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Taking Stock - The Theatre of Max Stafford-Clark
By Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark
Nick Hern Books £14.99
265 pages
Dateline: 14th February, 2007
Taking Stock offers a rare opportunity to get inside the mind
of one of British theatre's most original practitioners. For the past
forty years, Max Stafford-Clark has kept journals recording his activities
as a theatre director and this book takes these and builds on them to
provide a fascinating view of an incredibly diverse body of work.
The book opens with Stafford-Clark's arrival at Edinburgh's Traverse
Theatre in 1966, then far more fringy than it is today, where, within
two years, he graduated from stage manager to become the artistic director.
Already, he had picked up ideas working with La Mama in New York, which
was a good introduction to radical ideas in theatre.
Taking Stock then follows his career through the creation of
Joint Stock with the greatest influence on his career Bill Gaskill,
to the longest reign ever by an artistic director at the Royal Court
and, from 1993, his long and successful period running Out Of Joint,
initially with the indefatigable Sonia Friedman.
At times, this book can feel a little like a scrapbook with extracts
from diaries, interviews with Stafford-Clark and those who have been
key players through his theatrical life, but perhaps most valuable of
all, case studies of nine of his seminal productions.
It is also in the nature of both Stafford-Clark and this analysis of
his work that quite often what appears to be a section on one topic
will delve off into another, usually illuminating the subsidiary subject
as well as the ostensible one to great effect.
Perhaps the classic example is the section on Caryl Churchill's Serious
Money, produced while Stafford-Clark was at the Royal Court in the
midst of perhaps the greatest crisis of his life. He unwisely decided
to programme a play called Perdition by Jim Allen and having
discovered that it was potentially an explosively anti-Semitic work,
he ended up fighting his board, led by the unsympathetic publisher,
Matthew Evans.
Eventually, and with great courage, he pulled Perdition at the
last minute, making numerous enemies and winning few friends by doing
so. It is remarkable that Serious Money eventually came together
and is now remembered as one of the best stage representations of the
Thatcher era.
The real pleasure in reading Taking Stock is finding out about
this director's novel approach to his work. In true communist style,
he created Joint Stock as a collective in which all decisions were,
at least theoretically, made by the whole company. In practice, this
was no way to create or cast a production and it did not really fit
in with the autocratic directing habits that came naturally to Stafford-Clark,
and one would imagine to almost any other director worthy of the name.
The collaborative approach did create some memorable plays including
David Hare's Fanshen about a primitive Chinese village and, contrastingly,
Howard Brenton's Epsom Downs looking into the luxury end of Horseracing.
The attitudes of the actors and the ways in which artistic decisions
were made make for fascinating reading and include such bit-part players
as Antony Sher and Simon Callow, both now theatrical knights.
Just as interesting as the collaborative and verbatim pieces is a section
on Andrea Dunbar and Rita, Sue and Bob Too. The tragic tale of
a girl from Yorkshire who was pregnant in her early teens, became a
writer by chance and died before she was 30 is unrolled at the same
time as her director explains what it took to bring her plays on to
the stage.
One worries that the world does not create people like Max Stafford-Clark
any more and, if that is the case, Theatre will be much the poorer.
The book closes with the story of his African Macbeth but that
is hardly likely to be the final chapter in the career of this colourful
and inventive man.
Taking Stock is a fine and entertaining tribute to him and to
so many memorable productions by some of the greatest and most radical
playwrights of the last four decades, led by Caryl Churchill but with
a great supporting cast including Sebastian Barry, Mark Ravenhill, Timberlake
Wertenbaker and, of course, William Shakespeare.
Philip Fisher
Articles from 2007
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