Author Archives: Alexander Watson

Sentence and Execution: Concluding the Production

With STAMP Theatre’s The Trial now a week ago today, performing to strong audience quantity and reaction, I will take a retrospective look at the process of creating the show to examine the production’s strengths and flaws in order to assess how our company, and its members, can improve. As Jerzy Grotowski states, ‘you can’t ignore the result because from the objective point of view the deciding factor in art is the result’ (1981, p. 201).

To ensure everything required for a successful show was completed, I created a day-schedule (STAMP performance day schedule); tailored to have more time than perhaps necessary spent on technical details, as set-up, in my experience, often overruns because of unforeseen contingencies. I also wanted to have one cue-to-cue, to adjust ourselves to the lighting (which I would be operating with our stage manager and lighting designer’s cue sheet), and one final dress rehearsal. I also added several breaks due to the same reason of running only one dress rehearsal – so the technical staff and performers would not be exhausted for the night ahead.

I have placed the performance day schedule next to the actual timeline of the day above (the latter in document form here [performance day breakdown]) to show the difference in what was expected of the day and what happened. As we completed the technical details relatively quickly, we were able to have a cue-to-cue one hour early. However, I mistakenly set a dress rehearsal directly after this, as there were lighting states to improve after the cue-to-cue. Even with this, because of the extra technical allotment, we were working on time. The dress rehearsal was especially vital for me in operating the LX; although we had a simple technical procedure due to our lack of stagehand set-changing or sound, and I have had experience in working LX boards professionally, due to the quick lighting cues of the piece (which numbered more than 90) I had to adjust myself to where difficult cues appeared.

Throughout the day, when changes to the schedule were made, I acted as a go-between for the actors, the director, and our technical team (consisting itself of stage manager Darren Page, chief technician Martin Rousseau, and our lighting assistant Alex Kent). Problems arise in the schedule when there is miscommunication, and so I made everyone know clearly what was going to happen, and when. This was a very direct experience for me in terms of the importance of the producer – with the director affirming the look of the set, lighting and proficiency of the actors, I had the responsibility of making sure tasks were carried out. Although there are a few minor changes I would have made to the schedule (such as having allotted time after the cue-to-cue, and having the actors come in as early as possible [an amendment the director fortunately made]), I am assured that the technical success of the show and ability to perform tasks in good time was strongly aided by my scheduling foresight and on-day communication.

Although I believe the performance was a success, I believe I could have done several things as producer to increase the company’s effectiveness. Contrasting with my self-analysis for communication on the day, I failed to rotate several details between myself and the venue, which led to a clash in timetabling. I also expressed interest in connecting our marketing department more with the community, specifically in school workshops, which although was cancelled because of concerns with time, could have been done with effective planning. Nonetheless, I am glad to have experienced mistakes as well as successes, as if I had neither of each I would not be able to improve myself as a producer. As Grotowski states: ‘It is after the production is completed and not before that I am wiser’ (1981, p. 98).

Word count: 630.

Overall word count: 2,737.

Works cited

Grotowski, Jerzy (1981), ‘American Encounter’, Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. by Eugenio Barba, London: Methuen, pp. 199-210.

Grotowski, Jerzy (1981), ‘Methodical Exploration’, trans. Amanda Pasquier and Judy Barba, Towards a Poor Theatre, ed. by Eugenio Barba, London: Methuen, pp. 95-100.

Administrating the Cogs: The Role of the Producer

Leave a reply

David Jubb defines the arts producer as those who ‘seek to connect people, and promote an understanding of the importance of process, idea, artist’ (2007, p. 6). Naturally working with my additional role as dramaturge, my role as company producer grants me the task of idea synthesis with the director, working to compound the company’s production into a ‘product’, and overseeing the development of the performers, internal administration, and the outreach of the company. The central part of the work, as Madeline Hutchins, Sue Kay and Anouk Perinpanayagam write, includes ‘decisions closely related to the “product”… managing and supporting individuals… the financial side… Marketing… contracts, copyright, licensing’ (2007, p. 13). Essentially, the producer is the head of the company outside the rehearsal room.

The theatre company producer differs from the theatre producer in their informality and freedom of venue and output. The former, as explained below by David Gilmore of St. James Theatre in London, relies on the management of a business and staff in a single, compact working environment, selecting the shows that represents the theatre’s output.

The theatre company producer, however, has the ability to create projects without having to fulfil the taste of a certain venue – their business is based on pitching their product to venues. This is especially true of our non-profit company – although we are financed by our venue, Charles Grippo writes of the non-profit producer that ‘Since his shows don’t have to show a profit, he can focus more on “art”’ (2002, p. 15). As Hutchins, Kay and Perinpanayagam expand:

This freedom to make your own job, even within existing organisations, is symptomatic of the willingness to challenge the accepted forms or the “norm”. There is an informality and a lack of definition that leaves some completely bewildered and lost, but that is “home” to others. (2007, p. 17)

This sense of becoming ‘lost’ is encased in negotiating the various administrative procedures required with creating and presenting a performative product. Working with the director and company ethos to ‘select, come up with or agree an “idea” using finely tuned artistic, contextual and commercial judgement’ (2007, p. 38), the initial occupation of the producer is to secure any necessary rights. With The Trial, this meant contacting Berkoff’s agency and negotiating the price of the licence – then organising for the venue to secure it in our name. The negotiation of the rights, along with my initial dramaturgical message to the director, is attached (correspondence), as well as Samuel French’s quotation documents (IMG_0018/ back of quotation 2013/ Method of Payment Form-1). I have also attached a copy of our edited script, which I typed out and distributed for the cast. This was originally achieved using Celtx, followed by a second, definite copy in Word (trial) – the latter being the more accessible program.

‘Putting the right team together and then “managing” them effectively and “playfully” to produce the best results’ (2007, p. 38) is another part of the producer’s task. To ensure the quality of the product, I worked with our director in the auditions and casting among our set company to allocate characters within the play. Although the director is allocated the artistic creation of the performance, as overseer of the company’s workings it was important that my judgement was necessary to character choice. I found that responding to unforeseeable problems was of high significance as producer, and in this spirit of fluidly responding to the company’s needs I helped to direct certain scenes whilst our director concentrated on one or two actors. Despite my work being a blueprint for the director to improve, the producer requires an understanding of how a performance is shaped in the rehearsal room, in order to articulate its value outside of it.

Word count: 611.

Works cited

Grippo, Charles (2002), The Stage Producer’s Business and Legal Guide, New York: Allworth Press.

Hutchins, Madeline, Sue Kay and Anouk Perinpanayagam (2007), Passion and Performance: Managers and Producers in Theatre and Dance, Brighton: University of Sussex.

Jubb, David (2007), in Madeline Hutchins, Sue Kay and Anouk Perinpanayagam, Passion and Performance: Managers and Producers in Theatre and Dance, Brighton: University of Sussex, p. 6.

St. James Theatre (2012), ‘Video Interview – Theatre Producer David Gilmore.mov’ [online] < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcVbYkm_dC0> [accessed 19 April 2013].

‘No Door, No Entrance’: Kafka’s Comic Nightmare

1 Reply

The above diagram displays Kurt Vonnegut’s G-I Axis (good fortune versus ill fortune in stories), used to depict the narrative situation of Kafka’s characters. They do not experience the ascribed twists and turns of most narratives – they simply live, and then they die. This disaffection is born from paradox, as Malcolm Bradbury writes, leaving ‘the world unreal, detached from itself, suddenly made unhomely’ (1988, p. 268). In this intractable hollowness, a ‘temperament that sees a world where benign divinity has been replaced by random arbitrariness and absent authorities’ (p. 277), Kafka’s writings held a gripping relevance to the post-war world, which ‘came to resemble the imaginary one he constructed’ (p. 256). It is therefore no surprise that the Kafka-esque is connected to much post-war art, including theatre.

Much of the identity of the postmodern individual can be perceived in The Trial – such as ‘the abbreviation of Joseph K.’s name… which at once reduces his identity and seems to turn him into a case or a file’ (p. 258). This alienation pervades Kafka’s work through oppressive relationships. Isolation is especially created through sexual licentiousness, part of the ‘strong erotic charge [that] runs through all of Kafka’s writings, along with a troubling sexual guilt’ (p. 269). Berkoff therefore initially seems to be a fitting theatrical projector for Kafka, with his plays of sexually-minded young men caught in social systems. But his use of sexuality, far from being ambivalent, is what he words as ‘a loving appreciation of the male and female form’ (2000, p. 3). In his interpretation of The Trial, Berkoff translates the satirical elements of the novel onto an emphasised plane of physical theatre, but luckily the deeper existential anxieties and permeating frustration at human administration remains part of the play’s stronger points.

Nevertheless, Berkoff’s reading exhorts Bradbury’s suggestion that despite K.’s ‘hopes that a woman will intercede for him… his careless sexual activities seem part of his crime and instinct for self-destruction (1988, p. 269). Therefore:

K. himself is thus the source and cause of all the events, as if he is living in a dream which is from time to time separate from reality. Nonetheless the dream-reality grows more and more inclusive, and the gap between the familiar and the strange closes. (1988, p. 269)

Although this use of dream-like storytelling can be associated with the Modernist tropes of stream-of-consciousness and the Freudian influence on literature, I would argue that Kafka’s dream/nightmare is closer to the postmodern sense – equally permeated by the carnal and the mechanical, the real and the representative. Indeed, Kafka’s ‘mistrust of literature as an institution’ is a marker of his contemporary separateness and developer of ‘original patterns’, and informed the ‘idea of language as pure exorcism [that] fascinated him’, as Franz Kuna writes (1986, p. 131). This aspect of Kafka – literature as corrupting and language as purging – shares similarities with Dada’s communication breakdown; and is included in our staging of the court scene towards the end of The Trial, with the Judge proclaiming K.’s guilt with ‘blah, blah, blahs’. Kafka’s theories on language and literature can be best scene in his On Parables:

If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid all of your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. (Kafka 2005, p. 457)

It is yet another paradoxical tangle. However, if Kafka truly believed that language was an exorcist, then perhaps theatre is the best medium to convey his works (he himself wrote a short play, The Warden of the Tomb). The primal scream against institutionalism, an Artaudian act made by K. towards the play’s conclusion, is perhaps what Kafka longed for – a pure and simple gesture untangled in paradox. This, too, is what we look for from a play.

Word count: 654.

Works cited

Berkoff, Steven (2011), The Trial, in The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka, London: Amber Lane Press, pp. 5-69.

Berkoff, Steven (2000), East, in Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 1-42 (‘Author’s Note’, pp. 3-2).

Bradbury, Malcolm (1988), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, London: Secker & Warburg.

Kafka, Franz (2005), The Warden of the Tomb, trans. by Tania Stern and James Stern, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, pp. 206-19.

Kafka, Franz (2005), On Parables, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, p. 457.

Kafka, Franz (1999), The Trial, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, London: Vintage.

Kuna, Franz (1986), ‘Vienna and Prague 1890-1928’ in, Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds.), Modernism: 1890-1930, London: Penguin, pp. 120-133.

Vonnegut, Kurt (2005), ‘Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard’, [online] <http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/kurt-vonnegut-at-the-blackboard.php?page=all> [accessed 21 March 2013].

Theatre Engagement: A Trial for Relevance

Leave a reply

‘Theatre artists and scholars dedicated to advancing theatrical discourse have been placed in a position of having to struggle for not only the continuing growth and effectiveness of the form’, Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich assert, ‘but also its very importance in a society that has made theatre, especially the kind of theatre made by experimental artists, an increasingly elitist form’ (2002, p. 6). In this current climate, arguably caused by what Peter Brook terms the ‘Deadly Theatre’ – a form which we have marked for death in our manifesto – it is essential for our company to ask itself whether our performance is important to anything outside our institution, or whether it is part of the elitist, internecine form that has muted theatre’s relevance.

‘We’ve failed to get through,’ argues Peter Sellars regarding the construction of this elitism; ‘we’ve failed to connect our self-absorption, our smug self-satisfaction’ (2002, p. 130). Sellars’s deplored lack of social engagement can even be physically seen within the Deadly Theatre, in the development of the fourth wall. Tori Haring-Smith notes this device makes actors ‘oblivious of the community to whom they are supposed to be talking’ (2002, p. 100), inherently reminiscing Artaud’s desire for theatre to return to communal ritual. This community factor is included in the current second goal of the Arts Council, ‘developing arts opportunities for people and places with the least engagement’ (2011, para. 5 of 9). As Berkoff writes; ‘We were the world’s greatest video watchers, since we had lost the ability to speak to each other’ (2000, p. 97), charting the gradual transformation of the audience from engagers to voyeurs.

Our company’s emphasis is primarily on the performative rather than outreach, but The Trial itself is a play about one man’s confusion in the face of the opaque workings of the law – with Joseph K’s bafflement at Berkoff’s hyper-performative characters perhaps mirroring an uninitiated audience member’s own responses. Yet, just as our manifesto seeks to eliminate Deadly Theatre ideals with Deadly Theatre styles, so perhaps can we invigorate new audiences with high theatricality. Theatre, as Haring-Smith asserts, ‘was born so that communities could tell their stories’ (2002, p. 102).

Word count: 359.

Works cited

The Arts Council (2011), ‘Our goals and priorities’ [Online] <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/funding/apply-for-funding/national-portfolio-funding-programme/how-we-made-our-decision/our-goals-and-priorities/> [accessed 10 February 2013].

Berkoff, Steven (2000), Greek, in Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 95-140 (‘Author’s Note’, pp. 97-8).

Delgado, Maria M. and Svich, Caridad (2002), ‘Theatre in crisis? Performance manifestos for a new century: snapshots of a time’ in, Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds.), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 1-15.

Haring-Smith, Tori (2002), ‘On the death of theatre: a call to action’ in, Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds.), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 97-102.

Sellars, Peter (2002), ‘The question of culture’ in, Maria M. Delgado and Caridad Svich (eds.), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 127-44.

‘Before the Door’: Dramaturgical Foreword

Leave a reply

As the idea to perform Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial preluded the writing of our manifesto, the choice of play and the company ethos are somewhat intertwined – namely storytelling, adaptation and performativity. Although it is the theatricality of Berkoff – similarly sharing a strong influence from Brook – that attracted us to the play, the shadow of Kafka ties into both Berkoff’s theatre and our manifesto beyond merely being the originator of The Trial. As both dramaturge and producer, it is important for me that the literature, theories, and styles of our influences pervade our work and inform our performative choices, just as our dramatic tastes chose our sources. Practically, rather than keep a workbook, my role as dramaturge will be to research The Trial and utilise my findings in aiding the director and performers in their choices, and post dramaturgical writings onto the blog (for which I have distributed a loose schedule and idea sheet for my colleagues [Blog entry guideline]).

Our manifesto’s intent to conjoin binary oppositions is shared in the work of our stimuli. Just as Berkoff merges the high language of Shakespeare with the earthier narratives of lower class urban life, specifically seen in East and West, Kafka shares this ‘gift to turn the surreal into the matter-of-fact’, possessing ‘the power of seeming both real and strange at once’, as Malcolm Bradbury writes on the Modernist figure (1988, p. 258). In The Metamorphosis, the absurd situation of Gregor Samsa’s inexplicable overnight transformation into a man-sized insect is reacted to with as much bafflement with his condition, as anxiety in getting to work on time. This dedication is matched by Joseph K.’s affinity to the bank, despite the increasing threat of his unknown case. In a reversion of Chekhov’s invocation that ‘we must work’, The Trial displays that this alone is no longer satisfactory. Joseph K. is the doomed figure who cannot survive because he searches for answers that cannot be answered from condemners who are not present. For the performing artist, who must not merely work but struggle for the vitality and relevance of their occupation, K. is the avatar of Brook’s ‘Deadly Theatre’, possessing ‘the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done’ (Brook 2008, p. 17).

Before the Law, published separately by Kafka, serves as a meta-narrative, ‘a parable of life’s quest to discover meaning and significance, though it also implies the ambiguity of all significance’ (Bradbury 1988, p. 274). Kafka’s implication in ‘this gate was made only for you’ (2005, p. 4) seems to be that everyone has their perspective interpretation. Rather than see stories, like K., as deceptive (which undoubtedly gives theatre its appeal), we see it as a source for interpretation (which brings theatre its force). This makes The Trial not only a prime text for our company’s ethos and performance, but one that lends itself to constant adaptation.

Word count: 483.

Works cited

Berkoff, Steven (2011), The Trial, in The Trial, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka, London: Amber Lane Press, pp. 5-69.

Berkoff, Steven (2000), East, in Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 1-42.

Berkoff, Steven (2000), West, in Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 43-94.

Bradbury, Malcolm (1988), The Modern World: Ten Great Writers, London: Secker & Warburg.

Brook, Peter (2008), The Empty Space, London: Penguin.

Kafka, Franz (2005), Before the Law, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, pp. 3-4.

Kafka, Franz (2005), The Metamorphosis, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, in Nahum N. Glatzer (ed.), The Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka, London: Vintage, pp. 89-139.

Kafka, Franz (1999), The Trial, trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir, London: Vintage.

Images from Franz Kafka (2009), The Trial, ed. Ritchie Robinson, trans. Mike Mitchell, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Peter Brook (2008), The Empty Space, London: Penguin; Steven Berkoff (2000), Steven Berkoff: Plays 1, London: Faber and Faber.