THEATRE PRACTICE AND PERFORMANCE RESEARCH

(Theatre Quarterly Volume VIII. Number 30. 1978)

The British theatre has always tended to be long on practice and short on theory. If there has to be a
priority, then that clearly is the correct one. The British theatre has managed quite nicely, thank you, to
produce a vital and prestigious body of productions and performances throughout a great deal of its
history without any clear idea why this should be so. The manifestations of this have occasionally
been astonishing. Who could have foreseen the flood of dramatists, producing work of an
extraordinary variety, who suddenly appeared post-1956? What student of form would have gambled
that after the student upheavals in the mid-1960s it would have been the British theatre that would
emerge as the most prolific and potent in Western Europe?

In the words of one leading director: 'Surely what makes the English theatre work is that we do it, we
don't spend hours talking and writing about it. Bookstalls all over Europe groan under the weight of
theatre journals, magazines, articles, records etc., etc. And the theatres are either half-empty or the
standard rotten, or both.' To add further point to his opinions, the director in question was at that time
working as a guest in a European theatre. Whilst I personally would question his argument, there can
be no doubt that he has a case that deserves to be answered and which is representative of a long
tradition stretching back to the days of the Elizabethan companies touring Europe, in which we have
consistently exported good theatre whilst maintaining almost an import embargo on foreign influences
- or so the general opinion goes.

I say this because the British theatre seems not only oblivious to influences from abroad but largely
ignorant of its own history. Thus John Arden can assert that there was no political theatre between the
Restoration and the post-Second World War period, an opinion that, although manifestly untrue, has
not prevented Arden from being both an accomplished and politically committed playwright. Nor did it
inhibit him and Margaretta D'Arcy from writing The Ballygombeen Bequest, which, despite his
apparent devaluing of history, will go down to future generations as one of the major works of political
theatre. An apparent ignorance of the pre-war agit-prop tradition has similarly not prevented John
McGrath from re-inventing the form and utilizing it in a more imaginative and flexible manner than it
ever was before.

To some extent we are stuck in a vicious circle. If the theatre itself has found little use for history,
theory, and (ultimately, one must say) for criticism, the scholars and critics have found little, if any,
purchase on the theatre. A mutual distrust divides two worlds, and this is in itself a further division of
the basic dualism afflicting both. We have a theatre which has resolutely seen itself as removed and
unaffected by the social and political change in society around it, and a world of scholarship which has
largely through its writings maintained the illusion of this dualism.

Curiously, prevailing attitudes have failed to recognize the contradictions that arise from this way of
thinking. The profession has a low regard for the ivory-tower writings of scholars or their opinions.
Academics retain a snobbish disdain for the efforts of a theatre struggling to keep alive in the market-
place. Among the more bizarre manifestations of this is the fact that more scholarly and critical
attention is being directed to contemporary British theatre abroad than at home. It may have been
cold comfort to the conference of political theatre artists and groups meeting at the Oval House last
October, anxiously considering their relevance and influence, to reassure them that their work is being
taken very seriously in Eastern Europe, for example, but it is a fact.

The other side of the coin is the vitriolic and highly personal attack mounted by Charles Marowitz
upon John Russell Brown in Plays and Players. It surely matters nothing if Brown is an amateur,
professional, or semi-professional. What matters is whether the ideas he puts forward in Free
Shakespeare have any validity. And, there again. Brown's position in the National Theatre hierarchy
seems to have brought us no nearer to discovering the proof of the pudding. It is paradoxical that as
drama and theatre arts courses increase in Britain the contextual knowledge of what is actually
happening now seems to decrease.

The experience I write from is that of regularly interviewing students for university entrance whose
knowledge of the contemporary drama stretches little beyond Look Back in Anger than occasional
flirtations with Pinter. The abstractions of scholarship begin very early when such limited knowledge is
combined in an applicant who expresses confusion at the fact that her course teaches her that
Pirandello has been a major influence on the European theatre, but no-one ever does his plays and
the scripts are difficult to get hold of. The publishing industry at large is letting us down badly at the
moment over simple primers, but the dissemination of material on the current British theatre is
essential to inform the nascent interest of young people who have little or no access to first-hand
experience. It is also necessary for those teachers who are struggling to widen the horizons of their
students, but who lack documentation and teaching materials.

Brecht is easy to teach; if anything there has been too much critical writing on Brecht that wanders off
into abstractions when the basic ideas the man was promulgating have not yet been fully absorbed.
But where is the documentation on Pip Simmons, Mike Leigh, Shared Experience? Innovations in the
British theatre are not being made accessible to the next generation, except within the limited areas of
spasmodic tours.

Can we blame the next generation if it goes on to reinvent the same mistakes and fails to capitalize on
the achievements? It seems clear that that is happening. The upsurge of student theatre in the late-
1960s has had an enormous influence on the structure and style of work of the established theatre,
but as far as the contemporary student theatre is concerned it might as well never have happened.
We are almost back where we were before it all started. Will some bright future student re-invent The
People Show in total ignorance of what Welfare State is doing? It is several years now since we had a
serious review of their work, and in education three years is a generation.

In the universities, more and more drama departments are being set up, but fewer theatre scholars
seem to be emerging. The old guard go on publishing, usually through specialist theatre journals with
very limited circulations. The younger students gravitate more and more towards the theatre itself, and
this may well reflect the fact that no valid outlets exist in which they can usefully employ their training.
To some extent the nature of universities and the direction of the courses allow no useful outlets to
emerge. Clive Swift has 'deplored the entry of university graduates into tin- profession, and in the
short term I would probably agree with him, both in terms of unemployment in the profession and in
terms of the struggling graduates competing for work on unequal terms with trained actors. But in the
long term Darwin's laws will work inexorably, and the fittest will survive at the expense of a great deal
of talent and ability wasted. The clock cannot be put back, however. In schools and colleges more and
more drama and theatre arts courses are being set up. This must reflect a growing interest at large.
Whatever the problems, this interest must be fostered in the interests of the theatre, whether it be in
growing audiences or more practitioners.

The economic and structural problems of the professional theatre arc well documented by now and,
whilst not pretending that they will be easy to overcome or denying the importance of carrying on an
unrelenting campaign to strengthen the theatre, both as a source of entertainment and as a social
institution, I should like to concentrate here on the critical and educational needs and possibilities and
the function that Theatre Quarterly might have. I say 'might have' because it would obviously be a
foolish illusion to believe that any theatre journal can to any extent control its own destiny. There are
certain initiatives that an editorial board can take in commissioning writing and in selecting from
manuscripts submitted, but ultimately the first prerequisite of a strong theatre journal is a strong
theatre, and even then it is only as strong as the material its contributors submit.

If practitioners refuse to engage in areas of theory, critics grind personal axes, and scholars engage in
areas of historical minutiae which cannot be made relevant to the contemporary practice, then clearly
a journal chooses between publishing or going out of existence. It could, of course, alternatively
transform itself into a journal of coterie scholarship with self-justifying standards of excellence in the
field of theatre research, but I think that would be a pity.

There is a place, between the specialist journals which exist for those of us who get pleasure and
interest from theatre archaeology and the informed journalism of Plays and Players, for a theatre
journal which conceives its function as being effective in the theatre and in education at large. The
boundaries overlap to some extent. Plays and Players has become a much more responsible and
informative magazine in recent years, which is welcome. Theatre Research International and Theatre
Notebook are becoming oriented towards theatre practice. Useful functions for Theatre Quarterly
might well be to put more competitive pressure on Plays and Players in terms of a wider appeal, and
to provide a wider circulation for ideas and research originating in the specialist journals. This middle
ground has been held quite successfully by Theatre Quarterly - which is not to say that it could not
hold it more effectively, or even that it has yet found the most effective way of conceiving its function.

The question that remains to be answered is, how can a theatre journal best serve the theatre it
supports and feeds upon? And in many ways we run up against the other two crucial divorces that
characterize the situation in this country. The theatre critic is isolated in the world of journalism,
commenting from a detached position and largely considered a parasite by the profession. It is very
interesting to see how Martin Esslin, coming from a different tradition, manages successfully to
transcend the boundaries of journalism, scholarship, and practice but there have been few native
takers for the concept.

Then there is no academy tradition in Britain - or rather, the areas of theatre and literature remain
removed from it. By this I mean institutions for research and scholarship which, in spite of any
dualistic separation of the arts from society, contain under one roof scholars of many disciplines and
which, on the continent, have also contained practitioners. The strength of many continental theatre
journals is that they build on this tradition, and upon a much more responsible regard for the theatre
critic.

This is particularly true of France, where the house journals of a number of Centres Dramatiques or
Maisons de la Culture provide a forum for debate about the theatre engaging critics, scholars, and
practitioners, although again the boundaries between the professions are often difficult to define. The
French decentralization programme is running into difficult political problems, internal and external,
but theatre workers there are in a much stronger position to maintain a defensive campaign against
bureaucratic intervention, and the documentation put out by the various theatres has built up an
informed and partisan audience which can be marshalled in this defence.

Perhaps the major problem to be faced by a British theatre journal is to convince scholars that it is a
serious organ for publication, and to convince the profession that it is not parasitically trying to leech
off them to their ultimate detriment. It is in the interests of the theatre companies themselves to foster
this interest. Thus, the one theatre company that is widely known about is the Victoria Theatre-in-the-
Round at Stoke, because Peter Cheeseman has made himself available for documentation and for
theoretical discussion: and of all the copies of Theatre Quarterly on my shelves the one most used is
Number 1, which contains the casebook on "The Staffordshire Rebels" along with a history of the
company and a long, serious article by Peter Cheeseman on his work and the theatre-in-the-round
form.

The casebook form has many snags, as has the straight interview, and perhaps we need a more
imaginative approach to documentation. I appreciate the difficulties of writing about work whilst one is
still doing it, and the suspicion of 'journalists' or 'critics' infiltrating work in progress without being able
to evaluate it in its own terms: but the fact that there are problems to be solved does not devalue the
necessity for the attempt to be made.

The reluctance of British theatre artists to objectivize the theory behind their practice seems serious
when set against the situation in other countries. It does not seem to have inhibited Gorki,
Stanislavski, Brecht, Grotowski in their work in the least to have written works of theory. I would not
like to move towards the American situation where theorizing seems to have largely taken the place of
practice, but that is unlikely to happen anyway. As it is, when one constructs any sort of reading list for
study the one British book that has any strong claims to a place is Peter Brook's The Empty Space.
There was a heady period during the life of Encore when theoretical questions were aired in public,
but the breakthrough has never been consolidated. It badly needs reviving.

But perhaps there is more to this than simply pressing artists to write about their work. In Britain there
is no established tradition or language for writing about theatre practice. There are fine theatre
historians who have consistently made noises about the necessity for studying the past theatre within
the social context of its times, and fine critics of dramatic literature who have outlined the
inadequacies of studying the text without studying the play in performance, but as yet no-one has
more than tentatively laid down any indications as to what the methodology should be in either of
these areas. As a result, the educational system goes on teaching dramatic literature as literature, and
theatre history as quarantined archaeology. Passing through this educational system and working
alongside it, small wonder that artists are depreciative of its value but still lacking in an alternative
approach.

There is a wider need for a new methodology through which to study performance. The argument for
the subsidizing of innovative groups depends on a case being made out for support in areas of work
that do not conform to existing patterns and cannot be described in prevailing terminology. If the
problem with theatre students is that a play is a play is a play, whether performed by Shared
Experience, Moving Being, or the Birmingham Rep, the complementary problem is how to persuade
the Arts Council of the validity of one-off projects against continuous touring? The Pip Simmons
group suffers badly in this respect because there are no established precedents for what they want to
do, and part of the problem is that there is no established critical methodology or vocabulary for
validating it. And among newspaper critics there seems to be no real understanding of what it is that
they are doing.

Apart from the murky areas of subsidy, politics, and the destructive effect of critics, there is a
necessity to combat the traditional and dead patterns of education and, perhaps, a necessity to
educate the audience. The idea will, perhaps, be repugnant to many at first acquaintance, but it is not
a new one. At many points in history, artists have found it necessary to destroy the old aesthetics and
theatre forms in order to institute the new - and that means re-educating the audience or failing to
.progress. The process is, of course, two-way: one has to learn with the audience. The only purpose
in constructing theories is to put them into practice, and the only possible basis for theory is practice. I
think the debate needs widening beyond the hit-and-miss experience of performance pure and simple.

The traditional values of dramatic literature and theatre history are in any case still largely ingrained in
our practice, in spite of all the innovations of the last twenty years in many areas - changing company
structures; new acting styles; freer dramatic structures in the plays; new areas of thematic material;
and the questioning of accepted relationships between the theatre and society and the strategies for
changing these.

Thus if John Arden can believe that there was no political theatre between the Restoration and 1956,
a large part of the reason is that theatre historians have until now rarely looked for that history. A wide
ranging debate is now going on about the political significance of theatre. The old dualistic separation
of theatre from society is wilting under sledge-hammer blows from all points of the political and
sociological compass. A great deal of theatre history needs revising in the light of this debate.

It has begun to happen in the area of the nineteenth century, faintly in the seventeenth century, not at
all in the eighteenth century, and curiously very little in the twentieth. If the theatre can find little use
for works of historical scholarship, perhaps we have the wrong theatre history. The further one reads
into past and present work of foreign scholars it seems, for instance, that the whole world has learned
its dramatic techniques from Shakespeare, and the British have not. There are certainly developments
in contemporary British drama which have been imported from Brecht who learned them from
Shakespeare in the first place.

One crucial area is that of the popular tradition. There seems to be little idea in Britain of what the
popular tradition is. At least two conferences in recent years have tied themselves in knots trying to
define what the word 'popular' means, and it is often very painful to watch theatre companies equate
the popular tradition with some botched-up mugging version of the Edwardian music hall, as though
this has some talismanic guarantee of appealing to a working-class audience - who get their popular
culture from Benny Hill and Shirely Bassey, not from Leonard Sachs.

One virtue of working towards a critical methodology of performance is that it should force us to look
at all areas of performance, the 'illegitimate' ones as well as the 'legit' (to mention yet one more
destructive area of dualism in a British theatre hallowed by tradition).

The chronicling of the current theatre is also needed to present the British theatre abroad. To a certain
extent theatre is exported through the various tours made, individual directors fulfilling engagements
and the performance of British plays in translation. In some cases, to our shame, British companies
are better known and respected in Western Europe than they are at home, a long-standing tradition
which stretches back past the early days of Theatre Workshop just after the war, past Sean O'Casey,
at least as far back as Edward Gordon Craig, all of whom were taken much more seriously outside
Britain. To name but one area, anyone who has recently travelled in Eastern Europe must be aware of
the strong and growing interest there in the British theatre, together with the paucity of information
about it.

To give one specific instance, as a result of my own personal involvement with the country and the
strenuous efforts of people in official institutions there, the Bradford College of Art Theatre Group and
Albert Hunt have recently toured the GDR with The Destruction of Dresden Show, documentation of
which will appear in the next issue of Theatre Quarterly. On the one hand there is the bizarre fact that
the group has not performed publicly in this country for five years and had to be reassembled for the
visit, plus the stimulation of playing to very enthusiastic audiences, a large percentage of whom were
anxious to engage in long and serious post-performance discussion of the group's work. On the other
hand there is the almost equally bizarre fact which emerged from the discussion in Berlin, when the
chairman praised the group for its courage in treating historical material in such an imaginative and
highly metaphorical way. The only reply it was possible for Hunt to make was to point out that the
impulse had come from Germany in the first place, since it derived from Brecht. The future
possibilities implicit in that exchange are considerable for both sides.

It will not be long before other British groups are approached to tour. In spite of the revival of the cold
war and the erosion of detente, the theatre is going international again and wider louring is becoming
possible. Whatever efforts can be made through the revived British Centre of the ITI will be made (a
sufficient reason in itself for re-establishing it), but in many cases the first contacts are going to be
through the interest aroused by the written word.

I cannot believe that insularity from the rest of the world and from our history is in any way productive.
It may be that at the moment we have a thriving and vigorous native theatre which may well be the
envy of most of the world but complacency will get us nowhere. Would we not have had a much
stronger theatre through the first half of this century if we had been influenced by what was happening
on the continent and in America? It was a peculiar accident of timing that the recognition of Brecht
came with the visit of the Berliner Ensemble in 1956, when the British theatre was at last on the move
again. But Brecht had already been working in Berlin for nine years then, not to mention the pre-war
work. What did we gain from being insular? The style of free-wheeling, anti-establishment student
theatre that we threw up around 1968 and which contributed so much to the development of
alternative theatre was fully (and often more imaginatively) developed in Poland in 1957, and we
could have learned a great deal from it.

Reading about theatre is no real substitute for seeing it, but in the present economic condition of the
theatre in this country we are unlikely to see any revival of touring on the scale of the World Theatre
Season, or even the occasional guest visits to the National Theatre - though it could be argued that, in
the main, these visits were by prestigious companies and were confined to London, opportunities to
see them being limited and many innovative companies never making the trip.

If ideas and new methods arise, no matter where, communication about them should circulate: the
stipulation should be, however, that they do not circulate in abstract form. The approach should be
comparative and relate what is specific in one cultural context to what is usable in another. There
seems only a limited viability in having a French literature or cultural scholar document Théâtre
Quotidien if he knows nothing about similar attempts to work in community theatre in this country.

The main priority of Theatre Quarterly should be to encourage and foster whatever attempts are being
made to break down the fragmentation I have outlined above. The second should be to take whatever
steps possible to initiate new attempts. In the harsh world of the theatre which, naturally, theatre
journals inhabit, one tends to get hit hard for failures and very rarely praised for qualified successes,
and I would not wish the forward-looking tone of this piece to reflect adversely on the present or past
editorial board of TQ. In many respects their initiative calling into being the British Theatre Institute, in
creating Theatre Facts and New Plays, and now in reviving the steps toward a British Playwrights
Conference, gives them a track record second to none, although, in this fragmented society, the
failures, dissensions and the difficulties tend to get more prominence than the achievements and the
intentions.

There is a need for an extended British Theatre Centre and Institute even if, at present, the
establishment of this seems difficult to visualize. The British Centre of the ITI will certainly fail after its
initial two-year mandate unless it is proved viable not so much in cash terms, but in terms of the use
that is made of it. At first sight a British Playwrights Conference perhaps conjures up an image of
talking heads, but there have been moves in many other countries to assist the playwright which go
way beyond our own. They need to be tried or at least explored. Curiously, in France, the initiative in
providing facilities for new playwrights to get public readings, rehearsals of their work and, sometimes,
performances has come through Théâtre Ouvert, from Lucien Attoun, a critic.

In spite of all the economic problems, the British theatre is in a better state of health than at any time
in my remembered lifetime. A lot of its problems and confusions are a sign of its health as it struggles
with obstacles to change, both within itself and in society at large. Ultimately it is through the work
carried out that its future lies. But there is much that can be done in secondary capacities to assist this
work and to prepare the way for future progress.