ and tended to speak ‘from the emotion, from the form, rather than the idea’.61 The studio’s use of eurythmy, however, seems to have been much more successfully integrated into its practice. In this form of artistic movement, what Steiner called ‘the forms and gestures of the air’ which are created by sound and speech are converted into ‘movements of the whole human being’ to create ‘visible speech, visible music’.62 Steiner argued that ‘an actor should have a good knowledge of eurhythmy’ because it provides ‘a pure—let me say, a religious—understanding of what speaking really is’: ‘the artistic forming of inner experience’.63 Likewise, Steiner’s lectures on speech and drama frequently focused on ‘how to bring gesture into speech’, because, as he argued, in gesture ‘the force, the dynamic of the human being himself is present’.64 This underlying dynamic in speech could only be appreciated, according to Steiner, through ‘the feeling that is experienced in the muscle’ during each gesture. By concentrating on this experience, Steiner said, the actor may learn to ‘fill himself with the ghost of the eurythmic form’.65 Chekhov developed this idea of a ‘ghost […] form’ while at Dartington, which he sometimes termed the invisible body, as in this critique of student’s performance: The body I gave you was an invisible body, which will affect your visible body, […]. The invisible body must lead, entice and coax your visible body—not the opposite. […] When the visible body takes the lead everything becomes wrong, because it has taken its task from the intellect. The invisible body must be the leader, and you must follow it with great care … Our physical body needs time to adjust to the invisible one, so don’t force it. Your invisible body will coax the visible one if you will give it time.66 Chekhov’s notion of the ‘invisible body’ was based partly on his practice of Steiner’s meditation exercises, which he described in his memoir, Life and Encounters: I observed the harmonious forms of the plants, I imagined the process of the rotation of the Earth and the planets, I searched for harmonious compositions in space and gradually came to the experience of movement, invisible to the external eye, that was present in all natural phenomena. There

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even seemed to me to be such movement in motionless, solidified forms. It was movement that had created form and still maintained it … I called this invisible movement, this play of forces, ‘gesture’ … It seemed to me that through them I could penetrate into the very essence of phenomena … When I then performed ‘gestures’ that I myself had created, they invariably called forth feelings and impulses of the will inside me and gave rise to creative images.67 Chekhov was primed to identify this ‘invisible movement’ as ‘gesture’ not only by Steiner’s writings, but by his early experiences as an actor. He had participated, for example, in Stanislavsky’s experiments with yoga, and the experiencing and shaping of prana, or ‘the principle of energy exhibited in all living things’, and its ‘invisible radiation’ to an audience.68 Both Chekhov and his friend and collaborator Yevgeny Vakhtangov felt that Stanislavsky’s approach lacked both a clear technique ‘to immediately become inspired by the material offered by the author’ and a means of capturing what Stanislavsky had called ‘the kernel of the character’.69 Ironically, it was Stanislavsky who first suggested a solution to this impasse during a 1921 rehearsal for The Inspector General, when he responded to Chekhov’s struggle to define his character’s psychology with a spontaneous gesture: ‘a lightning-quick movement with his arms and hands, as if throwing them up, and at the same time vibrating with his fingers, his elbows and even his shoulders. “That is the whole psychology of Khlestakov”, said he, laughingly’.70 The same year, while directing Chekhov as Strindberg’s Erik XIV, Vakhtangov took the same approach, demonstrating a ‘strong, painfully passionate movement, as though trying to break an invisible wall before him or to pierce a magic circle’.71 Chekhov recalled, on both of these occasions, that by performing the gestures his directors demonstrated, he was able, immediately and instinctively, to grasp his character’s essential qualities. In the case of Erik XIV, as I have argued elsewhere, the gesture created by Vakhtangov ‘captured, in a tangible and embodied experience, the guiding idea in his whole production’ of a king trying, and failing, to escape the dead world of his courtiers and reach the living world of the common people beyond.72 This use of gesture drew on a wide range of influences including the movement system of Francois Delsarte, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze’s eurhythmics,73 and Vakhtangov’s study with Sergei Volkonsky, who described gesture as ‘an expression of a human being’s inner self by means of his external self’.74 This practice of using gesture as a means of articulating in physical form an intangible, dynamic experience characterised a great deal of the exercises developed at the CTS. According to Dorothy Elmhirst’s son William, Chekhov also used a version of it to enable students actively to experience his own revelation of the ‘movement, invisible to the external eye, that was present in all natural phenomena’:75 ‘he would take students out into the garden and say “feel the

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gesture of the trees: what gesture are they making, and try and express it through your body. Enter into the spirit of the tree”’.76 Chekhov gave examples in his later writing: ‘a cypress streams upward […] and has a quiet, positive concentrated character’, for example, ‘whereas, the old many-branched oak, rising upward and sideways […] will speak to us of a violent, uncontrolled, broad character’.77 Deirdre Hurst’s class notes record that Chekhov took the idea of gesture further still: We have spoken about psychological gesture as something which is […] bound together with the human body and human psychology, but it is to be found everywhere, not only in the human body. In nature, and in living things, and in dead things. In everything, and everywhere an artist can find or create psychological gestures which are not in immediate connection to the human body. For instance, this stick has a gesture. The length, thickness and colour of this stick make a certain impression on the human soul and this soul, if it is an actor’s or artist’s, reacts on all these impressions and this reaction can be made or molded as-if it is psychological gesture.78 At the CTS, Chekhov used gesture to give physical form to any such ‘impression on the human soul’,79 and applied it ‘to everything, to the character, to the settings, to the costumes, to the atmosphere, to everything’,80 to generate ‘the foundation, or stream, which is going on underneath’ any and all aspects of a performance.81 Chekhov’s term for an underpinning form was ‘rhythm’ which, he said, ‘lies behind everything’, meaning that, for him, ‘there is no difference’ between rhythm and gesture.82 All gestures, in Chekhov’s sense, are therefore rhythmical, because they seek to articulate the underlying form of a phenomenon. When such a gesture was used to explore a human character, Chekhov told his students, ‘[w]e have called it the psychological gesture’, and this term has gained in currency, in the decades since, with the gradual adaptation of Chekhov’s ideas to an aesthetic framework that has remained primarily characterised by realism.83 Chekhov told his students, however, that a psychological gesture ‘is actually a rhythmical gesture’, because it can just as easily be used to articulate the forms of things, such as sticks, that cannot meaningfully be considered to have psychology.84 Finally, and most importantly for this consideration of the exercises that provided the foundation of the creative process at the CTS, a rhythmical gesture is a means of giving form to things. For Chekhov, gesture enables an actor to ‘really express what I am going to do […]—the idea, the interpretation, the action, the text, everything. These gestures lie under the text, the feelings, the atmosphere, everything’.85 He proposed that any ‘impression’ made ‘on the human soul […] can be made or molded’ by a rhythmical gesture (my emphasis). In Chekhov’s technique, the movement quality of ‘moulding’ is produced when

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the body moves through the air as though it were ‘a thicker, heavier substance’, and with the intention of ‘overcoming the imaginary resistance and giving the imaginary substance a definite form’.86 For Chekhov, this process of creating ‘a definite form’ was paradigmatic of the artistry that he set out to inculcate in his students. The role of an artist, he said, was to give form to the world, ‘[t]o make cosmos out of chaos’,87 and this required that they become able to master the medium of performance, through the mastery of their bodies: ‘to be an actor […] means that I am using my body—I must be the master of my body’, Chekhov said, ‘my body is the instrument of my will, of me’.88 The anthropologist Tim Ingold has characterised such accounts of an artistry that is predicated upon mastery emblematically as journeys through a maze: The maze puts all the emphasis upon a traveller’s intentions. He has an aim in mind, […] and is determined to reach it. […] in the maze, the outward cast of action follows the inward cast of thought. […] action is intentional, […] a mind is at work, operating from within the actor, and lending it a purpose and direction beyond what the physical laws of motion would alone dictate. […] In the maze, intention is cause and action effect.89 Chekhov’s account of artistry was not, however, solely intentional. As well as the figure of the master, Chekhov articulated to his students the process of developing artistry by using the example of the worker: a worker arrives at a mastery of his craft by taking into consideration his own power, the weight of the instrument, and other things. After he has done the work many times freely, he gets a new feeling of freedom. This second feeling of freedom is right. In working on the play, we have a first moment of freedom when we do things instinctively. Then the next moment when we must do exercises and go through the narrow, narrow channel of the exercises before we come to the second freedom.90 In Ingold’s terms, Chekhov’s ‘second freedom’ is characterised not by the intentional ‘doing’ of the maze-walker, but by the attentional ‘undergoing’ of the ‘path-follower’ in a labyrinth, who ‘has no objective save to carry on’: to do so, his action must be closely and continually coupled with his perception. Lest he lose his way, he should be ever vigilant as the path unfolds before him. […] for the wayfarer in the labyrinth, following the trail is a task which, like life itself, he is compelled to undergo; his doings —those moments of perception and action through which his movement are carried on—are thus framed within this undergoing.91

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The attentional undergoing of Ingold’s path-follower is also the ‘taking into consideration’ of Chekhov’s ‘worker’, who must consider ‘his own power, the weight of his instrument, and other things’. Paradoxically, the worker can only ‘master his craft’ by submitting to it. As Ingold has it, ‘[t]o make a living, farmers and woodsmen must join with the ways of plants; hunters and herdsmen with the ways of animals; artisans with the ways of their materials’.92 The actor’s primary material, as Chekhov observed, is, of course, her body. But, as he later wrote, ‘separate actors are only parts of the whole, and have to be united with each other and with the audience to create a performance that is an organic whole’.93 The medium through which this unification can be achieved, for Chekhov, was atmosphere, which he called ‘the heartbeat of every piece of art’ and ‘the lifeblood of each performance’: surrounded by the Atmosphere […] the actor, inspired by it, will start to act, […] Images born out of the inner dynamic of the Atmosphere will surround him. He will absorb this hidden dynamic and will transform it into events, characters, words, and movements94. Therefore, this account of mastery achieved by exercises in the doing of gestures must be balanced by another, of the mastery achieved by exercises in the undergoing of atmosphere.

Atmosphere: the ‘feeling which does not belong to anybody’ At the CTS, the rhythmical gesture was, in Chekhov’s words, ‘our fundamental form, […] the thing underlying the whole psychological action and the action of the play’.95 Gestures were used in developing a performance, in other words, to connect ‘[e]verything that we perceive with our eyes and ears’, which Chekhov termed ‘the body of the performance’, with what he called ‘the spirit or the idea of a performance’.96 Very early in the students’ training, however, Chekhov introduced them to ‘that which is between the spirit and the body of the performance—the atmosphere, or soul of the performance’: ‘The atmosphere is what we, as the audience, have to feel. If you attend a performance which does not touch your soul or feeling, that performance is dead. Our theatre will be very responsible for the soul of the performance’.97 Although, for Chekhov, atmospheres must be felt by an audience for a performance to be effective, atmosphere is not the same as feeling. Whereas feeling inheres within a subject or subjects, atmosphere is ‘a feeling which does not belong to anybody’, and therefore necessarily exists prior to subjectivity: ‘[i]t is a feeling which is independent of anyone—the feeling which lives in the space in the room and belongs to no-one; this is atmosphere’.98 Chekhov’s use of the word ‘independent’ here may, however, be a little misleading, because atmosphere is not impervious to action. The ‘feeling which lives in the space in the room’ is dynamic

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and both produces and responds to the events in that room. An atmosphere is therefore an articulation of the feeling of a hybrid event-space, and a particular atmosphere may both produce action, in that it may make those who perceive it alter their behaviour, and be produced by action, in that it may be re-shaped by changes in behaviour. This is the cause of what Gernot Böhme has called ‘the peculiar intermediary position’ occupied by atmosphere.99 Tim Ingold has gone further; where Böhme situates atmosphere between human subjects and the objects he terms ‘environmental qualities’, Ingold argues that it is ‘more like the wind, a movement of the in-between’.100 Ingold’s ‘in-between’ has its roots in Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘line of becoming’, which ‘is not defined by points that it connects’, but ‘passes between points, […] comes up through the middle, […] has neither beginning nor end’ and is thus ‘always in the middle’, generating ‘a zone of proximity and indiscernibility, a no-man’s land, a nonlocalizable relation sweeping up the two distant or contiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other—and the border-proximity is indifferent to both contiguity and to distance’.101 For Deleuze and Guattari, movement in this ‘zone’ ‘passes between’ points, ‘carrying them away in a shared proximity in which the discernibility of points disappears’.102 Atmosphere, in Chekhov’s sense, is just such a movement of ‘becoming’, ‘by which the line frees itself from the point, and renders points indiscernible’.103 Atmosphere is the movement of ‘a feeling which does not belong to anybody’ because it renders subjectivity, and hence belonging, indiscernible. Atmosphere, therefore, is not merely an intersubjective phenomenon, rather it exceeds subjectivity. Since atmosphere is neither subjective nor inter-subjective and cannot be localised, it can only be understood as a displacement. It is therefore an affective phenomenon. Affect, in the sense first developed by Spinoza, is ‘the capacity to affect and to be affected’, and the atmospheres of a performance are thus a measure of the ways in which the feeling of an event-space affects and is affected by those who occupy it.104 For this reason, Chekhov commonly proposed atmosphere as a starting-point for the exploration of a play: ‘[i]f we take the text and try to interpret it first from the words, it is mechanical. We must find the atmosphere of the play, and it must inspire us’.105 Atmosphere may, then, be considered as the substrate of performance: ‘the material on or from which [it] lives, grows or obtains its nourishment’,106 and Chekhov repeatedly told his students that they must be receptive to its movements and qualities: You must be in the music of the play. […] You must always consider the atmosphere so that the gesture will be born out of the atmosphere. You must start with the atmosphere and then you will find the right way to produce the gesture and be full of feeling.107 Chekhov developed his students’ sensitivity to atmosphere through exercises in looking through ‘colored gelatine papers’ and allowing the colour to alter their

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behaviour, and by exploring the qualities of atmosphere physically: ‘[w]e must penetrate into the atmosphere with our hands, legs, bodies, voices, etc’, he said.108 At the CTS, then, the air between and among both the characters in a fictional setting and the actors and audience in a theatre, the medium of their interaction, was considered to have physical properties that shaped the conditions of that interaction and altered along with them. Thus, atmosphere was a necessary condition for what Chekhov called ‘contact’: ‘a special feeling […] that no-one is alone on the stage, and is never alone, even if he or she speaks a soliloquy’.109 For Chekhov, the fundamental contacted-ness of the actor extended beyond human interaction: ‘[t]he actor must get the ability to be in contact not only with everybody around him on the stage, but with everything’, he said: We must develop this feeling of contact not only with the other persons, but with the structures, with the space around, with the chairs, etc […] Each setting is a special world in which we have to create our actor’s activity. […] The problem is to find and establish contact with each other and with the setting, and to find the moments of climax in the play.110 The process of establishing contact within an atmosphere thus provided, at the CTS, the basis for defining the ‘world’ of any given play in performance: its aesthetic form. Unlike the explorations of a play’s forms and elements using the rhythmical gesture, however, which seeks to encapsulate large, complex patterns in a simple, almost instantaneous movement, and therefore sits outside the spatio-temporal dimensions of a performance, the process of exploring a play by establishing contact within its atmospheres is gradual and tentative and seeks to shape the spatio-temporal dynamic of a performance from within. Accordingly, Chekhov instructed his students to ‘First find the atmosphere, and then try to find the dialogues and soliloquies in the music of the atmosphere’.111 To return to Ingold’s account of the necessarily dialectical relationship between mastery and submission in the development of any technique (and, indeed, in the living of a life), it is revealing that Chekhov’s articulation of the creative process here gives primacy to attention and submission. Likewise, Ingold insists that ‘the leading edge of action, where it pushes out into the unknown is a moment not of doing but of undergoing, not of mastery but of submission’:112 Rather than a commanding mind that already knows its will trailing a subservient body in its wake, out in front is an aspirant imagination that feels its way forward, improvising a passage through an as yet unformed world, while bringing up the rear is a prehensive perception already accustomed to the ways of the world and skilled in observing and responding to its affordances.113

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The exercises analysed here were designed to train the student actors of the CTS both to develop ‘an aspirant imagination’ and ‘a prehensive perception, already accustomed to the ways of the world’ so that both could be deployed in the process of creating performances, of pushing ‘out into the unknown’. They could not, however, so easily teach how these two capacities are to be reconciled in ‘improvising a passage through an as yet unformed world’. Instead, Chekhov taught this process by using what he called ‘sketches’.

Progressive collaborations? Sketching performances at the CTS At the CTS, Chekhov used ‘sketches’, short improvisations, often ‘no longer than one minute, perhaps even less’, both to train his students in the application of their exercises to the creation of performances, and as the primary means of collaboration between writers and actors in the creation of productions.114 They therefore represented an intersection, in the practice of the CTS, between training and production, being used for both ends, sometimes simultaneously. Accordingly, Chekhov stipulated that these sketches ‘must be full of meaning’ as performances in their own right (despite often comprising only ‘a few short sentences’), with ‘a very strong atmosphere, very clear objectives for each person, and all the other means which we have learned through our exercises’.115 Sketches were developed as responses to Chekhov’s description of ‘the content of […] particular moments’, sometimes based upon a particular scene or episode in a narrative that the actors were working on.116 Chekhov requested that, rather than asking why these events happen, the actors would ‘[t]ake [the description] as a picture drawn by some painter’, and then ‘imagine in waves what can be done, and on the basis of this […] partially incorporate the moment itself’.117 Having partially incorporated the given ‘moment’ through this process of active listening, the actors would improvise—and thereby collectively sketch—its action. Chekhov repeatedly stressed two aspects of improvisation that were essential to this process of generating sketches. The first was that ‘you must have a real ground on which to improvise […]. Don’t allow yourself to improvise when you have lost the basis or ground’.118 This is to say that the improvisation must have some kind of structural basis in the actors’ technique. Second, Chekhov insisted that the actors’ execution of the sketch must exceed its description; they must add something ‘to the given scaffolding’.119 The combination of these two factors created Chekhov’s definition of improvisation: ‘on a certain given ground, and with certain conditions, you have to fill each moment as full as possible with your creative psychology’.120 For Chekhov, in other words, improvisation should always be creative but not only be creative. It should also both be both structured and governed by shared principles, agreed in advance. In Chekhov’s definition of improvisation, we can therefore see what his student Paul Rogers had called ‘the beauty of individualism operating in harmony with

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and for the benefit of the group’, as well as the balance between mastery and submission that was characteristic of the group’s shared technique. Jonathan Pitches has proposed, along these lines, that the gradual and collaborative process of developing improvised sketches into staged performances should be considered as ‘a microcosm of the Chekhov technique’.121 His argument is based upon a detailed analysis of the performance known as ‘The Fishers’ Scene’ that was developed at the CTS in 1937 and then revisited by Deirdre Hurst du Prey in 1980 as part of a summer course she led in Chekhov’s technique at Adelphi University.122 Pitches’ account of ‘The Fishers’ Scene’ emphasises the interdisciplinarity of the practice that it represented, with students taking on the direction, design, and writing of the scene as well as performing in it. As Pitches writes, ‘[a]t the philosophical centre of this approach was the idea that the actor would be the site where “complete harmony of all the elements of expression” was located’.123 Nowhere in the practice of the CTS is such an account more justified than in the students’ work on ‘The Fishers’ Scene’, and Pitches contextualises this undertaking among contemporary examples of progressive education such as the Cornish School in Seattle and Black Mountain College to demonstrate a continuity of ‘core progressive principles’ between these institutions and the CTS, such as ‘synthetic learning, interdisciplinarity, process-led, experiential training of the “whole” person’.124 His argument then extends, on the basis of ‘The Fishers’ Scene’s apparent status as a microcosm of Chekhov’s technique, to the claim that ‘Chekhov’s practice and his ongoing pursuit of a “Theatre of the Future” was aligned with several progressive movements in training and education philosophy, both in Europe and in the United States’.125 It is certainly true that there are parallels to be drawn between the work of the CTS and progressive movements in education, but the extent to which the CTS can itself be considered as an example of progressive practice remains in question. Certainly, taken in isolation, the egalitarian interdisciplinarity of the approach to developing sketch-performances of ‘The Fishers’ Scene’ at the CTS would seem to justify that claim. However, this argument hinges upon the question of how representative this exercise was of the wider practices of the CTS, and whether or not Chekhov went on significantly to develop similarly democratic structures of practice in the studio. Of course, it may be argued that, where Chekhov chose not to structure practice democratically, his decisions were made for pragmatic reasons, such as the inexperience of his collaborators. It is equally possible, however, that this apparent pragmatism served as a justification for an authoritarian approach to collective practice that allowed Chekhov to offer creative freedom to his collaborators where it served his purposes and to withhold it from them where it did not. In what follows therefore, I explore the creation of sketches at the CTS in order to ascertain the relative merits of these arguments.

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Chekhov’s first use of sketches at the CTS emerged early in the students’ training, at a time when he seems to have regularly lectured them on the importance of work: The most important thing is work. […] This is very important because everybody has a gift from nature, more or less, but what we really have in our hands is work. It is the only thing we can do. We cannot do the gift, but we can do the work. I think of our school, and afterward our theatre, as consisting of work, work, work. Gift, talent, inspiration, and intuition will come of themselves, and they will come in greater detail if we will work. We must not wait for the moments when we will be inspired. Therefore let us say that the main principle of our school is work, and the same will be true of our future theatre.126 We have already seen that work offered Chekhov a conceptual framework to articulate to his students the paradox of freedom that is achieved by learning to function within the constraints of practice. He also used the associated metaphor of ‘scaffolding’ to explain the ways by which the restrictions of technique may support creative freedom: ‘[b]y our exercises’, he told his students, ‘we are creating a scaffolding on which we will build our play’.127 Chekhov also used the metaphor of scaffolding in connection with sketches. In fact, he did so in his earliest use of the sketch as a form in connection to the 1909 play The Golden Steed. This had been adapted from an Estonian fairy-tale by the Latvian poet Jan Rainis and swiftly elevated to the status of national myth in that country. It centres on a peasant boy, Antin, who scales a glass mountain to rescue a princess, symbolising Latvia’s fight for independence from the Russian empire (which it achieved at the end of the First World War).128 Here, Chekhov is describing the content of a sketch of a scene from the play, using the ground of objectives, expressed as gestures: The mission of the evil group is to push Antin down, pushing him gradually slowly, but surely, until he is defeated. That is the dynamic of the scene. You must always have the picture of your gesture, and then you will be free to speak your words. […] The good group has three gestures: 1. Toward the mountain. 2. To protect the good people. 3. To gently push the evil forces away. The whole scene is a composition of these movements. This is the scaffolding. We must never do things in half gestures. First we must find the primitive elementary gesture, and out of that, we will make the ground work. Then we will find finer movements, and finally we will build the castle.129 Examples such as this establish the sketch as a way of both establishing the fundamental dynamic of a scene and of harnessing the creativity of his actors to

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generate the ‘finer’ details of its staging in line with the ‘scaffolding’ provided by his instruction. Chekhov’s decision to use this metaphor is revealing when set against his assertion that this process will make his actors ‘free to speak your words’. Scaffolding offers support more than it does freedom. It structures creative work, but also constrains its users to follow the patterns it has generated for them. The same is true of Chekhov’s generation of sketches in these early classes: he does not simply propose a ‘ground’ as the shared basis of an openended exploration of a given scenario, but uses grounds as a way of giving material form to his interpretation of that scenario in advance of the performed sketch. Thus, in the creation of this sketch, Chekhov’s students really can be considered to be working for him: their labour is being co-opted into a process that he assumes the authority to shape. In the case of The Golden Steed, Chekhov’s interpretation of the play’s ‘rhythmical dynamic’ centred on the requirement for Antin to relinquish ‘earthly desires’ in order to complete his quest and rescue the trapped princess.130 Therefore, Chekhov instructed his students to depict Antin ‘coming from the world of passion and trying to rise above it, while all the powers are trying to push him back to their level’.131 For Chekhov, these gestures were ‘dictated by the composition’ of the play, and established the ‘dynamic of the whole scene’, from which its performers should not depart.132 The focus of the exercise of ‘rehearsing on different grounds’ is on the actors’ aesthetic and technical challenge of defining and cleaving to the ‘the leading idea which is like a spine running through the scene’. However, this also serves to encourage the actors to defer to the interpretative content of the instruction, which remains hidden in plain sight.133 Furthermore, the moral framework used by Chekhov to describe the conduct of a ‘good’ and ‘evil’ group in The Golden Steed, where the ‘evil group’ are united by the underlying movement of pushing ‘Antin down’, presents as self-evident both the behaviour of those groups and the validity of morality as a means of elucidating the behaviour of social formations. Thus, the collaborative process of creating a sketch functions so as to bypass any acknowledgement—let alone contestation—of the ways in which interpretation shapes the supposedly neutral compositional form of a scene’s dynamic. This critique of Chekhov’s approach to directing his students through the use of sketches therefore calls into question the extent to which the ‘“whole” person’, to whom the project of progressive education was directed, can be justifiably considered to be ‘whole’ when they are rendered deferential by the structuring of their collaborative labour. In the case of The Golden Steed, the production of sketches functioned to advance an interpretative agenda that it also concealed, namely the reading of Rainis’s play through the lens of a universalist spirituality. It did so at the cost of a material and political understanding of the social order that was tacitly promoted by that perspective. Most obviously, Rainis’s play establishes a clear gender binary, in which men, in the figures of the hero Antin and his ‘evil’ brothers, actively compete for the hand of a princess, who is passive even once

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awakened: she ‘cannot live’ if Antin does not wear her ring.134 The gender binary also represents the opposition of (male) life, represented by the ‘father of light’, and (female) death, in the figure of the ‘mother of night’.135 Chekhov’s schematic conception of the play also positioned its male hero as a microcosm of its wider society: Dorothy Elmhirst’s annotated script records the instruction for the movements of the chorus to echo those of the lone rider as he climbs the mountain.136 It is important to note, in this context, that the play emphasises its hero’s exemplary status as a peasant. He is the youngest son of a man who is depicted in its first scene with a body broken by working the land to which he belongs, but which he does not own.137 In the context of the wider geopolitical events of 1937, it is selfevident that the play’s emphasis on the individual heroism of a dispossessed but assuredly native Latvian, and its power to galvanise and inspire undifferentiated crowds of his fellow people, make it vulnerable to being co-opted as a parable for nationalism and fascism. It does not, of course, follow that this was Chekhov’s intended interpretation of the play. On the contrary, in spite of his preference not to engage directly in politics, Chekhov was avowedly an anti-fascist, not least— albeit obliquely—in the CTS curriculum’s references to ‘the social problems besetting the modern world’.138 Nonetheless, it is not clear from the sketches of this play that Chekhov developed with his students how his technique would be used—as, for example, Brecht’s was at this time—to create contesting interpretations of a narrative, or performatively to expose its ideological structures. In spite of this, the argument that the hierarchical and tacitly dictatorial nature of Chekhov’s creation of sketches from The Golden Steed was primarily a consequence of the position of this project early in the life of the CTS remains potentially valid. It would follow from this that the interdisciplinarity of the students’ subsequent work on ‘The Fishers’ Scene’, which is justifiably emphasised in Pitches’ account of it, worked against the initial and temporary hierarchies of their practice towards a more horizontal form of collectivity. The decision to recruit directors for ‘The Fishers’ Scene’ from among the students clearly lends support to this view, as does the selection of both writers and designers from among the performers of such sketches, which meant that students did not simply take on one role, but experienced collaborative work from multiple perspectives. The version of ‘The Fishers’ Scene’ directed by Deirdre Hurst, for example, was scripted by Paul Rogers and designed by Gretel Schreiber and Beatrice Straight, who also performed in it, alongside other students, and the development of sketches seems to have functioned, on this occasion, as a basis for a more democratically structured endeavour. Chekhov began by introducing the scene to his students as a very simple sketch: Imagine a scene of fisher folk standing on the shore. They have been waiting two days and two nights for the fishing fleet to come home. They see a light, but it fades out, then two lights appear in the darkness, and finally in the early morning the ships return, but one is missing.139

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This sketch was gradually developed by Chekhov with his students, introducing specific characters and more detailed events in the narrative. Under the guidance of Deirdre Hurst, as director, the students also developed an interpretation of the story in which the sea figured as an ‘attacking insistent force’ and the land as a ‘defending, protecting force’, between which the protagonists were caught: ‘[t]he people are dependent on the earth for protection, and on the sea for life—they are never free from the conflict of the two forces’.140 Hurst asked her company to use the 1937 Easter holiday to work on various aspects of the performance, including the instruction to ‘show by means of colour—either as a chart or as a sketch—the relationship of these three elements’ of sea, land, and people.141 Chekhov noted the students’ effective use of both form and colour in these charts when he saw them: These [charts] are very good and they help the actor to discover many things, provided they are not done with the intellect […] You must imagine over and over again until you get the feeling of the powers in the play, and then you try to fix these powers. Then your head can help you, but the question is whether you start with your head or your imagination. If you start with your imagination you will get a feeling of the powers.142 The form of these charts suggests Chekhov’s earlier gestural depiction of ‘three major moments’ in the sketch: the people ‘being pushed down by the weight and power of their fear and anxiety’, then ‘being lifted up by their hope’, before finally ‘falling down into a bottomless pit when they realise the tragedy’.143 Both these gestures and the students’ charts were means of articulating what Chekhov called the ‘feeling of the dynamic of the event’,144 which came to be encompassed, in this case, by a ‘wave form’ representing both the characters’ ‘will to live’ and their vulnerability to ‘the elements’.145 The students’ rehearsals—some undertaken independently, and some under Chekhov’s supervision—developed with two principal aims. The first was simultaneously to ‘create’ and ‘elaborate’ the mise-en-scène and script for the sketch by beginning with its main climaxes and gradually adding detail. The second was to ensure that, in the process, the sketch’s ‘themes’ would be incorporated into ‘all the means on the stage’. This required the performers, in Chekhov’s words, ‘to be very responsible for each mise-en-scène, each movement’,146 and therefore to ensure that they would always ‘justify [their] movements and their relationships to the structures’ (of the scenery),147 and ‘express in [their] movements the idea of the waves’.148 The performers had to find ways of achieving this within the sketch’s chosen style of ‘drama near to tragedy’ (incorporating the ‘wave form’).149 They also took responsibility for the use of colour and

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sound in the sketch’s scenographic development and received feedback on this aspect of their work at the same time as their performances and writing. Chekhov praised the ‘metamorphosis of costumes’, but observed that the sounds in the score were ‘much too short in rhythm’ and the red elements in the design ‘too red […]—the deeper more passionate reds are right’. He also suggested that the sketch was, at twelve minutes, too short, arguing that ‘it must be elaborated and made longer’ by taking advantage of its ‘many potential moments’ and emphasising that since ‘[t]he whole sketch is waiting’, ‘the audience must wait’.150 This process exemplifies the holistic approach to theatre-making to which the CTS was committed, grounded in rhythmical gesture and atmosphere. In this process, even writing was conceived as part of the development of a theatrical whole, rather than a prescriptive activity undertaken in advance of rehearsals, and Chekhov commonly observed both the untapped potential for action and speech in a sketch and the moments where speech was superfluous and could be removed. The integration of Chekhov’s feedback to his students demonstrates the extent to which they were expected to consider all of the creative roles in which they were being trained as interdependent means of elaborating and expressing the central idea of a performance. This process was underpinned by Chekhov’s guiding principle that a performance should ‘weld into one harmony all of the elements of theatrical expression’,151 and should be developed by means of what he called a ‘new kind of conversation … between actors, playwrights, costume designers, directors, etc.’, which would be ‘much more artistic’,152 because it would replace verbal expression with what he later called the ‘language of gestures’.153 Chekhov considered this embodied language to be preferable to speech as the basis of collaboration because it enables a group of artists to ‘feel our purpose’.154 This basis in feeling makes gesture, for Chekhov, the language of acting: ‘[t]he actor will understand you in this new language, and will be able to follow your direction without the need of speaking intellectually. The gesture will become a language between the director and the actor’, he argued.155 Furthermore, Chekhov argued that the language of gestures extends beyond the stage, offering an embodied means of capturing the unspoken communication between actors and audiences that is the central fact of theatrical art. The language of gestures captures, he told his actors, what ‘[w]e must know’ and ‘the audience will feel without knowing’.156 This capacity of Chekhov’s creative process to engender ‘feeling without knowing’ was not confined to the ways in which it was used to shape an audience’s experience. Chekhov also noted that a director using gesture to communicate with actors ‘must have a very clear idea of what he is doing, and of the series of psychological gestures which will lead his cast the right way’.157 This tacit articulation of the ways in which Chekhov’s language of gestures may be used to direct the unconscious experience of both actors and audience returns us to the problem of authority for any collaborative

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process, within which, as I have already suggested, it may work to shape outcomes indirectly, through deference. Collaboration may, after all, refer equally to a process whereby members of a group engage democratically with each other to shape their shared endeavours (as it usually is assumed to today) or (as it did in the late 1930s) to the enforced co-operation of a group with a dictatorial power. This account of the development of sketches at the CTS leaves this question of how power was structured in its practice hanging in the balance. Members of Chekhov’s studio were clearly being trained for a form of democratic collaboration, but their work was also commonly being shaped by processes that bypassed democratic engagement. Therefore, in order to reach a judgement about the ways that power was structured by the collaborative practices of the CTS, we will have to consider the processes to which these sketches gave rise: the development of performances, which was the studio’s ultimate aim.

Collaborating with the author: performances by the CTS Among all of the public performances given by the CTS, its adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1871–2), which opened at the Lyceum Theatre, Broadway, on October 24, 1939, remains the most significant, if not the most successful. This is partly because, unlike the studio’s productions of Twelfth Night and King Lear (both 1940–1), The Possessed was a new play, developed by the studio, and, unlike its adaptation of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth (1940) and Chekhov and Arnold Sundgaard’s comedy TroublemakerDoublemaker (1941), it focused explicitly on the ‘social problems besetting the modern world’, as the studio had set out to do.158 Dostoyevsky’s novel charts the events in a small provincial town where a group of radicals led by Pyotr Verkhovenski, son of Stepan, a liberal intellectual, attempts to enlist the charismatic and enigmatic Nikolai Stavrogin, who ultimately rejects both their politics and religion and commits suicide in an apparently rational response to the crimes that he has both committed and allowed to happen. This long and complex narrative of many interwoven strands has been repeatedly adapted for performance in the years since the CTS version. Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), for example, focused on the novel’s extremist group to explore the Maoist ideas of student revolutionaries leading towards the uprisings of 1968. Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Les Possédés (1988) was created at the time of the collapse of Soviet power, and placed Omar Sharif’s Stepan (a devotee of western Enlightenment) and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz’s Shatov (an activist who wishes to leave Pyotr’s group) in the crossfire between an extremist younger generation and an authoritarian old guard. By contrast, a decade after the German reunification, Frank Castorf’s 1999 stage adaptation, at the Volksbühne in Berlin, presented western capitalism as an ideologically barren landscape.

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Like these subsequent adapters of Dostoyevsky’s text, Chekhov considered the novel not only had ‘some marvellous dramatic material’, but offered an opportunity to engage, albeit somewhat indirectly, with contemporary events in Europe.159 He was considering it as a source for a production since the start of his planning for the studio in 1936,160 and made reference in the same year to ‘one Russian author who could perhaps write one of the plays I have in view for our future repertory’.161 A pencil note in the margin identifies the author as George Shdanoff, who joined the CTS in 1937. The studio began working on the adaptation, which seems always to have been referred to as ‘Mr Shdanoff’s play’,162 in early 1938, when Chekhov announced that ‘we are from now on going to work more and more concretely with two plays’: The Possessed, and another new play, A Spanish Evening, under development with the writer Henry Lyon Young.163 Introducing a performance of an extract from Young’s play on December 8 of that year (at an occasion to mark the studio’s departure from Dartington for Ridgefield, Connecticut), Chekhov described the process of its development as ‘what we call collaborating with the author’,164 and this was the approach taken to the development of The Possessed too. Students created sketches of characters and scenarios from the novel, which they were discouraged from reading themselves, and Shdanoff developed his script on the basis of these sketches, as well as his reading of Dostoyevsky and his discussions with Chekhov. This process exemplified Chekhov’s vision for the CTS of an author ‘working with and among the cast’: The author of the new theatre will be a person who creates the words for the play, not in the solitude of the study but working with and among the cast. He must know what it means to stand on the stage and utter the words. If he is an actor as well as an author he will know what words he must write down, and what words are possible for the actor to say. The director and the actors must be able to tell him what they wish to do and the author must understand and give the words for their purpose. The theatre is a great power but it must find itself. We must know what it means to be a member of the theatre—it doesn’t mean to be the servant of the designer or the author. In the future the right impulse for the author and the designer will come from the actors and directors—they are the heart of the theatre.165 Once again, this process is characterised by paradoxical power relations. In seeking to break the controlling power of the author over theatre production, Chekhov seems to construct another hierarchy, in which ‘[t]he director and the actors’ assume the authority to ‘tell him what they wish to do’ and require him to serve ‘their purpose’ because, in Chekhov’s technique at least, the embodied language of performance is central not only to the theatre’s capacity to

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communicate, but to its creative vocabulary. At the same time, however, we must consider that this statement was not intended to be published, and was balanced by Chekhov’s assertion that ‘the author’s idea’ forms the basis of the theatre’s ‘great power’: We must dig deeply and penetrate to the very deepest point of the play, which is the author’s idea. After this we must elaborate on this first deepest place with our gestures, our speech, and our images. Then, and only then, will we be ready to begin to act. Compare this approach with the modern stage which commences its work with the play itself. From such an approach there is no development possible, only the repetition of certain habits and so-called technical things, with which the present, immovable actor is bound.166 The aesthetic intransigence of the contemporary, naturalistic theatre was the root, for Chekhov, of its commitment to ‘the plot, rather than the idea’ of a play.167 By contrast, he committed the CTS to creating aesthetic forms for performance that would be able to articulate ‘what we are going to say to our audience through the whole performance […] the rhythm, the music of the performance, the intangible parts’,168 which could only be fully articulated in an embodied form: We use the words ‘spine,’ ‘idea’ and ‘rhythmical gesture’ because I am not sure of the English word, but the meaning is the ‘rhythmical idea gesture.’ […] This ‘rhythmical idea gesture’ is the most important thing, and it can be spine, idea, rhythm and everything.169 At the CTS, we can see Chekhov applying this principle of seeking a unifying ‘rhythmical idea gesture’ equally to extant scripts and new plays created by the studio. For example, in directing a scene from Henning Berger’s play The Deluge (which Chekhov knew from having acted in Vakhtangov’s 1915 Moscow Art Theatre Studio production), Chekhov’s rehearsal notes include a diagrammatic score of atmosphere beginning with ‘Business (Staccato)’ moving through a ‘Thunderstorm’ into ‘Fear (legato)’, before rising to ‘Panic (staccato)’, and falling again to ‘Pause (legato)’.170 Whether it took place before or after a script was produced, this exploration of the form of a scene, using atmosphere and rhythmical gesture in particular, enabled Chekhov and his collaborators at the CTS to ‘try to penetrate into something which is behind the psychology’ of a character or scene or narrative, and ‘find a certain rhythmical pattern’.171 This pattern, once articulated, formed the basis of the entire production: the script, the actors’ movements, and the scenography, which Chekhov insisted must be experienced by the actors as ‘your world’, so that the actors have a ‘feeling of harmony not only with the

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other persons, but with the structures, with the space around’.172 This ‘feeling of harmony’ would emerge, Chekhov argued, not only because of the shared basis of these elements in the performance’s rhythmical gesture, but as a consequence of the production’s chosen style, which would characterise them all. In the case of The Possessed, Chekhov and Shdanoff chose the style of ‘drama, close to tragedy’, and to focus their adaptation on the polarity between the characters of Nikolai Stavrogin and Pyotr (here known as Peter) Verkhovenski.173 Chekhov referred, from the start of his explorations of the narrative at the CTS, to ‘two different and opposite psychological gestures of the two heroes in this play’,174 and went on to elaborate this polarity into a dramaturgical schema for the entire performance: the play begins from underneath. Verkhovenski appears from somewhere, from darkness, abroad, unknown, etc., and he develops his activities more and more […] at the meeting he opens himself entirely—then revolution and downfall. […] Then the line divides—Stavrgoin goes upwards […] and Verkhovenski goes down, from the point of the meeting and the revolution. From this point there are two lines.175 Chekhov had repeatedly articulated early in the production’s development that all aspects of the play, including the design by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, would have ‘to find how to incorporate […] this big gesture which divides, and which gestures are in each scene, because each scene has its gesture’.176 The ‘two lines’ into which this gesture divides are particularly evident in two key scenes in Shdanoff’s script. First, in Scene 4 (which is also indebted to Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novel The Double), Stavrogin is alone in his study, speaking ‘Verkhovenski’s thoughts’ and asking ‘How can I escape you … myself … You called yourself a worm … You are—a worm, right! (he laughs) The Sun and the worm’.177 Verkhovenski then appears, and perhaps, in Woodrow Chambliss’s portrayal, he did so somewhat like a worm, ‘from darkness’. The critic Richard Lockridge certainly described him in these terms, ‘scuttling darkly behind bits of scenery’.178 Certainly, Verkhovenski was associated with darkness in the mise-en-scène; he made his last appearance in the play’s final scene, where he is ‘lying in wait for Stavrogin’ with a revolver at ‘early morning’ before an encounter which again emphasises the two narrative lines these characters represent: Now I am going to finish you … (Takes aim, then suddenly lets the revolver drop and begins to back away from Stavrogin) Not yet … not now … later … We will come back … then we shall see … whose faith is stronger … your FAITH in CHRIST or our faith in the MAN-GOD-IDOL! (Verkhovenski disappears off the scene, Stavrogin remains alone on the stage. Morning begins to break.)179

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We can see clearly in this closing image that the text and staging are working collectively to embody Chekhov’s divided gesture in this closing scene. While Verkhovenski falls backwards, Stavrogin rises, though not triumphantly, concluding the play with his future—and the narrative—hanging in the balance. In the previous scene, the Stranger (a character introduced by Chekhov and Shdanoff) had accused Stavrogin of being ‘a walking phantom’: ‘You are the product of Verkhovenski’s imagination … his thoughts … but there is no You’.180 The Stranger, whom Stavrogin has heard offers ‘a whole course in the science of the spirit’, was evidently conceived as a figure of Rudolf Steiner, and tells Stavrogin that, ‘through work, hard work’, he must develop ‘a new sense’, which the Stranger calls ‘Inspired Imagination’, that will ‘enable you to see everything in a new light’.181 In the context of this scene, Chekhov and Shdanoff’s decision to minimise Stavrogin’s complicity in the crimes of which he is evidently guilty in the novel (including child abuse and being an accessory to murder), and to depict him neither rejecting religion nor committing suicide, serve to position their central character as a figure of Europe as they saw it in 1939. Chekhov’s initial description of Nikolai Stavrogin was of a hero, lacking only a conviction, a man who ‘wants to find the answer to the tragedy of the political situation’, ‘a tortured human being’ who ‘grows to a very vague feeling that something is above all this which is around him. […] he is going somewhere with closed eyes asking where is the truth’.182 This aptly summarises the play’s conclusion, in which Stavrogin’s future, like that of the continent from which the CTS had departed the previous year, hangs in the balance, but leans, or so the stage direction ‘[m]orning begins to break’ suggests, cautiously towards optimism.183 Stavrogin’s ‘faith in Christ’ remains, like Chekhov’s own faith, intact, and there is a further suggestion, in the new light of day at the play’s end, that the ‘new light’ offered by the Steiner/Stranger’s ‘Inspired Imagination’ will defeat the materialism of Verkhovenski’s Nietzchean ‘MAN-GOD-IDOL’. The final script is short, with just fifteen scenes, and—read as a play-text—the harsh view of the New York Post critic, John Mason Brown, that ‘the company couldn’t have found a worse one if they’d tried’ is not without justification. The style for which Chekhov strived in The Possessed of ‘drama near to tragedy’, ‘shown in the dimension of the gesture—large gestures’, is not supported by the play’s brevity, which severely constrains the time available for character and narrative development, making it feel strained.184 Furthermore, the play sits awkwardly between realism and tragedy, which seems to be a consequence of the decision to adapt such a particularly Russian narrative for an American audience. The script strongly emphasises Chekhov and Shdanoff’s universalist interpretation of the narrative, meaning that details of the play-world are largely absent. As a consequence, the stakes of the narrative are neither grounded in the concrete particularities of realism nor in the poetic scale of classical tragedy. In spite of these shortcomings, however, the Theatre Arts Monthly critic described the production as ‘an arresting example of directorial virtuosity’,185 a judgement that

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seems to have been based principally on the capacity of the actors to sustain a heightened style of performance that the Daily Worker’s critic described, in negative terms, as ‘postures, struttings, leaps and bounds [that] make Dostoevsky seem like a Marijuana addict’s dream’.186 As Franc Chamberlain observes, positive and negative reviews of The Possessed were united in ‘their recognition of the significance of a stylised physicality’.187 Although the production did not provide them with the critical success they sought, this widespread recognition across the spectrum of critical responses, testifies to the studio’s success at achieving the uniting ‘feeling of harmony’ through the production’s ‘rhythmical gesture’, as Chekhov intended.

The end of the CTS It has become commonplace to blame the closure of the Chekhov Theatre Studio on the loss of its young men who were drafted into the military following America’s entry into the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, by Japanese planes on December 7, 1941.188 This seems, however, to have hastened rather than caused the company’s demise. Core members of the studio had gradually been leaving ever since Paul Rogers and Jocelyn Wynne chose to remain in England, marry and begin their careers when the studio left Dartington at the end of 1938. The studio did attract new students in 1939, who trained in Chekhov’s technique alongside rehearsals for The Possessed and an adaptation of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers by Chekhov and Henry Lyon Young. In the run-up to the opening of The Possessed on Broadway, the company was also diluted, however, by the replacement of Dorothy Elmhirst in the role of Mrs Stavrogin with the actress and director Ellen Van Volkenburg, who was experienced and had worked at Dartington, but had no knowledge of Chekhov’s technique. They also auditioned and hired actors while on Broadway, one of whom—Ford Rainey—quickly became integral to Chekhov’s plans, taking over the role of Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night from studio member Woodrow Chambliss, who left in 1940 to move to Hollywood. We can see this process of dissipation beginning even as the studio’s first students graduated from its ‘three-year course’ in October 1939.189 Chekhov expressed himself delighted that, after ‘waiting […] for more than fifteen years’, ‘I get my first six children’, but also foresaw ‘difficulties, […] dark and difficult days’ in the studio’s future, which he hoped would ‘give us only more energy and more activity to go on’.190 Not even a month later, the ‘difficult days’ had set in with the closure of The Possessed, and, at a meeting to discuss this with his cast, Chekhov criticised them because they had chosen to ‘lower the performance’: We must be proud of our expressiveness […] You must accept this activity and presence of the whole human being on stage, which the modern theatre cannot accept because they have become used to this inactivity.

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On the stage we see activity which is still lower than what we see on the streets. But I cannot do this for you. I can only make a ‘revolution’ with you—to show the full capacity of the human being so that everything they scold us for makes us proud. […] If you don’t feel the points of the Method, you will only limp and fall down and become just the usual type of actors. Everybody can act on the stage, but to act as you have, not everyone can do, and that I am proud of. Please keep our weapons very strong. Our group can do something very different. We will be scolded and beaten, but we will be victorious, if you will believe in our small ‘revolution’.191 It would, however, take more than belief. Beatrice Straight spoke after Chekhov and pointed out that although the run of The Possessed had unified and professionalised the group and gained them valuable attention, their ‘funds’ had also ‘disappeared’, threatening their planned production of The Pickwick Papers, for which they would have to ‘get backers’.192 Straight also acknowledged that after ‘the pleasure of living alone’ in New York, returning to Ridgefield would be ‘hard for some of us’.193 A fortnight later, the group met to discuss ‘the future of the studio’ and address the fact that they were ‘frightfully isolated’ at Ridgefield and that both their ‘audience’ and ‘personal life’ were in New York. Chekhov vehemently disagreed saying that this was ‘against everything I wanted from you’ (‘from’ seems a telling preposition in the context) and that ‘the banal life of the city […] will never lead you to the ideal which I thought of’.194 Chekhov is revealingly unrelenting at this crisis point: this is not what I have been looking for my whole life. […] I must say that this is me, and if you accept it well and good; if not, I will find my destiny elsewhere. If you think that by leaving our life here you will get any more than the usual kind of results in the theatre, you are very much mistaken.195 The conversation continued, with some members of the studio voicing their desire to move to somewhere with an audience and where they could have personal lives, and others asserting that sacrifices were necessary for their success, and Chekhov does not seek to prevent them from expressing their views. His ‘suggestion’, however, does nothing to displace himself from his controlling position: ‘you have to live with this problem and take practical steps’, he told them, ‘[i]f you find a wonderful plan, then I will reserve the right to say “yes” or “no” to it’.196 This does substantially undermine the assertion of studio member Sam Schatz that ‘[t]his is essentially a democratic group—if we are strong enough, we can influence Mr Chekhov, and if he is strong enough, he will influence us. It can be merged and reconciled’.197

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In the event, a form of reconciliation between Chekhov’s perspective and that of his unhappy studio members was found, under which, in 1940, the studio formally altered its identity to become the Chekhov Theatre Players, touring productions to university theatres on the East Coast of the USA. The first of these, which toured that year, were Twelfth Night and Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth, notably plays with which Chekhov had enjoyed prominent earlier successes as director with the Habima Theatre (1930), and as an actor with the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre (1914), respectively. In fact, the studio would never again produce an adaptation, even though Chekhov had said that they ‘are always much more interesting to work on’ and they were much more amenable to the collective processes of creation the studio had developed.198 The following year, the company created new productions of King Lear and Henry Lyon Young’s Troublemaker-Doublemaker, which also toured, although Ford Rainey, who played Lear, recalled that Chekhov’s former student and assistant teacher, Alan Harkness, was drafted in to take over the directing. This change seems to have been precipitated by Chekhov’s abrupt withdrawal from rehearsals, allegedly because he had been rejected by one of the actresses to whom he had developed an attraction (the actress in question, Margaret Draper, was apparently—and, it seems, completely—asked to leave the company).199 Rainey said that he was ‘totally flummoxed’ when Chekhov reappeared and ‘tried in one day to coach me into his conception of the character of King Lear’.200 This is no surprise; even if Chekhov’s conception would have been clear to others, by the time Raney joined Chekhov’s company the studio was almost finished, and his training in Chekhov’s technique was therefore inevitably incomplete. In spite—or perhaps because—of the severe compromises that the remaining CTS members had to make after 1939 with regard to their initial vision for the studio and its working methods, these productions were met with much greater success, particularly Twelfth Night, in which the critic Stark Young found ‘the best thing’ to be ‘the ensemble playing’.201 This success notwithstanding, from the perspective of the practices analysed in this chapter, the CTS had long ceased to exist and was already unsustainable when the entry of the USA into the war made it untenable. Hardly any classes were recorded by Deirdre Hurst after 1939 except those given to professional actors in a Manhattan studio from the autumn of 1941, which were subsequently published as Lessons for the Professional Actor,202 and the studio had become what it had always threatened to be: simply a group of young actors led by an inspirational and much more powerful director, who also taught his own acting technique. Whether this was an inevitable consequence of the way in which power had always been structured at the CTS, or the result of more circumstantial problems; whether Chekhov’s enthusiasm for the studio practice was merely, as Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu argues, the result of a migrant actor seeking ‘shelter’ and taking ‘refuge in a messianic pedagogy’, and whether the CTS has valuable lessons to teach ensemble practice today are questions for the next chapter.203

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Notes 1 ‘Publicity Copy’, July 1936: Michael Chekhov Theatre Studio Deirdre Hurst du Prey Archive (hereafter MCTSDHPA), MC/4/14/A. 2 The Chekhov Theatre Studio (Dartington: Dartington Hall, 1936), 13, 19. 3 January 16, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 4 Ibid. 5 C. Mittelsteiner, ‘Georgette Boner and Michael Chekhov: Collaboration(s) and Dialogue(s) in Search of a Method’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. M. Autant-Mathieu and Y. Meerzon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 65. 6 Ibid., 57. 7 Ibid., 61. 8 Ibid., 60. 9 Ibid., 62. 10 ‘The Fishers’ Scene’, for instance, in which the people of a fishing village await the return of the ships after a storm, was introduced as an étude on October 21, 1936, and was subsequently directed by Deirdre Hurst du Prey during the spring term and performed as part of the final performance in July. The fairy-tale ‘The Golden Steed’ was introduced at about the same time and also performed at the end of the year. 11 September 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 12 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 25. 13 ‘Publicity Copy’, July 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/4/14/A. 14 December 14, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 15 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 13. 16 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 16. 17 A. Harkness, ‘The Function of Theatre in Regard to the Social Life of Our Times’, undated: MCTSDHPA, MC/S4/14. 18 P. Rogers, ‘The Function of Theatre in Regard to the Social Life of Our Times’, undated: MCTSDHPA, MC/S4/14. 19 January 30, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/9. 20 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 13. 21 M. Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, ed. M. Gordon (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), xxviii. 22 J. Daboo, ‘“As the shadow follows the body”: Examining Chekhov’s Creation of Character through “Eastern” Practices’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autant-Mathieu and Meerzon, 284. 23 Ibid., 284–5. 24 L. Nicholas, Dancing in Utopia: Dartington Hall and its Dancers (Alton: Dance Books Ltd, 2007), 93, 100, 105. 25 October 30, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 26 For more information, see T. Cornford, ‘“A New Kind of Conversation”: Michael Chekhov’s “Turn to the Crafts”‘, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 4, no. 2 (2013). 27 Daboo, ‘“As the Shadow Follows the Body”: Examining Chekhov’s Creation of Character through “Eastern” Practices’, 284. 28 October 5, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7 (emphasis original). 29 M. Chekhov, Lessons for Teachers of his Acting Technique, transcribed with an introduction by Deirdre Hurst du Prey (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000), 23–4, 47. 30 G. Padegimas, ‘Chekhov’s Lithuanian Lessons’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autant-Mathieu and Meerzon, 347. 31 A. Kirillov and F. Chamberlain, ‘Rehearsal Protocols for Hamlet by William Shakespeare at the Second Moscow Art Theatre’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 4, no. 2 (2013): 243. 32 Padegimas, ‘Chekhov’s Lithuanian Lessons’, 347.

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33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

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Ibid., 348. October 16, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7 (emphasis original). October 27, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. October 5, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. K. Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work: A Student’s Diary, ed. and trans. J. Benedetti (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 277. The relationship between Chekhov and Steiner has been remarked upon by a number of other commentators. See, for example, J. Pitches, Science and the Stanislavsky Tradition of Acting (London & New York: Routledge, 2006), 149–50; Y. Meerzon, The Path of a Character: Michael Chekhov’s Inspired Acting and Theatre Semiotics (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005), 213–17; C. Ashperger, The Rhythm of Space and the Sound of Time: Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique in the Twenty-First Century (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008a), 141, 289–90; M. Cristini, ‘Meditation and Imagination: The Contribution of Anthroposophy to Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autant-Mathieu and Meerzon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 69–81. Michael Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, ed. B. Merlin (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 134 (emphasis original). Cristini, ‘Meditation and Imagination: The Contribution of Anthroposophy to Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique’, 70. Ibid., 77. September 28, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. November 5, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. R. Steiner, and M. Steiner Von Sivers, Poetry and the Art of Speech (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981), 119. R. Steiner, ‘Lecture Four: The Presence of the Dead in Our Life’, Paris, May 25, 1914, accessed January 16, 2019, https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA154/Eng lish/AP1990/19140525p01.html. Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, 188. He already owned this book, which he had bought after seeing it by chance in the window of The Writers’ Bookshop in Moscow (Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, 133). R. Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds: How Is It Achieved? (Forest Row: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2004), 46. Chekhov, Lessons for Teachers, 47 (emphasis original). October 22, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. ‘Notes of discussion with Michael Chekhov, spring 1936’: MCTSDHPA, MC/S4/ 14/A. M. Sharp, Interview with Paul Rogers, August 1, 2000. December 14, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. Mark Tobey, Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings and Drawings 1925–1961 (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1962), 11. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 10. A.V. Coton, The New Ballet: Kurt Jooss and his Work (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd, 1946), 29. November 18, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. D. Oram, ‘The Expressive Voice in Performance: Chekhov’s Techniques for Voice and Singing’, in Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways, ed. C. Fleming and T. Cornford (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Ibid. Ibid. R. Steiner, ‘A Lecture on Eurythmy’, accessed March 9, 2012, http://wn.rsarchive. org/Lectures/Eurhythmy/19230826p01.html.

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63 R. Steiner, Speech and Drama: Lectures given in the Section for the Arts of Speech and Music, School for Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, September 1924 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press and London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1960), 252–4. 64 Ibid., 52, 53. 65 Ibid., 253. 66 October 20, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 67 Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, 187–8 (emphasis original); I have used the unpublished translation’s ‘natural phenomena’ here rather than the published ‘all phenomena in the world’, since Chekhov is speaking not only of phenomena ‘in the world’, but of those beyond the world: nature for an anthroposophist extends beyond the earth. 68 For more information, see T. Cornford, ‘Michael Chekhov, the Spiritual Realm and the Invisible Body’, in Theatre and Ghosts: Materiality, Performance and Modernity, ed. M. Luckhurst and E. Morin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 184. 69 Andrei Malaev-Babel, ed., The Vakhtangov Sourcebook (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 100. 70 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 89. 71 Ibid. 72 Cornford, ‘Michael Chekhov, the Spiritual Realm and the Invisible Body’, 187. 73 Ibid.; for more information about Delsarte and Volkonsky’s influence on Chekhov, see also R. Whyman, ‘Russian Delsartism and Michael Chekhov: The Search for the Eternal Type’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. AutantMathieu and Meerzon, 267–81. 74 Malaev-Babel, ed., The Vakhtangov Sourcebook, 338. 75 Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, 187–8 (emphasis original). 76 M. Sharp, Michael Chekhov: The Dartington Years (DVD, Palomino Films, 2002); William is the son of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst and Beatrice Straight’s halfbrother, and was a boy while Chekhov was at Dartington. This exercise is found in Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 39. 77 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 39. 78 February 7, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 79 February 7, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 80 February 23, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 81 November 24, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 82 February 17, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 83 See Chapter 4 for a fuller consideration of this, in particular, 136. 84 February 17, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 85 January 16, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 86 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 45. 87 February 7, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 88 November 24, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 89 T. Ingold, The Life of Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 132. 90 November 10, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 91 Ingold, The Life of Lines, 133. 92 Ibid., 155. 93 Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, 35. 94 Ibid. 95 May 6, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 96 October 16, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 G. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, trans. A. EngelsSchwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 19.

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100 Ingold, The Life of Lines, 150. 101 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 341–2. 102 Ibid., 342. 103 Ibid. 104 B. Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), ix. 105 October 16, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 106 ‘Substrate’, Oxford English Dictionary. 107 November 8, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 108 October 20 and 27, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 109 October 2, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 110 October 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 111 November 5, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 112 Ingold, The Life of Lines, 139. 113 Ibid., p. 140. 114 September 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 115 Ibid. 116 March 18, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 117 Ibid. 118 September 29, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8 119 September 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8 120 November 15, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 121 Jonathan Pitches, ‘The Technique in Microcosm: Michael Chekhov’s Work on the Fishers’ Scene’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 4, no. 2 (2013), 235. 122 Ibid., 221. 123 Ibid., 226. 124 Ibid., 233. 125 Ibid., 235. 126 November 8, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 127 November 10, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 128 G. Šmidchens, ‘National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics as a Source for Nonviolent Political Action’, Slavic Review 66, no. 3 (fall 2007): 498. 129 November 8, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 130 Šmidchens, ‘National Heroic Narratives in the Baltics as a Source for Nonviolent Political Action’, 498. 131 November 8, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 132 September 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 133 ‘Draft of Speech for Spanish Evening’, December 8, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/17. 134 A. Straumanis, ed., The Golden Steed: Seven Baltic Plays (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1979), 99. 135 Ibid., 59. 136 Annotated typescript, ‘The Golden Steed’: MCTSDHPA, MC/S6/4/B. 137 Straumanis, The Golden Steed, 53. 138 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 16. 139 October 21, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 140 D. Hurst, ‘Holiday Tasks for Fishing Scene Cast’, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S6/3/R. 141 Ibid. 142 February 18, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 143 January 16, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 144 February 18, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 145 June 29, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 146 June 22, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 147 May 24, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 148 June 1, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7.

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149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

197

July 1, July 12, 1937, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. July 12, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 13. December 11, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. See M. Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, ed. D. Hurst du Prey (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1992), 107–12. December 11, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. January 23, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. December 10, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. January 16, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 16. ‘Notes from a Meeting with Michael Chekhov’, spring 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/ S4/14/A. Ibid. M. Chekhov, ‘General Points to Be Considered when Contacting Playwrights’, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S4/14/D. For example, on March 2, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. January 31, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. December 8, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/9 (emphasis original). M. Chekhov, untitled note: MCTSDHPA, MC/S6/3. November 21, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. July 18, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. Ibid. February 9, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. October 12, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. February 17, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. October 27, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. January 17, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/9. February 24, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. July 11, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. July 11, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. G. Shdanoff, The Possessed (Ridgefield, CT: The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 1939), Scene 4. The New York Sun, October 25, 1939, quoted in F. Chamberlain, Michael Chekhov (London: Routledge, 2004), 94. Shdanoff, The Possessed, Scene 15. Ibid., Scene 14. Ibid. January 24, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. Ibid. March 22, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/9. Chamberlain, Michael Chekhov, 100. Ibid., 97. Ibid., 99. See, for example, C. Marowitz, The Other Chekhov: A Biography of Michael Chekhov, the Legendary Actor, Director and Theorist (New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2004), 194. October 5, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. Ibid. November 1, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. Ibid. Ibid. November 17, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. Ibid.

198

196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203

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Ibid. Ibid. November 1, 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. Marowitz, The Other Chekhov, 185–6. Marowitz, The Other Chekhov, 186. Ibid., 190. Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, 17. M. Autant-Mathieu, ‘Michael Chekhov and the Cult of the Studio’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autant-Mathieu and Meerzon, 82–95, 94.

6 MODELS OF PRACTICE IN THE CHEKHOV THEATRE STUDIO

Chekhov and his studio: the material of performance and the problem of hegemony Writing about Chekhov’s attachment to the ideal of a studio after leaving Russia, Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu takes a view that differs from Chekhov’s own statements. Chekhov wrote to his former colleagues that: [i]t is impossible for me to stay in the theatre just as an actor who merely plays a number of roles […] Only the idea of a new theatre in general, a new theatre art can fascinate me and stimulate my creative work.1 Autant-Mathieu argues, by contrast, that Chekhov’s decades-long attachment to this ‘idea’ emerged from the combination of his difficulty finding sufficient acting work and his longing for home: Because of the difficulties of acting in a language other than Russian, the actor took refuge in a messianic pedagogy. Without this cult of the studio that infected him in 1912 and which he spread around the world, he would not have been carried away by the ambition of founding a Theatre of the Future. The cult of the studio was like a bit of earth from his native land that he carried about with him, a cocoon he tried to weave at each of his stopping places, because it allowed him to take shelter and at the same time to reach out to others.2 Aspects of this argument can certainly be challenged on historical grounds. Most obviously, the assertion of a causal relationship between Chekhov’s exile and his ‘messianic pedagogy’ does not explain his decision to use the rehearsals for his

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1924 Hamlet at the Second Moscow Art Theatre as an opportunity to instruct the company in his technique. Autant-Mathieu’s focus on the example of Stanislavsky’s 1912 Studio as ‘a model he would never reject and would try to emulate in exile’ is also somewhat undermined by Chekhov’s own account of Stanislavsky as a ‘very difficult and strange teacher’ who ‘tortured all the actors around him, and […] tortured himself even more than us’.3 Likewise, AutantMathieu’s analogy of Chekhov weaving his studios like a cocoon around him is in danger of underplaying the various contributions of his collaborators, most notably Georgette Boner,4 George Shdanoff (whom, as Autant-Mathieu notes, Chekhov had planned to involve in a studio as early as 1928),5 Mstislav Dobuzhinksy, as well as those members of the CTS who joined it as students. Finally, Autant-Mathieu’s teleological assumption that Chekhov’s 1941 decision to offer classes in Manhattan meant that he ‘aimed to train experienced actors’ overlooks Chekhov’s commitment to do exactly the opposite at the CTS.6 Nonetheless, Autant-Mathieu’s argument is provocative because of its willingness to engage with the unspoken contradictions that remained, unquestionably, at the centre of Chekhov’s relationships with his studios in general and the CTS in particular. It is true, for example, that although the CTS was formed in order to create a company that would develop productions, Chekhov’s instinct was, frequently, to use the studio as a refuge. In 1936, he can be seen to be very wary of press coverage, and he remained reluctant to participate in the commercial theatre establishment in either London or New York. As the final part of the last chapter showed, Chekhov’s commitment to what amounted, almost, to artistic isolation was a major point of tension between him and the younger studio members. The way that this tension was handled—with Chekhov retaining a right to veto any suggestion put to him—also demonstrated that, in spite of its collective and collaborative ideals, the CTS always remained Chekhov’s studio, rather than a group that he co-founded. In this sense, Autant-Mathieu’s analogy of a cocoon is accurate: as transcriptions of classes and rehearsals frequently demonstrate, Chekhov used teaching and directing not only as opportunities to develop his students, but to bind them to him. He did so, initially, by emphasising the necessity for students to dedicate themselves to their work: Acting, he said, ‘is very hard work—like a violinist practicing scales’,7 and he insisted, as we have seen, that: The most important thing is work. […] everybody has a gift from nature, more or less, but what we really have in our hands is work. It is the only thing we can do. We cannot do the gift, but we can do the work. I think of our school, and afterward our theatre, as consisting of work, work, work.8 As discussed in Chapter 5, the ‘work’ to which Chekhov referred was always circumscribed by his technique, which he likened to the process of a worker learning to master his tools:

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When we have mastered the system, it will be much easier. […] After we have gone through the period of assimilating the Method and its exercises, we will be on the other side and we will discover many new possibilities which will make us absolutely free.9 The absolute freedom to which Chekhov referred was not, in fact, liberty so much as mastery: ‘I must be the master of my body. […] I Am, and my body is the instrument, the tool, by which I can present myself to an audience’.10 Mastery, here, is characterised as the capacity to dictate to the figuratively inanimate body, ‘the instrument’ or ‘tool’ of the will. Reading this statement through Chekhov’s anthropocentrist tendency—which he inherited from Steiner—to figure the individual and their movements as a microcosm of society and of nature—reflects revealingly on the studio as an enterprise. If, as he asserted, ‘the actor is the theatre’,11 and—as he asserts here—the actor’s technique is the means by which his will is able to master his expressive resources, then Chekhov, as the artistic will of the CTS, can also be seen to be using his technique to master the studio’s expressive resources—its members. I argued in the previous chapter, however, that Chekhov was always aware of the need to balance mastery and submission. His vision of mastery was not simply a question of domination. He did not conceive of the body as a formless, senseless mass to be shaped at the whim of the will and nor did he seek to deny the creative individuality of his students. Rather, Chekhov’s technique sought to work with the necessarily dialectical tension between what he called the ‘feeling of form’ and the ‘feeling of ease’. The former, which is associated with solidity and the movement quality of ‘moulding’, is necessarily an imposition. The latter, which is more liquid, and associated with the movement quality of ‘flowing’, is responsive and mobile. Therefore Chekhov told his students that ‘rules must swim in water, which is freedom’.12 He also told them, however, that ‘there is nothing to change in the organization—there is only one thing to do and that is to maintain and increase it’ and that they must put to themselves this question: ‘am I able to conform to the [studio’s] ideals and ideas? If not, […] I will not be able to change the organization at all and so must go through and disappear’.13 Therefore, if it is true that rules swam in freedom at the CTS, it is equally true that freedom was intended to be achieved by accepting rules. Towards the end of the studio’s life, Chekhov became more likely to be explicit, and even dogmatic, about rules: I don’t think there is anyone among us who does not desire to preserve our organization—[…] to develop it, to improve it and to make its life and its tone always higher and higher. […] the organization must stand unshakeable, and this is what we have to preserve. […] there is a very important principle involved, whether everyone who enters wishes to conform to the rules, the ideas, the methods, the kind of life which this

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place has. The principle is that everyone who enters this characteristic place must not have in mind to change these rules and regulations, but to […] preserve them.14 This assertion dates from 1940, four years after Chekhov’s formulation of rules swimming in freedom. As we have seen, there was, by this time, increasing pressure on the studio to produce work that would make it financially selfsustaining, and Chekhov was regularly somewhat embattled, his authority threatened both by the most experienced members of the CTS, who felt—not unreasonably—that they had earned the right to voice their perspectives, and by newer recruits, who had not been acculturated to the studio’s ways of working. We should therefore be wary of taking this statement out of context. At the same time, however, Chekhov’s decision to adopt an authoritarian position at this time exposes the extent to which his authority had previously simply been assumed. He had not needed to insist that studio members ‘conform to the rules, the ideas, the methods, the kind of life’ he proposed, because the fact of their membership constituted, in itself, tacit consent to this principle. The previous chapter has shown, for example, how Chekhov used technique as a means of guiding his students towards interpretations that he assumed the authority to shape. Thus, acceptance of ‘the methods’ of the CTS, as articulated by Chekhov, entailed a tacit acceptance of his ideas, and his authority. The question of how authority is sustained across the spectrum from coercive domination to tacit consent is directly addressed by the concept of hegemony, in the communist activist and political theorist Antonio Gramsci’s sense of the power to determine the ideological consensus of a social formation. This is achieved, Gramsci argued, through the various mechanisms of ‘civil society’, as opposed to the power of ‘“direct domination” or command’, which is wielded by the state, with which it commonly operates in tandem.15 Hegemony, therefore, articulates the capacity to determine ‘the general direction imposed on social life’, which is crucially distinct from—but often allied with—the power directly to dictate to the members of a social group.16 Hegemony, unlike direct domination, does not require active consent to its demands and therefore present itself as a force directly to be opposed. All hegemony requires is that a group defer to its leadership, however passively or unwittingly. We can apply this analysis analogically to the situation of Chekhov’s studio, over which, as its director, he was able to exercise direct control, but through whose mechanisms he was also able to establish hegemonic control of its members by shaping their shared artistic technique. In using this analogy, however, it is crucial to remember that the hegemonic status of Chekhov’s technique within his studio was always imbricated with the wider forces of hegemony in society. What Gramsci terms the ‘historically organic ideologies’ that emerge from given political structures have, he argues, ‘a validity which is “psychological”, they organize human masses, and create the terrain on which men [sic] move, acquire consciousness of

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their position, struggle, etc.’17 Gramsci proposes, then, in a manner reminiscent of Chekhov’s notion of technique as a ‘ground’, that hegemonic ideologies constitute a ‘terrain’, and this terrain is the basis upon which the ‘grounds’ of Chekhov’s technique are laid. Therefore, although Chekhov repeatedly asserted (and not without justification) the capacity of the development of technique through training to free the artist, a Gramscian analysis opens up two fundamental problems with this assertion. First, there is the structural dependence of training upon the tacit willingness of trainees to be led, which inevitably creates the condition of deference that enables hegemonic control to be established within the studio. Second, there is the wider problem that ideologies that are shaped by social and political structures are not experienced as coming from ‘out there’ in the world, but arising psychologically from within. Chekhov was not particularly given to the consideration of ideology. He preferred to think in terms of the interplay of the material and the spiritual, which he saw—crucially—in dialogue, with each side speaking and responding: ‘our whole body, […] is like a membrane through which all the finest psychological problems must be speaking to the audience’,18 and ‘we are able to understand our spirits if our bodies are responsive’.19 This feature of Chekhov’s technique echoes John Dewey’s conception (explored in Chapter 3) of artistic practice as a continual relation between perception and action, and the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s related argument that the role of the artist—as that of any skilled practitioner—is not to give effect to a preconceived idea, novel or not, but to join with and follow the forces and flows of material that bring the form of the work into being.20 On the basis of this assertion, Ingold proposes that ‘even if the maker has a form in mind, it is not this form that creates the work. It is the engagement with materials’.21 This engagement takes, for Ingold, the form of ‘correspondence’: ‘not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in the world of becoming’.22 Ingold’s argument develops the idea from Deleuze and Guattari that what they call a ‘matter-flow’ ‘can only be followed’, and therefore that an artisan’s ‘plane follows the wood, the fibers of the wood’,23 and ‘artisans are those who follow the matter-flow’.24 We can understand Chekhov’s training at the CTS, to a great extent, as a process of attuning his students to the ‘matterflows’ of the body. For example, one important respect in which Chekhov’s technique differs from Stanislavsky’s is in his approach to the idea of a character’s objective, as he said: [w]hen Stanislavsky gave his objective to his actors, we took it with our intellect, with our brain, with our thinking abilities. […] The result was

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that everything we did to reach our aim was […] like a straight line without any vibrations or modulations, because the intellect is very straight and primitive… .25 By contrast, Chekhov insisted that his students should ‘imagine that you are doing this. […] Fill your whole being with the action. […] A psychological objective can be expressed through the legs and arms—the most complicated psychological things are living in our legs and arms’.26 Chekhov’s description of the ‘straight line’ of the intellect ‘without any vibrations or modulations’ is, in Ingold’s terms, a ‘preconceived form’, produced regardless of the performer’s ‘engagement with materials’. The lines that are described by the movements with which Chekhov asks his students to explore their objective are, by contrast, produced from engagement with the ‘matter-flow’ that is ‘living in our legs and arms’. Therefore, for Chekhov, performance is not simply a means of expressing or communicating, but is itself a material, whose forces and flows must be followed. This conception of performance as a material with—as it were—tangible and intangible sides that interchange like those of a mobius strip is fundamental to Chekhov’s technique. It is also clear from his frequent references to the natural world that Chekhov considered the material of performance to be— initially, at least—free from ideology. The material of performance, however, is always already ideological; it cannot disentangle itself from systems of ideas that shape our experience of the ‘matter-flow’ of our bodies. As a cis-gender man, for example, I cannot separate out the strength of my limbs from the ideology of masculinity, I experience them—not as the same thing, but nonetheless simultaneously—in the ‘matter-flow’ of my movements; ‘gender’, as Judith Butler wrote, ‘is part of what decides the subject’.27 Thus, the practices of the CTS were unavoidably and doubly hegemonic: first, in that they could not detach themselves from the deeper ideological terrain upon which they were constructed and, second, in that Chekhov’s capacity to shape the technical terrain of the studio constituted a further layer of hegemony. Chekhov told his students, for example, that, when they made a gesture, ‘in our soul there are awakened certain desires, certain feelings, certain ideas, and so a certain spiritual content’.28 He gives an example of this process in his description of one of the gestures of eurythmy—Steiner’s movement system that takes what he called ‘the forms and gestures of the air’ that are created by sound and converts them into ‘movements of the whole human being’ to create ‘visible speech, visible music’:29 Let us take, for example, the sound of the letter ‘a’ in ‘father’. What Gesture lies behind it, creating it and giving it its power and audible content? Imagine we open our arms widely and stand with our legs apart and follow with our feelings this Gesture, trying to experience it strongly.

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What do we experience? A kind of astonishment, awe, admiration, and similar feelings.30 This pattern is characteristic of Chekhov’s teaching of gesture at the CTS to encompass the ‘spiritual content’ of anything connected to a performance. It was the basis of a process by which, as he said in a 1941 lecture to his students in Manhattan, ‘the spirit will be concretely studied’ and actors will ‘know what it is and how to take it and use it […] and how concrete and objective it can be for us’.31 Chekhov’s claim for the objectivity of this process constitutes an appeal to what Gramsci would call his students’ ‘common sense’.32 Gramsci used this term to articulate forms of ‘theoretical consciousness’, noting, however, that they may be ‘contradictory’. On the one hand, Gramsci uses it to describe a consciousness ‘which is implicit in [the] activity’ of working people, and which therefore articulates their interests as a class. The other meaning of ‘common sense’, for Gramsci, would be better translated as ‘received wisdom’: an idea that is ‘superficially explicit or verbal’, and has been ‘inherited from the past and uncritically absorbed’.33 Chekhov’s assertion of the ‘astonishment, awe, admiration’ that characterise the main vowel in the word ‘father’ is presented as the first kind of common sense: emerging as a concrete and objective truth from the activity of skilled performers. Tacitly, however, Chekhov’s assertion also reinforces the second form of common sense: the received wisdom, of a deeply patriarchal society, that associates the word ‘father’ with ‘awe’ and ‘admiration’. The exercise cannot, then, be considered ideologically neutral, and, from a Gramscian perspective, Chekhov’s technique is functioning, here, as a Trojan horse for an ideological position which is not explicitly fundamental to it, but which naturalised Chekhov’s (male) authority within the studio. The decision to provide uniforms for studio members can be seen to serve the same purpose. Studio member Paul Rogers recalled his fondly: It was blue stockinette in winter, which is extremely comfortable to move and be in, and on the feet we wore extremely sensitive simple sandals with a calf-skin sole that gave you complete contact with the floor. Because it was an essential part of the actor, as it were, to be in contact with the world […]. A uniform style of dress eliminates difference in terms of what you have and what you have not got. It does not iron out your personality at all, if anything it gives your personality—what it really is—a chance to shine through, unhindered by extraneous rubbish with which you might deck yourself.34 There is no doubt that the studio uniform had these effects, but it had other effects too. For Gramsci, we arrive at ‘[c]ritical understanding of self […] through a struggle of political “hegemonies” and of opposing directions’, which process constitutes the formation of a specifically ‘political consciousness’.35 Uniform dress served to forestall the development of such an understanding. First, it

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concealed real, material differences between, for example, Rogers—a grammar school boy from Plympton—and other studio members, most obviously Beatrice Straight, the daughter of an heiress whose wealth would have been almost unimaginable to him. Second, the studio uniform also served categorically to distinguish Chekhov—who was well known for his elegant dress and always taught in a suit and tie—and his associates from the choral mass of the studio membership. This visible, material distinction echoed a fundamental, dramaturgical structure for the CTS: the hero/chorus dyad. The analysis of the studio’s work on The Golden Steed in Chapter 5 exemplifies this tendency, to which Chekhov made prominent reference in the studio’s prospectus: It should be the function of the new theatre to […] reveal the heroic in preference to the defeated and to recall the greatness of the human spirit in its age-long struggle with adversity. The Studio will endeavour to discover in what facets of life the heroic quality still flourishes; it will then attempt to draw this quality once more onto its stage, and will demonstrate that the hero is still, as in the past, proper material for the theatre.36 Chekhov’s undisputed leadership of the CTS therefore combined the aspirations to achieve technical mastery and ‘to reveal the heroic’. Unavoidably, however, the rhetoric of heroism—like that of mastery—cannot be disentangled from wider histories of oppression and subjugation that underpin the truth-claims of hegemonic positions. This mutually reinforcing relationship between Chekhov’s technique and hegemonic power can be traced back at least as far as his 1923 rehearsals for Hamlet (Second Moscow Art Theatre, 1924), which saw him not only in the leading role, but, as artistic director, with a controlling interest in the production. Rather than choosing to displace himself from this position, however, Chekhov created a structure that would further embed his leadership, by appointing Valentin Smyshlyaev, Vladimir Tatarinov, and Alexander Cheban as directors. All of these men were, according to Andrei Kirillov and Franc Chamberlain, ‘close collaborators and artistic confederates of Chekhov […] but not profound directors themselves’.37 As a result, the production was shaped by Chekhov’s conception of the play, outlined by Smyshlyaev to the company: Hamlet is regarded as a tragedy of Humanity undergoing a cataclysm […] in three parts: (i) the presentiment and premonition of this cataclysm, (ii) the struggle with and the realisation of the mission received at the moment of this cataclysm, in other words, at the moment of the encounter with the Spirit, and (iii) solace through death.38 Chekhov asserted, on the basis of this concept, the need to approach the play ‘with a spiritual logic’.39 The ‘through-action’ underpinning this logic was

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embodied, of course, by the character of Hamlet, and specifically, ‘the desire of Hamlet’s soul for the Light’,40 which was opposed to the materialism of Claudius and the court, which Chekhov described as ‘a symbol of worldly prosperity and greatness’.41 This reading of the play lends support to Autant-Mathieu’s description of Chekhov’s propensity for the ‘messianic’. The moment immediately after Hamlet has been visited by the spirit of his dead father, which begins ‘the struggle with and the realisation of the mission [he has] received’, was described as ‘“The Agony in the Garden”. Hamlet accepts his cross’.42 In so doing, of course, Hamlet must renounce earthly attachments, in particular his ‘earthly love’ for Ophelia, who becomes, thereby, figured as an embodiment of ‘the elements of love, naivety and purity of such a force that she does not understand the earthly’, and therefore ‘an obstacle to [Hamlet’s] mission’ and even ‘the part of Hamlet’s soul which is in the hands of the earth’, making his cruel treatment and rejection of her not only justifiable but heroic: an act, in Chekhov’s words, of ‘victorious wisdom’.43 Ophelia’s madness was likewise conceived as a form of victory: she is no longer on earth but in the cosmos. […] Her arrival is the sound of the soul. And this music resounds in her whole body and captivates everyone around her. Ophelia is an incorporeal spirit, she is in the spheres of the cosmos. We need this ‘soul to sing’ so that it is a vibration of the cosmos, the music of the spheres.44 This description of the final part of Ophelia’s life in the production connects it powerfully to the climaxes of its first and last sections: Hamlet’s meeting with the Ghost, and his own passage into the spirit-world at his death. In the first of these, as Alma Law notes, Chekhov made a ‘radical departure from tradition’ in that ‘the Ghost never physically appears in the scene’. Instead, ‘music sounds and Hamlet “sees” the invisible Ghost of his father’.45 While Hamlet spoke to the Ghost, a moonlight effect illuminated ‘only Hamlet’s face and hands’, while ‘a chorus of male voices speaks the Ghost’s words’.46 Light also characterised Chekhov’s staging of Hamlet’s death as a ‘spiritual triumph’, as the actor, director, and teacher Maria Knebel recalled: ‘the stage gradually filled with a white light’ and Hamlet was carried away on a shield ‘to the sound of fanfares’.47 These accounts of Hamlet’s staging clearly demonstrate the associative language by which Chekhov understood the polarity of spirit and matter which would continue to define his artistic vision throughout his career. The spirit world is clearly associated with effects of diffusion, which Chekhov aimed for in the chorus that spoke the Ghost’s lines, the vibrating effect of the music accompanying the news of Ophelia’s death, and the flooding of the stage with light at Hamlet’s death. These effects are also notably gendered: the Ghost’s chorus and Hamlet’s fanfares are pointedly masculine, unlike the ‘momentary shift in tempo’ marked by Ophelia’s music.48 The association of the spirit world with

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light and the colour white are also clearly marked here and throughout Chekhov’s work, including in this assertion from his notes to students at the CTS on ‘colour and light’: The feeling of ‘I’ in a good, high sense can be found from WHITE. Each colour is a picture of something, and WHITE is the ‘soul picture of the spirit’. In the sense that we use the term ‘spirit’ here we mean the highest part of the human being. The soul is something in connection with the experience of every-day life. It is placed as it were between body and spirit. Spirit is something like an angel which lives in another world. Therefore WHITE is the soul picture of the spirit.49 This essentialising of the association of whiteness with enlightenment and superiority was further reinforced by Chekhov’s assertion that black represents ‘[w]eakness’ and ‘[t]he spirit picture of death’: ‘BLACK, GREY and BROWN are the three colours which represent evil powers and evil influences’.50 These associations are, of course, uncritically aligned with the white, male supremacy that explicitly underpinned the Anglo-American global power that made Dartington Hall possible as an enterprise. They also represent inherent contradictions of western liberalism, which ideologically underpinned the Dartington project. Victor Bonham-Carter’s summary of that project’s ‘fountain source of vitality […] in the personalities of its founders, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst’, who ‘personify Dartington’ and ‘are continuing the part played in the past by the squire and his wife, but in a modern and liberal form’, demonstrates a similar commitment to individual heroism, and to the tacitly unequal distribution of liberalism’s promises.51 The material interests of the CTS, and of Chekhov as its leader, were therefore to be found by combining broad, liberal orthodoxies such as the fundamental equality of people conceived as individual subjects with the figurative reassertion of the white, male authority that those orthodoxies served, in practice, to uphold. It was not, by contrast, in Chekhov’s interests, as the studio’s leader, to engage in a critical examination of these circumstances or to encourage his students to consider where their interests might diverge from those of the organisation. Consequently, models of practice at the CTS never sought to engage the political contradictions and problems posed by the mastery and heroism it sought. In the context of this analysis, it is also possibly revealing that the CTS began to break down within a matter of weeks of the graduation of its first students. At this point, it was inevitable that conflicts between the interests of the studio’s membership and its leadership would emerge, because the former students’ capacity to consider their interests was no longer circumscribed by their position as students. In the autumn of 1939, therefore, the social formation of the CTS was unavoidably reconfigured, and it is primarily as a consequence of that reconfiguration that Chekhov sought to impose his authority. In so

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doing, he figured his students as he had the dark, female forces in Hamlet: lacking insight, weak, and capable of destroying the spiritual quest for mastery and enlightenment that he represented. Thus, hegemonic power gave way to an increasing propensity for domination, and—ultimately—to Chekhov’s decision to abandon his studio mid-way through rehearsals for Lear. For the CTS to be sustainable as a studio, then, would have required a form of leadership that was willing to decentre itself and enable collective engagement with the material interests of both the studio and its members as well as the politics of its organisation and practice. Both Chekhov’s technique and his personal inclination seem to have been set against this, indeed these structural limitations of the CTS seem not to have occurred to him. That is not to say, however, that models of practice have nothing to offer such enterprises today. In what follows, I will show how a radical re-appropriation of some crucial practices of the CTS may offer a neo-Chekhovian model of practice that both retains and reaches beyond what the studio accomplished. In other words, if I have demonstrated here that Chekhov was, in many ways, a messianic figure, I will now consider his work from the perspective of a disloyal disciple.

Atmospheric politics: a model of radical practice from the CTS I have argued above that some aspects of the technique that Chekhov refined at the CTS were indirectly complicit in what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called ‘planetary networks of oppression’.52 In Fisher’s analysis, those networks are a consequence of the systemic functioning of global capitalism as ‘an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker’.53 Fisher focuses on the hegemonic power of ‘capitalist realism’, the passive acceptance of capitalist doctrine, which is —he proposes—resistant to critique because it is ‘a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action’.54 In spite of the receptivity of Chekhov’s technique to hegemonic power that I have already analysed, the practices of the CTS also offer a model of critical engagement with hegemony through the exploration of atmosphere. As the previous chapter demonstrates, for Chekhov—as for Fisher—atmosphere was a pervasive, conditioning factor, an invisible presence shaping thought and action. Indeed, it was, as Chapter 5 has shown, the primary condition of encounter, a substrate from and within which characters, action, and narrative were encouraged to live and grow; ‘the first step is to research the various atmospheres’ of a play, he said.55 We might appropriate this technique for the study of Fisher’s capitalist atmosphere, and—thereby—develop an affective exploration of contemporary capitalism. Because Chekhov conceived of atmosphere as the substrate of relation, such an exploration would ask what kinds of lives and relations are supported by the atmospheres of contemporary capitalism, and what kinds they punish or poison. In short, it would explore the nature of

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capitalism as a cultural condition within which we all exist and which we usually take for granted. By exploring cultures as atmospheres in this way, we may explore the ways in which the forces of culture operate at an embodied level and begin critically to engage them in processes of training and theatre-making. Furthermore, working with atmosphere challenges the pervasive assumptions of liberal individualism that continue to shape educational and artistic values and practices. Rather than analysing and developing a performance on the individualist basis of the actions of characters, atmospheric analysis proposes that events emerge from relations between characters. Conceiving of action relationally in this way also undermines the bourgeois assumption that individuals can be studied outside of politics and culture, to which the CTS was certainly prey. In spite of its commitment to ‘present personal problems […] in their relation to the social background’,56 Chekhov was given to a holistic vision of what he called, in a conversation with Dorothy Elmhirst about ‘the role of the theatre in life’, ‘the whole human culture’ whose ‘boundaries’ could and should be ‘dissolved’.57 Here, Chekhov’s conception of the affective possibilities of social relations detaches itself problematically from social context. He fails, for example, to recognise the extraordinary privilege by which his own global travel was able to ‘dissolve’ certain ‘boundaries’ in ways that were impossible even for many people who shared his background, let alone for colonised and impoverished people. His practice, however, contained a means of resituating affective relations within socio-political structures. He told his students to study each play in terms of its ‘historical values, background, costumes, etc’: In this study we must discover the ‘world’ in which the play has to be acted. Each play must have a special world around and about it. Hamlet is a special world. Faust is another world. We must develop each play as a world; therefore, we need special study for each play.58 By combining this idea of a performance as the embodiment of ‘develop[ing] each play as a world’ with its ‘various atmospheres’, we can expose and explore the politics of affective relations. As numerous feminist, queer, and critical race theorists have pointed out, the capacities to affect and be affected are political relations and are therefore not equally distributed across either populations or the globe. Likewise, feelings, in the words of Sianne Ngai, are ‘far from being merely private or idiosyncratic phenomena’, but are both ‘fundamentally “social” and material’ and are therefore subject to the same political processes that shape the social and material world.59 In spite of his antimony to the political, such relations are always mediated, for Chekhov, by atmosphere and structured by the ‘world’ of a play, therefore the practice of working with atmospheres and worlds offers the possibility of foregrounding the politics of relation that, in Fisher’s terms, ‘constrain thought and action’. Furthermore, atmosphere cannot be ‘mastered’ or created; as I have argued elsewhere, atmosphere

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is a material process in movement, in which context artistry is constituted by our capacity collectively to attune ourselves to and come into a fully embodied dialogue with possibilities of disclosure that will always exceed our capacity to capture and manipulate them.60 This observation returns us to the necessity for an artisan to ‘follow the matter-flow’. The capacity of atmosphere, however, always to exceed human capability makes it resistant to ideological control. Even the ‘pervasive atmosphere’ of capitalism is vulnerable to being transformed by aleatory possibilities, as numerous revolutionary movements have shown. Whereas hegemonic authority seeks to delimit possibility, atmosphere knows no limits and cannot be overcome. ****** These radical possibilities for the techniques developed at the CTS notwithstanding, the studio itself remained, in the final analysis, fundamentally conservative. Chekhov said as much: There are two kinds of organization—one in which people have come together to try to build an organization. They try to experiment and make anything they want from it. This is quite a different thing. Our organization was thought out, and the details were there before the very first student was accepted four years ago. So there is nothing to change in the organization—there is only one thing to do and that is to maintain and increase it.61 This conservatism was both the strength and the weakness of the CTS. Fundamental to Chekhov’s plan for the studio was the technique that underpinned all of its activities. This offered members of the studio a rigorous and systematic embodied vocabulary for developing and critiquing their collective practice, in contrast—for example—to the studios run by Saint-Denis and Devine. The centrality of Chekhov’s technique to his studio’s functioning also served, as I have argued here, to reinforce its hierarchical organisation and prevent it from being able to expand beyond Chekhov’s own grasp, meaning that it would always be unsustainable as a collective. At the same time, however, the rigorous, practical theorising of the studio’s work—and its equally rigorous documentation by Deirdre Hurst and others—offered—and continues to offer—to future theatremakers the possibility of appropriating and adapting Chekhov’s technique for purposes beyond both the scope of the CTS and Chekhov’s own imagination. I have proposed that such acts of re-appropriation require disloyal disciples and generate a legacy that is also a betrayal. Such re-appropriations also require artists to behave in the way that Chekhov outlines above as the opposite ‘kind of organization’ to the CTS. Such an

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organisation is founded, he proposed, both upon the collective attempt to ‘build an organization’ and upon ‘experiment’. Whereas the CTS prized its members’ commitment to the particular outcomes of a known method of working, and thereby sustained the authority of its visionary leader and his most devoted followers, an organisation of disloyal disciples would prize the capacity to imagine outcomes not yet known and the ability collectively to generate a method of reaching towards them through processes of trial and error using any available means. Shortly after the CTS left England, a group was formed with exactly these intentions. They called themselves Theatre Workshop, and it is to their work that we turn in the final section.

Notes 1 M. Chekhov, The Path of the Actor, ed. B. Merlin (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 219 (emphasis original). 2 M. Autant-Mathieu, ‘Michael Chekhov and the Cult of the Studio’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. M. Autant-Mathieu and Y. Meerzon (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 94. 3 July 4, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 4 C. Mittelsteiner, ‘Georgette Boner and Michael Chekhov: Collaboration(s) and Dialogue(s) in Search of a Method’, in The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, ed. Autant-Mathieu and Meerzon (Abingdon: Routledge,2015), 65. 5 Ibid., 86. 6 Autant-Mathieu, ‘Michael Chekhov and the Cult of the Studio’, 91. 7 October 28, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 8 November 8, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7 (emphasis original). 9 November 10, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 10 November 24, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7 (emphasis original). 11 M. Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, ed. D. Hurst du Prey (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1992), 158. 12 November 27, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 13 June 8, 1940: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. 14 June 8, 1940: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10. 15 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), 12. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 366–7. 18 September 30, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 19 December 14, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 20 T. Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 216. 21 T. Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 22. 22 Ibid., 31, 23 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 477 (emphasis original). 24 Ibid., 479. 25 September 30, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 26 Ibid. (emphasis original). 27 J. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993), x.

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28 January 21, 1938: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/8. 29 Steiner, ‘A Lecture on Eurythmy’, accessed March 9, 2012, http://wn.rsarchive.org/ Lectures/Eurhythmy/19230826p01.html. 30 M. Chekhov, On the Technique of Acting, ed. M. Gordon (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 75. 31 Chekhov, Lessons for the Professional Actor, 141. 32 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 330. 33 Ibid., 333. 34 M. Sharp, Interview with Paul Rogers, August 1, 2000. 35 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 333. 36 The Chekhov Theatre Studio (Dartington: Dartington Hall, 1936), 17. 37 A. Kirillov and F. Chamberlain, ‘Rehearsal Protocols for Hamlet by William Shakespeare at the Second Moscow Art Theatre’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training 4, no. 2 (2013): 241. 38 Ibid., 243. 39 Ibid. (emphasis original). 40 Ibid., 245. 41 Ibid., 246. 42 Ibid., 247. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 278. 45 A.H. Law, ‘Chekhov’s Russian Hamlet (1924)’, The Drama Review: TDR 27, no. 3 (autumn 1983): 38. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 44. 48 Ibid., 43. 49 March 15, 1937: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 50 Ibid. 51 V. Bonham-Carter, Dartington Hall, The Formative Years: 1925–1957 with an Account of the School by William Burnlee Curry (Dulverton: The Exmoor Press, 1970), 159. 52 M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2009), 15. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 16. 55 October 27, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 56 The Chekhov Theatre Studio, 16. 57 ‘What Is the Role of the Theatre in Life?’, a conversation between M. Chekhov and D. Elmhirst, August 1939: MCTSDHPA, MC/S4/16/H. 58 October 27, 1936: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/7. 59 S. Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 25. 60 For more detail, see T. Cornford ‘Actor-Dramaturgs and Atmospheric Dramaturgies: Chekhov Technique in Processes of Collaborative Playwriting’, in Michael Chekhov Technique in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways, ed. C. Fleming and T. Cornford (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 61 June 8, 1940: MCTSDHPA, MC/S1/10.

SECTION 3

Theatre Workshop (1945–1963)

7 REMNANTS OF THEATRE WORKSHOP

Theatre Workshop was founded in 1945 by Howard Goorney, Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl (formerly known as Jimmie Miller), Gerry Raffles, David Scase, and Rosalie Williams.1 All of these core company members except Scase (who had worked with Littlewood as a sound technician for the BBC during the war) had been part of Theatre Union (1936–42), which had its roots in earlier politically engaged theatre groups, including the Red Megaphones (1931–4), of which MacColl had been a member, and Theatre of Action (1934), in which he was joined by Littlewood. Theatre Workshop spent the next eight years as an itinerant group, travelling mainly in the north of England, taking advantage of such assistance as they could find, and gathering members as they went, practices which are explored in detail in Chapter 8. In 1953, however, they took up the lease of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in London’s East End. Their actor, scenic carpenter, and stage manager, Harry Greene, noted beneath a 1953 drawing of the Theatre Royal in his journal that ‘[a]fter years of enjoying the country air in Scotland, North East coast and Wales, we find ourselves living and working in the acrid, sulphur-laden, heavily-polluted air of London’s East End, BUT we’ve got a home of our own… ’.2 Although Theatre Workshop had enjoyed notable success in mainland Europe, including tours of West Germany (1947), Czechoslovakia and Sweden (1948), and Scandinavia (1951), it was not until it took up residence in London that the company began to make a name for itself in England. It was at Stratford that Theatre Workshop made the productions that feature most prominently in historical accounts of the company’s work, many of which transferred to the West End, a pattern followed by their most famous work, Oh What a Lovely War (hereafter Lovely War), which opened at the Theatre Royal in March 1963 before transferring to the Wyndham’s Theatre in June of the same year. Lovely War was not, however,

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so much the triumphant culmination of Theatre Workshop’s practice as a postscript to the company’s activities that had ceased in 1961 with the commercial failure of American playwright James Goldman’s They Might be Giants, which had led to Littlewood leaving Stratford to travel to Nigeria.3 After Lovely War, Littlewood, Raffles, and their remaining colleagues continued to make theatre at the Theatre Royal under the name Theatre Workshop, but there was little genuine continuity between the company they had formed in 1945 and their work in this period. Numerous consequences of Theatre Workshop’s activities emerged in the years during and following its gradual dissolution. Clive Barker notes that many former Theatre Workshop actors found success in television: Harry H. Corbett in Steptoe, which Joan despised; Yootha Joyce and Brian Murphy as the Ropers [in the sitcom Man About the House]; Glyn Edwards […] propping up the bar in Minder; Barbara Windsor in Eastenders; Stephen Cato in so much.4 George Cooper also worked consistently in television and film, Avis Bunnage had some success in British New Wave films, and Harry Greene went from set construction and acting with Theatre Workshop to a successful career as a television DIY man in the 1980s, after he had made the first show of its kind, Handy Round the Home (1957). Ewan MacColl channelled Theatre Workshop’s interest in authentic representations of working-class life into the Radio Ballads (1957–64), which he made with his wife Peggy Seeger and producer Charles Parker. Even the films of Bill Douglas were significantly influenced—according to him—by his time as an actor in Theatre Workshop. Further remnants of Theatre Workshop include the East 15 Acting School, established by Margaret Walker in 1961 to continue the training developed by Theatre Workshop, and Littlewood and the company are cited by numerous politically engaged artists of the ’60s and ’70s as formative influences. They include the director Alan Dossor, for example, who presided over a ‘golden period’ in the history of the Liverpool Everyman from 1970 until 1975 with an artistic policy committed to politically engaged, locally focused productions in a popular, colloquial style that was clearly indebted to Theatre Workshop.5 Likewise, writer and director John McGrath recalled finding himself at the dress rehearsal for Behan’s The Hostage in 1959 and watching the company mediating contemporary reality, but in a way that the Royal Court or the West End or the repertory theatres had not dreamt of: […] telling it the way the working class saw it, and in a way that the working class could enjoy, and […] did enjoy.6 McGrath was there because his girlfriend (and later wife), the actress Elizabeth McLennan had been a student with the designer Sean Kenny.7 Their founding,

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in 1971, of the touring company 7:84 was strongly influenced by Theatre Workshop’s ethos of taking theatre of the highest possible quality to workingclass communities wherever they were to be found and was also indirectly indebted to Theatre Workshop for what MacLennan describes as its ‘fastlearning group awareness, which was maintained by a non-hierarchical company structure, regardless of relative age and experience, and by equal pay’, albeit that McGrath’s success in television and radio gave him—like Littlewood in Theatre Workshop—an unavoidably high profile.8 Because this book is a study not of theatre companies but of studios and is concerned with the remnants rather than the legacies or influences of those studios, this chapter takes a different approach to tracing the remnants of Theatre Workshop’s practice to other accounts of their work. I argue that Theatre Workshop ceased to function as a studio in 1955, much earlier than the company’s eventual demise, and before it had created any of the productions that have secured its reputation in theatre history, including Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow (1956) and The Hostage (1958), Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), and Frank Norman and Lionel Bart’s Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be (1959). Rather than seeing these productions as direct creations of Theatre Workshop as a studio, they are positioned, in this account, as remnants of the studio phase of the company’s practice, and products of what I consider, following Foucault, a new dispositif—or apparatus—for theatre-making that followed its time as a studio. The productions generated in this second phase culminated in 1963 with Littlewood and her company’s creation of Oh What a Lovely War—not considered here, as it often is, as the most complete realisation of Theatre Workshop’s practice, but as the last remnant of its studio phase. This chapter is therefore divided into two parts. The first makes the case for seeing 1955 as a turning-point in the creative practice of Theatre Workshop, when it was forced to abandon the studio model. The second part turns to Lovely War, which it analyses alongside the next most significant remnant of Theatre Workshop’s practice for the theatre establishment that emerged in the 1960s: the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) The Wars of the Roses, which also opened in 1963 and was designed by the RSC’s then new head of design and former leading member of Theatre Workshop, John Bury. As my analysis of these productions demonstrates, both represented an accommodation of practices developed by Theatre Workshop to the production processes and values of the mainstream theatre with the consequence that these practices—which had been shaped by the company’s radical, critical politics—were notably reformed to serve much more conservative agendas.

1955: the end of Theatre Workshop’s studio phase Theatre Workshop has become, in both the popular imagination and in academic theatre history, virtually synonymous with the director Joan Littlewood.

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In their 1967 collection of interviews and essays, Theatre at Work, Charles Marowitz and Simon Trussler titled the chapter containing a ‘collage of opinions and attitudes’ from Theatre Workshop company members ‘Working with Joan’, and their account describes Theatre Workshop’s beginnings as ‘Joan and a handful of actors’.9 Media accounts of the company have since routinely identified Littlewood as Theatre Workshop’s founder and key creative figure in phrases such as ‘Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop’.10 Academic studies have tended to follow suit. Despite Robert Leach’s assertion, for example, that ‘beyond [Littlewood], other members of the company also made significant marks in different, often underestimated ways’, his account of the company’s work, Theatre Workshop, was subtitled Joan Littlewood and the Making of British Theatre. Chapter 8 takes a different approach to the company’s practice, not in order to diminish Littlewood’s instrumental function within Theatre Workshop, or to suggest that her contribution to its work has been over-stated, but to foreground the interdependence of Theatre Workshop’s practice, which was founded on a combination of actor training and creative activities that wove the various specialisms of the company members together. By contrast, the focus on Littlewood is symptomatic of the assumption within twentieth-century theatre history that ‘the director was the necessary force behind theatrical innovation’ that was shaped, as Dennis Kennedy argues, by a wider historical attitude that ‘codified modernist doctrine as the primary and proper message of the twentieth century’.11 This centralising of the figure of the director, Kennedy argues, was further bolstered by an approach to the ‘intellectual and historical organization’ of academic accounts of theatre-making that positioned directors as authorial figures in order to enable their comparison to artists working in other forms and, thus, the inclusion of theatre in wider aesthetic discourses.12 My approach is based, by contrast, on the assumption that Littlewood as director was a necessary but not sufficient force to create Theatre Workshop, and that to read her work as synonymous with that of the company as a collective will necessarily limit our understanding of their practices and politics. Kennedy also observes that the assumed primacy of the director in the theatre-making process has been a consequence of marketing: celebrity directors can readily become brand names with marketing potential. […] This has played out well in […] the major festival circuit. Here spectators, who by definition are cultural tourists, are likely to be informed about theatre practice, and as a result organizers commonly promote productions by directors’ names.13 It was at just such a festival, The Théâtre des Nations in Paris in 1955, that Theatre Workshop performed the anonymous Elizabethan play Arden of Faversham and Ben Jonson’s Volpone to great acclaim. As a result, Brecht, encouraged by the producer Oscar Lewenstein, gave Theatre Workshop the rights to

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produce Mother Courage in Devon, on the understanding that Littlewood would play the leading role. The production was not successful: Howard Goorney observed that Littlewood’s ‘energies were divided [between acting and directing] to the ultimate detriment of her performance and the production’.14 The singling out of individuals in public accounts of Theatre Workshop also made success divisive. Harry Corbett recalled the consequences of positive reviews of Arden of Faversham: The notices all started ‘Joan Littlewood this and that and the other.’ We had all been inculcated with the non-personality cult and we felt, rightly or wrongly, that Joan was being forced into a situation she didn’t really want, that for publicity purposes, she was being put through the screws. Then came massive Sunday coverage. They tried to single out the actors, and eventually they got to know them and that, quite rightly, caused a certain amount of dissension.15 One immediate consequence of the singling out of actors in leading roles, of course, was that offers of work came to them from elsewhere, and it was immediately after Theatre Workshop’s Devon festival performances of Mother Courage and Richard II (first produced at the Theatre Royal in 1954) that Corbett (who played Richard) and fellow long-term leading actor George Cooper left the company, along with John Blanshard and, soon afterwards, George Luscombe. Although former company members such as Cooper and Corbett did return to Theatre Workshop for particular roles, Goorney notes that ‘the nucleus of the company built up over the years was now split’ with the consequence that Littlewood ‘became predominant’.16 A small group of established collaborators such as Avis Bunnage, Gerard Dyvenor, Howard Goorney, and Maxwell Shaw remained and were joined by new company members such as Clive Barker, Glynn Edwards, Dudley Foster, and Brian Murphy. These actors had never known Theatre Workshop in its itinerant phase and were therefore, as Barker recalled, ‘largely ignorant of the past and unacquainted with Joan’s way of working’.17 As a consequence, as Goorney notes, ‘the focus from 1955 onwards tended towards Joan’s work in the company, without, I hope, minimising the contributions of those who worked with her’.18 Nineteen fifty-five also saw changes to Theatre Workshop’s organisation and finances. The company had been offered a guarantee against loss of £150 from the Arts Council in 1954, of which it was given £96 15s 0d at the end of the financial year.19 It was then promised a grant of £500 from the Arts Council for the financial year beginning April 1955, subject to the company securing double that figure from its nearby local authorities. This took until March 1956.20 Nadine Holdsworth has observed that Theatre Workshop’s position in 1955 was therefore ‘ironic’, travelling to an international theatre festival to represent ‘a country that failed to offer it financial subsidy’.21 After the performances in

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France, unable to pay its debts and refused further support by the Arts Council, Theatre Workshop was forced to declare bankruptcy. It continued its work under the name ‘Pioneer Theatres’, which was incorporated as a company limited by guarantee on October 20, 1955.22 Although this allowed Theatre Workshop to continue its work, it did not alter its difficulties in securing support from the Arts Council. Its offer of £1,000 for the year 1957–8 was dependent upon a doubling of local authority support to £2,000.23 In response, Raffles noted that this represented, in reality, almost tripling Theatre’s Workshop’s local authority support because ‘for 1955–6 and 1956–7 the eight councils only gave us £700 between them’.24 Nadine Holdsworth and Stephen Lacey both follow Howard Goorney in illustrating the extent of the Arts Council’s reluctance to support Theatre Workshop by means of a comparison with its grants to the English Stage Company (ESC) at the Royal Court.25 Goorney includes a table comparing the two companies in the appendices to The Theatre Workshop Story, showing the ESC receiving £5,500 in 1958–9 as against Theatre Workshop’s £1,000 in the same year,26 and Holdsworth adds that the ESC received £7,000 in support of its 1956 opening season, a sum that was certainly generous by comparison to Theatre Workshop’s support, but which George Devine later described as ‘a shoe-string’.27 In addition to the sparsity of Arts Council support, communications between Pioneer Theatres and the Arts Council illustrate the organisational difficulties that public funding entailed for a precarious company renting a ramshackle theatre and attempting to sustain an ensemble. The requirement to obtain local authority support (which, as Holdsworth notes, was not applied for the Sloane Square-based ESC)28 and to agree ‘a satisfactory lease’ with the Theatre Royal’s landlord meant that its grant for the financial year ending March 31, 1957 was not agreed until the start of that month.29 Raffles noted in a letter to Jo Hodgkinson, the Arts Council’s Drama Director, that [t]he first approaches for a grant for the current year 1956/57 were actually made by us in February 1956. The fact that it is February 1957 before our application can be couched in a form satisfactory to your Council would seem to suggest that there is an unwished-for disability on our part to supply all the information you would like, and we are prepared to go to almost any lengths to correct this.30 In this situation, it is hardly surprising that it was common practice for Raffles to use any available money to keep the theatre afloat, making accounting, budgeting, and planning even more difficult. As Hodgkinson noted in the Arts Council’s file for Pioneer Theatres following a message from Raffles in December 1957, ‘they have taken £325 in advance bookings for PUSS IN BOOTS. This money actually belongs to the London Children’s Theatre, but Pioneer Theatres have used £174 of it for themselves!’31 The persistent refusal of the

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Arts Council to increase their grant also meant that Theatre Workshop was, as Raffles noted in a 1959 letter, ‘forced more and more to turn to the West End as a means of keeping the Theatre Royal, Stratford, in operation’.32 This had two immediate consequences for the company. First, it made it impossible for them to continue the repertory system they had previously used, because West End productions had to run continuously—in the system continental European ensembles call ‘en suite’ but which is so naturalised within the UK that we have no term for it. This meant that more actors had to be hired, and on conventional contracts, which diluted and destabilised any attempt to re-establish the company on a permanent footing. As John Bury put it in 1961, ‘[w]e’d burned ourselves out. We’d lost about three companies in the West End, and Joan was having to come back to Stratford after every West End show and put together an ad hoc company and do it again’.33 Second, as Holdsworth observes, the fact that West End transfers meant ‘the company was […] perceived as a profitable organization resulted in the withdrawal of local authority support’.34 Littlewood noted that, even taking into account the income from transfers, ‘we can pack the Theatre Royal to the roof and still cannot make it pay’,35 meaning that they were doubly dependent upon local authorities: not only for their direct support, but because their support was—as we have seen—a condition of continued Arts Council funding. Inevitably, these constraints shaped Theatre Workshop’s policy and practice at least as much as the company’s earlier work. It is notable, for example, that Pioneer Theatres was established to present, promote, organise, provide, manage and produce such plays, dramas, comedies, operas, operettas, burlesques, films, broadcasts, concerts, musical pieces, puppet shows, ballets, entertainments, and exhibitions […] as are conducive to the promotion, maintenance, improvement and advancement of education, or to the encouragement of the arts.36 In short, the trading name for Theatre Workshop was established with the sole intention of producing performances, despite the statement, in the company’s plans for the 1957–8 financial year, that ‘[o]ur main aim is again to create a highly trained permanent company which can be extended when required’.37 Training exercises did continue to play a role in Theatre Workshop’s rehearsal processes, but no organised mechanisms for training were ever included in Pioneer Theatres’ budgets or plans. In short, the commitment to train and develop a sustainable collective, which, as we shall see, was crucial to the project of Theatre Workshop before this time, had to be abandoned after 1955. This change can be productively considered as a shift of what Michel Foucault termed a ‘dispositif’ (apparatus). Foucault explained that this term sought to capture ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures’ and to

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identify ‘the system of relations that can be established between these elements’.38 The formation of this system of relations emerges, for Foucault, ‘at a given historical moment’ in response to ‘an urgent need’.39 The alterations in Theatre Workshop’s practice that were formalised by the creation of Pioneer Theatres in 1955 meet both of these criteria: they sought to re-form the system of relations by which their theatre was made, and they did so with a clear and pressing strategic objective. The year 1955 also marked a further shift in Theatre Workshop’s financial and political position, as it was in this year that Raffles seems to have begun the process of purchasing the Theatre Royal, with money provided by his father.40 This process seems to have been drawn out as a result of the complexities of the leases pertaining to the Theatre. A letter to Raffles from the landlord’s solicitors dated February 1957 indicates that they would be prepared to accept £4,500 for their interest in the property (which amounted to two leaseholds and a small freehold),41 but a further note by Jo Hodgkinson in the Arts Council file dated December 19, 1957 indicates that ‘a new lease for the theatre has not yet been signed’, and Peter Rankin dates Raffles’s acquisition of the theatre to June 1961, just before the opening of They Might Be Giants at the Theatre Royal.42 Notes of a meeting convened to discuss the future of the Theatre Royal in 1975 record that Raffles ‘held the theatre under a deed of trust’, and that 50 per cent of it belonged to his estate and 50 per cent to Littlewood. They also note that ‘the rent of the theatre is paid’ until the following year.43 Presumably, this refers to the leasehold of the theatre and the rent (which was paid by Pioneer Theatres Ltd) went to Raffles’s estate and to Littlewood (who seems to have had no other reliable source of income at the time). Land registry documents record that, in 1996, the Theatre Royal was leased by Dramrail Limited to the Theatre Workshop Trust (which also numbered Littlewood among its directors) for 40 years. Dramrail Limited had been incorporated as a private limited company on November 7, 1962, by Raffles, Littlewood, and others, and seems to have acquired the freehold of the theatre.44 These complex tangles of ownership demonstrate only too clearly the constraining effects of Theatre Workshop acquiring the supposed security of a building-base for which Raffles, in particular, so longed. That longing was, it transpired, a form of what Lauren Berlant has termed ‘cruel optimism’: ‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a significantly problematic object’.45 This can be seen as early as June 1957, when Raffles wrote to the Arts Council (unsuccessfully, as it would turn out) to request further financial support because ‘[w]e are making strenuous efforts to redecorate the Theatre Royal and to make it more comfortable and convenient for the audience’.46 Two months later, a note on the file records a conversation between Raffles and Hodgkinson in which the latter urged that the local authorities would be ‘well able to contribute larger sums […] if Raffles could convince them that the theatre was worth supporting’, not an easy proposition given the building’s evidently parlous

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condition, which he had been denied the opportunity to alter.47 The Theatre Royal was evidently a ‘problematic object’, but Raffles’s attachment to it was maintained. Minutes from the 1964 Annual General Meeting of its Advisory Council note that the building ‘had cost so much to keep in operation that more than £36,000 had had to be paid over to settle the overdraft of Pioneer Theatres Ltd’.48 Six years later, the building was threatened by Newham Council’s plan to redevelop the area, a plan which Raffles successfully fought off by having the building listed, after a campaign that took two years.49 Nonetheless, in February 1975, the demolition of Angel Lane meant that contractors ‘bulldozed to the front entrance of the Theatre, causing a subsidence of 6' by 6' by 5'’.50 As a result, Raffles was beginning the process of suing both the developers and the council for the damage when he died.51 There would have been no hope for local authority support after that. Far from making Theatre Workshop more financially secure by releasing them from the obligation to pay rent and freeing them from an itinerant existence, the company’s gradually increasing responsibility for the Theatre Royal only served to reinforce the new dispositif for theatre-making outlined above. Furthermore, even with those changes to its practice, Theatre Workshop was not a sustainable enterprise, and by the end the theatre had proved—literally— to be a hole in the ground, into which Raffles poured their money. The only advantage conferred by the establishing of a permanent base was the income it brought to Raffles and Littlewood as the theatre’s de facto landlords. Given Theatre Workshop’s consistent rejection of the values of bourgeois culture, it was deeply ironic that its most prominent figure was left dependent upon an income from letting a theatre in which she no longer wished to work. This was Littlewood’s own assessment of the end of the company’s studio phase when she chose to leave the Theatre Royal in 1961, saying that theatre ‘does not depend on buildings’: [i]t is through collaboration that this knockabout art of theatre survives […]. No one mind or imagination can foresee what a play will become until all [its] physical and intellectual stimuli […] have been understood by a company […]. It is no use the critics proclaiming overnight the genius of the individual writer; these writers must graft in company with other artists if we are to get […] a great theatre.52 Littlewood spoke from experience. Marowitz and Trussler date Theatre Workshop’s ‘breakthrough proper’ to its 1956 production of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow, when ‘at last London was waking up to the fact that a homegrown genius was sitting on its doorstep’.53 Littlewood’s ‘genius’ became increasingly celebrated over the next few years as Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Behan’s The Hostage (both 1958) secured the company’s reputation. Increasingly, however,

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the process by which these productions were created required Littlewood individually to embody her ideal of collective collaboration, a pattern which reached its zenith in the creation in 1963 of Oh What a Lovely War. This production also demonstrated the ways in which—consciously or otherwise—the cultural values of the commercial sector exerted a shaping influence on Theatre Workshop. In the same year, another remnant of Theatre Workshop’s practices—John Bury’s approach to design—can be seen as instrumental to the securing of a new, subsidised theatre establishment with the success of the RSC’s Wars of the Roses. Here again, the appropriation of those practices can be seen to bend them to a notably conservative agenda. While I do not intend to suggest that every piece of work created by Theatre Workshop after it had ceased to function as a studio was thoroughly conservative, these productions represent the end-point of a process ushered in by the events of 1955, and which could not, thereafter, be avoided.

1963: Oh what a lovely war of the roses! At a 1974 lunch given in County Hall by the leader of the Greater London Council, Joan Littlewood found herself seated next to Peter Hall. Hall recalled that she took against this arrangement, complaining provocatively that ‘I’m not sitting next to you, you’re the Establishment’, to which Hall remembers replying that ‘she was the Establishment too’.54 Assuming that Hall’s recollection is accurate, this remark may well have seemed deeply ironic to Littlewood. It came just two months after the Theatre Royal was completely surrounded by building work to redevelop the centre of Stratford, and in the same month that Raffles resigned as general manager, following a letter to the Arts Council in which he announced that he would be advising the board of Pioneer Theatres to reject their proposed subsidy because it would ‘not make it possible to work at this theatre on a continuing basis’.55 Nonetheless, Hall’s riposte was not completely without truth, and suggests a revealing comparison between probably the two most prominent remnants of Theatre Workshop’s practice in the English theatre, both of which were created in 1963: Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War! and Hall’s The Wars of the Roses (RSC). In spite of the shared roots of these productions in Theatre Workshop’s radical approach to theatre-making, and their claims both to expose the brutality of war and the callous cruelty of ambition and to set themselves against conservative accounts of English history, I will argue that they worked, differently but comparably, to limit political critique and to uphold conservative historical myths. Created in the early part of 1963 with a group of actors at the Theatre Royal and opening on March 19, Oh What a Lovely War was based, in part, upon a 1961 radio documentary by Charles Chilton, called The Long, Long Trail.56 Chilton’s work is described by Derek Paget as an ‘aural montage of fact and song’,57 to which Littlewood added improvised scenes in a wide range of styles,

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slide projections of documentary photographs and factual headlines, and what Robert Leach calls an ‘electrical set’ by John Bury.58 The result, according to Encore critic Charles Marowitz, was ‘a context which accommodates—naturally and without strain—a number of different and often antithetical styles’.59 Paget borrows from literary and cinematic models of creative practice to argue, therefore, that the ‘creation’ of Lovely War was ‘primarily a work of editorship, not authorship’.60 He also picks up on the implicitly dialectical formulation of Marowitz’s account of the ‘antithetical’ production to describe Lovely War as ‘the montage-of-a-montage’, and subsequent scholars have echoed his use of Sergei Eisenstein’s famous term in their accounts of Littlewood’s production.61 Eisenstein developed his conception of montage after Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment in film editing, in which he cut from shots of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a woman lying seductively on a couch to the same shot of a man’s face. He used this experiment to show that the audience would unthinkingly project nuanced responses onto the unchanged footage of the man when it was juxtaposed with other images. From this, and from his study of dialectics, Eisenstein developed his theory of montage as the fundamental practice of film-making. There are evidently useful similarities between Eisenstein’s political development of the concept of montage and Littlewood’s theatre work, particularly in the case of Lovely War, which frequently relies upon antithesis and thus engages the audience actively in its construction of meaning. It was also a work with Littlewood unmistakably at its centre, echoing Eisenstein’s account of the creative process: It can be seen that the artist’s idea is not something that springs fully formed from his head; it is a socially refracted reflection of social reality. But from the moment a point of view and an idea take shape within it, this idea becomes the determining element of the whole factual and material structure of his work, the whole ‘world’ of his work.62 To create the performance text of Lovely War, Littlewood gave extracts from Chilton’s radio script and from other accounts of the First World War to her actors and asked them to read them before discarding their texts and improvising what they remembered. To describe this as the generation of ‘a socially refracted reflection of social reality’ seems apt. It is equally accurate to describe Littlewood trying, through this process, to make ‘a point of view and an idea take shape’. Indeed, the actor Brian Murphy (one of a small group who began work on the production with her at the very start of 1961) described this period as trying ‘to knock out a bit of a shape’.63 Finally, and in spite of the inputs of numerous collaborators in this process, it seems accurate to place Littlewood, alone, at its centre. Indeed, she seems the only participant with an awareness of the full range of inputs from which the production would be constructed. Murray Melvin recalled, for example, that, at first, the show’s impact ‘was quite

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a surprise to us, because of course we never saw the show as they [the audience] did, we could see and hear our bit but the other half of it, the slides, was literally happening behind our backs’.64 The process of ‘trying to knock out a shape’ would have been familiar to actors who had worked with Littlewood in the late 1950s, when she regularly used improvisation to this end. The opening of Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, for example, grew out of a long improvisation in which the play’s mother and daughter ‘dragged heavily weighted suitcases around the stage’ and then mimed going ‘down filthy tunnels’ to create the effect of arriving, exhausted, at their new lodgings.65 Likewise, the prison yard in Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow was re-created by Littlewood taking her actors ‘up on to the roof of the Theatre Royal’: All the grimy slate and stone made it easy to believe we were in a prison yard. We formed up in a circle, and imagined we were prisoners out on exercise. Round and round we trudged for what seemed like hours— breaking now and then for a quick smoke and a furtive conversation. Although it was just a kind of game, the boredom and meanness of it all was brought home.66 This improvised situation created a context from which the play’s narrative could be developed by the gradual introduction of plot and script by Littlewood, and Brian Murphy describes the similar basis for achieving realism in rehearsals for Lovely War, through improvisations of trench scenes designed to induce ‘that terrible feeling of being cramped, as they must have been, stuck in mud. Being cheery, but not that false brightness that actors can have for fear of losing the audience’s attention—a dull familiarity’.67 Realism was not, however, Lovely War’s dominant style. Instead, it was strategically deployed in contrast both to the naïve optimism of the end-of-the-pier Pierrot show that Littlewood used as a framing device and the satirical effect of the staged political cartoons she created to depict historical events, as in the ‘War Game’ that tells the story of the outbreak of hostilities. This development of distinctive, embodied styles for different performances would also have been familiar to actors involved in Littlewood’s earlier productions: ‘[t]he casual gusto of The Hostage, […] inchoate and rumbustious’, ‘the classically austere Edward II, the hot, dusty, violent Fuente Ovejuna, the speeded-up Keystone Cops cartoon Good Soldier Schweik, the dark, brooding, malevolent Duchess of Malfi, the soft, romantic lithograph Christmas Carol’.68 In Lovely War, Littlewood used a montage of such contrasting styles to make, in Eisenstein’s phrase, ‘a point of view and an idea take shape’. The question, then, is what was that point of view, and how was it shaped? In addressing this question, it is important to note that, although the dispositif for theatre-making developed by Theatre Workshop after 1955 placed great emphasis on Littlewood’s point of view as the director of productions, it did not

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exclude other shaping influences. In his close analysis of the development of Lovely War, Derek Paget notes that ‘Brian Murphy recalled that it was at the insistence of Donald Albery, owner of Wyndham’s Theatre, that “the audience should go out in a lighter vein”’.69 This led to the insertion of a reprise of the song ‘Oh It’s a Lovely War!’ at the production’s end instead of the MC’s (Victor Spinetti) final speech: ‘Please tell your friends that the War Game, which is invariably mounted regardless of cost, is continuous. Any number can play. See you in the penalty area. Goodnight’.70 Paget argues, on this basis, that ‘economic imperatives impacted on aesthetic decision-making more than is often acknowledged’. While the point is entirely justified, Paget’s assessment of the influence of ‘economic imperatives’ somewhat insulates Littlewood and her company from collusion with them by identifying their operation primarily with the agenda of a West End producer and relating them to the production’s transfer, rather than its initial creation. In reality, Littlewood and the Theatre Royal were dependent upon the income generated by transfer, and so Albery and the culture of the West End cannot be so neatly excised from an account of the production’s creation, which anticipated—and sought— their input. Reading the production in the light of its makers’ anticipated cooperation with a culture of artistic production that was not only more explicitly commercial but also (both explicitly and tacitly) extremely conservative demonstrates ways in which ideas were able to take shape within it that can be seen to negate the ‘critique of war as the greatest of all capitalist “enterprises”’ that Paget argues was Littlewood’s conscious intention.71 As well as insulating Littlewood from charges of commercial intent, Paget’s analysis serves to protect her vision somewhat from accusations of sentimentality, levelled both by Ewan MacColl and by John Hodgson, who thought that Lovely War encouraged its audience ‘to wallow in […] a desire for the “good old days”’.72 That nostalgic, sentimental strain and the ‘lighter vein’ that Albery seems to have encouraged are most clearly present in the play’s music, which was taken directly from Charles Chilton’s 1961 BBC radio programme The Long, Long Trail. As Paget notes, this programme was repeated twice in 1962, suggesting the possibility of commercial appeal that cannot have been lost on Gerry Raffles, who first wrote to Chilton requesting a tape of the broadcast with a view to its theatrical adaptation. The programme’s first sung words immediately connected the nostalgia of soldiers for home with the listener’s nostalgia, both for the generation of men lost in the First World War and the more recent losses of the Second: ‘There’s a long, long night awaiting until my dreams are come true,/’Til the day when I’ll be going down that long, long trail with you’. The medley of popular music that follows this opening shifts in register between similar sentimentality and upbeat songs designed to characterise the early part of the war. Littlewood’s adaptation in rehearsal of the material from the first part of Chilton’s programme to create Act One of Lovely War made very few alterations to its structure. Instead, she focused on the addition of scenes in either realistic or satirical style to replace Chilton’s uncontroversial

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narration. This decision demonstrates that the balancing of commercial appeal against the uncompromising use of historical facts and analysis was central to the development of her production’s point of view. Therefore, whereas Paget argues that, ‘[t]he original production was very highly skilled in wiping the smile of delight (produced by its constant capacity to entertain) off the spectator’s face with the “smack” of fact’, it was also—by necessity—skilled in doing the reverse, and smoothing the ‘”smack” of fact’ with a smile of delight, just as it was capable of both provoking and wiping away its spectators’ tears.73 Politically speaking, this multivalent capacity of Lovely War was both the making of the production’s radical critique, and can be seen to be the source of its undoing. The crux of Lovely War’s political critique of the First World War is simple: it presents the conflict as an ‘ever popular War Game’,74 played, initially, by European leaders, who are prepared to gamble with their countries to advance their own interests. Later, the highest-ranking British generals are subjected to the same critique, and we watch as, for example, Field Marshals Sir Douglas Haig and Sir John French risk the lives of thousands of soldiers in the interest of their own reputations and the pursuit of their rivalry. Such scenes in Lovely War are characterised by their geographical scale—the ‘war game’ is played out across a map of Europe, the generals speak of whole fronts and offensives—and by individual portraits of callous vanity and self-interested detachment from consequence. Their inverse is to be found in Lovely War’s evocation of soldiers’ lives in the trenches, which offer detailed portraits not of individuals, but of the collectively experienced diurnal conditions of war: mud, lice, cigarettes, and letters home. This effect is most memorably captured by the closing scene of Act One, ‘Christmas 1914’, in which unnamed British soldiers chat—in dialogue that was improvised in rehearsals, drawing upon accounts of material taken from newspapers distributed at the trenches. They play cards, discuss potential satirical contributions to ‘The Wipers Gazette’ and their ‘trench feet, corns, gripes’, and ‘chilblains’.75 This fundamental antagonism between the detailed but depersonalised depiction of the daily reality of war and the political sketches that lampoon a detached and self-concerned ruling class is reiterated in various ways during Act Two. A lieutenant inspecting trenches is appalled to find a severed German leg protruding from the ground and orders it to be removed, for example, prompting a sergeant to wonder aloud ‘what the bloody ’ell will I hang my equipment on’.76 As this analysis demonstrates, the dominant antagonism in Lovely War is between ordinary soldiers (on both sides) and the officer class. It is succinctly expressed by the alternative words for ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ sung in the play by injured men: Forward Joe Soap’s army, marching without fear, With our old commander, safely in the rear. He boasts and skites from morn till night, And thinks he’s very brave, But the men who really did the job are dead and in their grave.77

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The opposition between ‘the men who really did the job’ and a ‘commander safely in the rear’ is taken directly from the play’s source material. Littlewood and her company drew, for example, on Alan Clark’s 1961 history of the war, The Donkeys, which used the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ as its epigraph, attributing it to a conversation between the German generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann.78 The ‘lions’ of Lovely War are also, like the ‘soldiers’ songs’ used by Chilton in The Long, Long Trail, ‘mainly from the Western Front’.79 The consequence is that the heroic work of war is uncritically depicted by the play as that of white men. It does not extend to the home front or the munitions factory, for example, and nor does it occur within a colonial context. In Lovely War, the Western Front stands emblematically for the entire conflict, obscuring almost all else, and—in this context—its heroically depicted soldiers reassert white, male hegemonic power. That is not to say that the play does so deliberately and consciously, but it does, for example, fall into line with the songs collected by Chilton in depicting women exclusively with reference to men—as lamented sweethearts, wives and mothers, and as sexual objects. The play’s class analysis also struggles, somewhat ironically, to incorporate a critique of the significance of the war as a means by which capital may achieve the constant growth upon which it depends. The ‘War Profiteers’ Scene’ in Act Two attempts to repurpose the structure of the ‘war game’ to this end, showing British, French, German, and American munitions manufacturers discussing the ‘political and economic necessity’ of war with a Swiss banker.80 It is comparatively unsuccessful, however, because of the relatively depersonalised function of capital: satirical cartoons of generals or national leaders speaking words based on their own public pronouncements are a much more effective critical weapon than broad, national stereotypes representing the more intangible forces of international capitalism. Furthermore, this critique has no purchase elsewhere in the play. Whereas the snobbery and self-interest that mark Lovely War’s presentation of historical figures are replicated in lower-level members of the aristocracy, there are no equivalent representatives of capital elsewhere in the play onto whom the characteristics of the ‘War Profiteers’ can be mapped. As a result, this scene’s critique feels exogenous to the play’s dramaturgical structure, and it is therefore comparatively easily forgotten or dismissed—as it was by critics such as T.C. Worsley, who complained of ‘the feebleness of the actual mentality behind the way the sketch is written’.81 The lions/donkeys opposition, by contrast, was endogenous both to the play’s structure, and that of its source material, and could not be simply waved away. Indeed, conservative critics would find it difficult to do so because this opposition reworked a central narrative of nineteenthcentury liberal conservatism, the myth of the free-born Englishman. It is stated with unusually blunt clarity by the historian John Green: In the silent growth and elevation of the English people the boroughs led the way: unnoticed and despised by prelate and noble, they had alone

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preserved the full tradition of Teutonic liberty. The rights of selfgovernment, of free speech in free meeting, of equal justice by one’s equals, were brought safely across the ages of Norman tyranny by the traders and shopkeepers of the towns … [here] lay the real life of Englishmen, the life of their home and trade, their ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression, their steady, unwearied battle for self-government.82 Lovely War’s account of the 1914–18 conflict owes a great deal to this story of tireless, anonymous labour in the cause of freedom from aristocratic despotism. It is, as Foucault observes, also a racialised story, in which social formations are identified as fundamentally distinct groups: with nobles depicted as ‘descended from the Normans’ and ‘men of lowly condition’ as ‘the sons of the Saxons’; thus, social conflicts were ‘articulated, coded and transformed into a discourse, into discourses, about different races’.83 This racial identification of Green’s Englishmen with their German roots and in opposition to ‘Norman tyranny’ illuminates the otherwise surprising fact that, whereas Lovely War is willing to depict German soldiers in the same sympathetically realistic light as its ‘Tommies’, it never deviates from stereotypical representations of the French as vain, boasting, and foolish. It is ironic, given Theatre Workshop’s committedly pacifist and anti-capitalist stance, that Lovely War is so structurally dependent upon this patriotic ideology that was constructed with the intention of naturalising the conditions for capitalism by situating the rights of white, middle-class men to own property and trade freely at the centre of a narrative of English nationalism. Furthermore, viewed from the perspective of 1963, this narrative reveals potential readings of Lovely War that significantly undermine its claim to be a comprehensively anti-war play. The dominant narratives of English victory in the Second World War, for example, align easily with Green’s account of the ‘ceaseless, sober struggle with oppression’ that characterises the ‘real life of Englishmen’. It is entirely possible to embrace both Lovely War’s critique of the feckless irresponsibility and waste that characterised the First World War and to argue simultaneously for the necessity of the Second World War—and even the Cold War—as examples of the ‘free world’ resisting the most horrific excesses of tyranny and totalitarianism. Of course such an argument would have been resisted in the strongest possible terms by Theatre Workshop. The programme for Lovely War drew terrifying comparisons between the scale of slaughter in the First World War and that of a nuclear war such as that which was narrowly avoided in the Cuban Missile Crisis of the previous year: ‘One atom bomb in 1945 caused as many casualties as the entire Battle of Arras. One Polaris missile is 25 times as destructive as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima’, it stated.84 It also quoted Raymond Fletcher’s opinion that ‘a third, nuclear World War could kill as many in four hours as were killed in the whole of World War One’, and General Douglas MacArthur’s view that ‘[g]lobal war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides’.85 Nonetheless, political positions are neither unitary nor

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circumscribed by explicit intentions. They can both contain contradiction and spill over the limits of their proponents’ purposes. Lovely War is a case in point. Its presentation of exceptional British heroism contains the countervailing force of heroic British exceptionalism—a narrative that is easily mobilised in opposition to the anti-war stance to which the play is ostensibly fully committed. When Lovely War opened at the Wyndham’s Theatre in June 1963, patriotic narratives of British exceptionalism were, however, being pilloried at the Fortune Theatre in the sketch ‘The Aftermyth of War’, part of Beyond the Fringe. This revue was written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore, and produced, as was Lovely War, by Donald Albery. Beyond the Fringe was also famous for Peter Cook’s ground-breaking impersonation of then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who came to the theatre in October 1961, only to be spotted and further ridiculed by Cook for his attempt to look ‘with-it’. Beyond the Fringe’s mockery of Macmillan was not political as such; it simply presented him as a figure from a former age, bumbling, and out of touch. He was, indeed, the last prime minister to have been an adult in Edwardian Britain, and to have fought in the trenches, as had his predecessor, Sir Anthony Eden. Unlike Eden, Macmillan was not an aristocrat, but his demeanour and dress identified him as such. Macmillan had also played, as chancellor of the exchequer, a pivotal role in the Suez Crisis of 1956, when misplaced British confidence in the vestiges of its colonial power led to disastrous consequences for the Middle East. In all of these respects, Macmillan was vulnerable to the critique offered both by Lovely War and Beyond the Fringe of outdated aristocratic amateurism, a position which—as Albery clearly recognised— significantly appealed to the theatre-going public. As Albery’s willingness to speculate commercially on its success indicates, however, in the context of 1963, this critique of aristocratic rule did not constitute a thoroughly anti-establishment position. While it is true that the Profumo affair, which was at its height when Lovely War opened in the West End, represented a blow to the establishment, it also catalysed the emergence of a new establishment through the resignation of Macmillan in 1963 and Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s loss of the 1964 General Election to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party. Wilson was opposed, from 1965, by Edward Heath as Tory leader, and—in spite of their political opposition—the two men had a great deal in common. Both were born in 1916 into the middle classes; both attended grammar schools, and both studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University, which has since famously become virtually a requirement of political office.86 They therefore represented the emergence of a professional, bureaucratic, and even somewhat epistocratic establishment: a modern ruling class who had been trained specifically for the privilege of government, and worked to earn its privileges, unlike the gentleman amateurs of Edwardian Britain. This new ruling class would be comfortable laughing along with Beyond the Fringe, and could align itself comfortably with Lovely

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War’s anti-war position, while nonetheless committing to maintaining Britain’s status as a global superpower. This was also the establishment to which Peter Hall belonged, and to which he sought to co-opt Littlewood both by inviting her in 1963 to direct Henry IV Part One at the RSC (an invitation she considered but declined) and by rejecting her attempt to set herself against it when they met at County Hall a decade later.87 Hall’s 1961 conversion of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre into the RSC was a significant event in the creation of this new establishment, as it was the country’s largest subsidised theatre until the founding of the National Theatre two years later. That same year, Hall chose to adapt, with his colleague John Barton, Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Richard III as a trilogy with the title The Wars of the Roses. Hall and Barton had planned to include these plays in their Stratford repertory since Hall had taken over as director in 1960. Hall twice offered the plays to Peter Brook, saying that he was ‘more interested in the revelation of human character through drama than in the expression of social or political images’, but Brook twice refused, finally suggesting Hall take them on himself.88 Hall recalled ‘a growing awareness […] that it’s not power that corrupts, but that you have to corrupt yourself to be politically powerful’, and that ‘in the middle of a blood-soaked century […] a presentation of one of the bloodiest and most hypocritical periods in history would teach many lessons about the present’.89 He also, presumably, had one eye on the potential of the new National Theatre to eclipse his fledgling company, and chose to create a production that would clearly assert the RSC’s status as a national institution. Central to Hall’s creation of an identifiable aesthetic for his new company was his decision to employ John Bury as a designer, promoting him to head of stage design in 1964. In his Guardian obituary for Bury, Timothy O’Brien praises his work at the RSC: Among Bury’s very best work […] were Pinter’s […] Landscape and Silence, at the Aldwych. For Landscape, he created an ocean of emotional distance with a divided rostrum. Silence had a labyrinth of forlorn memory, in which light bounced off a rippled silver floor, throwing shadows and shimmering clouds on to a plain canvas ceiling.90 Kate Dorney notes that, at Stratford East, where they were ‘limited by the grandeur of the proscenium’, Bury and his fellow designer Sean Kenny had ‘relied on rostra and simple three-dimensional constructions combined with lighting to produce spare sculptural forms’ such as those O’Brien singles out for praise above.91 As we will see in Chapter 8, these ‘constructions’ did not only derive from Bury’s work at the Theatre Royal, but can be traced back to Theatre Workshop’s itinerant phase. Then, the company’s poverty of means and wealth of influences led to the creation of productions from what Howard Goorney refers to as ‘the orchestration of light, sound, voice and movement’.92

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Initially, Bury provided the lighting for these productions, with Littlewood designing. Robert Leach notes that her set for The Other Animals (1948) consisted of a silver disc suspended in space from which a series of rods descended, […]. The lighting by John Bury contrived to give the impression that this structure sometimes moved, and the bars, or rods, seemed to disappear, to reveal an arch which at times seemed so small it almost disappeared, but at others was tall and imposing.93 As Bury took over as Theatre Workshop’s principal designer, he added to this sculptural scenography, transformed by lighting, an increasing interest in the use of real materials, often woven into the action of a play, as in Henry Chapman’s You Won’t Always Be On Top (1957) in which a real brick wall was built on stage during the performance. Bury’s design for The Wars of the Roses was evidently a remnant of these practices. It consisted principally of two huge periaktoi (towers that were triangular in plan and could be both trucked across the stage and rotated to reveal their different faces). Clad variously in metallic sheets and grilles and rough wood, these towers initially resembled siege engines and fortresses, the military installations by which the warring barons of the plays maintained their power. As they turned and shifted about the stage to accommodate the action of the plays, however, the solidity of these structures gave way somewhat to the fluidity of their movement. Their evocation of the brute strength of war was thus balanced by their representation of the shifting ground of politics; as the actor Cherry Morris recalled, ‘huge, thundering walls moving into place and nearly running down any actors not on the ball’.94 That peace in this world was no less dangerous than war was also underscored by Bury’s flooring made of ‘steel sheets’ distressed in acid baths and ‘with an overlay of wire mesh’. This not only gave Bury the visual patina of history that he sought but amplified both boots as they crossed it and weapons as they rasped against it. Bury approached the creation of costumes similarly, so that they contained a long history of violence and accumulated wealth and appeared ‘corroded with the years’, with the result that, across the trilogy, ‘[c]olour drained from the stage until, among the drying patches of scarlet blood, the black night of England settled on the leather costumes of Richard’s thugs’.95 Bury achieved this corrosion by adding liquid latex and ‘a mixture of glue crystals, marble chippings, chicken grit and stone gravel’ to costumes made from ‘calico, floor-cloth […] and leatherised suede cloth’ and chainmail knitted from butcher’s string.96 Donald Sinden apparently weighed his costume as York at 56 pounds,97 but after their initial complaints the actors apparently came to appreciate the way their weight ‘helped the balance’,98 presumably not least when wielding the huge mild steel swords that gave the correct ringing effect when used.99 The weighty materiality of Bury’s design found its culmination in the death of Richard III (Ian Holm). Michael Redgrave

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memorably described Olivier’s Shakespearean deaths as portraits of each character, offering as one example his film of Richard III, in which his Richard ‘had no heart to lose and fought on and on, his muscles still twitching when all sense had left them’.100 In stark contrast to Olivier’s Machiavellian hollowness, Holm’s Richard, who had been athletic and confident in combat in Edward IV, staggers half-blindly about the stage, apparently overwhelmed as much by the weight of his armour and a broadsword almost as long as his body as by his foes. Holm’s Richard, a ‘manifestation’, in the word of the Times’ reviewer, ‘of the disease from which his country suffers’, fell victim to its scenographic logic. Probably the most iconic image of the production, however, was Bury’s council table. This was a direct product of one of a large number of textual interventions made by Hall’s co-director John Barton. Unlike Littlewood’s overt montage in Lovely War, Barton’s aim in re-shaping Shakespeare’s plays was that ‘nobody would know where the joints were’, but the changes he made fundamentally reconstructed their dramaturgy.101 In order to give clear dramaturgical shape to the first play in the trilogy, for example, which he and Hall had decided to call Henry VI, Barton added a section in which Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and the Lord Protector (Paul Hardwick), challenged of abusing his power by his rival Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester (Nicholas Selby), offers to abdicate a part of it to a mechanism of government that has nothing whatsoever to do with baronial feuds of the fifteenth century, but emerges—instead— from the kinds of liberal, representative democracy that only began fully to take hold after the Second World War: When we are met upon some troubled question, Let us resolve it by our general voice: And when the matter hath been given vent, Let the opinion of the greater part Be straight upheld, and those that are outvoic’d Yield their intents unto the general.102 Thus, faced by a crisis of power, Barton’s Gloucester reaches down the centuries to borrow the example of the United Nations. Bury’s design for the council table around which the nobles agree with Gloucester to meet strongly undercuts the plain optimism of this proposal. A huge, five-sided, sharp-edged and cornered sheet of metal, its resemblance to a medieval weapon serves as a constant visual reminder of the ways in which those sat around it see the political arena not as a space for consensus but for domination. This is never more clear than in the sequence leading up to Gloucester’s arrest on invented charges, when each member of the council clangs their dagger onto the table, weaponising a mechanism intended for peace and turning it on its inventor. In all of these respects, Bury’s design for Hall and Barton’s production seems to have borrowed both the insistent materiality of Theatre Workshop and the

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deep imbrication of their design processes with the dramaturgical shaping of a play, and applied them confidently to Hall and Barton’s Cold Warinfluenced exploration of the ideal of liberal consensus and its vulnerability to ambition in a world shaped by conflict. Indeed, without the combination of fluidity and solidity that Bury’s design achieved, the specifically systemic workings of power within the world of the play would not have been nearly so clear. There is, however, another dramaturgical pattern shaping Hall and Barton’s production and visible in Bury’s design, which runs counter to the story of brutal realpolitik with which it is commonly associated. Once again, this pattern can be traced back to Barton’s textual interventions. When Gloucester proposes the establishing of a council board, he is careful to add a royal veto to its terms: If it should chance at some unlook’d for time That what we do propose mislikes his highness, Then we should yield to his opinion. Barton set the spring of this dramaturgical trap in order to focus the climax of his Henry VI play, which was set in motion by the council’s arrest of Gloucester on the pretext of flimsy accusations of treason. Humphrey responds by appealing to the king to exercise his prerogative and over-rule the council, but the invitation for Henry to assert his rule goes unheeded. Gloucester’s imprisonment is quickly revealed as a means to have him killed, and Suffolk and Winchester are immediately exposed as the guilty parties, leading to their deaths: Suffolk beheaded by a mob, and Winchester tortured by sickness and guilt. When Winchester is told, on his deathbed, that the king has come to hear his confession, he responds, in more lines added by Barton, ‘what king? We have no king’, before telling Henry that ‘thou might’st have saved him [Gloucester] but in holy cowardice thou durst not do it’. Thus, Barton’s ending for Henry VI cuts and disentangles the narrative threads of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI in order to focus them on Henry’s failure as a king. Barton concludes his play with an invented dialogue between Margaret—who is grieving for her lover, Suffolk—and Henry—who is grieving for the failure of his reign. The text is a mixture of Barton’s words (underlined below) and text culled from Shakespeare’s play (the sources are indicated in square brackets): MARGARET:

Steel thou thy heart to keep thy vexed kingdom, Whereof both you and I have charge and care. Ay, then this spark shall prove a raging fire, If wind and fuel be brought to feed it with, [III.i] Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep. [IV.i] HENRY: My wife, let’s hence and learn to govern better, For yet may England curse my wretched reign. [IV.ix]

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Barton’s invented ending looks both forward to his Edward IV—which will be dominated by revenge, and prove the ‘raging fire’ to this play’s ‘sparks’—and back to his invention for the play’s beginning, which he adapted from a passage by the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall that was included in Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare,103 in which Henry V, in voiceover, commands his peers ‘to render your allegiance unto my son, King Henry VI, and […] I command you to love and join together into one league and one unfeigned amity’. He then divides his power between the realms of politics— instructing that his brother Humphrey should be Lord Protector—and of war— instructing that his brother Bedford should rule France and ‘with fire and sword […] persecute’ the Dauphin. Bedford and Gloucester are both notable for their lack of personal ambition: Humphrey abdicates power to the council and Bedford (John Normington) tells his fellow old soldier Talbot (Clive Morton)— once again in lines invented by Barton—that they ‘are simple men,/All our ambition is for England’s good’. The story of Barton’s Henry VI, then, is also the story of the machinery of war and politics being wrested from the purportedly disinterested control of men closely associated with Henry V, and of the failure of Henry’s son to grasp it back. Henry VI’s failure is unmistakably presented, in David Warner’s performance, as a failure of masculinity: his high, piping voice falters among the confident, gravelly baritones of his peers, and he occupies Bury’s imposing throne in an uncertain, adolescent slump that matures in Edward IV to increasingly pained reluctance. Likewise, the two subsequent kings, Edward IV and Richard III, are presented as failed men. Roy Dotrice’s Edward sits astride the throne, his legs (emphasised by the tight stockings and short breeches of Bury’s costume design) spread wide as he woos Elizabeth Woodville (Susan Engel). This shallow machismo fatally weakens him. Ian Holm’s Richard is differently vulnerable, becoming immediately paranoid upon achieving the throne, hunkering down in it as though expecting an attack at any second. It is only with the arrival of Richmond (Eric Porter) that the triumphant masculinity of Henry V returns. Hall’s programme note for the productions described Richmond as ‘a progressive force’, but Bury’s design demonstrates that this progress is markedly conservative.104 Fair-haired and fighting without a helmet in clean, bright leather armour and under the royal standard proclaiming ‘Dieu et mon droit’ (‘God and my right’), which was first adopted by Henry V, Richmond is presented as a return to dependable leadership by a reliably masculine hero. It is therefore clear that although The Wars of the Roses presented itself as a thoroughly contemporary reworking of Shakespeare, proposing that ‘the selfish instincts of men must be checked—by Parliament, democracy, tradition, religion— or else the men of ambition will misgovern the rest’,105 it was, in fact, underpinned by a deeply conservative assertion that the ultimate check on misgovernment remains strong, masculine leadership, as represented by the figure of Henry V, the ultimate image of upper-class English male exceptionalism. This reading is closely

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aligned with Hall’s view that ‘Shakespeare believed that there was a natural order in nature’ and that his ‘thinking […] is based on a complete acceptance of this concept of order’, and therefore that ‘[r]evolution […] destroys the order and leads to destructive anarchy’.106 In short, the small print inserted by Gloucester into the remit of the council board—that the king should retain a veto—was also the small print of Hall and Barton’s production: Shakespeare should be made contemporary, but his function of asserting the traditional values of the ruling order should be retained. Thus, in both Lovely War and The Wars of the Roses, we see a shared pattern of significant events from British history being subjected to apparently radical, contemporary readings, but in both cases with a strong countervailing political logic that tacitly reasserts the conservative values of the establishment. That dramaturgical tendency was also, in both cases, closely related to the ways in which these productions borrowed from practices that had been collectively developed by Theatre Workshop, accommodating them to mainstream processes of production that characterised both the commercial and subsidised sectors (whose practices have always, in practice, overlapped significantly). The next question, then, is what were these practices remnants of, and can their initial development be seen better to serve the radical political agenda to which Theatre Workshop was ostensibly committed? To answer that question, we will need to examine in detail the itinerant phase of the company’s existence, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 H. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story (London: Methuen, 1981), 39. 2 K. Harris, Interview with Harry Greene, September 20, 2007, British Library Theatre Archive Project, accessed March 19, 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literatureand-performance/Theatre-Archive-Project/024M-C1142X000182-0100V0. 3 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 124. 4 C. Barker, ‘Closing Joan’s Book: Some Personal Footnotes’, New Theatre Quarterly 74, 19, Part 2 (2003): 107. 5 M. Coveney, ‘Alan Dossor Obituary’, The Guardian, August 11, 2016. 6 N. Holdsworth, ed., Naked Thoughts That Roam About: Reflections on Theatre, 1958–2001 (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002), 31 (emphasis original). 7 E. MacLennan, The Moon Belongs to Everyone: Making Theatre with 7:84 (London: Methuen, 1990), 19. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 T. Milne and C. Goodwin, ‘Working with Joan’, in Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in the Modern British Theatre, ed. C. Marowitz and S. Trussler (London: Methuen, 1967), 113. 10 The phrase can be found in many press accounts of the company’s work, such as obituaries of John Bury (T. O’Brien, ‘Obituary: John Bury’, The Guardian, November 15, 2000), of Littlewood herself (C. Marowitz, ‘Obituary: Joan Littlewood’, The Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2002), and in the headline given to an extract from Peter Rankin’s Joan Littlewood: Dreams and Realities, The Official Biography (London: Oberon, 2014) published in The Guardian: ‘Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop: A design for living’ (November 11, 2014).

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11 D. Kennedy, ‘The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower’, Theatre Research International 30, no. 1 (March, 2005): 39. 12 Kennedy, ‘The Director, the Spectator and the Eiffel Tower’, 46. 13 Ibid. 14 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 102. 15 Ibid., 100. 16 Ibid., 103. 17 Barker, ‘Closing Joan’s Book’, 99. 18 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 103. 19 Letter from Gerry Raffles to Anne Carlisle of the Arts Council, February 27, 1955: V&A Theatre and Performance Collection (hereafter V&ATPA), ACGB/34/68/1. 20 N. Holdsworth, ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My Grave”: The Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 1 (1999): 6. 21 Ibid., 5. 22 ‘Memorandum of Association of Pioneer Theatres Limited’, October 20, 1955, accessed July 21, 2017, https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00556251/ filing-history?page=9. The articles of association were signed by the producer Frederic Piffard, the publisher William McLellan, the poet and journalist Christopher Grieve (better known by his pen name Hugh MacDiarmid), the Labour politician Tom Driberg, and James Ford, a retired teacher and lecturer. All of these except Driberg had been directors of Theatre Workshop, and they were joined by Littlewood and John Bury, who were the only members of Theatre Workshop who subscribed to these Articles of Association and therefore had the right to appoint members of the council. 23 Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 6. 24 Letter from Gerry Raffles to Jo Hodgkinson (Drama Director, Arts Council of Great Britain), May 21, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. 25 Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 6; S. Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context, 1956–1965 (London: Routledge, 1995), 43–54. 26 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 214; the Arts Council’s annual report for the year ending March 31, 1958, lists a figure of £5,000 (rather than Goorney’s £5,500) for the English Stage Company, see The Arts Council of Great Britain, A New Pattern of Patronage: The Thirteenth Annual Report of the Arts Council of Great Britain, 1957–58 (London: Arts Council, 1958), 96. 27 Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 6; I. Wardle, The Theatres of George Devine (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), 259. 28 Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 7. 29 Letter from Drama Director, Arts Council to the Town Clerk, Borough of Walthamstow, March 5, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. 30 Letter from Gerry Raffles to Drama Director of the Arts Council, February 8, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. 31 ‘Note for the File’ dated December 19, 1957: V&ATPA ACGB/34/68/1. 32 This undated letter was written in response to the Arts Council’s proposed grant for 1959–60. It is quoted in Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 8. 33 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 123. 34 Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 9. 35 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 124. 36 Ibid. 37 Plan submitted to the Arts Council of Great Britain, March 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. 38 M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Vintage, 1980), 194. 39 Ibid., 195 (emphasis original). 40 Based on Goorney’s recollection (The Theatre Workshop Story, 96), in Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre (Exeter:

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57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

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University of Exeter Press, 2006), Robert Leach notes that by 1955 Theatre Workshop had ‘raised enough money to purchase the building’ (109), and, in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Nadine Holdsworth adds that the money was provided by Raffles’ father (21). However, a note by Jo Hodgkinson in the Arts Council file dated December 19, 1957 indicates that ‘a new lease for the theatre has not yet been signed’: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. Letter to Gerry Raffles from Smith and Hudson Solicitors, February 27, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. Rankin, Joan Littlewood: Dreams and Realities, 139. ‘Future of Theatre Royal’, June 3, 1975, document acquired by Nadine Holdsworth from Clive Barker. Holdsworth, ‘They’d Have Pissed on My Grave’, 13; Official Copy of Register of Title, Number EGL3 4 August 16, 9542, 2019: HM Land Registry. L. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2011), 24. Letter from Gerry Raffles to Jo Hodgkinson, Drama Director, Arts Council, June 12, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. ‘Note for the file’, August 23, 1957: V&ATPA, ACGB/34/68/1. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 216. Ibid., 137. ‘Future of Theatre Royal’, Notes of a meeting on this subject held at 3 Gerrard Road, London N1, June 29, 1975. I am grateful to Nadine Holdsworth for sharing this document—which she received from Clive Barker—with me. Ibid. ‘Goodbye Note from Joan’, Encore, 1961; quoted in Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 185. Milne and Goodwin ‘Working with Joan’, 114. P. Hall, Peter Hall’s Diaries: The Story of a Dramatic Battle, J. Goodwin, ed. (London: Oberon, 2000), 104. Letter from Gerry Raffles to the Arts Council, March 4, 1974: V&ATPA, ACGB/ 34/68/1. This programme was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service on December 27, 1961, and then repeated, in a new edition narrated by variety performer Bud Flanagan, on February 21, 1962 and then again on Armistice Day, November 11, 1962. D. Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, New Theatre Quarterly 23, no. 6 (1990): 250. Leach, Theatre Workshop, 192. Quoted in Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 255. Ibid., 246 (emphasis original). Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 250; see also Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre, 8, 70 and Leach, Theatre Workshop, 184. S. Eisenstein, Writings 1934–1947: Sergei Eisenstein Selected Works, Vol. 3, ed. R. Taylor, trans. W. Powell (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 26. Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 248. M. Kennedy, ‘Oh What a Lovely War Set for Stratford Revival’, The Guardian, January 9, 2013. Milne and Goodwin, ‘Working with Joan’, 117. Ibid., 116. Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 252. Milne and Goodwin, ‘Working with Joan’, 120. Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 259. Ibid. Ibid., 244.

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72 Quoted by Paget in ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 258 from John Hodgson’s ‘Foreword’ to Alan Cullen’s The Stirrings in Sheffield on Saturday Night (London: Methuen, 1974). 73 Paget, ‘Oh What a Lovely War: The Texts and Their Contexts’, 244. 74 Theatre Workshop, Oh What a Lovely War (London: Methuen, 2000), 3. 75 Ibid., 30–1. 76 Ibid., 51. 77 Ibid., 75. 78 A. Clark, The Donkeys (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1961), front-papers; for more information on the play’s use of Clark’s account of the war, see D. Paget, ‘Popularising Popular History: “Oh What a Lovely War” and the Sixties’, Critical Survey 2, no. 2, Writing and the First World War (1990). 79 ‘Charles Chilton The Long, Long Trail’, YouTube Video, February 20, 2015, accessed March 19, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W319l1mtASs. 80 Theatre Workshop, Oh What a Lovely War, 41–7. 81 The Financial Times, June 21, 1963. 82 J. Green, A Short History of the English People (London: Macmillan, 1874), 89. 83 M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. D. Macey (London: Penguin, 1997), 101. 84 Programme for Oh What a Lovely War, 1963: British Library, Shelfmark YD.2005. b.591, 11. 85 Ibid., 9, 11. 86 See A. Beckett, ‘PPE: The Oxford Degree That Runs Britain’, The Guardian, February 23, 2017. 87 J. Littlewood, Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells It (London: Methuen, 1994), 633–5. 88 R. Pearson, A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes: The Story of the Royal Shakespeare Company Production of The Wars of the Roses (London: Adelphi Press, 1990), 8. 89 Ibid., 8–9. 90 Timothy O’Brien, ‘John Bury’, The Guardian, November 15, 2000. 91 K. Dorney, ‘Staging Space: Design for Performance, 1958–1989’, in British Design from 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, ed. C. Breward and G. Wood (London: V&A Publications, 2012), 189. 92 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 42. 93 Leach, Theatre Workshop, 190. 94 Pearson, A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes, 39. 95 Ibid., 40. 96 Ibid., 40–1. 97 Ibid., 41. 98 Ibid., 42. 99 Ibid., 39. 100 T. Cole, Actors on Acting: The Theories, Techniques and Practices of the Great Actors of All Times as Told in Their Own Words (New York: Crown Publishers, 1957), 389. 101 Pearson, A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes, 16. 102 Quoted in S. Hampton-Reeves and C. Rutter, The ‘Henry VI’ Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 61. 103 G. Bullough and J. Drakakis, eds, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1996). 104 P. Hall, ‘Blood Will Have Blood’, Programme Note for The Wars of the Roses, 1963. 105 Ibid. 106 Pearson, A Band of Arrogant and United Heroes, 8.

8 PRACTICES OF THEATRE WORKSHOP, 1945–1955

Was Theatre Workshop a studio before 1955? Both Saint-Denis and Michael Chekhov deliberately established the studios, whose work has so far been the subject of this book, as extensions of lineages of practice within which they had been trained. They called them ‘studios’ in order to emphasise their emergence from these histories. The members of Theatre Workshop, by contrast, never saw themselves within the studio tradition, and never—to my knowledge—described themselves as a studio. They did, however, place great emphasis on experiment, as the 1945 manifesto for their new company demonstrated: Theatre Workshop is an organisation of artists, technicians and actors who are experimenting in stage-craft. Its purpose is to create a flexible theatreart, as swift-moving and plastic as the cinema, by applying the recent technical advances in light and sound, and introducing music and the ‘dance theatre’ style of production.1 In this intention, Theatre Workshop differed very little from the London Theatre Studio, the Old Vic Theatre Centre, and the Chekhov Theatre Studio, though it placed more explicit emphasis on technology than any of them. Also like Chekhov’s studio (but unlike Saint-Denis’), Theatre Workshop’s manifesto emphasised theatre’s relationship to wider society, albeit in more stridently political terms: [t]he great theatres of all times have been popular theatres which reflected the dreams and struggles of the people. […] We want a theatre with a living language, a theatre which is not afraid of the sound of its own

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voice and which will comment as fearlessly on Society as did Ben Jonson and Aristophanes.2 Theatre Workshop’s manifesto said nothing, however, about how its ‘flexible theatre-art’ would be created and sustained, although this may be in part because regular training was already deeply ingrained in Theatre Workshop’s membership through their work before the war with Theatre Union, which had been established in Manchester by Littlewood and MacColl in 1936. When Rosalie Williams joined this group in 1938, she was ‘overwhelmed’ by ‘[t]he range and intensity of the training programme that Joan and Ewan had worked out’, which involved ‘relaxation exercises, […] voice production, Stanislavsky, ballet, movement and mime’, and took place every evening and on Sundays.3 This memory is borne out by surviving timetables, which record three and a half hours of training each day, involving a combination of physical and analytical exercises and scene studies.4 Littlewood’s notebooks also contain what seems to be a plot to be used as a basis for improvisation, in a process similar to the ‘sketches’ that Chekhov used in his studio. It recounts the story of a young girl, ‘dreamy and restless’, leaving her parents to seek work and unable to find it, closing as she ‘walks down a huge streets with towering skyscrapers forlorn terrified finally sits down despondent old folks get a letter from her telling them she’s OK’.5 The purpose of these exercises was not simply to train performers, but to develop what Theatre Workshop’s manifesto would call ‘artists […] experimenting in stage-craft’. As Littlewood wrote elsewhere in her notebooks from this period: [m]uch of what you might call training should be incorporated into the production of a play. And side by side with this physical training must go the study side of our work—the political and historical study. These two aspects of work are indissolubly linked just as we understand the class struggle with our bodies as well as our brains.6 Littlewood’s criticism of one student in Theatre Union offers an example of how this process functioned in practice. Littlewood notes that the student in question ‘did not succeed in welding the given circumstances to the plot’, and advises her not to ‘let your plot remain like a hard core’, but to ‘break [it] up’ and ‘make it fluid’ so that plot and given circumstances are not ‘extraneous to each other’.7 One of Littlewood’s later notebooks picks up this idea of relations between ‘form and content’, arguing that they cannot ‘be divorced from each other’, and that it is therefore impossible to ‘take the old and conventional and outdated forms—the play form and the techniques of production—and pour new life into them with so-called revolutionary material’.8 She proposes that such an attempt can only yield ‘a series of clichés or slogans’, and that to ‘get down to the problem of man the real person, […] you inevitably find that your

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search for truth leads you along the paths of realism—socialist realism—not along the naturalistic lines of professional theatre presentation’.9 Littlewood’s opposition to the structural tendency of the ‘bourgeois theatre’ to occlude the significance of social and political struggle for the development of human consciousness led her to the conclusion that ‘our whole approach must change. Our method of writing plays, of producing them, and of acting them, lighting them, stage managing them, must change’.10 Thus, in their intent to develop new forms of theatre, grounded in forms of physical training and conceptual analysis that were indissolubly linked, Theatre Workshop adopted and explicitly politicised the model of the studio. Thinking about Theatre Workshop as a studio is not, however, simply a matter of applying a useful explanatory framework to their activities. It also mitigates against members of the company’s understandable tendency—given their counter-cultural position—to fall into narrating themselves as though they were sui generis, a unique and spontaneous occurrence that set its own rules and generated its own practices. In fact, many of the practices developed by Theatre Workshop were borrowed directly from the studio tradition, and the company’s work was often imbricated with the work of other studios. Littlewood, for example, became acquainted with Rudolf Laban, Lisa Ullmann (who had taught at the CTS while she was working for the Jooss-Leeder School at Dartington), and Sylvia Bodmer, watching their classes at the Art of Movement Studio, which they founded in Manchester in 1945, and meeting them privately. Evidently, these experiences were formative for Littlewood, who wrote to Gerry Raffles in January 1947 that I went to Laban’s flat tonight and talked to Lisa [Ullmann]. I had a long chat with Sylvia [Bodmer] earlier and saw one of her classes. Laban has invited me to one of his classes tomorrow. They treat me as if I were an important person and it embarrasses me when I think how much more important they are. What I do is a crude, unfinished version of their work. Lisa is only a few years older than me but she has so much knowledge, so much command of her art. I know nothing, I know absolutely nothing—I haven’t even begun to find out.11 Jean Newlove, performer, choreographer, and teacher of movement in Theatre Workshop, was trained by Rudolf Laban as his assistant when he was resident at Dartington Hall after February 1938, and joined Theatre Workshop in 1946, when they were resident at Ormesby Hall. Later, the company also overlapped with the Old Vic Theatre Centre (OVC). In January 1948, Littlewood wrote to Michel Saint-Denis to thank him for lending them rehearsal space at the Old Vic, saying that ‘we found the atmosphere of the place inspiring and we did a tremendous lot of concentrated work there’.12 She also remarked that ‘we have so little in common with the English theatre that we are hoping to find

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a home somewhere in Scotland or Ireland’, not only because ‘this wandering with a company is often fruitless’, but because they hoped to establish a ‘training centre’. This training centre had been on the company’s mind for some time. When the company established themselves at Ormesby Hall near Middlesbrough in 1946, their headed notepaper described ‘Theatre Workshop Players and Drama School’. This was an optimistic description; the ‘school’ to which it referred was, according to Jean Newlove, in fact a series of ‘drama weekends’ at which they taught amateurs in order to raise funds for the company.13 By the time Littlewood was writing to Saint-Denis in 1948, however, the company, which had been temporarily disbanded on leaving Ormesby Hall, was also on the cusp of developing more concrete plans for a new ‘centre’.14 That same month, Gerry Raffles created a document titled ‘Scheme for the formation of an experimental theatre workshop and theatre school in Liverpool’.15 This scheme never came to fruition, but that does not mean that to give it consideration is to engage in counter-factual history. Its aspirations were evidently grounded in the company’s direct experience, and although the document claimed that ‘the idea of school and theatre being inseparable has always been paramount in Theatre Workshop’s approach’, the fact that the plan emerged after the company had been in existence for three years, demonstrates that it was not merely a hypothetical ideal, but an extension of the company’s ongoing practice. Theatre Workshop’s proposal drew explicitly on the example of the OVC, of which it said it could become ‘the northern equivalent’, and whose directors had offered ‘to advise and help’ Theatre Workshop to implement the project.16 In most respects, Theatre Workshop’s proposal did, indeed, echo the recently opened OVC. Their proposed ‘Theatre Centre’ was also envisaged to comprise a permanent company and a school. The company’s productions would run for a month, with relatively high financial expectations: the plan suggests a breakeven point of 10,000 audience members across a four week run, which (assuming seven performances per week) would have meant 357 per performance. This figure that would have had to rise to 660 in order to fall in the middle of the target of 17,000–20,000 for the theatre to be ‘a success’. This would have meant the equivalent of playing to two-thirds capacity at the Old Vic, and—if Littlewood’s memory was correct—undertaking more than seven performances per week at the David Lewis Theatre which they had earmarked for the proposed centre—she recalled that its capacity was only 540.17 The plans for the school were also financially optimistic: Raffles noted that it would not operate for profit but ‘would be expected to pay its own way’, initially requiring the company to charge an all-inclusive fee of thirty-three guineas per term.18 This was not an inconsiderable sum—being roughly equivalent to £1,200 today, or £3,600 per year19— but it was very close to the fee of ‘either £96 for three twelve week terms, or £40 for a single term’ charged in 1946 by Laban, Lisa Ullmann, and Sylvia Bodmer’s Art of Movement Studio in Manchester.20 Like

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the OVC, Theatre Workshop aimed to widen participation, noting that ‘[a]n attempt would be made to establish scholarships through private individuals and Education Authorities for as many students as possible’, but there is little reason to think that large numbers of funded places could have been made available.21 Finally, as was the case in all of the studios studied in this book, Theatre Workshop planned to offer employment to ‘the best’ students, either ‘as members of the Theatre Workshop company, playing in the Theatre, or as the nucleus of new Theatre Workshop Companies’.22 Theatre Workshop’s plans differed, however, from the Old Vic’s in two crucial ways. First, it was committed to making this centre an international enterprise, using the company’s contacts from touring in order to ‘interchange seasons with the best theatres in Ireland, Scotland and neighbouring English cities, and later on with the best foreign companies’.23 These contacts would also form an initial basis ‘to exchange students, methods, and information with foreign schools of a similar nature’, and the school would be ‘opened without restriction, to students from anywhere in the world’.24 Second, Theatre Workshop planned to bring community engagement into the training offered by the school: ‘[a]s part of the curriculum, students will be expected to train and produce amateur dramatic groups in local youth organisations’ and ‘adult dramatic societies throughout Merseyside, thus spreading the teachings of the school amongst a wider section of the population’.25 This commitment exceeded the more audience-development focused work of the Young Vic by framing training not only as a means to professionalise theatre-making but as a further opportunity for theatre to engage with the public, a task it evidently considered more expansively than merely the selling of tickets. Thus, whereas the OVC set its sights on transforming the British theatre outwards from the centre, Theatre Workshop proposed to decentre it by establishing networks around and across its peripheries, both geographically and figuratively conceived. Theatre Workshop’s proposal for the home of their centre is also revealing in relation to the patterns of their practice during this itinerant phase. Their decision to identify themselves with the North, for example, reflected the identity of the audiences they sought to reach as much as it did the origins of most of the company’s members. Touring around Britain’s industrial centres, like the eponymous hero of Johnny Noble travelling to find work, had been the mainstay of the company’s practice in its first few years, as a script prepared by Littlewood for a 1947 radio documentary about the company’s work recalled: JOAN: DAVID: JOAN: DAVID: JOAN: DAVID: JOAN:

Gateshead. [Scase (Theatre Workshop’s Stage Manager)] Rig. De-rig. Load. Unload. Blyth. Rig. De-rig. Load. Unload. Stockton. Rig. De-rig. Load. Unload. Wigan. Blackburn. Bolton. Liverpool.26

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The Liverpool venue referred to here was the David Lewis Theatre, where Theatre Workshop performed in December 1945 and January 1946. It had been used as a music hall, concert venue, and cinema, as well as by amateur dramatic societies, and was part of a very large building in Great George Street, constructed in 1906 by a philanthropic trust established by entrepreneur and department store owner David Lewis (who had died in 1885), which also contained a club and hostel. Raffles’s proposal describes this as the only building in Liverpool ‘structurally suitable’ for the scheme, because it ‘consists of a well equipped theatre, and many large rooms, which could be converted into Studios, Workshops, and Lecture Rooms’.27 The David Lewis building was therefore both ideally placed within what Theatre Workshop was attempting to establish as their northern touring circuit, and as a place of refuge, entertainment, and education for the working classes, culturally aligned with the people who they sought to reach with and to represent in their work. The David Lewis building had, however, one other thing in common with the sites of Theatre Workshop’s practice in its first few years: it had fallen into decline. The main reason for this was that in 1940 and 1941 Liverpool suffered the most significant war damage of any UK city except London, when its docks (less than a mile from the David Lewis building) were a strategic target. It also suffered high unemployment in the post-war period, and Raffles noted in his plans that ‘the former inhabitants, the poorer working-class for whom the building was intended, have moved out to the north side of the city’,28 meaning, he suggested, that the population of the area increasingly comprised ‘newcomers, immigrants mainly, of many nationalities’.29 This is, unsurprisingly, somewhat simplistic. Liverpool’s city centre was, indeed, ethnically diverse, but not all of its inhabitants were therefore either newcomers or immigrants. The children who arrived at Theatre Workshop’s first matinee performance at the David Lewis Theatre in 1945 were, for example, ‘mostly Chinese’, and Chinatown was indeed close by, but the area had been so called since the 1860s, when Alfred Holt and Company employed significant numbers of Chinese sailors on its Blue Funnel Line between Liverpool, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, so they were not exactly ‘newcomers’.30 During the war, colonial subjects of various ethnicities had indeed travelled to Liverpool, ‘responding to the needs of the merchant marine, munitions factories and armed services’.31 Although we should stress that, as James Hampshire has shown, these migrations were ‘of citizens within an imperial polity, rather than a movement of aliens to a sovereign territory’,32 they were commonly seen at the time as ‘dark strangers in our midst’.33 When this racist rewriting of history met with high unemployment and the continued arrival of colonial citizens after the war, the conditions were created for civil unrest, and race riots did indeed break out in August 1948. The assumption, shared as far as we can tell by Raffles and the trustees of the David Lewis building, of a hegemonically white working class was evidently increasingly untenable, but even if Theatre Workshop’s proposal had been alert to this

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challenge, it is clear from the widespread active hostility to people of colour from former colonies taking advantage of their rights to citizenship under the British Nationality Act of 1948 that it would not have been favourably considered.34 Raffles was evidently aware that the favourable consideration of his proposal would be essential to its success. His plan acknowledges that, in order to secure the premises within the David Lewis building, Theatre Workshop would require ‘[t]he active support and goodwill of the Trustees and the Warden of the University Settlement’, as well as ‘the Education Authorities, the Press, and all Liverpool citizens interested in the furtherance of The Living Theatre and the development of education in the city’.35 According to Littlewood’s recollection, Raffles had a ‘list of favourable contacts’, but acknowledged that he’d ‘have to win over half of Liverpool’ in order to win the support of the trustees.36 He attempted to do so by sending out copies of his proposal to supporters of Theatre Workshop who might have influential contacts, and by travelling to Liverpool to meet the trustees and anyone else who might be able to support the venture. As a result, he reportedly won the provisional support of the trustees who couldn’t ‘make any financial contribution’ and were concerned by ‘what they call the Bohemian element’ and therefore wanted to ‘reserve the right to veto any Theatre Workshop production’. Raffles also travelled to London where he met David Webster, formerly a manager in Lewis’s department stores, who was one of the trustees. Webster had become general administrator of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, after the war, where the two principal beneficiaries of Arts Council support, the Vic-Wells Ballet Company and the Covent Garden Opera Company, were based. He was responsible to John Maynard Keynes, chairman of both the Opera House and of the Arts Council, who tasked Webster with establishing the permanent ensembles at Covent Garden that would be become the Royal Opera and Ballet in 1956. Keynes’s position at the head of both the funding and funded bodies and his aim of using the newly available subsidy to create permanent opera and ballet companies in London exposes the extent to which Arts Council support was modelled, at the time, on patronage: a means of securing the availability of elite art forms for the most privileged. As subsidy was extended to the regions and to smaller companies in subsequent years, a logic drawn from local government spending began to take over, as Anthony Field (finance director of the Arts Council from 1957 to 1983) recalled: there was always this worry about “Are we in fact subsidising a theatre company servicing a region […], but should we be subsidising Joan Littlewood or the Theatre Royal Stratford Company?” And there was always this worry as to whether we were subsidising a charismatic person or a theatre.37

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Field went on to explain that—as we have already seen in the case of Theatre Workshop’s time at Stratford East—many of the decisions taken by the Arts Council were the result of negotiations with local authorities, and were therefore predicated upon managing the regional distribution of arts provision rather than responding to a compelling case for supporting particular artists. Conceived as it was, as an anti-elite project, and in a city that already had an active repertory company (housed in what is now the Liverpool Playhouse), Theatre Workshop could not but struggle to make a case for support that would appeal either to the Arts Council or those, like David Webster, whose priorities were aligned with it. It also transpired that it could not make a successful appeal to the David Lewis Trust, whose committee—in spite of what Raffles thought was a majority of trustees in favour of his proposal—voted against it. Its chair J.T. Edwards reportedly wrote that ‘[y]our project would seriously interfere with activities being carried on at present and for which the D.L. was designed’.38 Unlike Saint-Denis and Chekhov, then—both of whom managed to fit the plans for their studios, albeit temporarily, into the agendas of their funders and supporters—Raffles’s plans proved incompatible with the perspectives of those upon whom they depended for their realisation. In 1948 Theatre Workshop therefore found itself in the position of an itinerant studio. It was dedicated to the imbrication of training and practice in all of its activities, and to the experimental development of an ensemble, but it had no geographical base or secure organisational structure upon which to build. The next question, therefore, is to what forms of practice did this instability give rise?

Wayfaring, bricolage, and response-ability: Theatre Workshop in 1948 At the end of a 2014 presentation at the University of Teesside, Jean Newlove asked her audience to join in with the chorus of the ‘sort of satiric song’ that Theatre Workshop sang ‘all over our travels, wherever we were’: We are poor little lambs That have lost our way, Baa, Baa, Baa. Sad little lambs That have gone astray, Baa, Baa, Baa. Lousy ham actors all are we. Damned from here to eternity. Lord have mercy on such as we, Baa, Baa, Baa.39 By putting the data from Howard Goorney’s records of the company’s performances into Google Maps (Figures 8.1 and 8.2), we can see the extent to

Practices of Theatre Workshop, 1945–1955

FIGURE 8.1A AND B

Map of Theatre Workshop’s touring 1945–46.

FIGURE 8.2A AND B

Map of Theatre Workshop’s touring 1947–48.

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which the company seemed, indeed, to be constitutively ‘astray’ between 1945 and 1948. Apart from numerous visits to northern towns and cities, particularly as seen in the repeated traversing of the Pennines in Figure 8.1b, patterns are difficult to distinguish in the trajectories described by Theatre Workshop in this period because their movements were guided primarily by the contingency of circumstances of which they only ever had partial knowledge and over which they exercised minimal control. By contrast, successful theatrical careers at this time followed an established trajectory from amateur or repertory theatre in small towns to periods of employment in the repertory companies of major cities, and then to London. Theatre Workshop eschewed this centralised model. Even when visiting major cities, the company commonly skirted around their wealthy centres, and even its ultimate home in London was, as Shelagh Delaney

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remarked of Stratford East, ‘not really London’.40 Littlewood drew on this experience of itinerancy in her script for the radio documentary ‘From Kendal to Berlin’ to provide an analogy for the creative process: The artist’s progress is no luxury tour. There is no smooth autobahn along which one rides to one’s objective. The path, if you can call it that, is a rough one, always mounting upwards, disappearing now and then in morasses and swamps, a perilous path twisting through barren places, littered with the bones of dead enterprise.41 Littlewood articulates here a vision of Theatre Workshop as a group of what anthropologist Tim Ingold terms ‘wayfarers’. Ingold distinguishes ‘wayfaring’, as a modality of travel, from ‘transport’.42 Transport is characterised by Ingold as a sequence of movements from point to point, which render the traveller ‘a passenger, who does not himself move but is rather moved from place to place’ so that the experiences of travel ‘have no bearing on the motion that carries him forth’.43 This is the model of travel that is tacitly reproduced by the images generated by Google Maps seen above, whose lines describe elliptical and apparently disembodied leaps from A to B to C, and so on. Seen in this way, the maps represent such a confusion of purposes as to appear, in the final analysis, purposeless. If we consider these maps, however, as traces of wayfaring, they appear quite different. The wayfarer is, for Ingold, ‘continually on the move’, or rather, ‘he is his movement’, he ‘is instantiated in the world as a line of travel’.44 The lines in Figures 8.1 and 8.2 must therefore be conceived not as a series of leaps that detach themselves from the earth in order to reach the next destination, but as a process of continual movement along the ground. Continual movement was clearly central to the experience of Theatre Worksop’s company in this period. Littlewood chose to open her script for ‘From Kendal to Berlin’ not with a manifesto for the company’s work or an extract from one of its performances, but with a departure: [Fade up back-stage atmosphere] VOICES: [creak of rope] VOICES: [creak of rope] VOICES: [creak of rope] HOWARD: DAVID: JOHN: DAVID: JOHN:

Heave! Hup! Heave! Hup! Heave! Hup! This end’s clear! Hold it! How’s your end? O.K. Let it down, slowly. Easy! Easy! That’s it. All right, make it fast! Better have those front curtains down.

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INTERPRETOR: DAVID: KRISTIN: […] GERRY: DAVID: GERRY: […] DAVID: […] BILL: JOHN:

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Lasse den Vorhänge etwas herunter. Costumes all packed, Kristin? Yes, they’re on the lorry. Will someone give me a hand with the tarpaulin? Is everything packed, Gerry? Yes. We’ll have to dig the lorry out, though. Come on, we’d better get moving.

We’ve got to be over the border before twelve o’clock. Before we split up, I want five cigarettes off everybody for the German stage hands. ROSALIE: Here. There’s a hundred. You can all pay me back later. GERRY: Well, I’m off with the gear. What are the arrangements for tomorrow? DAVID: We meet in Cuxhaven at eight o’clock tomorrow night. BILL: What time does the boat leave? DAVID: Twelve. GERRY: O.K. See you tomorrow. Auf Wiedersehen. BILL: Auf Wiedersehen, Willi. Auf Wiedersehen, Karl. KRISTIN: Auf Wiedersehen. ALL: Auf Wiedersehen, Berlin. [Up-wind. Sound of lorry-engine starting up]45

Littlewood describes the company’s ‘last impression of Berlin’ as ‘a wilderness where the snow falls endlessly’; Düsseldorf was ‘[a]s far as the eye could see, nothing but ruins’, and Wuppertal ‘a mountain of rubble’.46 Theatre Workshop was able to visit these ruins thanks to the Combined Services Entertainment Unit and the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), which occupied Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war, establishing communications and other administrative functions of the state in the absence of a functioning government.47 This tour was typical of the way that the company took advantage, like any wayfarer, of pre-existing, often partially ruined, systems and resources to sustain its activities. For example, in 1946 Theatre Workshop took up residence in the east wing of Ormesby Hall, a country house near Middlesbrough, at the invitation of its owners Colonel James and Mrs Ruth Pennyman. Mrs Pennyman was an enthusiastic supporter of the arts, who saw the company perform in February 1946 at the Newcastle People’s Theatre. The Pennymans were already engaged in philanthropy and the wing of their property stood empty as a result of the general decline of the country house economy in the early twentieth century and the compulsory purchase of the estate’s land after the war, so they offered it to Theatre Workshop as a base. The company benefitted from philanthropy

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of a different kind during its 1948 tour of Czechoslovakia, organised at the suggestion of the Labour MP Tom Driberg by Raffles and the country’s newly formed communist arts organisation Umeni Lidu (Art for the People). Here, as Ben Harker records, they ‘slept in palatial hotels vacated by senior Nazis’ at the end of the German occupation only a few years earlier,48 before going on to tour Sweden, where they were received in splendour—playing to a full Royal Opera House in Stockholm, for example—thanks to the initiative of Swedish company member Kristin Lind who had arranged it. Sweden’s prosperity and wartime neutrality meant that it was untouched by European food shortages, and the company returned to Britain weighed down by food that was still tightly rationed at home. Diverse and seemingly disconnected as they were, all of these situations were temporary in themselves (albeit differently so), and were made available to Theatre Workshop because of the company’s willingness to keep moving. Their lavish reception in Sweden, for example, was clearly a consequence of the temporary nature of these visits. Furthermore, as the company’s residence at Ormesby Hall extended, they found that there was an increasing likelihood of interference from their hosts, particularly Colonel Pennyman, who refused to continue to extend his patronage to MacColl upon hearing that he had deserted. As a result, as Littlewood wrote to Raffles (away in Germany) in March 1947, ‘[w]e are definitely leaving Ormesby’.49 Far from seeing this as a crushing blow, Littlewood seems to have taken it—literally—in her stride: [i]n some ways I can’t help feeling that it is a good thing. It will avoid all this nonsense of running schools and mean that I shall be free to do purely creative work, […] I never felt that the future at Ormesby would be fruitful. The colonel’s interference was becoming unbearable. Repeated exits were evidently the norm for Theatre Workshop, indeed they had to be willing to leave because wayfarers do not travel in order to arrive somewhere else, but remain on the move in order to sustain themselves, which is a direct result of their capacity, in Ingold’s words, continually to ‘work their paths’.50 Howard Goorney offers a direct example of the process of working paths in his account of Theatre Workshop’s practice: spring 1948 brought manna from heaven in the shape of a Flying Fortress of the U.S. Special Air Service. It was carrying equipment used in the entertainment of troops on the Continent, and it crashed on Bleaklow Hill in Derbyshire, scattering stage lighting equipment including some large spotlights, all over the moors. Camel [John Bury] led the company on a hike of several miles from the nearest road to the scene of the crash, and we each shouldered a piece of equipment, and staggered back to load it into a van. We cleaned it up and make good use of it for several years.51

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This was only an extreme example of standard practice for Theatre Workshop, Bury also recalled that ‘most of’ the company’s ‘switchboard and equipment’ had been ‘picked up from various theatres around Yorkshire and Lancashire’.52 Goorney described the actress Kristin Lind ‘arriving from one expedition in a large car with several rolls of very expensive material for costumes’, and the actor, stage manager, and scenic carpenter Harry Greene remembered that, when he began working with the company, ‘I was really staggered, because there was no subsidy, there were no savings. […] as a set designer and constructor, there was often nothing left for paint or nails, so I had to go and cadge’.53 Jean Gaffin, who worked as a secretary for Theatre Workshop at the start of the company’s time at Stratford, remembered that these practices continued there: ‘all the sets were recycled, all the clothes were recycled, […] Josie and Shirley [wardrobe mistresses] would go up to Berwick Street market and rummage for remnants to make clothes’.54 Such ‘cadging’ was also common within the company. The actor Barbara Young recalled that Littlewood did pinch my best coat […] well, she didn’t pinch it, she said it was going to go into the wardrobe and I didn’t need it. And then she wore it when she went off to Edinburgh to do something and I remember seeing my coat disappearing out of the back door thinking, ‘that’s mine!’55 It was, of course, appropriate, given its roots in the Red Megaphones ‘Propertyless Theatre for the Propertyless Class’,56 that Theatre Workshop should regard property as a ‘resource’ to be ‘pooled’, as were—for example—Howard Goorney’s ‘gratuity’ payment (given to him upon demobilisation from his armoured regiment) and Bill Davidson’s savings of £250 (the equivalent of over £4,000 today).57 As well as making detours to acquire equipment and materials, Theatre Workshop had—at times—to divest themselves of it, and store equipment for future collection, as hunters commonly do the carcasses of their prey. In September 1948, as the company prepared to leave for its tour of Sweden, Lind arranged for its equipment to be housed by a Mrs O’Leary, an enthusiastic supporter, who found the ‘upstairs front room’ of her two-up-two-down crammed ‘with large crates, sets, lighting equipment and other paraphernalia, until it spilled onto the landing’, where it remained for the next three months.58 The paths worked by Theatre Workshop’s itinerant practice were, therefore, in reality considerably more indirect and convoluted even than those represented above, which only track their performances. The routes they followed were also shaped by opportunities for cheap or free transportation that were actively exploited by members of the company, most notably Kristin Lind, who seems regularly to have deployed what Howard Goorney refers to as ‘her “helpless foreigner” act’ to avoid paying train fares, and even ‘managed to get herself adopted as a football team mascot’ in order to secure a free flight.59 In all of

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these respects, Theatre Workshop’s practice exemplifies theatrical wayfaring; it was, to borrow again from Ingold, ‘continually responsive to […] perceptual monitoring of the environment that is revealed along the way’.60 The environment revealed to Theatre Workshop in the course of its itinerant practice was not only constituted, however, of the landscapes of postwar Britain and Europe and the materials and equipment to be found within them, but of people, and of the formal contractual arrangements and informal kinships that bind them together. We have already seen that Raffles sought to secure the use of the David Lewis building both by sending letters to Theatre Workshop supporters and by travelling to and around Liverpool and elsewhere to build connections with people who could offer support. Connections were not always valuable to the company, however. Jean Newlove recalled arriving at Ormesby Hall for the first time to find the entire company hiding from the grocer’s delivery man so as to avoid being asked to settle their account.61 According to Littlewood, the tactic of divesting the company of property was also used by Raffles as a means of delaying the settlement of debts. At the start of 1948, he had persuaded Theatre Workshop’s board of directors ‘to accept ownership of our theatrical effects’, so that they could not be forced to sell them to repay their creditors.62 Company members and associates were therefore not only useful for what they could give to Theatre Workshop but what they could take from it, both literally and legally, to lighten its load. Strategies such as those developed by Theatre Workshop in this process of ‘perceptual monitoring’ of a constantly shifting environment did not, however, simply occur spontaneously to them as a result of their itinerant condition. Members of the company were equipped, in various ways, to take advantage of them. Unusually, however, as John Bury recalled, with the exception of Littlewood (who had abandoned her training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), ‘very few of the company were actors in any sense of that word; very few of them had been trained’.63 Most had experience of amateur performance of one kind or another, and some had training in dance or singing, but the skills upon which the company most depended to create its productions were developed either auto-didactically or outside the theatre. As Harry Greene recalled, Theatre Workshop’s company were people […] who’d lived … they’d travelled … Harry Corbett had been in the Navy. George Cooper had been in the army in India, and we’d all sort of … we’d lived. So guess what, we were tactically trained. We were expert […] at getting whatever was needed to survive. I’d better leave it at that, eh? [Laughter]64 Greene’s laughter plainly suggests that ‘getting whatever was needed’ commonly involved straying across the bounds of legality, and he and Karl Woods were,

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apparently, indeed arrested for attempting to steal trees from Epping Forest to use as scenery. Ironically, it is probable that much of Theatre Workshop’s tactical training in bending the law came from company members’ military service. John Bury, for example, had served in the Fleet Air Arm between 1942 and 1946,65 and recalled that, initially, his most significant value to the company was that I knew how to mend fuses and organise things, and it transpired that I could cook far more economically than anybody else. […] I […] took to the communal living because, having been in the Navy for a long time, I could make things work.66 After attending Newport Technical College, Greene also began military service at the start of the war as an engineer, and subsequently joined the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME), which was established in 1942 with the task of maintaining the army’s equipment. Inevitably in the extremely dynamic and unpredictable context of a conflict that became increasingly mobile, engineers could not carry with them all of the equipment and materials they would need to perform complex maintenance tasks. Instead, they borrowed from other units, rescued abandoned equipment, and requisitioned or salvaged what they could find on the move, sometimes improvising and designing ‘their own substitute spare parts with only basic materials’.67 In March 1945, for example, as the Allies advanced through mainland Europe, the REME established a ‘central tank repair workshop’ in an abandoned factory in Lot, near Brussels, which was capable of simultaneously working on a hundred vehicles, and employing hundreds of local people. Greene probably did not experience this directly as he had been ‘seconded to classified work on tank design’; nonetheless, repairability would have been a significant consideration in the design process.68 This approach also characterised Jean Newlove’s war-time work with women in factories and with the Women’s Land Army and Forestry Corps, which had the aim of increasing output and minimising injuries by using her training with Laban to show ‘the women how to make heavy jobs lighter for themselves’.69 We might expect the armed forces and nationalised industries to function overwhelmingly through systems characterised by command-and-control, with a high degree of formality and hierarchy, however, at a local level—and particularly in a time of conflict—they depended upon an approach characterised at least as much by improvisation and adaptation. In addition to their experience in military service, members of the company drew on a wide range of other activities in the course of their day-to-day work. Sometimes, they were directly related to their role within the company. David Scase, for example, spent the war working ‘as a BBC sound engineer’,70 and contributed those skills to the company’s creative process: ‘Sound […] can effect

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transitions in time and place, point an idea, create atmosphere. Give me two turntables and a mike and I’ll bounce the audience right out of their seats’.71 At other times, specialised skills that underpinned Theatre Workshop’s practice were less self-evident within it. Greene had ‘trained as a draughtsman’s assistant’,72 a skill he used in order to realise Littlewood’s designs, but also to conduct an informal survey of the Theatre Royal for Raffles, who was undecided as to whether or not the substantially ruined building could provide a viable home for the company: because I’d studied engineering and architecture, I was able to do a nifty sort of survey as I was going round with this agent guy. […] I was making notes—leaks in the roof, especially over the stage… […] Worn steps coming down from the dressing rooms […] the fly ropes on the side, […] most of them were worn—they were down to sort of the thickness of my finger, where they should have been the thickness of my wrist! […] the most dangerous of all was the worn lifting gear that I found on that fire curtain which […] must have weighed half a tonne. […] But you see, I was not daunted. […] I said the company could… because they’re all good at [jobs], they have initiative, all of them, they’re all good with their hands, and under my supervision we could all do the repairs and paint the place.73 Greene’s account of this process, learned by wayfaring and then deployed to secure a long-term home for the company, is a description of ‘bricolage’. The term was first formalised by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1962 book La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind), where it is defined in relation to the French verb ‘bricoler’ and the related noun ‘bricoleur’. ‘Bricoler’ refers to ‘a ball rebounding’ in a game such as billiards or, in hunting, to ‘a dog straying or a horse swerving from its direct course to avoid an obstacle’.74 The noun ‘bricoleur’ denotes ‘someone who works with his hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman’.75 Bricolage therefore describes a set of making practices that are unorthodox, spontaneous, and unpredictable. Its activities are always contingent and limited by circumstance, as Lévi-Strauss describes: [the bricoleur’s] universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.76 Lévi-Strauss’s emphasis on the bricoleur’s use of ‘whatever is at hand’ and thus on the heterogeneity of a finite and contingent assemblage of both materials and

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techniques with which she must make do resonates strongly with the techniques developed during Theatre Workshop’s wayfaring phase, just as the quixotic unpredictability of this process chimes with the requirement that the company was not only able to use its hands, but to think on its feet. Both the finite contingency and unpredictability of bricolage are also echoed by Michel de Certeau’s account of it as part of a wider set of practices whereby [u]nrecognised producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungle of functionalist rationality, consumers […] trace ‘indeterminate trajectories’ […] that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems.77 Littlewood referred implicitly to such ‘unrecognised producers’ when she argued (in the script for ‘From Kendal to Berlin’) that ‘theatre is really a synthesis of the arts and to achieve this synthesis the old conception of the technician must give way to a new one—the conception of the technician as a creative artist’.78 Such creative technicians can only be considered creative if they follow De Certeau’s ‘indeterminate trajectories’, and can only be considered technicians if they ‘use as their material the vocabularies of established languages’ and ‘remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes’.79 Theatre Workshop, as conceived of implicitly by Littlewood here, would, therefore—like De Certeau’s ‘poets of their own affairs’—‘remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires’.80 De Certeau described this process of working both within and beyond the bounds of given systems with a simile that aptly evokes Theatre Workshop’s itinerancy: ‘[t]hey circulate, come and go, overflow and drift over an improvised terrain, like the snowy waves of the sea slipping in among the rocks and defiles of an established order’.81 The distinction between the improvised circulation of bricolage and the solidity of ‘an established order’ does not merely indicate alternative, co-existing systems; it also instantiates De Certeau’s famous distinction, in his theoretical account of practices, between tactics and strategy. This distinction articulates, at its most fundamental level, a difference in power. That difference recalls Littlewood’s opposition, in analogising Theatre Workshop’s practice, between the ‘smooth Autobahn’ and the ‘perilous path twisting through barren places’ that an artist must both find and take. Littlewood’s Autobahn articulates what is, in De Certeau’s terms, a strategy: it ‘postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats can be managed’.82 In asserting their power to manage relations in this way, such strategies inevitably produce a certain kind of knowledge, which De Certeau characterises as ‘sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place’.83 By contrast, the adoption of the ‘calculated action’ of tactics presupposes, for De Certeau, ‘the absence of a proper

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locus’.84 Thus, ‘a tactic is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organized by the postulation of power’. Theatre Workshop was, by this definition, a constitutively tactical enterprise, determined by the absence of power, and calculated to turn ‘the absence of a proper locus’ to the company’s advantage. We have already seen numerous ways in which this tactical approach characterised Theatre Workshop’s management of their resources, and what De Certeau calls their ‘relations with […] exteriority’, but this approach can also be seen to have shaped the company’s internal relations.85 The arrival of Harry Greene is a case in point. He was picked up—much like the other resources they collected—on Theatre Workshop’s travels. While touring Wales in 1950, they were on the look-out for an actor to play Welsh-accented parts who could also design and construct sets, drive a lorry, and stage-manage. Greene came to Littlewood’s attention after asking the class of drama students from Tredegar Grammar School that he had taken to see Uranium 235 in Rhymney Church Hall to help the company to load their lorry. She was asking a local amateur producer if he knew of anyone who fitted their diverse expectations for a new company member and he pointed to Greene. Although there would have little hope of finding a professional actor to meet them, those expectations were characteristic of Theatre Workshop’s practice, which conceived of theatre—as Littlewood had said—as ‘a synthesis of the arts’. This had significant consequences for the company’s structure, insofar as it substantially undermined the hierarchical division of labour. Rather than the various functions of production being distributed among distinct people, within Theatre Workshop, they were shared much more informally, with one person usually having more than a single role, and roles also commonly being shared. The ‘set designer’ was therefore often more than one person, with—for example—Bury, Greene, and Littlewood all contributing to the process. Littlewood’s contributions were intrinsic to her approach to directing, and her direction was also part of the process of a play’s writing, for which MacColl—who produced the text—shared responsibility with her. As well as designing the stage, Bury and Greene were also responsible for its construction, and for stage electrics and stage management. Likewise, Raffles, MacColl, and Newlove were not only the company’s manager, playwright, and choreographer, but also actors in its productions. In other words, at a structural level, Theatre Workshop’s practice represented an attempt not just to facilitate collaboration between theatre’s constituent parts, but to synthesise them into a coherent whole. This process of synthesis did not, however, render meaningless all distinctions between the various activities of theatre-making. It did mean that they invariably became tangled up in each other, though, as did the activities and lives of the company members. Theatre Workshop is therefore perhaps best conceptualised, in a phrase which Tim Ingold uses to describe itinerant people’s conception of a place, as ‘a knot of entangled life-lines’.86 Ingold names these knots

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‘meshworks’, rather than networks, to signify that they are not grids of point-topoint connections, but tangles made by ‘the trails along which life is lived’.87 By theorising connections in this way, Ingold shows that they are not so much made between people imagined as static points, but made by people on the move in the ‘in-between’ of living: ‘Between’ articulates a divided world that is already carved at the joints. It is […] a double-headed arrow that points at once to this and that. ‘Inbetween’, by contrast, is a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming […]. It is an interstitial differentiation, […] flowing one way in a direction orthogonal to the double arrow of between but with no final destination. Between has two terminals, in-between has none. […] In the in-between, […] movement is the primary and ongoing condition. Where between is liminal, in-between is arterial; where between is intermediate, in-between is midstream.88 The generation of Theatre Workshop’s productions through an approach that was characterised by the entangling of practices in the midstream is aptly illustrated by Littlewood’s working notebooks, which capture vividly what she described as the ‘composite mind’ with which the company developed its productions. The double-page spread shown in Figure 8.3 is an example of Littlewood’s notes taken during the creation of The Other Animals (1948). This production was developed by Theatre Workshop in the period immediately

Pages from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.

FIGURE 8.3

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after the news that the David Lewis building would not be made available for their proposed theatre centre. They moved into a house, 13 Wilmslow Road, Manchester, known by the company as the Parrot House because of the wallpaper in the front room, and began developing the production in rehearsals in a nearby Jewish community centre.89 The Other Animals was based upon a script by MacColl that had been rejected by the BBC’s Third Programme.90 Tyrone Guthrie likewise reportedly had ‘no desire to see it on the stage’, and even company member Bill Davidson, who considered it ‘[a]ll very clever’, wondered ‘what does it all add up to?’91 This is far from an unreasonable response to the script, which stages the final moments of the life of a revolutionary prisoner named Hanau. While held in solitary confinement, he encounters and/or imagines or hallucinates meetings with his bourgeois gaoler, Graubard, and his fellow prisoners, with allegorical and historical figures, and with a shadow of himself, who is given his first name, Robert. Tempted to renege on his political commitment, Hanau finds resolve in a pageant of revolutionary heroes from the Paris Commune, the Spanish Civil War, and the Chartist uprisings,92 and is shot by Graubard, whereupon Robert escapes with the figure of the Morning, leaving Graubard imprisoned in the cage of his own making, to be taken by Death, whose child he has become. MacColl’s expressionist text includes both prose and verse, is often antiquated and portentous in style, and drifts in and out of metaphor and abstraction, making it often infuriatingly obscure. MacColl refers to it twice in his autobiography as ‘ambitious’, but has nothing else to say about it.93 In his biography of MacColl, Ben Harker astutely notes that it functioned, in part, to ‘heal’ MacColl’s wounded ego following his arrest in December 1946 for desertion and incarceration until his release in April 1947, which included a period of time in a military hospital.94 Whereas MacColl seems spuriously to have claimed to have epilepsy to escape imprisonment, his imprisoned hero is martyred, vindicated, and figuratively resurrected. For Theatre Workshop, however, The Other Animals functioned very differently. Following the success of Uranium 235, which was added to the company’s repertory in 1946, it offered a larger canvas for their collective creativity. One reason that MacColl’s script is frustrating to read today is that it offers only glimpses of Littlewood’s direction and set design, and of Jean Newlove’s choreography, and none of the music from Mahler’s ‘Resurrection’ Symphony that featured prominently in the production. In other words, it reveals only part of the creation of what Littlewood termed the ‘composite mind’ by which Theatre Workshop’s productions were made.95 Littlewood had reportedly referred enthusiastically to the core of that composite mind—herself, MacColl, and Newlove—as ‘the trinity’ when Newlove arrived at Ormesby Hall in 1946, an unusually theological metaphor for Littlewood, but an apt one to describe their distinct but entangled contributions.96 In spite of the fact that MacColl’s script existed before rehearsals began, the company did not regard it as complete at

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that point, and his writing cannot, therefore, be fully considered in isolation. Company member Barbara Young remembered, for example, that ‘Ewan was […] very often writing on the spot—so he could write for the people he had there and their particular abilities, and their talents, which was very unusual’.97 Just as MacColl’s scripting was imbricated with the Theatre Workshop performers’ various capacities, Littlewood’s direction was bound up with the company’s technical capabilities, as she recalled: The play took place in the hero’s mind. A bare stage wouldn’t do though; the changes of mood could be helped by the lighting. At first, the hero is physically confined, but a realistic setting would be inappropriate. I imagined a disc, suspended in space at an angle, supported by silver rods that converged towards the vertex. It should look like a pendulum, arrested in space. It would have to appear to move and the imprisoning rods to disappear. To convey the prisoner’s sense of claustrophobia, then his sense of boundless space, we settled for a distant arch, at times so small that it would be necessary to crawl through it, then so high that the stage was suffused with light […]. Camel didn’t draw but he kept my sketches and made life-size mockups, simple but adjustable […]. The design of the dresses decided on, the girls made their own, scared at first to touch the shimmering fabrics […].98 There are photographs of the production’s 1955 staging in Stratford that show that Littlewood’s image was realised with two simple platforms. One, downstage right of centre, is circular and the other is rectangular and crosses the full width of the upstage area. Both are supported by scaffolding frameworks, with a cage-like arrangement of vertical bars supported on top of the downstage disc so that they appear to go through it.99 The tilted and convergent angles that Littlewood had wanted have not been built into this design, though they were for the 1948 version, where the circular platform was raised only a matter of inches above the stage on its lower side.100 Nonetheless, it is clear that the appearance of movement that Littlewood sought was achieved by lighting the 1955 set from a range of angles. The arrangement of the stage in both productions reflects the topographical patterns shown in Littlewood’s notes: the arrows on her diagram of the stage on the right-hand page seem to represent the movement of characters travelling across the stage and swirling around the circular platform. A further striking aspect of the design is its embodiment of the contrast between ‘claustrophobia’ and ‘boundless space’ in the relationship between the circular platform, whose diameter seems to be only about two and a half metres, and the expanse of space beneath it. This reflects the relatively static and declaratory nature of MacColl’s script and the scale of both its imagery and theatricality. When Hanau asks the ‘Voice of the Prison’ ‘how long the night will last’, it answers:

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Cities pass and seas and mountains Centuries and dreams are left behind. It’s the Express History, The dark comet across the universe!101 After this, the pageant of revolutionary heroes appears to Robert in a ‘railway carriage’. They then disappear in a blackout, to be replaced—when the lights come up—by a businessman, a commercial traveller, and a ‘brave little woman’. The design offers clear opportunities for locations to shift and blend in this way, and it is revealing that Littlewood’s notes for acting classes shown in Figure 8.4 below, which are in the same notebook as her sketch in Figure 8.3, detail exercises drawn from Stanislavsky to develop the use of actors’ imaginations: a) Imagine that this class is being held not in 42, Deansgate but in a Lakeland youth hostel at 11am on a sunny summer morning after the class is over what are you going to do b) That the class is being held on a spring early evening on the banks of the Seine in Paris c) In a London night school on a November evening it is thick yellow fog outside

FIGURE 8.4 Notes for acting classes taken from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.

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Such exercises clearly served as the technical basis for generating the dream-like shifts of location in The Other Animals. Furthermore, it is clear from the sequential structure of Littlewood’s notes (Figure 8.4) that the process of building up staging and script together in rehearsal was also based in Stanislavskian technique. The numbered descriptions of action listed by Littlewood around her sketch organises the staging into a series of units, as Stanislavsky proposes actors should analyse a scene. The open space of the stage beneath the platforms also creates space for Littlewood’s initial cast of twelve fully to realise stage directions such as ‘the insane begin to dance’, which Robert describes as ‘an awakening of the dead’.102 These sequences were created by Newlove in rehearsals that were, as Robert Leach has observed, ‘quite unique’ in the comprehensiveness of the demands they placed on actors and in their emphasis on the physical.103 In pages close to Littlewood’s sketch shown in Figure 8.3 are notes on Laban’s three-fold analysis of movement as defined by ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘energy’ (Figure 8.5), and of the effort-actions that result from this analysis: ‘FLOAT INDIRECT SLOW WEAK’, and so on. The company’s fluency in movement techniques such as Laban’s effortactions was clearly fundamental to Newlove’s capacity to create choreography with a group of performers, very few of whom had any formal training in dance. It is also evident from the script that the women were, in general, the

FIGURE 8.5 Note of Laban’s effort actions taken from one of Joan Littlewood’s working notebooks, undated. Held in the Michael Barker Collection by the Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.

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more accomplished dancers. The girls in white, green, and crimson express themselves primarily through movement. Here again, however, their capacity to do so is a function of the interaction of creative processes. Their ‘shimmering’ costumes, described by Littlewood above, depend upon the interaction of Bury’s lighting, the fabric acquired by Lind, and Newlove’s choreography to create the effect of the movements notated in the light, pencil swirls of Littlewood’s sketch (Figure 8.3, lower right hand page). The relationship between Littlewood’s vision for Theatre Workshop’s productions and the company’s creative and technical capacity was evidently the source of a crucial tension in their work during this period. In 1947, Raffles wrote to Littlewood from Hamburg that ‘Bill [Davidson] was defending himself over the Stanislavsky as modified by Vakhtangov line’.104 Davidson was, in other words, advocating for an interpretation of Stanislavskian technique that would enable the company to develop a style of performance similar to Vakhtangov’s ‘fantastic realism’, which was based in Stanislavsky’s teachings, but also embraced physical and visual forms derived from symbolism and expressionism. Raffles continued: ‘Howard [Goorney] said this theatre was really Littlewood as modified by ham actors’. It is certainly true that Littlewood had, uniquely among the founders of Theatre Workshop, a vision both far-sighted and specific of the form of theatre they should be creating. In her notebook, Littlewood recorded the following aspirations, which probably date from 1945: it is reality—truth—that we are out to portray in the workers’ theatre. Therefore our whole approach must change. Our method of writing plays, of producing them, and of acting them, lighting them, stage managing them, must change. Instead of actors being flat, moving pictures dressed to look charming or dirty or ugly or interesting, they must be real, they must be flesh and blood. The stage must not be a flat, coloured picture—it must be three dimensional, solid, real, something for the workers to get hold of, to understand— both physically and mentally. There should be no artificial barriers between the audience and player. Involve the audience in the action of your play, make them feel part of it. […] The simplest experiments in production can solve this problem—flat planes can be thrust out into the auditorium along which actors can move from the audience or towards them […]. The ideal is to build a mobile and plastic stage of your own—an architectural structure which can be altered to suit each new production which you tackle. Such a stage will necessitate realism—realistic truthful acting—instead of […] exhibitionism or representationalism […]. This revolutionary approach which we must have towards the theatre involves everything in theatre. […] In understanding the politics of theatre we must never forget that the technique we use must be revolutionized as

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well as form. […] Form and content are interdependent, that is—in our case— politics and theatre. Political understanding—in our case—involves a deep study and a search for truth.105 The Other Animals represented a committed move towards many of these ideals. The stage was certainly ‘three dimensional, solid, real’ and it certainly offered ‘something […] to get hold of, to understand—both physically and mentally’, both for its performers and audiences. In it, furthermore, ‘form and content are interdependent’, as we see, for example, in the court that sentences Hanau spiralling into gibberish (‘Wilt swore to spike the ruth, the bold ruth and butting but the ruth?’) that parodies the proceedings of justice and hollows this performance of state discipline of its content.106 By contrast, Hanau’s capacity to summon his pageant of heroes clearly expresses the power of the revolutionary to impose a counter-narrative onto a hegemonic account of social relations, and the replacement of his heroes by bourgeois characters asserts the unavoidably dialectical nature of this process. The ‘mobile and plastic stage’ that is fundamental to the dramaturgical form of The Other Animals can also be seen in the arrangements of ramps, steps, and platforms that characterised the settings for both Operation Olive Branch (1947) and Richard II (1954).107 Littlewood and Greene’s sketches for the latter can be seen in Figure 8.6, creating an arena for what Nadine Holdsworth has identified as the production’s physical exploration of ‘how the actors could embody and communicate power relations, the hostility between characters and the everpresent threat of violence’.108 Its insistence on the ‘three dimensional, solid, real’ nature of the play’s concerns extended, crucially, to the deposed king’s final soliloquy in prison, a moment of apparently abstract and self-consciously poetic reflection on the regal condition. Harry Corbett’s Richard, by contrast, was chained to the floor so that, forced to circle the stage, his movement became a plastic, ‘flesh and blood’ image of the former king’s condition: I wasted time, and now doth time waste me; For now hath time made me his numbering clock: My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch, Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point, Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart, Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time Runs posting on in Bolingbroke’s proud joy, While I stand fooling here, his Jack o’ the clock.109

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FIGURE 8.6 Sketch by Harry Greene and Joan Littlewood (1953) for the setting of Richard II by William Shakespeare, dir. Joan Littlewood, Theatre Royal Stratford East, 1954.

The relentlessly, helplessly circling Richard is an image that emphasises what Littlewood called ‘[p]olitical understanding’ as did, for example, Theatre Workshop’s 1956 Macbeth, which explored ‘the consequences of a hierarchical social order that ignites a lust for power in someone lower down’.110 That production also had clear roots in The Other Animals, in that it was organised so as to have a ‘flashback structure’ with ‘frequent nightmare scenes’, which located the play’s supernatural events in Macbeth’s mind, resisting the play’s fatalism and emphasising, instead, both the individual and systemic functioning of ambition and masculinity.111 It is evident that without Littlewood’s vision Theatre Workshop could never have become the company that it was. To return to Goorney’s quip about the company, if you take ‘Littlewood’ out of the description ‘Littlewood modified by ham actors’, Theatre Workshop is no more. Nonetheless, as this analysis has demonstrated, Littlewood’s vision, like every other individual component of Theatre Workshop’s composite mind, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the company’s practice. No practice can exist without numerous

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modifications, and theatre-making particularly so because of the thoroughly social nature of it as an activity. Furthermore, it is clear that Littlewood’s vision could not have developed as it did without both the creative and technical contributions of others. She was evidently aware of this, as we can see in her manuscript draft of a ‘Report on the Acting in Theatre Workshop’, probably produced in the autumn of 1948, which is uncompromising in its assessment of the deleterious artistic consequences of a creative hierarchy: In my opinion the company is at the stage where a broadening and intensification of each individual’s artistic contribution is necessary. During the last period of work, I have, as producer, attempted to remove many of the props which I thought it necessary to use in the early stages of the theatre’s history. By this I mean the covering of individual defects by production tricks. […] With successive productions […] it has been possible to work with the actors more and more to substitute a co-operative effort between myself and the actor in the place of tactful superimposition to cover gaps in the actors’ equipment. We need a higher standard of individual imaginative contribution, a deepening artistic relationship between producer and actor. […] This plea is liable to misunderstanding. I do not mean for instance that actors or producers should arrive at rehearsal with a fully worked out representation of the character. […] No, I mean that at the study of the play and the analysis of characters we should all bring more wealth to the discussion, more imagination, real study, more theatrical ambition. […] The more the actors bring to the play, the better will be the production. But this does not operate in reverse: a production sustained only by the producer is an empty shell. No, we must stimulate each other. People say this is impossible, it is not, it happens every day in a scientific laboratory where one person’s discoveries lead to another’s and progress is impossible without communal effort. […] It is the only great way to human creativeness. A company of artists creating between them something greater and finer than the efforts of any single one of them. I am convinced that we can achieve this. In fact, at times we have already given a glimmer of it.112 Littlewood’s frank assessment of ‘the covering of individual defects by production tricks’ and her call for the company to ‘stimulate each other’ illuminate the paradox at the heart of Theatre Workshop’s practice, that its unquestionably dominant and inspirational leader sought to use her dominance—at least in part —against itself and against hierarchy more widely, and that she sought to train her actors not so much to be a docile and versatile ensemble as a ‘company’ of artists, simultaneously ‘individual’ and ‘communal’. This paradoxical striving goes some way to offering a concrete example of Littlewood’s meaning when she argued that ‘[i]n understanding the politics of

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theatre we must never forget that the technique we use must be revolutionized as well as form’.113 Her depiction of the ‘scientific laboratory’—commonly a site of deeply entrenched hierarchy—as an exemplar of ‘communal effort’ clearly indicates the political consequences of her call for ‘a broadening and intensification of each individual’s artistic contribution’.114 She does not, however, choose to articulate her agenda in political terms by, for example, justifying her ‘opinion’ by arguing that it is the political responsibility of any artist within a workers’ theatre to commit to ‘co-operative effort’. Such an approach would probably—in any case—have carried little sway in Theatre Workshop at this time; Ben Harker has justifiably argued that ‘early productions were the locations of numerous struggles […] to forge a theatrical aesthetic capable of responding to and intervening into rapidly shifting political contexts’.115 Theatre Workshop was committed to thinking politically, but by no means dogmatically. It had no ready-made answers—as this account has shown—even to the most basic questions posed by the theatre-making process, and no over-arching strategy to which it could turn to find them. Rather than trying authoritatively to delineate problems in advance of encountering them in practice, Theatre Workshop’s tactical training and creative practice were both limited by circumstance and open-ended in their outlook. The company’s practices emerged, therefore, from a process that was continually unfolding and was produced relationally, between and among the company’s members, rather than dictated from a supposedly secure, single position of knowledge. Rather than being responsible, then, to a particular creed or ideological position, the company were response-able to each other, a pun I have borrowed from Donna Haraway: Response-ability is not something you have toward some kind of demand made on you by the world or by an ethical system or by a political commitment. […] Rather, it’s the cultivation of the capacity of response in the context of living and dying in worlds for which one is for, with others. So I think of response-ability as irreducibly collective and to-bemade. In some really deep ways, that which is not yet, but may yet be. It is a kind of luring, desiring, making-with.116 Haraway’s encouragement to consider responsibility not as a demand, but an invitation to focus on each other, to open ourselves to our fundamental collectivity, and direct our shared attention to the not-yet that it contains echoes throughout this account of Theatre Workshop’s practices. Whereas both SaintDenis and Chekhov’s studios—in very different ways—unquestionably sought to develop actors who would be capable of responding to specific demands, Theatre Workshop’s itinerant phase was the ‘not yet’ that ‘may yet be’, a ‘luring, desiring, making with’ that was never fully consummated or formalised, and— though repeatedly deferred—never abandoned. Anything so fundamentally contingent cannot, of course, be meaningfully understood by being pinned down,

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and therefore any attempt to label Theatre Workshop as, for example, ‘leftist’ or ‘popular’ or even ‘radical’ will inevitably conceal as much as it reveals. That is not, however, to say that the company’s work in this period did not constitute a model of practice. Evidently, it did. The question of how that model may best be understood is the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1 H. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story (London: Methuen, 1981), 42. 2 Ibid. 3 Leach, Theatre Workshop: Joan Littlewood and the Making of Modern British Theatre (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2006, 78. 4 Notebook held in the Michael Barker Collection (hereafter MB), Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, 1/1; see also Leach, Theatre Workshop, 79. 5 Undated note: MB, 1/1. 6 Undated note: MB 1/5. 7 Ibid. 8 Undated note: MB 1/5. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Letter from Littlewood to Gerry Raffles, January 27 and 28, 1947: MB, 2/9. 12 Letter from Littlewood to Michel Saint-Denis, January 24, 1948: British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 81099. 13 J. Newlove, ‘Jean Newlove Public Lecture’, Teesside University, YouTube Video, October 13, 2014, accessed September 23, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch? v=DMyqa-TI7I4&t=3306s. 14 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 62. 15 G. Raffles, ‘Scheme for the Formation of an Experimental Theatre Workshop and Theatre School in Liverpool’, January 10, 1948: MB, 15/6, 1. 16 Ibid., 4, 2. 17 J. Littlewood, Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells It (London: Minerva, 1995), 302. 18 Raffles, ‘Scheme for the Formation of an Experimental Theatre Workshop and Theatre School in Liverpool’, 3. 19 The equivalent value in 2019, calculated using CPI inflation, is £1,190 per term, which is certainly low compared to current UK student fees (of £9,250/year), but in the post-war period only about 3 per cent of the population undertook higher education, compared to ten times that figure today. 20 F.M.G. Willson, In Just Order Move: The Progress of the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance 1946–1996 (London: The Athlone Press, 1997), 34. 21 Raffles, ‘Scheme for the Formation of an Experimental Theatre Workshop and Theatre School in Liverpool’, 3. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 ‘From Kendal to Berlin: The Diary of Theatre Workshop’, written by Joan Littlewood and produced by Normal Swallow, typescript for transmission on North of England Home Service, August 5, 1947, 14. I am grateful to Nadine Holdsworth for sharing this document with me. 27 Raffles, ‘Scheme for the Formation of an Experimental Theatre Workshop and Theatre School in Liverpool’, 4.

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Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 302. Ibid., 302. Ibid., 186. J. Belchem, Before the Windrush: Race Relations in Twentieth Century Liverpool (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 79. J. Hampshire, Citizenship and Belonging: Immigration and the Politics of Demographic Governance in Postwar Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 10. C. Waters, ‘Dark Strangers in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies 36 (1997). See R. Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 2. Raffles, ‘Scheme for the Formation of an Experimental Theatre Workshop and Theatre School in Liverpool’, 5. Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 302. K. Harris, Interview with Anthony Field, March 14, 2007, British Library Theatre Archive Project, accessed March 19, 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/ TRANSCRIPTS/024T-C1142X000160-0100A0.pdf. Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 311. Newlove, ‘Jean Newlove Public Lecture’. ‘Shelagh Delaney’s Salford’, Monitor, no. 56, BBC, September 25, 1960, accessed March 19, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXmMsOBrx9g. Littlewood, ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 4. T. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 75. Ibid., 78. Ibid., 76. Littlewood, ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 1–2. Ibid., 3a. In 1947, Littlewood remained in England while the company toured Germany to support MacColl, who had been arrested for wartime desertion. Her letters to Raffles during this period are addressed to him via the B.A.O.R. (British Army of the Rhine). B. Harker, Class Act: The Cultural and Political Life of Ewan MacColl (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 88. Letter from Littlewood to Gerry Raffles, post-marked March 20, 1947: MB, 2/9. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 76. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 67. R. Eyre, Talking Theatre: Interviews with Theatre People (London: Nick Hern Books, 2009), 254. K. Harris, Interview with Harry Greene, September 20, 2007, British Library Theatre Archive Project, accessed March 19, 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/related-con tent/TRANSCRIPTS/024T-C1142X000182-0100A0.pdf. K. Harris, Interview with Jean Gaffin, April 25, 2007, British Library Theatre Archive Project, accessed March 19, 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/related-content/TRAN SCRIPTS/024T-C1142X000172-0100A0.pdf. R. Lumsden, Interview with Barbara Young, December 4, 2007, British Library Theatre Archive Project, accessed March 20, 2020, https://sounds.bl.uk/related-con tent/TRANSCRIPTS/024T-C1142X000198-0100A0.pdf. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 1. Littlewood, ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 4. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 68. Ibid., 67. Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 76. Newlove, ‘Public Lecture’. Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 311.

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63 Eyre, Talking Theatre, 254. 64 Harris, Interview with Harry Greene. 65 S. Lyall, ‘John Bury, Set Designer Who Changed the Look of British Theater, Dies at 75’, New York Times, November 17, 2000. 66 Eyre, Talking Theatre, 254. 67 R. Richter, Historical Notes 4: Ivan Hirst, British Officer and Manager of Volkswagen’s Postwar Recovery (Wolfsburg: Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, 2003), 25. 68 ‘Harry Greene: Obituary’, The Daily Telegraph, March 13, 2013. 69 Newlove, ‘Public Lecture’. 70 P. Webster and D. Cockayne, ‘David Scase: Making Radical Theatre Accessible in the Regions’, The Guardian, March 11, 2003. 71 Littlewood, ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 6. 72 ‘Harry Greene: Obituary’. 73 Harris, Interview with Harry Greene. 74 C. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1966), 16–17. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 17. 77 M. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S. Rendall (London: University of California Press, 1988), 34. 78 Littlewood, ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 6. 79 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 34. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid., 36. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 37. 85 Ibid., 36. 86 Ingold, Lines: A Brief History, 98. 87 Ibid., 80, 81 (emphasis original). 88 T. Ingold, The Life of Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 147. 89 Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, 65–6; Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 315; Harker, Class Act, 85. 90 Harker, Class Act, 86. 91 Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 313–14. 92 H. Goorney and E. MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 180. 93 E.MacColl, Journeyman: An Autobiography, ed. P. Seeger (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 249, 261. 94 Harker, Class Act, 72, 82, 87. 95 Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 321. 96 Newlove, ‘Public Lecture’. 97 Lumsden, Interview with Barbara Young. 98 Littlewood, Joan’s Book, 321–2. 99 Because of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the final stages of this book’s preparation, I was unfortunately unable to clear one of these photographs for use. One is reproduced, however, on the cover of The Art of the Theatre Workshop, ed. M. Melvin (London: Oberon, 2006). 100 See Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, plate no. 15. 101 Goorney and MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, 180. 102 Ibid., 174; for cast list, see 132. 103 Leach, Theatre Workshop, 124. 104 Letter from Raffles to Joan Littlewood, Hamburg, Saturday 10.30pm [February 1, 1947?]: MB, 2/9.

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105 Undated note: MB 1/5; the reason for dating this material in 1945 is that the notebook records that Littlewood is in 77 Oxford Street, Manchester, where she was at that time, and it contains versions of what would become Theatre Workshop’s Manifesto (produced that year). 106 Goorney and MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, 170. 107 See Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story, plate 14 for a photograph of the setting for Operation Olive Branch. 108 N. Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 90. 109 Shakespeare, W. Richard II, V, v. 110 Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre, 112. 111 Ibid., 111. 112 ‘Report on the Acting in Theatre Workshop’, undated manuscript: MB, 1/3. 113 Undated note: MB 1/5. 114 ‘Report on the Acting in Theatre Workshop’, undated manuscript: MB, 1/3. 115 B. Harker, ‘Missing Dates: Theatre Workshop in History’, History Workshop Journal 66 (Autumn 2008): 276. 116 D. Haraway and M. Kenney ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene. Donna Haraway in conversation with Martha Kenney’, in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. H. Davies and E. Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 231.

9 MODELS OF PRACTICE IN THEATRE WORKSHOP

The counterhegemonic project of Theatre Workshop Having introduced Theatre Workshop in the typescript for the radio documentary ‘From Kendal to Berlin’ with the company’s evocatively fictionalised departure from a German theatre, followed by their arrival ‘home’ to ‘a dressing room with cracked mirrors and poor lighting’, Littlewood scripted an interjection for herself: [fade with lorry] JOAN:

But the constant travelling from place to place isn’t the whole story. Ideas and dreams are far more important features of our itinerary. For the journey into theatre is the journey from one idea to the next and the distance is the distance between the dream and its fulfilment.1

This thorough commitment to pursuing its ‘ideas and dreams’ marked Theatre Workshop out as uniquely experimental in its time, although Littlewood mistrusted ‘that word’: Maybe we should drop that word, ‘experimental’—the fact is that much of the theatrecraft that passes for experiment is anything from fifty to five hundred years old. Here in Britain, at any rate, they’re often a cover for cheap labour and half worked-out theories. Others drop any form of experiment at the first hint of west-end success.2 These objections are not to the concept of experiment, but to what Littlewood saw as the word’s misuse at the hands of people (probably including SaintDenis) who sought merely to distinguish themselves from the techniques and

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values of the traditional theatre without struggling to revolutionise their technique, the forms of their theatre, or its relationships with its audiences. Insofar as it was simply shorthand for the non-traditional or alternative, then, Littlewood had no time for the ‘experimental theatre’, and yet no term better encapsulates the vision to which Theatre Workshop was committed, of a ‘journey from one idea to the next’, from a ‘dream to its fulfilment’. We saw in the previous chapter that the fulfilments of dreams that Littlewood describes here as way-stations in the company’s journey were, in reality, often less significant in themselves than they were as part of the company’s movement along the paths of its explorations, or in other words, of its continuing to dream. The Other Animals, for example, was not particularly significant to the company’s development as an achievement in its own right. It received mixed reviews in 1948, and its revival in 1955 was a failure. However, as a process of exploration that generated various ideas and techniques that articulated the company’s dreams, proposed ways in which they might be fulfilled, and would be repurposed in their subsequent work, it was unquestionably significant. If experimentation is an uncertain journey to a dreamed-up destination, then Theatre Workshop was, by definition, experimental, but this process was further complicated by the fact that it functioned as a collective, and—as such—did not seek a single, coherent articulation either of its dreams or the manner of their fulfilment, both of which were inevitably sometimes misaligned and unevenly distributed among the company. This chapter seeks, therefore, to derive a theoretical account of Theatre Workshop’s collective ideas and dreams, and of the strategies it deployed to realise them. Crucially, Theatre Workshop was not dedicated to the fulfilment of artistic dreams for their own sake. This is clear from a section of the ‘From Kendal to Berlin’ script that closely resembled the opening of Theatre Workshop’s manifesto. It commits the company to a form of popular theatrical radicalism which it situates historically by citing Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Molière as a triangulation of references: All the great theatres of the past have been experimental theatres and what is more they have been popular, too. The theatre of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Molière were violently experimental. They were also theatres which faced up to contemporary problems. If our theatre is to play a real role in society, then it must do the same.3 Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Molière are revealing reference-points as they bring together the author of Europe’s earliest preserved plays with the house dramatist of the Comédie Française—Europe’s leading national theatre—and with the ‘chief of all Poets’, as Thomas Carlyle described Shakespeare. Carlyle was, of course, the principal theorist of bourgeois liberalism, the intellectual tradition that had given rise, in the theatre, to the increasingly vocal campaign for a national theatre to rival that of Paris, exemplified by Matthew Arnold’s 1879

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essay ‘The French Play in London’, and William Archer and Harley Granville Barker’s Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre (1908, revised 1930). These texts loudly proclaimed not only the case for a British national theatre centred on the figure of Shakespeare, but the values of the liberal, educated middle class, as opposed to what Arnold called the ‘riff-raff’ to be found in popular theatres.4 Barker likewise sought to elevate the theatre to ‘something more than casual entertainment, […] an art worthy to rank with other fine arts’, in other words, an art for the middle classes, whose expansion and rising prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had encouraged them increasingly to distinguish themselves culturally from the proletariat. Theatre Workshop was fundamentally opposed to this movement, as the attempt to reclaim Shakespeare, Molière, and Aeschylus for its ‘violently experimental’ vision demonstrated. This was a deliberate attempt to regain control of the political trajectory of British theatre history and direct it back towards the culture of the working classes from which it had been diverted by bourgeois reformers, and to recapture the stage for the working people. It was therefore always a counterhegemonic project, responding, whether or not the company were explicitly aware of the fact, to the takeover of the stage by bourgeois liberals in the nineteenth century. It is notable, however, that Theatre Workshop was less overtly antagonistic than its forerunners in the Workers’ Theatre Movement. Whereas ‘The Red Megaphones’, formed by MacColl and others in 1931, explicitly styled themselves ‘A Propertyless Theatre for the Propertyless Class’, Theatre Workshop chose more politically neutral terms for its manifesto, which described ‘an organisation of artists, technicians and actors who are experimenting in stage-craft’.5 Theatre Workshop’s political strategy was not directly to confront bourgeois culture, but to plot a course orthogonal to that of the middle-class theatre, cutting across its operations and values, and borrowing, adapting, and repurposing its materials and techniques for alternative ends. For these reasons, Shakespeare was not out of bounds for Theatre Workshop, but rather a figure whose preeminence within the bourgeois theatre could be turned to their advantage if they could reclaim him by re-appropriating his work, re-describing its roots, and taking it in new directions in relation to contemporary society. Reviews for both Richard II (1955) and Macbeth (1956), as Nadine Holdsworth has shown, questioned the extent to which Theatre Workshop could be said to have produced ‘the play[s] that Shakespeare wrote’.6 The emphasis on ‘stage-craft’ in Theatre Workshop’s manifesto, and the decision to interpose ‘technicians’ between ‘artists’ and ‘actors’ set themselves similarly against the values of the bourgeois theatre without announcing the fact. Bourgeois advocates for the theatre as an art form worthy of inclusion in the sphere of culture had, by contrast to Theatre Workshop, consistently chosen to emphasise drama’s proximity to the literary and fine arts, whose study and practice they sought to distance as entirely as possible from anything—like ‘stage-craft’ or ‘technicians’—that was associated with labour. Indeed, the development of liberal, bourgeois education

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in the nineteenth century was predicated upon exactly such a separation of learning from economically productive activity.7 This point is central to David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s analysis of the demarcation of culture in the nineteenth century as a sphere of activity in its own right, defined by a set of institutions that were—they argue—designed to transform the individual of civil society into a subject of the state.8 Lloyd and Thomas show that ‘the structures of the Church provide the model for the institution of national education’ that was central to this project, and Loren Kruger has shown that Arnold, Archer, and Granville Barker used the same strategy in advocating for a national theatre.9 The arguments of these theatrical reformers drew analogies between, for example, the proposed national theatre and St Paul’s Cathedral as a way of ‘associating the as yet vaguely illegitimate power of the theatre with the fully legitimate power of the Church’, Kruger writes, which ‘allows them to discuss the “important influence” theatre can have on the “national life and manners”’.10 Archer and Barker also used the analogy of a cathedral explicitly to assert the position of theatre as ‘something more than casual entertainment as an art worthy to rank with other fine arts, as having its spiritual function also’.11 Lloyd and Thomas likewise note ‘the desires of middle-class reformers to produce a “general elevation of character” […] by regulating the spaces of recreation’.12 In so doing, they argue, these reformers did not have in mind so much the supposed working-class beneficiaries of their largesse as ‘a middle class that needed the reassurance of seeing the upper strata of the working class as becoming “respectable”’; the ‘cultivation’ offered by the study of art was evidently imagined by the middle class as a means of achieving ‘order, contentment and prosperity’ among a proletariat it was feared could all too easily become disorderly.13 Tony Fisher has likewise argued that the long historical project of modern government to ‘discipline […] objects and practices immanent to forms of common life’ was made manifest in the imposition of ‘regimes of great austerity’ in order ‘to convince the “productive” part of the population that only a life dedicated to authentic frugality was a life worthy of salvation’.14 Fisher’s analysis focuses on the impacts of this project for the theatre, which it sought to divide along artificially rigid class lines, first by imposing a distinction between theatre and music hall. Subsequently, given that it would have been impossible in practice to banish the working class from theatres altogether, theatre buildings were carefully segregated along class lines.15 This increased segregation was most keenly felt in the abolition of the ‘pit’ at the centre of the theatre, and its replacement with the ‘high-priced seating’ we know today as ‘the stalls’.16 This was first achieved in Bancroft’s theatre on London’s Haymarket, where—as the Morning Post’s correspondent observed—‘you look in vain for the “people” as distinguished from the more refined classes. […] the pit, that place where beats the heart of the house […] has been altogether banished’.17

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The hegemonic project mapped in educational contexts by Lloyd and Thomas, and by Fisher in relation to the stage, is revealing in relation to aspects of Theatre Workshop’s practice whose claim to political engagement may otherwise seem indistinct. Littlewood’s assertion of the significance of experiments in production whereby, for example, ‘flat planes can be thrust out into the auditorium along which actors can move from the audience or towards them or speak to them’ evidently manifests a desire among the company to return the pit to the theatre, and engage as directly as possible with the working-class spectators it housed, whom Littlewood positioned as the contemporary equivalents of ‘the working people’ of early modern London who ‘paid their pennies and crammed themselves into the pit […] “the stinkards” as they were called’, and ‘created that theatre as much as Shakespeare and his mob’.18 The lack of a coherently structured hierarchy within Theatre Workshop is another example. Although it clearly altered the political relations that shaped the company’s practice as it was experienced on the inside, its wider political significance is less immediately clear. The wider political context of both of these seemingly minor aspects of Theatre Workshop’s practice is, however, illuminated by a longer historical perspective on, and by a Gramscian critique of the political function of culture. Lloyd and Thomas’s analysis, for example, is rooted in ‘Gramsci’s conception that the institutions of civil society that are usually conceived of as private are actually part of a general conception of the state’, which is shaped by what he calls its ‘educative and formative role’.19 This form of government is termed by Gramsci the ‘ethical state’—as opposed to what he calls the ‘night-watchman state’, which is closer to Foucault’s ‘disciplinary society’, a system of direct, coercive control. It functions not by outright domination, but—as I argued of Chekhov’s practice in Chapter 6 above—by mobilising minimally active consent. Lloyd and Thomas supplement Gramsci’s conception of this mode of functioning with the observation that the very possibility of the “ethical state” and its institutions requires the replication of the same forms across different institutions […]. Their formal consistency guarantees that even where these institutions come into antagonism, they do so within the same fundamental paradigms.20 This emphasis on the significance of the formal constitution of the institutions of the state echoes a common anarchist critique of the trade union movement’s shift, in the late-nineteenth century, towards representation as its core purpose. John Quail’s analysis of the development of the Shop Assistants’ Union under John Turner, for example, demonstrates the ways in which its increased membership and the creation of formalised, bureaucratic structures and paid officials to manage them meant that the union was no longer controlled by working people, but managed on their behalf by officials who inevitably began to function as ‘a bureaucratic interference with local militancy and initiative’.21 Lloyd

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and Thomas’s argument allows us to see that this accommodation of union officials to the interests of capital typifies the capacity of ‘formal consistency’ to foster paradigmatic alignment between institutions. In order to represent their members’ interests to capital and its representatives, union officials must be able to manage their membership by, for example, preventing unofficial industrial action. The negotiation of pay and conditions therefore inevitably becomes a means whereby management may indirectly control the workforce, thereby creating a potential alignment of the interests of union leadership with those of capital. The gradual emergence of Gerry Raffles as Theatre Workshop’s manager—particularly once he became the lessee and then owner of the Theatre Royal in Stratford East— is another example of this phenomenon. Initially, Theatre Workshop had no basis upon which it could create the kinds of artistic and financial plans that were expected by the Drama and Finance Committees of the Arts Council because its model of practice was so responsive and unstable. Equally, it had no management structure by which it could reassure potential supporters that such plans would be delivered. Even as early as 1948, however, Raffles was taking responsibility for this problem. He argued, for example, against working on MacColl’s The Other Animals, not only because of the personal antagonism between the two men, but because it made extreme demands both on the company’s resources and on the willingness of its audiences to be challenged.22 On this occasion, his view did not prevail, but by 1955, when his position had become formalised, Raffles’s role to represent the interests of Theatre Workshop to the institutions of government required him equally to represent the interests of those institutions to Theatre Workshop. It is therefore clear that, in spite of its ultimate unsustainability as a strategy, Theatre Workshop’s resistance to organising itself with formal, hierarchical structures functioned politically, for a time, as a refusal to be co-opted by the institutions of bourgeois hegemony. This emergence of a managerial function within Theatre Workshop was not, however, a question of imposing hierarchy, but of shifting from an associative to a representative structure. As Lloyd and Thomas show, representation became structurally hegemonic ‘with the gradual emergence of representative democracies’ in the nineteenth century, through the arrangement of various forms of assembly at that time, such as ‘the classroom, the parliament, the political rally, the recreationary “event”’.23 In all of these examples, representation is characterised by a ‘formal relation’ between participants that echoes the ‘relation of spectators to the stage’.24 Although it never addresses theatre directly, Lloyd and Thomas’s account is ghosted by the bourgeois realist stage, whose practice of representing generalised types as both exemplary figures and as though they were real and distinct individuals can be mapped onto the conception of the state developed by theorists such as Matthew Arnold, who argued in his 1879 essay ‘Democracy’ that, as ‘the representative acting-power of the nation’, the state should represent ‘its best self’ to the individuals that constitute the nation.25

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True to the precepts of liberal theory, this account associates rights and freedoms with the individual while assigning power to the state, which acts supposedly in their interests. In this context, Littlewood’s advocacy for a stage that would require what she called ‘realistic truthful acting—instead of the exhibitionism or representationalism which are the chief features of the bourgeois actor’—can be seen as an embryonically counterhegemonic project,26 challenging the primacy of representation as a structural principle for political thought and action. As she put it: ‘[e]very element in the designing of a bourgeois theatre takes you further away from reality. And it is reality—truth—that we are out to portray in the workers’ theatre’. In this context, what Littlewood calls ‘representationalism’ simply inserts ‘artificial barriers between the audience and player’, which Theatre Workshop sought to remove: Involve the audience in the action of your play, make them feel part of it. How could you possibly produce a dynamic play inside the confines of a proscenium arch and how can a play possibly be dynamic without the participation of the audience.27 The political calculation is simple and stark in its aesthetic consequences: representation—regardless of its stated political intent—is structurally committed to the disenfranchisement of the working class and the sustaining of the symbolic power of the bourgeoisie. It can therefore contribute nothing to the cause of a workers’ theatre. Theatre Workshop’s resistance to the hegemonic position of representation as a basis for politics indicate a wider model of practice engaged by the company, which can be broadly understood as the attempted revival of a working-class radicalism that had been quiescent for a century, since the failure of Chartism to secure its aims of enabling members of the working class to sit in parliament, and to establish education not only of but by and for the working class. Although these objectives did not constitute an attempt to break with representative democracy, in their advocacy of working-class self-education, the Chartists were fundamentally opposed to the bourgeois liberalism of thinkers such as Arnold and John Stuart Mill that underpinned it. Mill argued that, in order to become educated, members of the working class must be taught to reach beyond what he characterised as the ‘small circle’ of their experiences and interests and become ‘consciously a member of a great community’.28 This idea is directly at odds with radical working-class thinkers, such as the anonymous ‘Senex’ (Old Man), who argued for the fundamentally situated nature of knowledge and therefore the unavoidably political nature of its development: [a]ll useful knowledge consists in the acquirement of ideas concerning our condition in life; […]. The position of a man in society, with its obligations and interests, forces ideas upon him which all the theory of

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education would not have impressed upon him as long as he was not called upon practically to make use of them.29 As Lloyd and Thomas observe, ‘what is finally at stake’ in both Mill and Arnold’s arguments is ‘the necessity to produce abstract citizens for a state which is, as idea, everywhere yet nowhere’, and their advocacy for the fundamentally generalised nature of knowledge serves to foreclose the possibility of radical action, which depends upon ‘the linking of local and particular practices into a mobile and decentred mass movement’.30 This theoretical articulation of the political necessity for radical working-class projects to fuse together local and particular situations in mobile and decentred movements demonstrates that the analysis of Theatre Workshop’s practice developed in Chapter 8 should be considered not merely as an exploration of the particular historical and material contexts of the company’s emergence. Seen in this longer historical view, Theatre Workshop’s practice can be seen to be not only contingent and tactical, but aligned with more sustained forms of counterhegemonic strategy. The company was consistently committed to the genre of fictionalised documentary, for example, as we can see from Johnny Noble’s account of travelling labourers and their later practice (at Stratford East) of commissioning local, London writers such as Henry Chapman (You Won’t Always Be On Top, 1957), Frank Norman (Fings Aint What They Used T’Be, 1959), and Stephen Lewis (Sparrers Can’t Sing, 1960). The company thereby aimed to reflect its working-class audiences’ experiences and, more generally, to use theatre as a means for the exploration of social and historical conditions. This exploration was undertaken through overtly physical and material productions that resisted the contemporary theatre’s widespread tendency towards abstraction and universalism, and thus rejected the notion of a universal human condition as advanced by liberal theory. Furthermore, the company’s concerted efforts to sustain their mobility and to foster links with politically engaged artists in continental Europe both served to resist their absorption into the institutions of bourgeois hegemony in the UK, and to set their horizons beyond the nationstate that had always been a vehicle for the project of liberal hegemony. In short, the model of practice developed by Theatre Workshop was, historically speaking, committedly counterhegemonic. This chapter explores the counterhegemonic model of practice developed by Theatre Workshop in order to address the question: in what ways were the company’s practices counterhegemonic and what kinds of theoretical account may be derived from them? It addresses this question by analysing the company’s practices with reference to two theories of radical politics. The first, anarchosyndicalism, would have been known to members of the company through their activity in and around communist and socialist circles during the 1930s. Essentially a theoretical model for libertarian communism, it came closest to actual implementation during the Spanish counter-revolution following Franco’s coup

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in July 1936. In spite of its defeat in Spain, however, anarcho-syndicalism remains a significant theoretical model for the operation of communism or socialism without the necessity for imposing state control. The second model deployed here, feminist standpoint theory, emerged in academic circles during the 1970s as a project, in Patricia Hill Collins and Chela Sandoval’s phrase, of ‘oppositional consciousness’ with feminist, Marxist, and anti-racist roots.31 Defined by Sandra Harding as a form of ‘feminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowledge and practices and power’, standpoint theory was a forerunner of intersectional theory and similarly sought ‘to create a different kind of decentered subject of knowledge and of history than was envisioned either by Enlightenment or Marxian accounts’.32 Grounded both in materialism and in the materiality of living, seeking the construction of equality without authoritarian means, and envisaging the production of knowledge from radically decentred positions, these two theoretical formulations plainly resonate with the practices explored in Chapter 8 above and will form the basis of understanding what they can teach us today.

Direct action: anarcho-syndicalism and the making of Uranium 235 This ideological account of the close alignment between theoretical articulations of radical working-class resistance to bourgeois hegemony in the nineteenth century and the practices developed by Theatre Workshop in the twentieth offers a necessary but not sufficient account of the emergence of the company’s work. In order to go further, it will be crucial to remember that, in the words of the anarchist Rudolf Rocker, [i]deas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life, and are never purely the result of abstract ideas.33 Rocker wrote this in his 1938 book Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, which was, itself, ‘the intellectual precipitate’ of the outbreak, in 1936, of civil war in Spain after Nationalist rebels under Franco staged a coup against the elected government of the Second Republic. This led to a counter-revolution in which the putatively anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (National Confederation of Labour, known as the CNT) had a crucial function among the growing ‘Bando republicano’, an alliance of republicans, communists, anarchists, and members of the International Brigade of volunteers. The CNT’s experience of direct action meant that they were prepared to requisition arms in advance of the coup, and then call a general strike and take over factories and farms in order to mount a counter-revolution.34 Media coverage of the Spanish

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conflict and the involvement of the International Brigade generated interest in the various ideological positions of those engaged in the hostilities, and the publisher Fredric Warburg sought to commission a short book on anarchism as a result. This suggestion was put to the leading anarchist writer Emma Goldman, who passed the request on to Rocker. His account of anarcho-syndicalism—a combination of ‘the political philosophy and goals of anarchism with the economic organisation and methods of syndicalism’, as the Solidarity Federation define it—was the result.35 The anarchist commitment to ‘a free association of all economic forces based upon co-operative labour’,36 was fused, in Rocker’s text, with the syndicalist conception of a trade union (or syndicate) as both ‘the fighting organisation of the workers against the employers’ and the school for the intellectual training of the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general, so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remaking it according to Socialist principles.37 In this, the anarcho-syndicalist conception of a union can be mapped onto the studio tradition’s conception of a theatre, and particularly Theatre Workshop’s iteration of it, founded on free association and co-operative work, and dedicated both to the training of its members and experimental production that would serve their interests. In spite of the roots of his thinking being predominantly in continental European and Russian anarchism, Rocker’s commitment to the principles of working-class self-education and self-government closely parallels that of nineteenthcentury radicals such as ‘Senex’, quoted above. The difference in his historical position, however, means that the state is not, in Rocker’s account, an emergent phenomenon but an institutional edifice capable of violent suppression: [The state is] [t]he organ of political power of privileged castes and classes for the forcible subjugation and oppression of the long possessing classes. This task is the political life work of the state, the essential reason for its existing at all. And to this task it has always remained faithful, must remain faithful, for it cannot escape its skin.38 For these reasons, Rocker advocated the ‘theory and practice’ of anarchosyndicalism as a means of resisting the working class’s ‘gradual assimilation to the modes of thought of capitalist society’, and thus its ‘integration into the state and the management of capitalism’, which he saw as the ‘insidious poison’ of participation in parliamentary politics. Rocker’s proposed solution was a system built on ‘free combination from below, upward’, rooted in horizontal forms of organisation by association rather than the hierarchical structures of delegation

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and/or representation. There was, in short, a close relationship between the project of Theatre Workshop and this contemporary political philosophy. There was also a direct connection at the level of action. The modus operandi of the anarcho-syndicalists, direct action, was theorised by Emile Pouget (vice-secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail in France) as ‘a constant rebellion against the existing state of affairs’ in which ‘the working class […] creates its own conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its means of action. […] eliminating the employer and thereby achieving sovereignty in the workshop’.39 In its counterhegemonic intent, and in its commitment ‘to create our own resources’ and ‘to substitute a co-operative effort between [the director] and the actor’ for directorial control, Theatre Workshop’s practice can be considered a comprehensive (though certainly in practice compromised) attempt to use theatre-making as a form of direct action.40 We can trace this process through the development of Theatre Workshop’s first undisputed success, Uranium 235 (1946). While Theatre Workshop was touring its first production, Johnny Noble, alongside three short plays—Chekhov’s The Proposal, MacColl’s version of Moliere’s The Flying Doctor, and Federico Garcia Lorca’s The Love of Don Perlimplin for Belisa in His Garden—the Smyth Report into the development of the atomic bomb by the United States government from 1940 until 1945 was published.41 MacColl recalled that it made for ‘horrifying and fascinating reading’, and his interest was noted by other members of the company, who suggested he should use it as the basis of a play.42 Initially reluctant, MacColl agreed and produced a script that, unlike Johnny Noble, encompassed ‘a whole variety of styles’: ‘the clash of different idioms was a vitally important feature of the over-all style’ that was required by ‘the complex world of politics and atomic physics’.43 The initial sixty-five minute version was quickly almost doubled in length in order to circumvent the technical difficulties of rigging its very particular lighting as one half of a double-bill. This version continued to be updated as the play toured, hence the play’s structure, based on what Littlewood described as ‘eleven episodes each covering a different period or aspect of the problem and each cast in a different theatrical form’.44 These episodes are frequently connected by the metatheatrical device of dropping a role and speaking directly either to the audience or the other actors as actors as in these two examples: ACTOR:

(Taking off mask and addressing the audience) At this stage, we could, on this stage, show you the many detailed stages through which the science of physics passed before it reached the present interesting stage. But time and space, or to be more precise, space time does not permit.45

The actress who has been playing the role of the mother suddenly abandons the role and becomes an actress again, talking to her workmates.46

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Sometimes, this technique is also used as a means of critical engagement with the play’s subject and its presentation: 1st Actor: 1st Actress: 1st Actor: 3rd Actress: 1st Actor: 2nd Actor: 1st Actor:

2nd Actress: 1st Actor:

God! What a lot of codswallop! Why? What’s wrong? The whole bloody scene’s wrong. I thought it was quite effective. Oh, come on! It’s an absolute travesty of the truth. What are we trying to show? We’re helping to perpetuate a myth. That isn’t our job. Can you imagine the rulers of the ancient world wafting around like a bunch of flat-footed Isadoras, spouting bad poetry? You got a better idea? We could try using some common sense. Athens wasn’t the paradise the Victorians cracked it up to be. It was a powerful military state, founded on slave labour.47

This exchange segues into a vignette of a market in which the 2nd Actor apparently improvises the patter of a slave-trader selling the 3rd Actress, which segues again into a conversation between two businessmen about the profitability of imminent war and another between the Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus (considered the first exponent of atomic science) and a youth. One of the businessmen challenges Democritus because he interprets the philosopher’s explanation to the youth that ‘everything is made’ from atoms as a treasonous form of egalitarianism, which the philosopher defends (somewhat anachronistically), although in the limited sense that everything is physically constituted of the same stuff: If you choose to interpret an abstract philosophical idea in social terms, then the fault is not mine. I am not responsible for the way nature organises her resources and neither threats nor arguments can alter the fact that life is constituted in a particular way.48 This altercation, which leads to the trampling to death of Democritus under the feet of a crowd whipped into a combination of indignant anger and imperial fervour by a priest, sets a pattern for part one of the play, in which a visionary scientist (the next is Giordano Bruno) is dispatched by people who ‘understand no language but the language of violence’.49 In part two, however, this pattern shifts, and the scientists (including Pierre and Marie Curie, Joseph Thomson, and Einstein, Planck, and Bohr) are auditioned by the sinister figure of the Puppet Master for an apocalyptic performance that ‘will draw your heart out of your body and turn your eyes to scalding pools of salt’.50 The Puppet Master announces that ‘my name is Legion. I am sometimes known as James

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Pierrepoint Rockerfeller Thyssen Zaharoff Vanderbilt Power’, in other words: part demon, part hangman, part American and German industrialist, part armsdealer, part ‘robber baron’, part Hollywood star. The Puppet Master also asserts that ‘[m]y friends call me Order, my enemies, Chaos’,51 and goes on to order chaos, lining up five scientists to produce ‘a blinding flash and a loud sustained explosion followed by a blackout’ near the play’s end.52 The consequences of this explosion are embodied by a woman who enters lamenting: I had a son, A song in my veins, A green shoot in my heart, A flight of grace notes, That was my son.53 She is followed by a soldier who can only smell ‘burning flesh’ and hear ‘screaming’, and two ‘concentration camp inmates’.54 The Puppet Master encourages them to blame the scientist, whose ‘brain conceives the tools of death’, and the scientist returns the accusation to ‘the puppet-master who shapes the play/Of death’.55 Ultimately, then, the audience is left with a binary choice: Energy:

Puppet Master: Scientist: Energy:

All:

I will go where you go. If you work for war I will work with you. If you work for peace I will work too. There are two roads. My road is the familiar one. You can walk it blindfold. Come with me. Mine is the new road, where a man walks with his eyes on the future. The road out of the night. There are two roads. It is for you to choose and for me to follow. The crowd hesitates. Which is it to be? Which way are you going? [The End].56

Subsequently—having lost his faith in Eisenhower’s famous notion of ‘atoms for peace’,57 and having witnessed a series of nuclear accidents from ‘[t]he blow-out at Windscale in 1957’ to the ‘two thousand incidents investigated [in America] in 1979’58— MacColl wrote a further revision to this ending. In this version, the Scientist and Puppet Master become increasingly aligned with each other and opposed to the figure of the Woman, who takes a position that we would read today as a critique not only of war, or of scientism and technocracy, but of a climate crisis that is endemic to the Anthropocene:

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Even while we’re talking, the reactors go on breeding more and more plutonium […] plutonium has a half-life of twenty-four thousand years and it takes about ten half-lives for radioactive material to become harmless. That means plutonium has to be kept out of the environment for a quarter of a million to half a million years. If at any time during that period it is released into the environment, land and water are poisoned forever. Forever! Forever! Who are the real vandals? The football gangs who tear up railway carriages or the glib engineering geniuses and men of science who are prepared to tear up the planet we live on?59 As this sketch of its development shows, the literally on-the-hoof creation of Uranium 235, and its constant revision, as well as its attempt directly to engage its audiences, are fundamental to its dramaturgy. It makes no effort definitively to represent the development of nuclear weapons and power, but uses theatricality as a means to open these histories and their attendant political problems to scrutiny. It proceeds, therefore, by a process of trial and error, in which action precedes—and indeed gives rise to—consciousness. This process echoes the development of anarcho-syndicalism as theorised by Pierre Besnard, then secretary of the International Workers Association, who described it as ‘a movement of trial and error’: Just like every social movement and all the sciences. In sociology as in physics or chemistry or mechanics, the idea springs from the act and returns to it. The fact always predates the idea and conjures up the doctrine, the philosophy from which the realization is to sprout.60 The form in which such realisations emerge in Uranium 235, through the reflections of the performers whose role is to represent ideas from which they commonly then distance themselves, functions dramaturgically to reject not only representationalism, but what Rocker terms ‘centralism’, ‘that artificial organization from above downward which turns over the affairs of everybody in a lump to a small minority’, and to promote a kind of dramaturgical federalism, a ‘free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions’.61 There are clear relations between the utopian form of direct action that characterised the dramaturgy of Uranium 235 and the itinerant working practices of Theatre Workshop analysed in Chapter 8. Rocker writes of ‘the cultural significance of the labour struggle’, ‘[t]he practical experiences and occurrences of the everyday struggles of the workers find an intellectual precipitate in their organizations, deepen their understanding and broaden their intellectual outlook’. The collaborative development and ongoing revision of Uranium 235 both in reality

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and in the somewhat idealised form in which it is presented in the play enact just such a process. Rocker also proposes that this process offers a basis for solidarity: ‘[a] feeling of mutual helpfulness, whose strength is constantly being renewed in the daily struggle for the necessities of life’.62 The collapse of Theatre Workshop’s dispositif in 1955, described in Chapter 7, demonstrates, however, the obvious point that solidarity is not reliably produced by ‘everyday struggles’. Particularly significant in this instance was the antagonism between the practices of Theatre Workshop and the wider norms of theatre production, which meant that, in Rocker’s terms, the company’s ‘common convictions’ became increasingly opposed to its members’ material interests, which were better served by their departure to the entrepreneurial freedom of individual careers. In this sense, the failure of Theatre Workshop’s experiment in a form of anarcho-syndicalist theatre production prefigured the wider failure of anarchosyndicalism to resist the circumvention of its organisational strategies by neoliberal capitalism. By shifting to post-Fordist models of labour which emphasised entrepreneurial self-reliance and out-sourced modes of production which facilitated widespread divestment, capital succeeded in decentralising itself and federalising its operation. Simultaneously, by rapidly expanding both personal credit and property ownership, it split off large numbers of working-class people from what had been the material interests of the proletariat. Thus, a wedge was driven between the political commitment of anarchism and the organisational strategy of syndicalism. Likewise, the widespread appropriation of the aesthetic strategies of Theatre Workshop by the commercial theatre split those formal solutions from their political commitments, reducing them to mere innovations, and even committing them, as we have seen most starkly in relation to Bury’s design for The Wars of the Roses, to the values of the bourgeois theatre they were designed to oppose.

Developing theatrical standpoints: Johnny Noble and A Taste of Honey In spite of the slow defeat of anarchism as a viable political project during the mid-twentieth century, its purpose of achieving, in Rocker’s words, the ‘liberation of man [sic] from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression’ using direct action was taken up widely by decolonial and antiracist, feminist, and gay liberation movements. Like Rocker’s anarchosyndicalism, all of these movements were ‘the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life’. All of them also adopted, in one form or another, the principle that, in the words of Nancy Hartsock, ‘there are some perspectives on society from which […] the real relations of humans with each other […] are not visible’,63 and therefore that, as Sandra Harding argues, ‘some social situations are scientifically better than others as places from which to start off knowledge projects’, specifically the social

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situations of the oppressed.64 This is the fundamental claim that underpins a broad range of liberatory projects driven by marginalised people that grew in prominence in the post-war period and asserted—either implicitly or explicitly— the superiority of the margin as a space for fostering radical action, in the words of bell hooks: ‘a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives’.65 This commitment to the margin is clearly visible in, for example, Paul Gilroy’s analysis of the ways in which the culture of what he famously termed ‘the black Atlantic’ was ‘forged out of the experience of racial subordination’, so that ‘what was initially felt to be a curse […] is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain critical and useful perceptions about the modern world become more likely’.66 Gilroy explicitly credits Harding and Hartsock’s ‘standpoint epistemology’ as a formative context for his work, which he develops along similar lines to its two stages. The first stage in the development of a standpoint is, in Hartsock’s feminist version, its ‘articulation […] based on women’s relational self-definition and activity’, which ‘exposes the world men have constructed and the self-understanding which manifests these relations as partial and perverse’.67 However, a standpoint is not synonymous with the articulation of a social location; standpoints are grounded in situated knowledge but they are not reducible to it, or the systemic nature of their analysis would ultimately collapse into individualist relativism. The second stage in the development of a standpoint, in Hartsock’s words, is ‘an achievement of both analysis and political struggle occurring in a particular historical space’ that seeks for ‘common threads which connect […] diverse experiences’ and ‘structural determinants of the experiences’.68 A standpoint, therefore, is forged both in alignment with the social construction of particular knowledges and in opposition to the functions of oppressive systems. Both of these phases of standpoint epistemology are necessary for its full development. Political analysis and struggle may articulate the perspectives of oppressed people, but standpoints are not simply perspectives that can be abstracted from reality. Standpoint is a materialist epistemology, and a standpoint cannot therefore be fully understood when it is abstracted by analysis. The critical phase of developing a standpoint does not, therefore, sublimate the earlier phase of articulating a social position. Rather, the two phases must be sustained in dialogue for a standpoint to be developed. By tracing the theatrical development of standpoints in Theatre Workshop’s practice, I propose to provide a case study in support of this claim. The use of the stage as a site for the development of standpoints can be seen as a model for the earliest work of Theatre Workshop, particularly where the company’s creative practice was most widely engaged, in the development of new works from scratch. The first of these was Johnny Noble, a simple tale of a sailor from ‘any seaport town’ who must constantly move in order to find work, leaving the woman he loves and challenging her willingness to trust that

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he will return.69 As in The Other Animals, the script was developed by MacColl, but on the basis of documentary material such as the company’s conversations with working people in the North between the wars and folk songs collected by MacColl. The theatrical form developed for Theatre Workshop’s production likewise blended the concrete particularities of detailed, realistic acting with a transcendent perspective offered by folk-tale narration (both spoken and sung) that framed the story not only as socially particular, but having universal significance: 1st Narrator (Singing): 2nd Narrator (Speaking): 1st Narrator (Singing): 2nd Narrator (Speaking): 1st Narrator (Singing):

Here is a stage— A platform twenty-five feet by fifteen. A microcosm of the world. Here the sun is an amber flood and the moon a thousand-watt spot. Here shall be space, Here we shall act time.70

This bare stage, on which lighting and movement enabled locations and events to appear and vanish almost instantaneously, drew specific attention to the skill and labour of the company and to the specific social conditions of touring theatre. Furthermore, the close relationship between the Theatre Workshop’s touring route and the journey undertaken by Johnny in search of work were designed to emphasise what Theatre Workshop saw as the class position they shared with their audiences: this was avowedly, as MacColl tells us a contemporary critic wrote, a ‘working-class dance drama’ by and for the working classes.71 The production withdrew, however, from developing a thorough political analysis of the working-class position it embodied or attempting to foment a struggle against class oppression. It chose instead to emphasise the capacity of Johnny and Mary’s love and faith to overcome the barriers placed in their way by unemployment and wider social inequalities, which—like the illusions of location produced on the production’s bare stage— simply vanished. Johnny Noble therefore exemplified the first phase of standpoint development—the articulation of a social position—but not the second: it fell short of critical analysis. Theatre Workshop continued to develop productions committed both in subject matter and form to the articulation of the company’s working-class standpoint through the 1950s, notably with the work of the playwrights Brendan Behan, Henry Chapman, Shelagh Delaney, and Frank Norman. These playwrights were valued, by Littlewood specifically, for the authenticity of their language and their detailed articulations of working-class experiences, as well as for the somewhat incomplete quality of their scripts, which enabled rehearsals to proceed as ‘a voyage of exploration for both director and actors, and sometimes even for the playwright’.72 The endpoint of these explorations was always— according to the Theatre Workshop actors interviewed by Tom Milne and

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Clive Goodwin in 1960—exactly the right ‘style’, which inevitably defied convention in one way or another.73 They offered the example of Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), which began with ‘a more or less naturalistic sequence’ in which the central character, Jo, and her mother, Helen, arrive in their new digs. When Jo exits to make coffee, Helen continues talking to her, and then ‘turns her head, quite casually, and suddenly she is talking to the audience’.74 This combination of naturalism and direct address to the audience was, of course, not unprecedented—it is used in Uncle Vanya, for instance, which Theatre Workshop had produced in 1953. It was, however, extended in A Taste of Honey by Littlewood’s decision to have Helen (Avis Bunnage) perform songs from the music hall and to allow this to influence her performance so that—in Kenneth Tynan’s description—she would regularly ‘address herself directly to the audience, music-hall fashion’.75 Littlewood made a further musical intervention, including jazz, which was played live on stage. According to her notes, this was predominantly the jazz of the 1920s (which, like the music hall, was associated with Helen), but the choice of genre also enabled Littlewood to connect mother and daughter, as it gestured towards bop, a dominant musical influence on Jo’s generation, which, unlike the jazz of the ’20s, was explicitly Black music, and Jo’s boyfriend is Black. Hence, Littlewood staged the Boy’s entrance into Jo’s flat to jazz—‘They move towards each other as if dancing to the music’—before the music stopped and the action switched to a naturalistic mode: ‘Jo: Oh! It’s you! Come in. Just when I’m feeling and looking a mess’. Littlewood also used jazz to indicate the passing of time as the pregnant Jo and her closeted homosexual friend Geof establish a home together in Act Two, Scene One: ‘Waking, Geof dances and goes off with bedclothes. Jo dances off. Geof dances in with props for the next scene, which in reality would be a month or two later’.76 In Theatre Workshop’s production, jazz functioned, therefore, to underscore the structural similarity between Jo and Helen that underpins even their most extreme differences: HELEN:

JO: HELEN: JO: HELEN:

You stupid little devil! What sort of a wife do you think you’d make? You’re useless. It takes you all your time to look after yourself. I suppose you think you’re in love. Anybody can fall in love, do you know that? But what do you know about the rest of it? Ask yourself. You know where that ring should be? In the ashcan with everything else. Oh! I could kill her, I could really. You don’t half knock me about. I hope you suffer for it. I’ve done my share of suffering if I never do any more. Oh Jo, you’re only a kid. Why don’t you learn from my mistakes? It takes half your life to learn from your own.77

It is revealing that, in editing this passage from Delaney’s typescript, Littlewood kept most of the hostility but cut an uncharacteristically poetic reflection

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from Helen in which she described herself as ‘like a deaf woman standing alone in the middle of a silent universe waiting for a reply to questions for which there are no replies’.78 Littlewood seems to have decided that, like her subsequent observation in the typescript that ‘[m]arriage at your age is a death—it kills something—but it never does the favour of killing you’, Helen’s reflection on her isolation was too heavy-handed an intervention from an authorial voice.79 However, Helen’s plea to Jo to ‘learn from my mistakes’ remained, and with it a brief articulation of the continuous subtext that the hostility between mother and daughter contains the seeds of solidarity, a point reinforced by Littlewood’s re-written ending in which Helen leaves Jo alone but also says that she is coming back. The use of music both to connect and separate the warring yet co-dependent mother and daughter focused the portrayal of social relations in A Taste of Honey. Delaney’s play rejects simplistic, hegemonic narratives about workingclass experiences in favour of a complex exploration of solidarities and differences between the various differently marginalised people whose lives form the focal points of its depiction of society. The Boy, for example, is Black, though not—as the other characters assume—from Africa but from Cardiff.80 Referred to in the script as ‘Boy’, despite being named ‘Jimmie’, this character is a victim of racism in other respects too. Helen, who Jo assures Jimmie is not ‘prejudiced against colour’, reacts with shock to the news that her grandchild will be Black, for example: You mean to say that … that sailor was a black man? … Oh my God! Nothing else can happen to me now. Can you see me wheeling a pram with a … Oh my God. I’ll have to have a drink.81 Nonetheless, it is striking that Littlewood cut much of the explicitly racist language used about Jimmie from Delaney’s typescript, and the role is not shaped primarily by his race. Jimmie’s departure from the narrative, for example, is a consequence of his work as a male nurse in the navy and takes place before he and Jo realise that she is pregnant, so although he is evidently profoundly shaped by his social position, he is not stereotypically presented as an absconding Black father. Similarly, Geof seems to have been made homeless as a consequence of his closeted homosexuality, but his relationship with Jo and her unborn child far exceeds that of her stereotypically repressed gay friend. Again, although he is clearly substantially defined by his oppression, he also exceeds such definition. The same is true of Helen and Jo, who conclude the play in very much the same position they began, Jo’s pregnancy—about which she seems largely ambivalent—notwithstanding. All of these characters, therefore, can be seen to be either rendered static or forcibly displaced by the various forms of structural oppression they face. Those oppressions do not, however, reduce our understanding of their position to stereotypes, but rather illuminate the complexities

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and contradictions of social life in just the ways that standpoint proposes. Nor does oppression succeed in eliminating the characters’ capacity for resistance. Rather, as hooks proposes, it offers, particularly in Jo’s relationships with Jimmie and Geof, a radical perspective from which to imagine alternatives. This perspective was evidently strengthened by the stylistic interventions of Theatre Workshop’s production, which steadfastly refused to descend into miserabilism. Indeed, Tynan characterised the play, in spite of the subject matter, as a ‘broad comedy’ that resolved itself in the second half into a ‘comic and heroic’ mode.82 Although this reading risks vanishing the production’s detailed and realistic portrayal of poverty and social exclusion, it does capture the extent to which its juxtaposition with theatrical and musical forms that were excluded from the bourgeois theatre created a production that both rejected middle-class assumptions about poverty and was crucially marked by contradiction. Rather than a simple ‘broad comedy’ (a notably class-marked term), Theatre Workshop offered a fundamentally conflicted account of the vulnerability of working-class people to structural oppressions and the capacity of working-class culture to resist victimhood. Thus, A Taste of Honey represented a model of practice that combined the two phases of standpoint development in relation to the social position of both its characters and its author: staging both an account of their lived experience and a critical analysis of their social positions, including—but not limited to—the bases for solidarity that this presents. The social subjects so constructed by Theatre Workshop’s production were—like the ‘subject/agent of feminist knowledge’ proposed by Sandra Harding—‘multiple, heterogeneous and contradictory or incoherent’.83 Jimmie’s position of race and class oppression is offset by the privileges that obtain to men under patriarchy; Geof’s position within the dominant group as a white man is threatened by his inability fully to conform to its expectations of masculinity; Helen’s dependence upon Peter for money is also her (limited) escape from poverty, and the racism that gathers around the figure of Jimmie serves as a reminder that both Helen and Jo benefit from whiteness in a way that the Black nurse who will look after Jo in hospital does not. Theatre Workshop’s production of this deeply antagonistic story of social margins and their misfits was evidently also unifying in the comic heroism that Tynan described it embodying. The politics it presented were likewise conflicted, enabling difference and contradiction to be seen simultaneously as the roots of discord and the causes of solidarity. ****** The theoretical models derived from Theatre Workshop’s practice in this chapter are significant for a number of reasons. To begin with, they trouble the view that the company’s practice grew progressively in importance towards Oh What a Lovely War, the assumed pinnacle of its achievement, before tailing off. Rather than accepting this tacit hierarchy of Theatre Workshop’s productions, I have proposed that we consider the company’s work as a continuous process

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of development in relation to the ‘ideas and dreams’ Littlewood identified as fundamental to its project: a horizon of possibility whose proximity was continually shifting in relation to their practice, and indeed moving in and out of focus. Furthermore, this analysis challenges the notion that the horizon of possibility the company envisaged for its work and the productions it created are commensurable. To compare the two is to assume that the company’s ‘ideas and dreams’ were fundamentally aesthetic in nature. By contrast, this analysis of the theoretical models that can be deduced from Theatre Workshop’s practice proposes that their horizon of possibility was always more broadly cultural than that. That is to say that the company sought—by intervening in the ways in which theatre was made, the audiences it engaged, and the politics of its representational strategies—to challenge and unsettle hegemony and generate the possibility of new cultural formations. As this analysis of A Taste of Honey demonstrates, by engaging representational strategies devised during the company’s period of itinerancy in its collaboration with a novice, working-class female writer, Theatre Workshop used theatre as a means of standpoint development, and anticipated counterhegemonic and liberatory political movements that would not widely emerge in Europe until a decade later, when the failed revolutions of 1968 galvanised struggles for feminist, anti-racist, and gay liberation, and brought them into dialogue with the politics of class struggle. As I write, this dialogue remains unresolved for the contemporary Left, which has yet successfully to unite class and identity politics to form a convincing counterhegemonic movement. Instead, what Stuart Hall called the ‘neoliberal revolution’ successfully reshaped social relations to conform to an individualistic, entrepreneurial model.84 This accounts, to some extent, for the reverse engineering by theatremakers, publishers, and scholars of, for example, ‘Joan Littlewood’ the Great Director, and—more widely—to the relative inattention paid by scholarship in theatre studies to the operation of collectivities. Here I have sought to rebalance such accounts by insisting on the fundamental significance of the collective and the structure of its relations, not only to the work of Theatre Workshop at the most practical, daily level, but to the theoretical models of practice which that work can be seen to have generated. In the final chapter of this book, I synthesise this book’s findings about the models of practice developed by studios before jumping ahead half a century to a project that set out to be likewise fundamentally collective and counterhegemonic, and ask the question: what is the legacy of the studio movement for theatre-makers today?

Notes 1 ‘From Kendal to Berlin: The Diary of Theatre Workshop’, written by Joan Littlewood and produced by Normal Swallow, typescript for transmission on North of England Home Service, August 5, 1947, 3. 2 Ibid., 1. 3 Ibid., 5.

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4 M. Arnold, ‘The French Play in London’, in The Nineteenth Century, August 30, 1879, 239. 5 H. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story (London: Methuen, 1981), 42. 6 N. Holdsworth, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 82; see also E. Schafer, Ms-Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare (London: The Women’s Press, 1998), 11. 7 D. Lloyd and P. Thomas, Culture and the State (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998), 84. 8 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 67. 9 Ibid., 68. 10 L. Kruger, ‘“Our National House”: The Ideology of the National Theatre of Great Britain’, Theatre Journal 39, no. 1, Theatrical Perception: Decay of the Aura (March 1987): 43. 11 Harley Granville-Barker, The National Theatre (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1930), 1–2. 12 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 90. 13 Ibid., 111. 14 T. Fisher, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 1500–1900: Democracy, Disorder and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 240. 15 Fisher, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 250. 16 Ibid. 17 The Morning Post, February 2, 1880; quoted in Fisher, Theatre and Governance in Britain, 250. 18 Undated notes: MB, 1/5. 19 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 21. 20 Ibid., 21. 21 J. Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists (London: Flamingo, 1978), 247. 22 J. Littlewood, Joan’s Book: Joan Littlewood’s Peculiar History as She Tells It (London: Minerva, 1995), 317. 23 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 57. 24 Ibid., 57. 25 Ibid., 119. 26 Undated notes: MB, 1/5. 27 Ibid. 28 From ‘Considerations of Representative Government’, quoted in Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 124. 29 Lloyd and Thomas, Culture and the State, 83. 30 Ibid., 125. 31 See P.H. Collins, ‘The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14:4 (1989): 745–73 and C. Sandoval, ‘U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Differential Oppositional Consciousness’ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding (London: Routledge, 2004), 195–209. 32 S. Harding, ‘Introduction: Standpoint Theory as a Site of Political, Philosophic, and Scientific Debate’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding, 1, 8. 33 R. Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004), 19. 34 See the Solidarity Federation, Fighting for Ourselves: Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Class Struggle (London: Freedom Press, 2012), 55–63. 35 Ibid., 63. 36 Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, 1. 37 Ibid., 57. 38 Ibid., 15. 39 Solidarity Federation, Fighting for Ourselves, 48.

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40 Undated note, MB 1/5 and ‘Report on the Acting in Theatre Workshop’, undated manuscript: MB, 1/3. 41 H.D. Smyth, Atomic Energy for Military Purposes: The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government, 1940–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945). 42 H. Goorney and E. MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop: Political Playscripts, 1930–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), lii–liii. 43 Ibid., liv. 44 ‘From Kendal to Berlin’, 12. 45 Ibid., 99. 46 Ibid., 126. 47 Ibid., 83–4. 48 Ibid., 86. 49 Ibid., 93. 50 Ibid., 100 51 Ibid., 101. 52 Ibid., 121. 53 Ibid., 122. 54 Ibid., 123–4. 55 Ibid., 124–5. 56 Ibid., 126. 57 This phrase came from a speech given by President Eisenhower to the United Nations on December 8, 1953. 58 Goorney and MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, 127. 59 Ibid., 129. 60 P. Besnard, ‘Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism’ (1937) accessed on December 21, 2019, reproduced at https://libcom.org/library/anarchosyndicalism-anarchism-pierrebesnard. 61 Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, 60. 62 Ibid., 79. 63 N.C.M. Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding, 36–7. 64 S. Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is “Strong Objectivity”?’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding, 131. 65 b. hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding, 157. 66 P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), 111. 67 N. Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’ in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. S. Harding, 48. 68 Ibid., 48. 69 Goorney and MacColl, Agit-Prop to Theatre Workshop, 37. 70 Ibid., 36. 71 Ibid., liv. 72 T. Milne and C. Goodwin, ‘Working with Joan’, in Theatre at Work: Playwrights and Productions in the Modern British Theatre, ed. C. Marowitz and S. Trussler (London: Methuen, 1967), 115. 73 Ibid., 120. 74 Ibid., 114. 75 K. Tynan, ‘Review: A Taste of Honey’, The Observer, June 1, 1958.

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76 S. Delaney, G. Leeming and E. Aston, eds, A Taste of Honey, Methuen Drama Online, 54, accessed March 20, 2020, www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/a-taste-ofhoney-iid-160897. 77 Ibid., 41. 78 S. Delaney, ‘Typescript of A Taste of Honey with manuscript additions by Joan Littlewood (1958)’: British Library, Add. MS 89164/8/75, 25. 79 Ibid. 80 Delaney, A Taste of Honey, 25. 81 Ibid., 23. 82 Tynan, ‘Review: A Taste of Honey’. 83 S. Harding, ‘Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is “Strong Objectivity”?’, 134. 84 See S. Hall, ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’, in S. Hall, Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays, ed. S. Davison, David Featherstone, Michael Rustin and Bill Schwartz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 317–35.

CONCLUSION Why do theatre studios matter?

Each of the sections of this book has reached a number of conclusions about the work of the studios which are their subject. I have focused, in particular, on the elaboration of theoretical models from their practices in the third chapter of each section, and I will not repeat those conclusions here. Instead, this final chapter draws selectively on these earlier findings in order to consider the broader question of why theatre studios and their history matter; specifically: why they matter for the history of mid-twentieth-century theatre, and for our understanding of ensemble theatre-making, and of the politics of artistic practices more widely. Having explored these perspectives, I turn to the question of why the history of the studio movement matters for theatre-making in the present day. I have been able to consider this question in depth thanks to an invitation to work with the Secret Theatre ensemble company at the Lyric, Hammersmith, between 2013 and 2015 as an embedded researcher. The final section of this conclusion therefore comprises an analysis of this company’s work and its significance for the contemporary theatre in the historical frame provided by this book.

Lessons from the past To begin with an obvious but significant point, this book has shown that studios were a product of their time, a relatively brief period principally characterised— in English theatre history—by the gradual transition from the leadership of the actor-managers of the Edwardian stage to that of the director-bureaucrats and commercial producers of the 1960s. The halfway point of this gradual shift was Gielgud’s 1937–8 season at the Queen’s Theatre. Led by an actor-manager who chose to displace himself somewhat by hiring prominent directors and selecting

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plays that increasingly emphasised the strength of his company, it served as a forerunner of the National Theatre Company (NT), which would emerge under Laurence Olivier a quarter of a century later, both by creating an ensemble and by choosing a repertory that combined commercial appeal and perceived cultural value. Gielgud’s most experimental choice was Saint-Denis’ 1938 production of Three Sisters, and, in many ways, this production exemplified the wider function of the studio movement within the historical shift in the theatre establishment of which it was the mid-point.1 In short, Saint-Denis’ production featured virtuosic, ensemble acting and was avowedly artistic and experimental, and this is what studios offered the emergent theatre establishment of their day. The emergence of the subsidised theatre of the 1960s was a story of the confluence of three models of theatre-making. The first was expressed by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts’ wartime policy of ‘the best for the most’, and exemplified in the theatre by the Old Vic’s provision of canonical plays to a wide audience at affordable prices (both in terms of the cost of tickets and the level of subsidy required). The second model was that of the commercial theatre, represented in this study by Bronson Albery’s partnership with Michel Saint-Denis to form LTS Productions, and his son Donald Albery’s relationship with Theatre Workshop. Finally came the model of the studio. As I have shown, studios were responsible not only for the artistic development of central figures within the new, subsidised theatre, but for providing a model for building and sustaining a company that would be sufficiently experimental to balance the expectations of tradition with those of contemporaneity, and thereby justify sustained subsidy on the grounds that innovation requires investment. The mutual accommodation of these three models that generated the new subsidised theatre inevitably involved compromises, and we have seen repeatedly that the studio tradition was stripped of its radicalism in the process—both in the sense that its politics were commonly diluted and that it was forced to abandon its roots in ongoing training. Studios did, however, provide training for the new theatre sector by generating models of practice that would shape the curricula of drama schools, whose number, size, and scope all increased exponentially in the post-war period. Without theatre studios, then, the subsidised theatre and the forms of training upon which it depends simply would not exist as they are known today. This book has also indicated—necessarily in less detail—that a parallel story may told of the post-war theatre and film industries in North America, and of the acting studios that both fed into and were parasitic upon their success. I observed in the introduction that the studio movement represented an alternative form of modernity, developed both as a consequence of and as a backlash against industrialisation and mass production. The examples explored here have added detail to this picture, showing that the studio tradition was a product not only of modernity but of its ruins. These included country estates such as Dartington and Ormesby Hall, whose economic basis had collapsed thanks to the

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migration of working-age people to cities and the death-toll of the 1914–18 war, leaving them part-ruined and available for reinvention by their owners and appropriation by artists seeking spaces in which to work. Industrialisation had also produced venues for studios to tour, such as clubs, town and village halls, and theatres for both amateur and professional use, all with their attendant social networks. The great majority of those mentioned in Howard Goorney’s chronology of Theatre Workshop’s tours had been built in the nineteenth century to cater for expanding populations in industrial towns and cities, and many were evidently in a state of disrepair by the time they were visited by the company.2 Their disrepair was not, however, simply a problem for studios to overcome. As in the case of the war-damaged Old Vic theatre building in which the Old Vic Theatre Centre (OVC) opened, dilapidated venues represented an opportunity to studios that could not have competed financially with commercial managements and would have therefore found it much harder to gain access to such spaces in pristine condition. Ruins would have been useless to these studios, however, had sources of funding not also been available, as Gerry Raffles discovered when he attempted to establish a Theatre Workshop studio in the David Lewis building in Liverpool. All of the studios explored in this book were dependent not only on income from their box office and/or student fees, but on additional financial support either from liberally minded members of the aristocracy or upper middle class, or from the state, or both. Both the London Theatre Studio (LTS) and Chekhov Theatre Studio (CTS) required substantial patronage to establish themselves, for example, and Theatre Workshop required constant support both in cash and kind from friends of the company. Reliance on patronage proved, however, to be unsustainable for all of these studios in anything but the short term. Most payments from patrons were given as one-offs, so they could not contribute to running costs except in an emergency, and even where patronage was sustained it was not indefinite. The CTS had to commit itself to becoming self-sustaining after a period of guaranteed income from the Dartington Hall Trust had been used to establish its permanent company, for example. Patronage also proved difficult for artistic and political reasons. At the CTS, it reinforced a hierarchy that centred the enterprise on Chekhov, structurally constraining the democratic participation of studio members in its decisions. More explicitly, Theatre Workshop’s politics were always set on a collision course with those of the liberal, aristocratic Pennymans who owned Ormesby Hall, and the difference in taste and values between the Old Vic governors and OVC directors inevitably placed limits on the support upon which the OVC could rely. Perhaps unsurprisingly—since it was established by members of the uppermiddle class to produce the culture they valued—the terms of Arts Council support did not differ substantially from those of patronage in this respect. The one substantial distinction was that Arts Council funding was conceived as a regular subsidy, but this did not mean that it was guaranteed; the general financial

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uncertainty caused by post-war austerity was keenly felt in the arts, which had no senior representation in government until Jennie Lee was appointed Minister for the Arts by Harold Wilson in 1964. Furthermore, even when state subsidy was reliable, it was not free from tacit or explicit conditions. The requirement to achieve public subsidy enmeshed the OVC, for example, in an establishment whose values it was forced to incorporate, compromising the model of practice it had set out to establish. Furthermore, the OVC’s treatment by the Arts Council, and even more so that of Theatre Workshop—whose work was likewise widely, albeit differently, praised—demonstrates that public funders were not much less liable to be swayed by their own tastes and political persuasions than were private funders. In short, the experimental and at least putatively radical nature of the studio project—which sought to question and frequently to resist conventional tastes and practices—invariably led to tensions with the agendas and practices of funders that were ultimately always impossible to reconcile. Commercial practices proved no less damaging to all of these studios, committing them to short-term horizons that crucially limited their sustained development. One should be careful, however not to slip from this critique into romanticising poverty. The form of bricolage developed by Theatre Workshop as a consequence of its limited means proved unsustainable in the long term and meant, in practice, that the company moved between and combined all of these sources of income, thereby encountering—as we see from their inclusion in all of the examples above—all of their various problems. These problems that were attendant upon studios’ various sources of income were all problems, ultimately, of power, which brings us to a further reason for this history’s significance. The story of theatre studios brings sharply into focus the politics of practice: the power relations manifested by processes of theatremaking, rather than only those embodied by the productions so made. From the point of view of power relations, the case studies explored in this book have moved gradually across a spectrum from the frankly hierarchical organisation of both the LTS and OVC to the more distributed, collective structuring of power in Theatre Workshop. Connecting these extreme examples is the CTS, where I have shown that authority was commonly deferred to the technique that governed its collective approach to theatre-making, albeit a technique that was firmly in the control of the studio’s director. Students at the LTS and OVC were taught technique, but never in such a way as to challenge the authority of those who taught them. Indeed, at the OVC, in particular, technical classes were led by junior teachers, with Saint-Denis and Devine focusing much more on subjects such as interpretation and production, and functioning more like directors than what are known today as actor-trainers. Joan Plowright’s recollection of being briskly told that she had ‘got it’ before being asked if she could ‘do it again’ and dismissed by a slap on the bum is revealing in relation to the OVC’s attitude to technique: if you could do it, you didn’t really need to understand it, and all the more so if you were a woman.3 The CTS was certainly different

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from the OVC in this respect. Chekhov was deeply committed to teaching technique at all levels, and to exploring its complexities at great length with his students, among whom the leading figures were women. Metaphorically speaking, however, the slap on the bum was still present: authority remained with Chekhov until he could no longer exercise it, at which point the studio became untenable as an organisation.4 Theatre Workshop’s power relations were chaotic, by comparison to other studios, as was its development of technique. Rather than a thoroughly theorised approach underpinning all of its collective work, it developed an assemblage of technical means that were never comprehensively considered in relation to each other, but tried and tested against the challenges that arose in the course of the company’s work. Many, but not all, of these means were developed by Joan Littlewood, and she was certainly capable of being personally authoritarian— numerous actors have testified to her capacity to harangue performances from them. Crucially, however—during what I have argued was the studio phase of Theatre Workshop’s existence at least—Littlewood exercised her authority in the context of a structure that emphasised collective responsibility and decisionmaking. She also did so as a woman in a company dominated by men. Therefore, her authority did not express itself as a slap on the bum but as a series of challenges and provocations to her collaborators to go further—not to ‘do it again’ but either to do it better or to do something entirely different. Littlewood thus sought, to a certain extent, to use her authority not in the interests of sustaining hierarchy, but of promoting greater horizontality, an endeavour that was, however, at best paradoxical and at worst fundamentally conflicted, since few could match the strength of her will. It was, nonetheless, significant that, as a working-class woman, Littlewood exercised her power against the grain of social relations rather than with it. This is not to dismiss the forcefulness of Littlewood’s personality, but to insist that we must not fall prey to the assumption (frequently to be seen in accounts of her work) that a forceful personality signifies the will and capacity to dominate or control. As a fundamentally collective, social process, theatre-making necessarily establishes organisational structures and social relations, and these are certainly shaped, in part, by the will of those involved, but these relations are nonetheless established within an existing social field of possible relations, and these did not favour Littlewood as they did Chekhov, Devine, and Saint-Denis. Consideration of the relations that emerge in the process of a studio’s work brings us to the question of what this history has to tell us about ensemble theatre-making more widely. We saw in the introduction that claims for the ensemble have frequently been made on the basis that a given company is dedicated to exploring the process of theatre-making over a sustained period. Such companies are often considered—by virtue of this process of sustained collective engagement—to be ‘greater than the sum of their parts’.5 The examples explored in this book underline the extent to which such a commitment to

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process and to sustained, collective practice commonly fail to add up to a liberatory vision of democratic participation. Indeed, frequently the ensemble’s claim to transcend the sum of its parts can be seen to function politically as a means of reasserting hierarchical power relations within it. The transcendent status of the project of the OVC over and above its constituent parts, of Chekhov’s technique over and above the CTS membership, and of the project of Theatre Workshop beyond what was, in effect, its dissolution as a group all served structurally to reinforce the power of these studios’ self-designated leaders. We might, therefore, wish to reconsider the received wisdom that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and ask whether the opposite may be the case: that ensembles may, in fact, be less than the sum of their parts. The philosopher Timothy Morton has coined the term ‘subscendence’ for this idea. ‘Wholes’, writes Morton, ‘subscend their parts, which means that parts are not just mechanical components of wholes, and that there can be genuine surprise and novelty in the world, that a different future is always possible’.6 Morton is careful to qualify this opposition to a theistic holism that values those beings deemed transcendent over and above those they transcend by advocating equally against the kind of ‘anti-holist’ reductionism that claims, in the infamous claim of neoliberal capitalists, that ‘there is no such thing as society’ because individuals outnumber the societies of which they are a part. Out-numbering something, as Morton observes, does not mean being more important than it, and he therefore proposes ‘a special, weak holism’ that recognises that wholes are ontologically less than their parts, but not therefore necessarily either more or less valuable.7 If we consider that an ensemble is ontologically less than the sum of its parts, a number of features of the history of studios emerge more clearly. First, it is clear from this analysis that investment in its parts at the expense of the whole commonly causes an ensemble to break apart, like a cell dividing, as did the LTS—into a drama school and a series of loosely related commercial ventures—and the OVC—into a school, a touring young people’s theatre, and a series of productions with the Old Vic Theatre Company. Second, it becomes clear that there is a necessary ontological tension between what the ensemble as a whole can contain and the potential of its parts, which must be sustained for the ensemble to function effectively. In this sense, the ensemble resembles a balloon full of water.8 It depends, ontologically, upon the relationship between the possibilities it contains and the material from which it is constructed. If it contains too many possibilities or its structure is too rigid, it will burst, which was certainly part of the structural problem of the CTS, where ultimately the studio’s commitment to its leader’s model of practice would prove unacceptably constraining to many of its members. Likewise, if an ensemble contains too few possibilities or its material is too flexible or leaky, it will sag, which was certainly the case for the CTS as its membership began to leak away, and for Theatre Workshop as it became forced regularly to recruit new members. This history of studios therefore extends our understanding of the

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nature of ensemble, which it reveals to be a stretchy, relational being, dependent both on flexibility and constraint, as it seeks to encompass and harness possibilities that will always exceed it. This book has attempted to theorise the social relations that constitute the relational being of a studio—that generate and are generated by its artistic practices—in a number of ways that could not be accused of being schematic but, taken as a whole, may seem less than theoretically coherent, and will therefore merit some further consideration here. I began by using the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism as a source of theoretical perspectives to support the elaboration of models of practice from the work of theatre studios. There are, as I observed in the Introduction, both historical and philosophical reasons for this choice, in that the studio tradition can be seen to have been both responsive to and closely allied with the work of philosophers within the pragmatist tradition, and in particular John Dewey. Dewey’s focus on the practical and theoretical consequences of seeing intellectual endeavours as a question of habit formation and re-formation, and his insistence on the groundedness of creativity in such habits and the actions they entail, offers a useful vocabulary for the theoretical ideas that were immanent in the studio projects with which this book is concerned. In spite of this, it would not take a particularly close reading of this book to see that its articulations of the theoretical models of its case studies move quickly away from an explicit reliance on pragmatist vocabulary and concerns. This shift is partly a consequence of the fact that the model of experimental practice as a cyclical process developed in Chapter 3 can be considered to underpin the entire studio movement and therefore to apply, to a great extent, to the subsequent case studies, without needing to be reiterated. More significantly, however, this move away from pragmatism relates to a difficulty with its conception of truth. On the one hand, the pragmatist idea that truth is best considered as a measure of efficacy and that therefore the fundamental question in assessing truthfulness is ‘does it work?’ is fundamentally appropriate to a consideration of the work of a studio. There is a clear relationship between this conception of truth and experimental practices of numerous kinds, and truth claims rooted in it are particularly resistant to essentialism and dualism, which tend overwhelmingly to conserve hierarchies of knowledge that reproduce the presumed superiority of the abstract over the material. Any radical, experimental project—such as the studio—ought to oppose itself to such hierarchies, and we might therefore justly assume that pragmatist ideas would help them to do so. In practice, however, I have shown that self-proclaimed radical, experimental projects do not inevitably set themselves against such hierarchies, and may indeed (as can be seen particularly in the cases of the LTS, OVC, and CTS) use their claims to experimentalism as a means of reinforcing such hierarchies both within their own practice and beyond it. In the LTS, OVC, and CTS, for example, we see a transparently gendered division of labour with men taking responsibility

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for the abstract, and women for the realm of the material. It might be assumed that this use of an avowedly anti-hierarchical doctrine as a vehicle for reinforcing hierarchy in a slightly altered form represents a failure fully to embrace pragmatist principles, but the same flaw can be seen on a theoretical level within those principles themselves. If the crucial question for judging a truth claim is ‘does it work?’, a further question is begged, namely: ‘for whom?’ At the OVC, there was never any question that the answer to this second question was Byam Shaw, Devine, and Saint-Denis—‘the three boys’, as they were known—whose authority was structurally reinforced by every aspect of the studios’ functioning. At the CTS, Chekhov sought somewhat to displace his own authority by developing a technique whose principles were intended to function as measures of artistic efficacy, but—as I have argued—that technique was self-evidently also a means of hegemonic control, and was therefore itself also a means of sustaining hierarchy. Faced by this theoretical problem—that an experiment implies an experimenter, whose judgement is the disavowed point from which pragmatism seeks to assess a truth claim—there are two routes available to us. The first is to say that truth is not only what works, and therefore to seek a higher order account of it, but to do so would be to risk discarding the anti-essentialism of a pragmatist approach and embracing a form of idealism that would be even more fundamentally at odds with a project of radical experimentation. The second route is to accept that although pragmatism can help us to see truths as productively contingent and answerable to habits and practices, ideology nonetheless continues to work within them in ways that are commonly disavowed—that is, after all, the nature of ideology. This book has taken the second course, and sought not a higher order account of truth that seeks to transcend that of pragmatism, but a lower order account that seeks to develop the pragmatist conception by extending it: truth is what works and for whom. The latter part of this account of truth—‘for whom’—has been addressed by an approach rooted in Gramscian neo-Marxism and standpoint feminism. The former offers a way of thinking not only about the economic power of the forces of capital, but also about their social and cultural power which is dispersed and often disavowed. The latter extends Gramsci’s account by an explicit focus on the social and cultural power of the interlocking hierarchies of patriarchy and coloniality that are systemically imbricated with those of capital. Both of these theoretical models begin from the material conditions of existence of marginalised and oppressed people, and the critical perspectives to which they give rise. They have been chosen for their capacity to recognise that, particularly in the context of collective creative practice, truth is unavoidably a question of politics, of the structure and function of power. The perspectives offered by these models therefore expose the extent to which the aesthetic experiments of the LTS, OVC, and CTS were detached from any consideration of the politics of experimentation, meaning that we can see repeatedly in the products of these

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studios the re-hashing of old hierarchies in new forms. It is only in the case of Theatre Workshop—and even there only relatively briefly and partially—that the development of new aesthetic forms can be shown to result from a collective process that was experimental at a political level. To conclude this consideration of the significance of the history of studios, then studios matter for two related reasons. First, they matter because they represent a substantially disavowed current within theatre history (in England and more widely), and second, they matter because, in the process of locating what has been disavowed, we inevitably confront ideology. Thus, the history of studios exposes the ideological underpinnings of other more self-evidently significant currents within theatre history with which studios existed in tension, as well as the ideological positioning of claims to the idea of the ensemble, which was one of the main themes of twentieth-century theatre-making. Furthermore, the critical challenge of accounting for the ideological positions exposed by this history offers us a model of interrogating the politics of collective, creative practice that will, I hope, not only prove valuable to historians, but to those seeking to develop, through their work as theatre-makers, forms of social organisation dedicated to liberation. This, above all others, is the project I have sought to engage through this history, and it is therefore to one of its most recent manifestations that I turn to conclude this study.

Studio practice in the present: Secret Theatre at the Lyric, Hammersmith (2013–2015) Fifty years after Peter Hall, as artistic director of the RSC, kicked the model of studio practice for the company into the long grass, his successor, Michael Boyd, seemed keen to retrieve it. Boyd made much of his ‘belief in ensemble theatre making’ during his tenure at the RSC and, from 2007 to 2008, contracted a group of thirty-four actors, known as the ‘RSC Ensemble’, to perform Shakespeare’s two tetralogies of history plays.9 At the end of his tenure, Boyd also subsequently reintroduced the ‘RSC Studio’, but in a form very different from its manifestation half a century earlier. This studio sought proposals from artists outside the company who ‘have created or co-created at least three professional productions’, ‘for whom an organic development process is an important part of their working method’ and ‘who are interested in engaging with and developing the RSC’s artistic vision’.10 It was, therefore, an invitation for external collaborators to pitch projects to a committee comprising Associate Director David Farr, the RSC Company Dramaturg Jeanie O’Hare, and Associate Director Deborah Shaw, with successful pitches being allocated support for ‘a maximum of four weeks development’. There was no mention of training, or the direct involvement of anyone at the RSC in the development of these projects, so—rather than being a studio in the sense intended here—it seems to have been a way of the company out-sourcing innovation and product development.

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At Boyd’s RSC, then, studio practices were somewhat revived, but in the compromised and bifurcated form of a company employed on long contracts on the one hand, and a largely detached experimental operation on the other. It is also significant that the ‘ensemble’ employed by Boyd was contracted not only for new productions, but also to revive his 2000–1 productions of the Henry VI plays, originally created for the RSC’s ‘This England: The Histories’ season, which inevitably limited the company’s capacity creatively to contribute to the project. It is perhaps telling, then, that when Boyd announced in 2011 that he would be standing down as the RSC’s artistic director, he said that ‘I’d like to spend more time with my actors’.11 This observation reveals the extent of the gap between studio practice—of which ‘time with […] actors’ is arguably the most essential condition—and the model of the large, subsidised theatre company led by an artistic director. That impression is confirmed by Nicholas Hytner’s account of his period as artistic director at the National Theatre (NT), whose studio—in stark contrast to the RSC’s short-lived venture—has been continually active since it was founded in 1985. The NT Studio receives scant mention in Hytner’s book, however. He describes it, in simple terms, as a place ‘where young playwrights are given residencies, and ideas are allowed time and space to develop’.12 Hytner’s relationship with the studio was evidently semi-detached: The director of the Studio has a large degree of autonomy: she brings in the artists she thinks can use the Studio’s resources most productively and she lets me know when I should see work in progress. In turn, I send over to the Studio shows that I think would benefit from unpressured workshop time before they go into rehearsal.13 The utilitarian basis of Hytner’s vision for the studio is evident: artists are expected to use its ‘resources […] productively’, and to ‘benefit’ from it. An example of Hytner’s implicit cost/benefit analysis in relation to the studio is Marianne Elliott and Tom Morris’s 2007 production of War Horse. This began its life as a studio workshop in 2005: ‘[i]f the enemies of arts subsidy had seen two actors walking in a circle with cardboard boxes on their heads, pretending to be horses at the taxpayer’s expense,’ writes Hytner, ‘they would have had a field day’.14 Hytner’s frequent recourse, in interviews, to this example of the value of a studio has, however, almost nothing to do with the tradition of practice explored in this book. The fundamental lesson he wishes us to draw from it is about the crucial role played by commercial practices within the subsidised sector, specifically, the combination of what Hytner presents as his ruthless dedication to produce theatre that will appeal to and satisfy a broad audience and his willingness to behave entrepreneurially and take the calculated risk of producing War Horse’s transfers and tours from within the NT rather than spreading the risk by partnering with a commercial management. As

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a result, the NT announced in 2013 that it had generated £87 million the previous year, which the Guardian reported as ‘a record figure that means the organisation has almost doubled its annual turnover in the last six years’ (the period since War Horse—which was still then running in the West End and touring internationally—had opened).15 For Hytner, then, a studio was not a space either for training, for developing an ensemble, or even for experimentation. Rather, it was dedicated to innovation in the commercial sense: to the development of products in a low-risk environment, from which it is the director’s role to select and shape those they consider most promising for the riskier—and potentially more profitable—business of full production. It is also significant that—as was the case at Boyd’s RSC—Hytner evidently considered the studio as something of an optional extra as far as the core business of the NT was concerned. At the same time as the theatre announced its record profits, it recorded a small dip in income from fundraising, upon which Hytner emphasised the NT depended to sustain the breadth of its repertoire, ‘outreach’ and without which ‘the work we do outside of our three theatres— through our learning department and at our studio—would be under severe threat’.16 In short, what may have seemed to be a revival of some studio practices between 2006 and 2013 was a revival in name only: the mainstream model of subsidised theatre production in England could no more accommodate them than could Hall’s RSC in 1965. There was, however, one exception. In 2013, Sean Holmes, then artistic director of the Lyric, Hammersmith, announced the creation of an ensemble company that sought to challenge the mainstream approach to theatre production in the UK that seemed, everywhere else, to be so impregnable. Holmes acknowledged some important influences on the project, including the playwright Edward Bond and the British, German, and Estonian company of Sebastian Nübling’s 2012 production of Simon Stephens’ Three Kingdoms, co-produced by the Lyric. Holmes’s experiences of working with Bond and on Three Kingdoms had taught him that ‘things we thought of as rules were merely assumptions, […] that had become so ingrained we didn’t even notice them anymore’.17 He therefore observed that ‘[y]ou can only work within the structures that exist’ and ‘decided to challenge these existing structures’ by creating Secret Theatre in ‘an attempt to create a new structure that might lead to a new type of work’. Holmes acknowledged further influences: ‘devising companies’ (he had worked in particular with Filter), the European ensemble model, and ‘the spirit of Joan Littlewood’, which, he said, ‘hovers somewhere over us’. The historical analysis offered by this book suggests that Holmes’s project was more than vaguely connected to Littlewood and to the wider studio movement. Like that movement, Secret Theatre was committed to sustaining a company who would train together in order experimentally to develop new approaches to theatre-making. Secret Theatre’s company of ten actors (Nadia Albina, Hammed

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Animashaun, Leo Bill, Cara Horgan, Charlotte Josephine, who was replaced after a year by Matti Houghton, Adelle Leonce, Katherine Pearce, Billy Seymour, Sergo Vares, Steven Webb) were not permanently employed, but they were given a full-time salary for the duration of the project and were not hired through a casting process. At the point of the actors’ employment, the company’s repertory had not been decided, so they were committing to the project, rather than to particular parts, or even plays. Secret Theatre was also not only a group of ten actors, but also included ten further members: two directors (Holmes and Ellen McDougall), four writers (Joel Horwood, Arinzé Kene, Hayley Squires, Caroline Williams), a designer (Hyemi Shin), a lighting designer (Lizzie Powell), a sound designer (Nick Manning), and a dramaturg (Simon Stephens). The project began with a lengthy period of experimentation with approaches to theatrical representation (inspired in part by a visit to Berlin’s Theatertreffen festival) before any plays were selected. This was not training in a formal sense, and the company did not commit to a particular method, but they did gradually develop a collective attitude and vocabulary that they would subsequently draw on in rehearsals for the seven productions they would create. The actor Leo Bill described this as a process of exploration and gathering resources: ‘you’re digging towards some sort of end concept and, whilst digging, almost unconsciously filling the pack that’s on your back’, he said.18 Secret Theatre was not only an exercise in creating an alternative structure for theatre-making, but sought an alternative relationship with theatre’s audiences. Until close to the end of the company’s existence, its shows were advertised only by their number: Show 1 was Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (opened September 2013); Show 2 was Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (opened October 2013); Show 3 was Chamber Piece by Caroline Bird (opened October 2013); Show 4 was Glitterland by Hayley Squires (opened February 2014); Show 5 was A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts devised by the company with Holmes directing and Joel Horwood as dramaturg (opened May 2014); Show 6 was an untitled new play by Mark Ravenhill, who stepped into the gap left when Arinzé Kene was unable to complete his planned script because of acting work (opened August 2014); and Show 7 was A Stab in the Dark by Joel Horwood (opened February 2015). The secrecy that was intended to shroud these productions was, in the event, short-lived, with social media and press reviews quickly revealing the shows’ titles, but it nonetheless signalled the company’s commitment to experimenting with a different approach to audience engagement. Rather than being asked to invest the price of a ticket in the supposedly known quantity of a canonical play or star actor, Secret Theatre asked its audiences to commit to the company and its vision of what the theatre could be: to step therefore both into the unknown and into an ongoing relationship with a group of artists. Of course this decision was not without its commercial sense. Holmes acknowledged that he had learned from Three Kingdoms that there was ‘an audience hungry—perhaps starved of—work this exciting, provocative and

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important’, and the company’s strategy to attract such an audience traded, in part, as Adam Alston has observed, in ‘commodified secrecy’.19 Certainly, there was significant irony in the banner hung in the Lyric’s foyer during Secret Theatre’s first phase that announced ‘we think art is not commodity’ to audiences who had just bought tickets to gain access.20 The relationships of studios with their audiences has not received close scrutiny in this book, mainly because of the difficulties of obtaining data, and I do not therefore propose to pursue it in depth here, but it is certainly significant that Secret Theatre both attempted to resist and could not escape the prevailing form of commercial logic governing relations between theatres and their audiences. Nonetheless, the company’s choice to keep ticket prices relatively low and to emphasise the sequential nature of its productions—and thus the journey it proposed to undergo with its audiences, culminating in a final weekend (on February 28 and March 1, 2015) with performances of all seven productions—did encourage audiences to engage with the project in a sustained way, and to experience and consider these productions not only as individual entities but also in their tangled relations with each other. Finally, there were structural similarities between Secret Theatre and the history of studios of which the company were unaware at a historical level, but deeply conscious of in terms of their significance for the project. First, Secret Theatre took advantage of a partly ruined theatre. It was designed to plug a gap in the Lyric’s regular operations which was caused by a large capital investment project to remodel and extend the theatre’s front-of-house, office, and backstage spaces. Such projects have become gradually more essential to the running of a theatre ever since the advent of public funding for the arts, and, in recent decades, numerous artistic and executive directors have placed them at the centre of their tenure, regularly leaving their posts soon after their completion, as did both Boyd and Hytner.21 Among these, Holmes is, however, unique in that he chose not simply to increase touring or operate a temporary space during the rebuild, but to use this period of capital accumulation as an opportunity radically to experiment with existing structures of production. This was possible for two main reasons. First, the capital project would hardly affect the theatre’s main auditorium, which would remain accessible for most of the rebuild, as Holmes observed, ‘through back doors and goods lifts’. Second, Holmes had been able, since beginning his tenure as artistic director in 2009, to accrue what he described to me as a ‘healthy surplus’ and had a ‘very supportive’ board.22 At a time when it was effectively impossible for the theatre to make money, therefore, Secret Theatre both did not represent a significant financial risk and offered potential reputational benefits. After a year of operation, the significance of the company’s experiment secured it an Exceptional Award from Arts Council England (ACE), which were only given, as What’sOnStage reported, ‘to projects of high ambition (£50,000 and above) that sit outside the usual programme of a funded organisation’.23 Moira Sinclair, Chair of ACE in

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London, described Secret Theatre as ‘a catalyst for artistic excitement and change’.24 Unfortunately, at the time of writing, it is hard to see evidence that Sinclair was right. Artistically exciting though it certainly was, Secret Theatre does not seem to have catalysed change. Holmes attempted to bring the company back to the Lyric after 2015 but was unable to find a producing model that could reconcile its structure with the regular operations of a mid-scale subsidised theatre. Events elsewhere suggest that this decision was justified. After committing itself to a repertory company in 2016, Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse announced in 2018 that it had dropped out of ACE’s National Portfolio of arts organisations receiving regular funding, saying that the experiment had pushed the company financially ‘towards a tipping point from which we now need to step back’.25 It would seem, therefore, that experiments rooted in the studio tradition frequently remain both exciting to and incompatible with the artistic establishment. This brief analysis of Secret Theatre’s work therefore focuses on how the company challenged the established operations of theatre-making, asking both what this reveals about the legacy of studio practices today and what it might take for this challenge to catalyse wider change. It does so by focusing on two of the company’s productions, Shows 2 and 5: A Streetcar Named Desire and A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts. The reason for selecting these two productions is that they best exemplified the radicalism of Secret Theatre’s approach, which was the impetus for my engagement in the company’s work. A broader evaluation of Secret Theatre would therefore observe that it was frequently more conflicted and compromised than my account here may suggest. In particular, of the three areas into which the company’s work is most obviously divided—classic plays, new writing, and devised performance—I have omitted one (new writing) altogether. This is because it was clear from observing Secret Theatre’s work that its aim of challenging conventional structures of production was most compromised in the case of new plays. Here, the presence of writers (whose knowledge and understanding of their emergent texts was necessarily superior) frequently tipped the company, for pragmatic reasons, back towards the conventional hierarchies of British rehearsal rooms that prioritise the writer or their interpreter, the director. Time pressure played a role too. The commissioning of plays at the project’s start meant short deadlines for the authors of Shows 3 and 4, but a relatively long period of rehearsal for the company to prepare themselves for Shows 1 and 2. Holmes’s decision to select well-known, tested classics for these first productions also gave the company robust material with which to work. New plays are different. They commonly require reworking to mend holes in their logic or reshape their dramaturgy. This process absorbs rehearsal time that cannot, therefore, be given to other experiments. The same is not necessarily true of devised performances, which can emerge from—rather than displace—such experiments, as did Show 5. Of the two classic plays produced by Secret Theatre, I have chosen to

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focus on Streetcar rather than Woyzeck for the simple reason that another London production of Williams’s play presented itself as an instructive comparison.

‘Shaping something into something’: Secret Theatre Shows 2 and 5 [content warning: discussion of violence and sexual assault] Secret Theatre’s production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire offered an unusual opportunity to grasp the differences between the company’s work and more conventionally structured production thanks to the coincidence of another London Streetcar, Benedict Andrews’ Young Vic production starring Gillian Anderson, which opened nine months later, in July 2014. It was also fortuitous that, like Holmes, Andrews—who began his career in his native Australia—was strongly influenced by German Regietheater (directors’ theatre), so the two productions emerged from a comparable set of aesthetic influences. From an ideological perspective, however, the two productions could hardly have been more different, a difference that can, as I will argue, be traced back to the structural conditions of their making. The making of Andrews’ Young Vic production was described by Gillian Anderson (who played Blanche) thus: From the moment I made contact with David Lan, and we started the conversation […]. I felt like I was working with somebody who understood what I was interested in, understood my vision and then Benedict’s vision […]. He kept in touch with me at all points, was always easy to reach and straight-up, honest about all stages of the journey, which I always appreciate. And then, getting into rehearsal […] being able to work with the revolve from the first day of rehearsal, which was no mean feat.26 There is a clear relationship between the sequencing of decisions here and the structural hierarchy of the team responsible for making them. Anderson’s desire to play Blanche led her to contact David Lan, and then Andrews. Next, the designer Magda Willi was brought on board, and so by the time the full team was assembled at the start of rehearsals, the production had been substantially conceived, the set design was complete, and its revolve had been constructed and was ready for use. By contrast, the Secret Theatre company began working together with no idea of the plays they would stage, and without even the rights to Streetcar. As Steven Webb put it: ‘[at the start of Secret Theatre] we didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t know what we were aiming for and it was amazing’.27 Another actor, Matti Houghton, observed that such venturing into the unknown is ‘not allowed in other shows’ whose rehearsals

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she described as ‘fixing stuff that’s already there rather than shaping something into something’.28 This opposition between one process in which you ‘fix stuff that’s already there’ and another where you ‘shape something into something’ was fundamental to the differences between these two Streetcars because of the ways in which these two possibilities work differently to structure power. Conventional theatre production follows the former model, via something like this sequence of events: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Producer/artistic director meets leading actor/writer/director; They begin to collaborate with: leading actor/director/writer; They hire: designers/choreographer/composer; They liaise with: production management, marketing; They instruct: cast, musicians, stage management, wardrobe, scenic construction, stage electricians, sound engineers, front-of-house staff, etc.

As Ric Knowles has argued, the hierarchy that shapes this sequence of events also shapes, as the actor Leo Bill told me, the lived experience of rehearsal.29 Speaking of the difference between working within and outside Secret Theatre, Bill observed that: There are people in this show who don’t have very much to do in it, and when you’re sat around the table talking about the work, those people don’t normally input because it’s ingrained in them as actors that ‘as I don’t have very much to do in this show, my opinion is lesser than someone who has a lot to do’.30 Furthermore, production processes function to emphasise what has already been decided at every point. This includes practices as seemingly innocuous as distributing scripts to company members in advance of or at the point of employment, which represent a production in advance of its making (admittedly with varying degrees of stipulation). It also includes read-throughs at the start of rehearsal, which re-assert the hierarchy of casting, as well as model-box-showings and costume drawings, which represent to the company the physical and visual reality into which they will have to insert themselves, whose creation is already substantially in the past. Andrews’ production seems to have committed fully to these processes, and—whether or not it is intended—imposing a linear order on the temporality of a production process in this way will inevitably tend to reinforce hierarchy. Secret Theatre adhered to none of these standard practices; rather than concerning themselves with a particular play, let alone individual parts, or building—or even conceiving—a design, the company spent time in rehearsal playing games and exploring stage vocabularies that would evoke, rather than literally represent,

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actions and events. It was crucial to Holmes’s vision for the company that it would go beyond what he described as the ‘literalism’ of most British theatre. This process recalled, for me, the pragmatist conception of truth based upon experimentation, used to analyse the work of the LTS and OVC in Chapter 3. Like Dewey’s account of experience, Secret Theatre’s experimental approach of ‘shaping something into something’ depended upon the interplay of sensation and action both literally and metaphorically. At a literal level, the company often worked by splitting into small groups to develop short sequences of performance that responded to a challenge set by Holmes, and then watching each other and discussing what they had seen. At a metaphorical level, the idea of ‘shaping something into something’ depends as much on the appreciation of the ‘something’ of performance which was at the company’s disposal as it does upon decisions about the ‘something’ to which they would convert it. This process is also inevitably more cyclical than the linear order described above: it engages problems in order to find solutions, and then seeks the problems in those solutions, and so on. It was therefore characteristic of Secret Theatre that some very significant decisions were taken extremely late in the process of developing a production, requiring the company’s willingness to un-fix what was already there. Unlike the LTS and the OVC, however, Secret Theatre’s experimental processes often worked to question and resist hierarchy. This was partly a function of the constitution of the company, which was gender-balanced, racially diverse, and contained one actor who is disabled and another for whom English is a second language. It was also a consequence of Holmes’s commitment to asking his actors to challenge the usual expectations of their role within the theatremaking process, to reject conventional aesthetic decisions, and to bring their own lived experiences to their work. This process was exemplified in a rehearsal for Streetcar, when the actor Katherine Pearce, who was playing Eunice, interjected to ask ‘why are we doing these accents?’ ‘It sounds ridiculous’, she said, ‘if this is about us, why don’t we do it in our voices?’ It seemed to me particularly important that it was Pearce—a working-class woman from Bolton and the youngest member of the company, who was playing a very marginal part in this production—whose observation led to the crucial decision to abandon the play’s expected accents. A woman whose voice is always read as ‘an accent’ inevitably has a different standpoint on accents to those people whose voices are not, and Secret Theatre’s structure allowed that standpoint to hold sway. Secret Theatre’s Streetcar was also remarkable for the fact that its Blanche, Nadia Albina, is a disabled woman, a casting decision that Holmes thought would ‘make people fucking furious’ and, initially, made Albina feel terrified. She told Lyn Gardner that the fear that ‘my disability would be a lens through which everything would be seen […] has never gone away’.31 This fear was clearly justified: one blogger reportedly described Albina’s casting as ‘ludicrous’,32 Michael Coveney wrote that ‘[h]er drinking is secondary to her

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physical neediness’,33 and Matt Trueman claimed that Albina’s disability made ‘every mention of Blanche’s beauty ping out from the text’.34 The production, however, made nothing of Albina’s disability beyond accepting it as a physical fact. It never suggested that Blanche was disabled in a realistic sense, much less that she was needy because of it, but nor did it seek to pretend that Albina wasn’t. She described her habitual experience, as a disabled person, of feeling ‘isolated, not belonging, an alien in your surroundings’ as crucial to her understanding of Blanche.35 Her character’s alienated position was, indeed, clear from the first moments of Albina’s performance, when she struggled to drag huge suitcases onto the stage in a pristine white suit and high heels that stood out against the comfortable, casual clothes worn by every other character. Secret Theatre’s approach, then, was not to treat Albina’s disability as a metaphorical lens through which the audience should view Blanche’s character, but as one of a number of standpoints that it materialised not to explain the play from the outside, but to evoke it from within. Such standpoints functioned, in other words, as ‘somethings’ the company could ‘shape into something’ in the process of making the production. By contrast, Andrews’ Young Vic production took pains to explain its central character and—in so doing—to use her to explain the play. Magda Willi’s revolving design, for example, was set in motion as Anderson’s Blanche took her first drink after arriving in Stella and Stanley’s apartment, and its constant slow-motion whirling thereafter was repeatedly associated with Blanche’s alcoholism, which Anderson signalled heavily with a tottering-but-deliberate gait, as though the world were spinning beneath her feet. The continually revolving stage was also deliberately associated with the Varsouviana that Blanche remembers from the night she apparently revealed to her young husband that she had seen him having sex with a man, causing him to commit suicide. The music of this whirling polka was dirtied and stretched in Paul Arditti’s sound design, situating it unmistakably in Blanche’s increasingly unhinged consciousness, where it echoed with mounting regularity. Stanley’s violence towards Stella as his card game span out of control was similarly staged by Andrews as an eruption that seemed prompted by the newly dizzying world in which Stanley found himself. In spite of his military costume (combat fatigues and dog-tags), there was no suggestion in Ben Foster’s Stanley of a traumatic past echoing, like Blanche’s, in his ears or setting the stage-world turning. Instead, his violent outburst was incorporated into a sequence of events that the production clearly indicated were initiated by the arrival of Blanche. Later, Andrews represented Blanche’s rape by having Foster’s Stanley pull back layer upon layer of taffeta ball gown as Anderson lay supine on the bed, suggesting that his assault was an attempt to penetrate Blanche’s disguises rather than a brutal assertion of patriarchal authority. This reading was exacerbated by the fact that, before Foster’s Stanley returned from the hospital, Anderson’s Blanche had begun, unmistakably, to self-destruct. She drank to a point of

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extreme intoxication and was only able to dress partially, so that the gown in which Stanley found her was undone and partly falling off, her tiara was askew, and she had smeared her own lipstick. This performance by Anderson’s Blanche of the tropes of sexual violence upon herself was, thus, the culmination of the victim-blaming logic that characterised Andrews’ production. Secret Theatre’s Streetcar handled these episodes very differently, though it did feature a direct parallel to Andrews’ revolve in the form of a curtained cubicleon-wheels that served as the bathroom in Hyemi Shinn’s otherwise empty set. As Sergo Vares’ Stanley threatened and attacked Nadia Albina’s Blanche, she sought refuge in this cubicle only to be swung around the stage inside it. This was Stanley’s space, and he would order it by violence if he so chose. From the outset, the set’s walls had been associated with property and exclusion: Katherine Pearce’s Eunice had explained that she owned her apartment from the top of one, and Vares’ Stanley had sat on top of the other to overhear Blanche’s challenge to his authority in bad-mouthing him to Stella as ‘your Polack’. The walls thus began to stand explicitly for the boundaries of property constructed by those in power to assert their control. At the point of her rape, Albina’s Blanche attempted to escape by climbing one of them, but she was unable to do so, partly because her right arm ends at the elbow, but more so because of her small stature. Crucially, Albina’s Blanche knew she couldn’t get out, and let go of the top of the wall, sliding back to its base and allowing Vares’ Stanley to pin her to it with his torso, saying ‘we’ve had this date with each other from the beginning’. There was no suggestion of willingness in this letting go, merely a weary acceptance that there was nothing to be done: she could no longer hold her weight. Albina’s Blanche submitted to Stanley not as a model victim of assault resisting to the last, but as a woman who has learned that there is a gravitational pull in sexual relations, and this is just the way it goes. Blanche’s acceptance of the inevitability of patriarchal violence in this moment returns us to standpoint theory’s emphasis on the material experience of oppression as a basis for political understanding, which also shaped Secret Theatre’s interpretation of Stella, who was played by Adelle Leonce, a mixedrace Black woman. Leonce’s Stella entered, at the start of the production, to Otis Redding’s civil-rights-era lament ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’, a song that not only articulated her deep sexual longing for Stanley, but—particularly given Leonce’s Blackness—brought sharply into focus the history of enslavement and Jim Crow legislation that shaped the social relations of both the play’s setting in New Orleans and the history of ‘Belle Reve’, Blanche and Stella’s family’s plantation in Mississippi. This strategy of exposing the emotional and political dynamics of Williams’s play by means of anti-literal staging generated a kind of productive incoherence in Secret Theatre’s production, requiring its audience constantly to negotiate between what it was hearing and what it was seeing, and to work to disentangle the threads of its scenography in order to be able to read the production’s exploration of the ideological structures of the

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play. Repeatedly, the production used food in this way. At its start, Vares’ Stanley brought a white carrier bag full of mince onto the stage, which he held up, calling out ‘Stella! Meat!’, before lobbing it onto the floor where it landed with a thud that clearly presaged violence. Later this image of a man returning from the hunt was re-worked in the men’s poker game, which was represented by the hacking up and sharing of a water melon (which had been likewise presented aloft) around a central table, the flesh enthusiastically consumed and pieces of rind tossed aside, littering the floor. The food imagery was complicated by the use of ice cream to represent sexual contact. Leonce’s Stella and Sergo Vares’ Stanley ate ice cream as they flirted in the absence of Blanche and then fed it to each other when they were reunited after he had attacked her. Finally, at the production’s close, Stanley repeated the action: as Blanche departed, he walked—apparently comfortingly—to Stella and stood behind her, offering ice cream on a spoon that he proceeded to push into her mouth until she seemed about to gag. While the production no more suggested that Stella was Black than that Blanche was disabled, Leonce and Vares’ racial identities could not possibly be ignored in this moment in which a white man quietly and forcefully asserted his control over the body of a Black woman. It was clear from this tangle of gendered images of food and feeding that the choice for women in this social world was either to be cast aside like rinds, as Blanche had been, or accept their consumption and oppression at the hands of men, as Stella did. Thus, the production’s incoherent surface served to expose ideological structures beneath, just as standpoint theory proposes. The generation of incoherence in Secret Theatre’s production was structurally dependent, in rehearsals, on a process that was also deliberately—but not easily —incoherent, and therefore often inefficient. Nadia Albina described creating too much material and too many ideas, and the constant risk of ‘losing sight of what we were doing’: We were manic. We kept sending each other music, lyrics, lectures, videos, scenes from films that we thought were relevant. It was exhilarating but it was scary, too. We were constantly chewing on things. We were arguing a lot. It was fertile but there was also a lot of misery in the room. We had got tired. Sean would try to direct a scene and he’d get nine different opinions thrown at him. We knew we’d lost sight of what we were doing. We had so much stuff that we no longer even knew what the plot was any more.36 Albina’s account of rehearsal stands in stark contrast to Anderson’s account of the Young Vic production which stressed the theatre’s efficient realisation of ‘my vision, and […] Benedict’s vision’, and the Young Vic’s marketing, that described Andrews as a ‘visionary director’.37 Standpoint theory shows, however, and this production demonstrated that the vision from the top of

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a hierarchy looks not only downwards, but outwards from the centre to the margins. Andrews’ production seems to have lacked a mechanism for the margins to speak back. The centralisation of power in Andrews’ production is not necessarily evidence of a strategy of deliberate ideological control, however. It may simply be a consequence of efficiency. By contrast, Holmes’s structure for Secret Theatre generated both the space and time for inefficiency, for him to respond to the ‘nine different opinions’ that would be ‘thrown back at him’ whenever he directed a scene, for example.38 The excess of meaning and possibility so generated had two clear consequences for the process of ‘shaping something into something’ that characterised Secret Theatre’s approach. Because the first ‘something’—the performative materials with which the company was working—was excessive both in terms of volume and complexity, the second ‘something’—the company’s shared image of the production that would ultimately emerge from this shaping process—was both blurred and deferred. As Albina put it, ‘we had so much stuff that we no longer even knew what the plot was any more’. At its best, Secret Theatre thus demonstrated the political uses of inefficiency and incoherence, and its intervention into the conventional model of theatre production can be seen, on the basis of Streetcar, to have been to challenge the pervasive, conservative notion that theatre is made by the well-organised delivery of a coherent and well-planned artistic vision. This was never more true than in the case of Show 5, the devised performance, A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts, in which, as Matti Houghton recalled, ‘really up until the last two weeks there was no pressure on the work so we could fail—we could have a whole day of complete failure’.39 This essential inefficiency was no accident, but the show had come about accidentally, because a gap emerged in Secret Theatre’s programme when the plays and spaces that were available to the company did not fit each other as the planned schedule had assumed they would. The company therefore decided that they would make a performance in and for the Lyric’s rehearsal room before taking it to the Edinburgh Fringe. They began the process of deciding what this performance would be, as dramaturg Joel Horwood recalled, ‘by going for a big walk to work out what we might want to make as a company’: on that walk we discussed lots of really good ideas that started to become something that none of us had expected. Amongst the things we were discussing was the idea of doing a project that was about sex because discussing sex is difficult and portraying sex on stage is really difficult. So we started to think about what it was to do things that were really difficult and then the title came and we could use the title as a kind of pilot, along the track…40

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It is worth pausing here to consider the conflicting senses of time in this narrative of the emergence of Secret Theatre’s Show 5, and their relationship to the opposition laid out above between ‘fixing what’s already there’ and ‘shaping something into something’. The conception of time manifested by the process of programming is that it connects events, which it frames as a series of destination-like moments, abstracted out of the temporal stream, like points in a network.41 Crucially, this conception of time skips over the process of rehearsal by focusing not on its continuity, but on a series of deliverable snapshots: a read-through, a runthrough, a dress rehearsal, an opening night. The alternative vision of time is represented by the company’s walk at the start of its work on Show 5. This was a walk without a destination, a walk whose purpose was not to reach anywhere but simply to spend time walking. Released from the bracketing of a departure and a destination, time simply goes and it keeps on going—it persists and it disappears. It therefore knows no completion, but it does have direction. It goes towards but not to. This is the difference between, for example, the model box that defines the point at which a set will ultimately arrive, and Horwood’s description of a title as ‘a kind of pilot along the track’. For Secret Theatre, time kept on going: it both persisted and disappeared, it could not be captured but it was always leaving traces. Inevitably, this condition recalls my analysis, in Chapter 8, of Theatre Workshop as wayfarers. Both they and Secret Theatre moved in their work continually towards an unknown-but-anticipated future and away from a known-butvanishing past. This has led me to think about the Secret Theatre company metaphorically as wayfarers too, filling their knapsacks, as Leo Bill observed, as they figuratively worked the paths of rehearsal, not giving ‘effect’—in Ingold’s words—‘to a preconceived idea’, but following ‘the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being’.42 Bill put this more directly, speaking about Streetcar: ‘everything that we put into that show was just the obvious thing to do within the environment that we were working in’.43 That environment was defined, first and foremost by a set of relations. Holmes described the company, in fact, as unfolding like a romantic relationship: in the first six months ‘everyone was all loved-up. It was like that first six months—you don’t argue’, then came ‘our first row: “can we live together? Do you do the washing up?”’, then the realisation that, as he put it, ‘we might have to split up’, followed by a further level of commitment: ‘we love each other but we’re also now in a deeper stage which is: “I’ve got to love your flaws”’.44 In many ways, rehearsals for Show 5 exemplified this idea as the show developed not as a narrative, but an environment constructed from a collection of relational possibilities: scenes, vignettes, and structures for improvisation were developed by the company, which only cohered into a dramaturgical form very close to the production’s opening. The format for Show 5 was a kind of hero’s quest, to be followed by a ‘protagonist’ who was chosen from a hat by an audience member at the start.

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The actor selected to perform this role would then walk to a microphone centrestage, put on a superhero cape and introduce themselves to the audience, at which point a whistle was blown and the performance began with the other performers laying out a series of objects on the stage to be used in the first sequence, impossible circuit training, in which the protagonist tried, for example, to bend a scaffolding bar, get both legs behind their head, balance on a small beach ball using their belly with all hands and feet off the ground in a flying position, and eat a lemon whole. The performance then unfolded as a series of impossible tasks set for the protagonist by their fellow actors, who watched from seats upstage, stepping forward periodically to assume the role of antagonist(s). These tasks were interspersed with short scenes: a monologue in which the protagonist told the story of their first kiss; two versions of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene—first, a contemporary rewriting in which the speakers vie to outdo each other with increasingly bizarre and violent expressions of love and, second, Shakespeare’s text; an interrogation based upon Iago persuading Othello of Desdemona’s infidelity; a post-coital dialogue beginning with the antagonist asking the protagonist’s name and then a series of personal questions that the protagonist would answer as truthfully as they wished; and a scene structured as a series of questions posed by the antagonist that produced a montage of a romantic relationship from the couple’s first meeting to their meeting again after separating. Most of these scenarios required the protagonist to improvise as a version of themselves and were designed to be exposing, as were the questions put to them periodically through the performance. One antagonist asked ‘what do you hate most about yourself?’ and wrote the answer onto the protagonist’s body with a permanent marker, and at two other points, the protagonist was asked: ‘what’s this show about?’ On the second occasion, near the show’s end, the answer was written on the blank back wall of the performance space (Figure C.1) alongside the answers from all of the previous performances. Thus, the increasingly impossible acts of Show 5 were framed as metaphors for the ongoing and always contingent and incomplete struggle to live, and thereby to be—inescapably—in relations with ourselves and with each other that we cannot encompass, and to make sense of this struggle every day, over and over again. The initial programming of Show 5 in the Lyric’s rehearsal room was not insignificant. A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts took problems that rehearsal is commonly designed to solve and chose instead to lay them out, unresolved, for audiences and performers alike. Conventional processes of rehearsal take for granted, for example, that a play is a series of knowable actions and events that should be integrated together so as to create a repeatable and coherent entity. Likewise, rehearsal processes tend to assume that a character is an integrated entity comprising a set of relationships and attitudes that can and should be represented in such a way as to make them legibly cohere. In short, there is a clear expectation in theatre production that the company will leave the rehearsal room and relocate to the theatre having increased their knowledge of a production and rendered it predictable. Show 5, however, looked for problems

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FIGURE C.1 The back wall of the Tricycle Theatre, London, following the run of Secret Theatre’s A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts, dir. Sean Holmes, December 2014 (photograph taken by the stage manager, Sally C. Roy).

not solutions. In fact, having begun by dis-integrating the company into protagonist and antagonists, each show could be seen as an attempt to disintegrate its protagonist too, to render them incoherent and expose their ambiguities, doubts, and contradictions by placing them under intense physical and cognitive pressure and scrutiny. After the protagonist’s final answer to the question ‘what’s this show about?’ was recorded on the wall, however, marking the acceptance of their attempt to articulate an idea that would render both themselves and the performance—albeit temporarily—whole, Show 5 reversed its direction, working quickly to reintegrate the protagonist into the ensemble. This process began with them borrowing from Tina Turner the trick of closing a show with a choreographed routine to the song ‘Proud Mary’, and concluded when the nine antagonists stepped up in a final round of impossible circuit training to help the protagonist complete each task. Members of the company supported the protagonist’s arms and legs so that they could balance on the ball, for example, and—touchingly—flapped their cape as though they were flying, and one would even step forward and volunteer to eat the lemon. Finally, the company returned to their opening positions, the protagonist introduced themselves to the audience again, replaced the cape on the microphone stand and returned to the line.

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Reviewers who criticised Show 5 commonly did so because it failed—or refused—their expectations. Libby Purves, for example, lamented, of the neonlit sequence titled ‘Sex Dance’ in which one performer danced frantically in front of another doing yoga poses, that ‘you hope they’ll do a balancing act, but it never happens’, and later of the balcony scene ‘they did remarkably well. But it made me wish they’d done some real acting earlier’.45 Fiona Mountford thought, by contrast, that the balcony scene was performed ‘atrociously’ and also complained that ‘[t]he most talented member of the company barely moved from his chair at all last night’.46 Secret Theatre was, however, explicitly designed productively to frustrate such expectations: eye-catching acrobatic achievements, ‘real acting’—for which read empathic, realistic representations of identifiable characters in conventional narratives, and hierarchically ordered displays of talent—were not on the company’s agenda. Instead, Secret Theatre was, in many ways, an after-shock of the studio tradition charted in this book. Like the pragmatist model of experimental practice developed in Chapter 3, Secret Theatre sought the point at which established habits of practice break down: the ‘really difficult’ things to which they are not adequate. Like the elaboration of a technical vocabulary at the CTS explored in Chapter 6, Secret Theatre sought to develop new habits that would be equal to these challenges, a concrete, performative vocabulary to communicate intangible content. Finally, in both of the shows discussed here, the company also engaged in the creation of theatrical standpoints theorised in Chapter 9, exploring the social construction of subjectivity and grounding its work in the social positions of its members. ****** Thus, Secret Theatre temporarily created a space close to the centre of the mainstream British theatre for perspectives and practices from the margins. Such a space had been generated—in the twentieth century—by the tradition of theatre studios. Secret Theatre was not a remnant of that tradition, but a new iteration of it, made possible by similar conditions and aspirations. It was, however, short lived. This history of radical, collective creative practice in the twentieth century ends, then, with a question about similar possibilities in the twenty-first. Will the highly networked conditions of a post-Fordist economy offer fertile possibilities for the emergence of new forms of creative commons as, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued?47 Or will the ideological commitments of capitalism to individualism and competitive markets as models for conceptualising social relations continue ‘to prevent the democratic potential of the multitude from being realised’, as Jeremy Gilbert has suggested they have?48 Of course these questions far exceed the scope of theatre history, but the studios explored in this book can be seen to have functioned as parallels in the sphere of cultural production to the activist projects that Gilbert describes as ‘experimental laboratories for the development of democratic forms’.49 Such

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forms are immanent to the necessarily collective processes of theatre-making, as they are to the wider networks of social production generated by the ‘biopolitical’ or ‘immaterial’ labour that Hardt and Negri have shown to be fundamental to a post-Fordist economy.50 This book has argued, however, that these potentially democratic relationships are always vulnerable to the structural imposition of hierarchies of numerous kinds. That process cannot, in my opinion, be effectively resisted from within a liberal conception of society as a collection of individuals whose personal freedom is the fundamental concern of politics. Giving due consideration to the work of theatre-making in relation to the problems of sociality in liberal societies will, however, be a task for other books. In the meantime, counterhegemonic, radically democratic, anti-individualist forms of cultural production will continue to emerge, in the theatre as elsewhere. It is my hope that this book will offer some useful analysis, resources, and reasons for optimism to anyone seeking to advance those projects.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

See Chapter 2, 80–1. H. Goorney, The Theatre Workshop Story (London: Methuen, 1981), 200–210. See Chapter 3, 119. See Chapter 6, 191–2. See, for example, D. Radosavljević, The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-Makers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 2; A. Skinner, ‘More Than the Sum of Their Parts: Reflections on Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Theatrical Ensemble’, in Encountering Ensemble, ed. J. Britton (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 61–77. T. Morton, ‘Subscendence’, in e-flux, Journal #85 (2017), accessed March 3, 2020, www.e-flux.com/journal/85/156375/subscendence/. Ibid. This idea simplifies, for the sake of clarity, Morton’s description of a human being as ‘a perforated bag full of water in which are swimming countless little perforated bags full of water, in which are floating …’ (Ibid.). The phrase ‘belief in ensemble theatre making’ is taken from RSC publicity materials. It can be seen in the publicity blurbs from play-texts produced by the RSC at this time, for example: T. Crouch, I, Cinna (The Poet) (London: Oberon Books, 2012), D. Greig, Dunsinane (London: Faber & Faber, 2010). ‘RSC Ensemble’ is from the RSC’s Annual Report and Accounts, 2007–8, accessed April 4, 2020, https://cdn2.rsc.org.uk/sitefinity/corporate/rsc-annualreport2007-08.pdf? sfvrsn=b3535f21_2. RSC, ‘RSC Studio—Guidelines for Submission’, undated document, accessed April 10, 2012, www.rsc.org.uk/downloads/rsc_studio_guidelines.pdf. Charlotte Higgins, ‘RSC’s Artistic Director Michael Boyd Announces Final Curtain’, The Guardian, October 14, 2011. N. Hytner, Balancing Acts: Behind the Scenes at the National Theatre (London: Vintage, 2017), 76. Ibid., 76–7. Ibid., 247. M. Trueman, ‘National Theatre Makes a Record £87m’, The Guardian, October 4, 2013. Ibid.

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17 S. Holmes: ‘Maybe the existing structures of theatre in this country, whilst not corrupt, are corrupting’, What’sOnStage, June 18, 2013, accessed on April 4, 2020, www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/sean-holmes-maybe-the-existing-struc tures-of-theat_31033.html. 18 L. Bill, Interview with the author, April 2, 2015. 19 A. Alston, ‘“Tell No One”: Secret Cinema and the Paradox of Secrecy’, in Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, ed. A. Harpin and H. Nicholson (London: Palgrave, 2017), 148. 20 I am indebted to Lucy Tyler for this observation, which appears in her PhD thesis, ‘Work in Progress: English Play Development under Neoliberalism, 2000–2020’ (The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, 2020), which it was my privilege to supervise. 21 For a broader view of this trend, see T. Cornford, ‘Organisation, Authorship and Social Production: Directors in the British Theatre since 1945’ in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre Post-1945, ed. J. Harvie and D. Rebellato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 22 S. Holmes, Interview with the author, September 25, 2014. 23 T. Bosanquet, ‘Sean Holmes on Extending Secret Theatre and Challenging the Culture of Literalism’, What’sOnStage, March 11, 2014, accessed March 26, 2020, www. whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/sean-holmes-on-extending-secret-theatreand-challe_33797.html. 24 Ibid. 25 Quoted in C. Romer, ‘Liverpool Everyman Drops Out of National Portfolio’, Arts Professional, December 7, 2018, accessed March 4, 2020, www.artsprofessional.co.uk/ news/liverpool-everyman-drops-out-national-portfolio. 26 Young Vic, ‘Gillian Anderson on A Streetcar Named Desire and the Young Vic’, YouTube Video, February 2, 2015, accessed March 26, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch? v=KjUsTtD798M. 27 S. Webb, Interview with the author, February 20, 2015. 28 M. Houghton, Interview with the author, February 20, 2015. 29 R. Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 29; see also the introduction to this book, 16. 30 L. Bill, Interview with the author, April 2, 2015. 31 L. Gardner, ‘My Disability Helped Me Understand Blanche DuBois, Says Streetcar Actor’, The Guardian, June 2, 2014, accessed March 5, 2020, www.theguardian.com/ stage/Gilbert, 2014/jun/02/disabled-actor-plays-blanche-dubois-streetcar-named-desire. 32 The anonymous blogger’s view is quoted in Gardner’s article but I can find no original source for it. An online review by Peter Mortimer described the production’s use of a giant fan as ‘slightly ludicrous’, but this was published two days after Gardner’s article, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, The British Theatre Guide, June 4, 2014, accessed March 5, 2020, www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/a-streetcar-nam-north ern-stage-10198. 33 M. Coveney, ‘Secret Theatre: Show 2 (Lyric Hammersmith)’, What’sOnStage, September 10, 2013, accessed March 5, 2020, www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/ reviews/secret-theatre-show-2-lyric-hammersmith_31869.html. 34 This remark is quoted in Gardner, ‘My Disability Helped Me Understand Blanche DuBois, Says Streetcar Actor’. 35 Gardner, ‘My Disability Helped Me Understand Blanche DuBois, Says Streetcar Actor’. 36 Gardner, ‘My Disability Helped Me Understand Blanche DuBois, Says Streetcar Actor.’ 37 ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Young Vic Website, accessed March 26, 2020, www. youngvic.org/whats-on/a-streetcar-named-desire.

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Straumanis, Alfreds, ed. The Golden Steed: Seven Baltic Plays. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1979. Susi, Lolly. An Untidy Career: Conversations with George Hall. London: Oberon, 2010. Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos. Collective Creation in Contemporary Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013a. Syssoyeva, Kathyrn Mederos. A History of Collective Creation. New York: Palgrave, 2013b. Syssoyeva, Kathyrn Mederos and Proudfit, Scott, eds. Women, Collective Creation and Devised Performance: The Rise of Women Theatre Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Theatre Workshop. Oh What a Lovely War. London: Methuen, 2000. Tobey, Mark and Mathey, J. François. Mark Tobey: Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings and Drawings 1925–1961. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1962. Tynan, Kenneth. Alec Guinness. London: Theatre Book Club, 1953. Tynan, Kenneth. Tynan Right and Left: Plays, Films, People, Places and Events. London: Longmans, 1967. Ustinov, Peter. Dear Me. London: Arrow Books, 1998. Vilard-Gilles, Jean. Mon Demi-siècle. Lausanne: Payot, 1954. Wardle, Irving. The Theatres of George Devine. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Waters, Chris. ‘“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’. Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997): 207–38. Whyman, Rose. ‘Russian Delsartism and Michael Chekhov: The Search for the Eternal Type’. In The Routledge Companion to Michael Chekhov, edited by Marie-Christine Autant-Mathieu and Yana Meerzon, 267–81. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Williamson, Audrey. Old Vic Drama: A Twelve Years’ Study of Plays and Players. London: Rockliff, 1948. Williamson, Audrey. Theatre of Two Decades. London: Rockliff Publishing Corporation Ltd., 1951. Williamson, Audrey. Paul Rogers. London: Rockliff, 1956. Willson, Francis and Glenn, Michael. In Just Order Move: The Progress of the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance 1946–1996. London: The Athlone Press, 1997. Zucker, Carole, ed. In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting. London: A & C Black Ltd, 1999.

INDEX

7:84 theatre company 219 Aaron, Stephen 38–9 acting techniques 35–7, 136–7; English tradition 35 see also American Method Acting Actors’ Studio, the 133–5 actor training 1–10, 17–18, 35, 67, 76–7, 92, 110–11, 132–3, 302; improvisation 75; mime 75–6, 87; movement 54, 56–8, 59, 74–5, 87–8, 170–1; and race 137; technique 88–9; verse 55–6, 59; voice 54, 57, 59, 88–9, 118, 170–1 adaptation 162 Aeschylus 276–7 Albery, Bronson 69–70, 81–2 Albery, Donald 229, 233 Albina, Nadia 315–18 Alford, Geraldine 57 American Method Acting 36, 52, 131–14 see also acting techniques anarcho-syndicalism 282–5, 288–9 Anderson, Gillian 313, 316–17, 318 Andrews, Benedict 313–15, 316, 318–19 Anthroposophy 168–9 Arnold, Matthew 276–7, 280–2 Art of Movement Studio, the (Manchester) 245 Artaud, Antonin see Theatre of Cruelty Arts Council of Great Britain 29–30, 84, 221–3, 249–50, 301–2 Ashcroft, Peggy 40–1, 42–3, 44, 50, 79, 82

audience 285, 292, 310–11 Autant-Mathieu, Marie-Christine 199–200 Barker, Clive 221 Barker, Harley Granville 7–8 Barton, John 56, 60, 61, 236–8 Behan, Brendan: The Quare Fellow 225, 228 Berger, Henning: The Deluge 187 Berliner Ensemble 12 Besnard, Pierre 288 Beyond the Fringe 233 Bill, Leo 314, 320 Bing, Suzanne 6–7, 68–9 Blatchley, John 92, 120 Boner, Georgette 162–3 Boyd, Michael 307–8 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 220–1 bricolage 258–9, 302 British exceptionalism 233, 238 Brook, Peter 2–3, 58 Broome, John 58 Brown, Ivor 110 Bull, John 3 Bury, John 3, 219, 227, 234–8, 257 Butler, Judith 204 Byam Shaw, Glen 27–9, 85, 96–7; Macbeth 32–4 capitalism 209, 210, 284 Carnicke, Sharon 131 Certeau, Michel de 259–60 chartism 281

338

Index

Chayefsky, Paddy 157 see also Network (1970 film) Chekhov, Anton: The Cherry Orchard 38–51; The Seagull 4–5; Three Sisters 79–81, 111 Chekhov, Michael 4, 9, 18–19, 127–36, 161–92, 199–212, 303; the actor’s march 167–8; atmosphere 167, 175–8, 209–11; character 131–2, 146–7, 203–4; entirety 164; exercises 132, 176–7; gesture 136, 149, 167, 171–5, 180–4, 187–90, 204–5; Hamlet 206–8; harmony 161–2, 164, 171, 178–9, 187–8, 190; influence on film and television 137–55; invisible body 171–2; King Lear 192; Lessons for Teachers of his Acting Technique 128; Michael Chekhov Association [MICHA] 135–6; Michael Chekhov Drama Society 133; Michael Chekhov On the Art of Acting 128; Michael Chekhov Studio (New York, 1980) 133; pauses 151–5; performances: Hamlet 206–8; Khlestakov 9, 172; polarity 139–41; The Possessed 185–6, 188–90, 191; Psychological Gesture [PG] 136, 167, 173, 188; scaffolding 180–1; ‘sketches’ 178–85; A Spanish Evening 186; and studio theatres 199–200; To the Actor 128–31; triplicity 139–41 Chekhov Theatre Studio [CTS] 3, 17, 18–19, 127–31, 133, 135, 136, 137, 149, 151, 155, 157, 165–71, 173, 177–85 200–2, 208–9, 211–12, 301, 302–3, 304, 305–7; closure of 190–2; curriculum 161–5; productions 185–90; uniform 205–6 Chilton, Charles: The Long, Long Trail 226, 229–30, 231 choreography see dance Chronegk, Ludwig 12 Clark, Alan 231 class 38, 230–2, 278–82, 284, 291 collaboration 108, 164, 184–6, 226, 262, 288–9 see also ensemble theatre making La Compagnie des Quinze 10, 69 Cook, Peter see Beyond the Fringe Cooper, George 221 Copeau, Jacques 6–8, 10, 14, 68–70 Les Copiaus theatre company 10, 68–9 costume 39–41, 147, 235 Court Theatre 7 Crouch, Tim 14–15 Cusack, Cyril 151, 154

dance 74–5, 165, 170, 265–6 Dartington Hall 9, 127, 161, 165–7, 169–71, 208 see also Chekhov Theatre Studio David Lewis Theatre 248–9 Delaney, Shelagh: A Taste of Honey 228, 292–4, 295 Deleuze, Gilles 176 Democritus 286 Dench, Judi 42, 44–6 design, theatre 32, 37–8, 70, 76–7, 89, 94–5, 106, 129, 226–7, 234–8, 255, 257–8, 260, 263–4, 316 Devine, George 3, 27–31, 51–2, 67, 75, 83–7, 91, 92–3, 94, 96–8, 107, 111–12, 114, 119–20 devising practices 17 Dewey, John 19–20, 108–12, 115–17, 305; artists 108; experience 109, 315; pragmatic intelligence 19 director training 89–90 disability 315–16 Doone, Rupert: theatre as ‘social force’ 77–8 Dossor, Alan 218 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Possessed 185–6, 188–90, 191 Dotrice, Roy 42 Douglas, Bill 218 Dunaway, Faye 144–5 East 15 Acting School 4, 218 economy of movement and gesture 149 Eisenstein, Sergei 227 English Stage Company see Royal Court Theatre ensemble theatre making 11–15, 56, 69, 74, 78–81, 82, 84, 223, 303–5, 307–9 see also collaboration Esher, Lord (Reginald Brett) 97–8 eurythmy 171, 204 experimentation 109, 111–12; experimental theatre practice 275–7, 279, 305, 315 Farrah, Abd’El Kader 106 First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre 6, 9, 14 Fisher, Mark 209–10 Fisher, Tony 278 Foucault, Michel 223–4, 232; dispositif (apparatus) 223–4, 225

Index

Gaskill, William 31, 52–3 gender 38, 44, 70, 117–21, 204, 207; gender binary 181–2; gendered division of labour 70, 118, 305–6 Gielgud, John 32–3, 39–40, 76, 79, 80–1, 110, 299–300 Gilbert, Jeremy 323 Gilroy, Paul 290 Goodwin, John 2, 61 see also RSC Goorney, Howard 254–5 Goya, Francisco 74–5 Gramsci, Antonio 202–3, 205, 306; hegemony 203–4, 206, 208–11, 279–82 Green, John 231–2 Greene, Harry 256–8, 260 Grotowski, Jerzy 17 Group Theatre, the 11, 77–9 Guattari, Félix 176 Guinness, Alex 34, 36–7, 120 Guthrie, Tyrone 97, 99 Hagen, Uta 35–6 Hall, George 89 Hall, Peter 1–3, 51–9, 61, 145–54, 226, 234, 238–9; Wars of the Roses 219, 226, 234–9 Haraway, Donna 117, 270 Harding, Sandra 117, 282, 289–90, 294 Hartsock, Nancy 289–90 Heath, Edward 233 hegemony 203–4, 206, 208–11, 279–82; counter-hegemony 281–2, 285, 292, 295 see also Gramsci hierarchy, in theatre 38, 44, 76, 84, 107, 113, 116–20, 182, 186–7, 211, 269–70, 280, 303, 306, 312, 314, 318–19 Holden, William 139 Holdsworth, Nadine 221, 222, 223, 267, 277 Holm, Ian 45, 147, 149, 150, 155, 236 Holmes, Sean 309–15, 319–20 homophobia 293–4 hooks, bell 117, 290 Horwood, Joel 319–20 Hunt, Hugh 95–7 Hurst, Deirdre 19, 127–8, 165, 182–3 Hytner, Nicholas 308–9 improvisation 52, 58, 60, 75, 178–9, 227–8, 244, 320 individualism 210 Ingold, Tim 18, 174–6, 177, 203, 252, 256, 260–1; meshworks 260–1; wayfaring 252–6, 259, 320

339

Jayston, Michael 150, 154 jazz music 292 Joas, Hans 109–11 Jooss, Kurt 165, 170 Joseph, Stephen: Studio Theatre Company 11 Kennedy, Dennis 220 Knowles, Ric 16, 132–3 Kruger, Loren 278 labour: anonymous 232; collaborative 181; co-operative 284; division of 15, 260; gendered division of 70, 118, 305–6; immaterial 324 Leach, Robert 220 Leigh, Vivien 34 Leonce, Adelle 317 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 258 liberalism 208, 276–8, 280–2 Littlewood, Joan 10, 15, 18, 219–21, 223, 225–31, 244–6, 252–3, 259–70, 275–6, 279, 281, 292–3, 303, 309 Liverpool (city) 248–9 Living Theatre 12 Lloyd, David 278–80, 282 London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art [LAMDA] 58 London Theatre Studio [LTS] 10, 16–17, 28, 50–1, 53–4, 58, 61, 70–7, 79–84, 99, 107–11, 116–17, 119, 302, 305–7 Lumet, Sidney: Network 138–45 Lyric, Hammersmith 309–12, 320 see also Secret Theatre MacColl, Ewan 10, 218, 229, 262–3, 285; Johnny Noble 290–1; The Other Animals 261–7, 276; Uranium 235 285–9 Macmillan, Harold 233 Magito, Suria 74–5, 87–8, 90, 91, 118 Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faustus 56–7 masculinity 151 masks/mask work 52 materialism 14–15, 20 McGrath, John 218–19 Merchant, Vivien 155, 156 Merlin, Joanna 133 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 4–6, 13 Mill, John Stuart 281–2 mime 75, 87 Mitchell, Yvonne 34, 73–5 Molière 276–7 montage 227, 228 see also Eisenstein Montague, Lee 87

340

Index

Morton, Timothy: subscendence 304 Moscow Art Theatre 4–6, 13–14, 42, 200 Motley (theatre designers) 70–1 Murcell, George 47–9 Murphy, Brian 227–8 music 11, 176–7, 207, 229, 243, 292–4 music hall 278, 292 National Theatre [NT] 3, 30–1, 308–9 National Theatre Studio 308–9 nationalism 182, 232 Network (1970 film) 138–45 Newlove, Jean 245, 246, 257, 265–6 nuclear warfare 232, 285 Obey, André: Noah 71, 112–13 Old Vic Theatre Centre [OVC] 17, 27–9, 50–1, 58, 61, 84–7, 90–9, 107–9, 111–12, 114–19, 301–2, 304, 305–7; Experimental Theatre [EXP] 85–6, 91–4, 99 Old Vic Theatre Company 27, 29, 32, 79, 84–6, 92–9, 111, 114, 116 Old Vic Theatre School [OVS] 27, 87–90, 92, 118–19 Olivier, Laurence 32–8, 236 Ormesby Hall 253–4 Paget, Derek 226–7, 229–30 paternalism 70, 106, 113–14 patriarchy 205 patronage 301 Pearce, Katherine 315 Peirce, Charles Sanders 108 Petit, Lenard 136 Phoenix Theatre 81–2 Pinter, Harold: The Homecoming 145–55 Pioneer Theatres 222–3 see also Theatre Workshop Pitches, Jonathan 179 Plowright, Joan 119–20 Poliakoff, Vera 70, 106 politics of artistic practice 269–70, 302 Pooley, Ernest 29 postcolonialism 289 Pouget, Emile 285 Powers, Mala 130 pragmatism 19, 106, 108–12, 114–17, 305–6, 323 see also Dewey, John and Peirce, Charles Sanders ‘Preparation’, Steiner 169 Queen’s Theatre 79, 299–300

race/racism 137, 289, 292–4, 317–18 Radosavljević , Duška 11–13, 15–16 Raffles, Gerry 222–5, 229, 246, 248–50, 256, 266, 280f Rainis, Jan: The Golden Steed 180–2 Rancière, Jacques 90 realism 35, 82, 228, 266 Redgrave, Michael 28, 34–7, 68, 82, 110 Rees, Llewellyn 95–7 rehearsals 44, 46, 80–1, 320 representationalism 280–1 Rigby, Terence 154, 155 Rocker, Rudolf 283–4, 288–9 Rogers, Paul 137–8, 145–57, 164, 205 Royal Academy of Dramatic Art [RADA] see Tree, Herbert Beerbohm academy Royal Court Theatre 3, 11, 29–30, 51–2, 107, 114 Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers [REME] 257 Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC] 1–3, 11, 51–61, 234, 307–8; Wars of the Roses 219, 226, 234–9 Royal Shakespeare Company Experimental Group 2–3, 58 Royal Shakespeare Company Studio 2–3, 53–61, 307–8 Sadler’s Wells Opera 3 Saint-Denis, Michel 2–4, 7, 9, 10, 18, 27–8, 51–61, 67–99, 106–7, 109–16, 119, 245–6; and actors 109–12; The Cherry Orchard 36–7, 38–51; Danse De la Ville et des Champs 69; and designers 37–8, 70; and directing 116; habit 74–5; living theatre 85; Macbeth 32–3; Noah 71, 112–13; rehearsal process 44, 46, 80–1; style 31–3, 35, 77, 89–92, 114–15; Theatre: The Rediscovery of Style 67; Three Sisters 79–81, 111, 300; Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises 67, 75, 92; transformation 37–8, 44; Twelfth Night 82; The White Guard 81–2; The Witch of Edmonton 79 Saint-Denis, Suria see Magito, Suria Salaman, Chattie 120 Salaman, Michael 106–7 Scase, David 257–8 scenic environment 147–9 Scott, Harold 137 Second World War 232; impact on studio theatres 84, 190

Index

Secret Theatre 309–23; A Series of Increasingly Impossible Acts 319–23; A Streetcar Named Desire 313–20 Shakespeare, William 53, 237–9, 276–7; Hamlet 206–8; Henry VI 237–8; Romeo and Juliet 320; Macbeth 32–4, 36; Richard II 267–8 Shankar, Uday 165–6 Shdanoff, George 186, 188–9 Shepherd, Simon 116 silence 154–5 Sinclair, Moira 311–12 Smith, Dorothy E. 118–19 social purpose of theatre 163–4 solidarity 289 Sonrel, Pierre 94 Spanish Civil War 283–4 speech 151, 170–1 standpoint feminism 283, 290–1, 294–5, 306, 318–19, 323 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 4–8, 13–14, 17, 42, 131, 172, 266; An Actor Prepares 81–2; My Life in Art 81–2 Steiner, Rudolf 167–9, 170–1 Stephens, Simon: Three Kingdoms 309, 310–11 Straight, Beatrice 127, 138–47 Strasberg, Lee 35–6, 131–2 subsidised theatre 300 see also Arts Council of Great Britain Sulerzhitsky, Leopold 14 Syssoyeva, Kathryn Mederos 12–13, 16 Theatre of Cruelty 58 Théâtre des Nations festival 220–1 Theatre Royal, Stratford East 217, 224–5 Theatre Union 217, 243–4 Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier 6–7, 9–10 Theatre Workshop 3, 4, 217–26, 243–71, 275–95, 301–3, 304, 307; and acting 266–9; Arden of Faversham 220–1;

341

community engagement 247; ‘From Kendal to Berlin’ 252–3, 275–6; Johnny Noble 290–1; legacy of 218–19, 236–7, 239; manifesto 243–4; and military service 257; Oh What a Lovely War 217–18, 219, 226–32, 294; The Other Animals 261–7, 276; political critique 230–3, 243–4, 277; Richard II 267–8; set design 260; and the studio tradition 245; A Taste of Honey 228, 292–4, 295; touring practices 250–6, 291; training programme 244–7, 250; Uranium 235 285–9; West End productions 223 Thomas, Paul 278–80, 282 Tobey, Mark 169–70 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm academy 76 tréteau nu (bare stage) 6 Tutin, Dorothy 45, 49 Tynan, Kenneth 15, 31, 33–4, 292, 294 Vakhtangov, Yevgeny 172 vanguardism 116–17 voice 54–5, 57, 59, 74, 86, 77, 87–9, 118, 141, 146, 170–1, 315 War Horse 308–9 Watson, Marion 89 wayfaring 252–6, 259, 320 see also Ingold, Tim Webster, David 249–50 Williams, Clifford 54, 56–7 Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire 313–20 Wilson, Harold 233 xenophobia 98 Young, Henry Lyon: A Spanish Evening 186 Young Vic company 85–6, 91–2, 97, 111, 313, 316, 318–19