STAMP MANIFESTO
If someone were to speak the word ‘theatre’ to you, what would you think? It is a messy word, polluted with images of spotlights, red curtains, proscenium arches, musical numbers, pandering soliloquies, and pretension. In spite of this, all theatre is can be contained in a space with one person talking and one person listening. For us, theatre is a story told with more than a book, a screen, or an audio system to impart it. How then do we recapture this idea of a pure theatre?
The Deadly Theatre that Peter Brook writes of is the former image; stale conventions and repetitive systems. Sadly, the most part of an audience expects to see this, because it is their signified response of what theatre is. And yet, it is perhaps not in the other three forms of theatre that Brook describes wherein the Deadly Theatre may be most profoundly challenged, but in itself.
If you were to think of the Theatre of the Absurd, you would see two men on a gloomy stage spurting methodical madness. If you were to think of the Theatre of Cruelty, you would see savage, archaic and shocking captures of immediacy. If you were to think of Musical Theatre, you would see a large cast in a harmony of synchronised sound and movement. The list goes on. Though each person would undoubtedly have a varied connotation to each form, the stereotype for each rarely wavers – just as it does for the conception of ‘theatre’ in general. Therefore, every form of theatre is part of the Deadly Theatre unless it is new. But even the new will become Deadly as soon as it is re-performed or written about, and regardless, we are undoubtedly living in a period where fresh forms in theatre seem harder to create. In this sense, the Immediate Theatre of Brook is flawed.
Yet Deadly Theatre is, of course, attempting to tell a story – but that story becomes muddied by the stigma that comes attached to the form of theatre projecting it. To recapture a pure storytelling theatre, the story must come before the devices constructing its performance. We believe the answer can be found in a paradox of this.
All theatre is interpretative and adaptive: whether it is a devised piece using various sources, or a company staging a single script-text. If the sources are output through an alternative form of theatre, or through a convention that best ‘allows it to speak’, they inevitably become Deadly Theatre. But if the source is allowed a hyper-interpretation – a multi-interpretation – then the story can be told. If binary oppositions between theatrical forms can break down and conjoin to perform the source, then no particular form of Deadly Theatre can cloud the story. In the paradox of using a collage of Deadly Theatre forms rather than one or two, we believe the story becomes dominant. It will also become reinvigorated through the defamiliarising effect this inevitably entails, championing an overthrow of the blind following of established forms.
As such, it is on the power of the performing storyteller to transform (in order to paradoxically highlight the essential power of the story) that we predominantly focus upon, and will come first before all technical aspects and textual requirements. In the contradictory spirit of Rough Theatre, we will play with our source, we will have fun with what we can do with it, in order to scathe the polite dogma subscribed to each overdone form of Deadly Theatre;
Lightheartedness and gaiety feed it, but so does the same energy that produces rebellion and opposition. (Brook, Peter [2008], The Empty Space, London: Penguin, p. 79)
– Alex Watson, STAMP Theatre Producer and Dramaturge