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Devised Theatre - What's it Worth?Dateline: 23rd May, 2004Last month someone wrote on our Forum, "Can anyone enlighten me: what's the value of Devised Theatre?" I replied, but there's been no response from the original enquirer. Either my reply was so devastatingly powerful that (s)he was forever silenced or (more likely!) (s)he hasn't bothered to come back to read the replies. It's actually a very British question because our concept of theatre is very text-based and we have a very high regard for the playwright. To an extent, of course, that's true everywhere, and every culture is proud of its great dramatists, but in many parts of the western world, particularly Eastern Europe, the last century saw the emergence and flowering of a theatre which is based not upon words but upon images and symbols. The linear flow of text-based drama gives way to an almost impressionist succession of visual (and often verbal) symbols. This has led to what we often refer to as physical theatre, which overlaps with dance on the one hand and mime on the other. It's a vast spectrum, which includes such diverse work as the performances by Russian company Derevo and the work of people like Belgian choreographer/director Wim Vanderkybus, and both of these develop their work through a collaborative process, involving all the members of the company. In North America, too, we had the growth of improvisation as a theatrical form. It's been used here, of course, as part of acting training and for the exploration of ideas and emotions for decades, but the US was the first to make it a public performance. Now, through TV programmes such as Whose Line Is It Anyway? and companies like Improbable Theatre, impro has become a part (albeit small) of the British theatre and entertainment scene. So there is a strand of theatre, even in the UK, which is moving away - indeed, has moved away - from the single-author/text-based piece. More than forty years ago, Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East created Oh What Lovely War, working collaboratively with each other and with writer Charles Chilton. Much more recently, in 2002, Matthew Bourne created Play Without Words at the National Theatre, a piece which uses dance and physical theatre to tell a story from a number of points of view simultaneously. In the UK, however, we do tend to be fixated on the writer model and yet it is not inherently superior to any other. In the hands of a great writer, then clearly it works brilliantly - one only needs to look at Shakespeare (or any other great dramatist, whether British or from elsewhere) to see that - but it is not the only model. We accept, for example, that two or more writers can combine their talents to produce a great piece of theatre - look at Beaumont and Fletcher, Waterhouse and Hall, George and Ira Gershwin - so why can't a piece which is a collaboration between a larger number of people be equally as effective? Ah, you may well say, but look at Oh What a Lovely War, it had a single writer, Charles Chilton. True, but he was part of the collaboration and the final text was based upon the research and exploration (including improvisation) of the whole company. There are, it must be admitted, dreadful devised pieces, but then there are dreadful pieces written by single authors - and I've seen a few in my time! One might even say that it is more difficult to produce a coherent piece when there are a number of creators - the words "cooks" and "broth" spring to mind - but to suggest, as the contributor to the Forum seems to do, that a devised piece is somehow a lesser breed is, I think, wrong: there is no reason why a devised piece cannot be great theatre. Theatre, after all, is a collaborative art: all the devising process does is take that collaboration a step further. Articles Indices:
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