Bullet points for a soundbite culture Antonin Artaud's vision of a truly experiential theatre: 'The theatre will never find itself again except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery, his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism, pour out on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior.' (Theatre of Cruelty: First Manifesto, 1932). Or: 'If theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything in love, crime, war and madness.' And don't forget Moscow: Vlad Nemirovich-Danchenko once said to Konstantin Stanislavski, co-founder of the Moscow Art Theatre, just before Chekhov's The Seagull opened in 1898: 'New plays attract audiences everywhere because they discover in them new answers to the problems of living.' (You hope.) George Devine, the first artistic director of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court - and the man who chose John Osborne's Look Back in Anger for its opening season in 1956 - had a vision of the Royal Court as a writer's theatre, 'a place where the dramatist is acknowledged as the fundamental creative force and where the play is more important than the actors, the director, the designer.' Devine's aim was to discover the 'hardhitting, uncompromising writers whose plays are stimulating, provocative and exciting'. In 1960, he said: 'I want the theatre to be continuously disturbing.' In 1964, director Peter Brook wrote an introduction to the playtext of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade - it now reads like a brief manifesto for experiential theatre: 'Starting with its title, everything about this play is designed to crack the spectator on the jaw, then douse him with ice-cold water, then force him to assess intelligently what has happened to him, then give him a kick in the balls, then bring him back to his senses again.' 'I think the theatre's a real bear pit. It's not the place for reasoned discussion. It is the place for really savage insights, which can be proved at once.' (Howard Brenton, 1975) 'Because new writing had slipped off the agenda of most theatres in the 1980s and early 1990s, many young actors were simply not able to see productions of important new work. Yet, ironically, a new generation of exceptionally talented playwrights was having its work produced by a handful of new writing theatres. Their plays were uncompromising, richly imagined, heretical, beautiful, edgy, intelligent and faithful to the heart.' (Nick Darke) 'I went up to a prostitute in the street and eventually persuaded her to come and have a coffee if I paid her £50. As a writer I wanted to know all about her, yet as an actress I'd played innumerable prostitutes and I'd never bothered to delve deep. As an actress I cheated and I knew I could not cheat as a writer.' (Lynda la Plante, Widows, Prime Suspect) 'Nobody seems to be writing those Thatcher's Britain plays any more. And there are fewer "kitchen as microcosm" plays. We've seen fewer middle-class plays and more grittier pieces of writing.' (Phil Setren, London New Play Festival, 1992) In 1993, Stephen Daldry - artistic director of the Royal Court - said: 'Perhaps we should be expanding, exploding these notions of what new writing is. Perhaps we should ditch new writing as a term altogether, perhaps . . .' 'Our audiences have a hunger for new stories and new ways of telling them and I believe that the words of new writers and the challenge of new plays hold in safe keeping the soul of the nation.' (Mike Bradwell, artistic director of the Bush theatre) In 1998, Ian Rickson - artistic director of the Royal Court - said: 'When I arrived at the Court, playwriting was in a rather depressed postition - the energy was with the classics and directors as auteurs. Now playwriting has moved into a position of centrality in the culture.' 'I cannot see the purpose of theatre unless it is to plunge down the U-bend where television and film cannot go without losing their shirts.' (Simon Burke in Live 3: Critical Mass) 'If a play is good, it breathes its own air and has a life and voice of its own. What you take that voice to be saying is no concern of mine. It is what it is. Take it or leave it.' (Sarah Kane) In 2002, Mike Bradwell - artistic director of the Bush theatre - said: 'Find a building, squat it, put on a show.' Playwright Sarah Woods on thinking theatrically: 'Why have a pool, if you only use it as a foot-spa?' (2004) Critic Ian Shuttleworth of Theatre Record: 'Theatre historians should pay less attention to critics and more to the scribbles on the toilet walls.' (2006) ^top