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.' Or: 'If
theatre wants to find itself needed once more, it must present everything
in love, crime, war and madness.' (Theatre
of Cruelty: First Manifesto, 1932)
- 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.' (What about her?)
- In
1975, there was an early version of in-yer-face
theatre: '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)
- '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)
- In
1992, the London New
Play Festival supremo said, '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)
- 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)
- 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)
- '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
- then 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)
- Aleks
Sierz: 'What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?'
(2007)
- Aleks
Sierz: 'The history of theatre begins with a prayer and ends
with a sigh...' (2008)
^top
Plus: some in-yer-face quotes!
Superplus: new writing bibliography
• More Sierz...
