I was working on a hunch again. It came to me when I was
reading the introduction to Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. After
a brief warning that the script, as printed, probably wasn't going to be the
script, as performed, Ravenhill mentions an ‘ecstasy workshop’ that he feels he
ought to attend. Right there, I guessed that something was different about the
way Max Stafford-Clark directed his shows. Sure, he’s been associated with a
raft of celebrated authors – Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Howard Brenton, and
William Shakespeare. But the way Ravenhill puts it, something more is going on
in the studio than learning lines.
Let me go back to the beginning. I’d been trying to work out
what ‘devised theatre’ meant. I keep seeing it about the place – coming out of
the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, hanging out with the kids from the
Contemporary Performance Practice course. And it has a heavy linguistic friend
circle too: words like ‘problematize’ and ‘performativity,’ the kind of
language to make a Latin scholar run to the etymological dictionary. There were
rumours that Artaud was involved, maybe some of the guys from the San Francisco
Mime Troupe – the ones who’d helped Eldridge Cleaver escape the heat in the
1960s, plus of a couple of the international heavy-weight crowd: Lecoq, even
Brecht.
Like that time I decided to define ‘visual theatre’ for the manipulate
festival, I was on shaky ground. Any attempt to pin down ‘devised’ to one
definition only threw up exceptions that proved the rule was wrong. Using
Complicite as a model, I got something close to physical theatre, based around
movement: the British school of the 1990s, Frantic Assembly, DV8 supported the
choreographic cross-over, but that left out things like Forced Entertainment’s Bloody
Mess. That had been the tipping point that got me into the critical
business in the first place, and damn if it didn't use text and speech more
than movement or fancy visuals.
But Ravenhill’s evocation of a workshop process struck a
chord. I’d been in the studio a few times already, once with The Ultimate
Dancer to try and create a synthesis of dance and criticism. Ravenhill was
signalling that there was a process going on here, one that opened up
communication between the performers and the writer – and the director. Like
Ravenhill nipping along to the rehearsal room for a wee taste, I was going to
check out this Max Stafford-Clark character.
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