Sample Pages from Stanislavski Through Practice:Belief1. The teacher could begin the work on belief with an exercise in which the students do not even realise they are participating! Come into the studio in a real flap and tell the students you've lost your wallet, car keys, glasses, register, notes on Stanislavski, whatever you like! Make sure it is something really important - without the lost item, you, or they, will be in real trouble - so that they are really looking everywhere. You think it may have fallen behind something, have been picked up by mistake and be in someone's bag, etc. It's up to you to keep the urgency going in any way you can. Keep it going as long as you can, constantly whipping up their concern and commitment to the task. Eventually you disclose that this is all an exercise and that you want them to repeat their search from the beginning, trying to remember how they felt, behaved, etc. Observe them carefully. How convincing are they? Do they believe in what they are doing? How can you tell? Comment on their 'performance' as fully as you can. [ Another way of doing this is to let one or two students in on the secret at the beginning, giving them instructions to observe closely the differences in feeling, commitment and sincerity between the two searches.] Either way of approaching the exercise is a useful starting point and will fuel an animated discussion, which should be fully explored, explained and written up by the students. The realisation they should come to, hopefully of their own accord, is that doing something for real is one thing, imitating that activity in such a way as to convince an audience that it is real is an altogether different thing and infinitely harder to pull off.

Central to Stanislavski's System is believing in what you are doing. Only if the actor believes will the audience believe. They are drawn in by the sincerity of what the actor is doing. Basically the whole System is the set of aids by which the actor is helped to believe he is the role he is creating. Despite the fact the whole System is working towards belief, I find it helpful to do some 'belief exercises with students early on, which can prove a number of important things, starting with the realisation that belief 'in limbo' is well-nigh impossible.

Practical Work2. Sit in a circle. Teacher leads by passing a scrumpled up piece of paper around the circle and telling them it is a bird that has fallen out of its nest, fully feathered but not yet able to fly. The students must be very gentle. Keep talking about the bird, its colour, size, the brightness of its eyes, ' Look at its beak opening, perhaps it's hungry'; 'How its claws grip, don't they?' - you are trying to build up belief by building up visual facts to hang onto. When the bird returns to you, you can do a number of things. You can mash it in your hands - this cruelly tests belief - those who have begun to believe will be horrified. You could gently place it in a box, or take it outside. It is up to you. The seriousness with which you, the teacher, approach this gives the students a clue as to how seriously these actors' exercises should be taken.

3. Still in the circle, pass round an envelope containing a blank piece of paper.

It must be used as:

a love letter a coded message containing escape plans

exam results

a letter calling off the engagement

news of the death of a rich old aunt from whom you are due to inherit

the offer of a job

news that your son has been killed in the war

the letter has been given to you by mistake - it should really have gone to another member of your family

4. Pass an object around and each person must use it in a different way convincingly. The object could just be a stick, or the biro you have in your pocket. It could be used as a comb, a dagger, a mobile phone, etc. Variation: scatter and use any object in the room as something it is not; retain the same object and change what you use it as at least twice more.

After this series of exercises discuss the difficulties. Some will have the quality of 'naivety' that allows them to lose themselves in the imagination quickly and easily. Whether they could sustain that quality with a number of distractions is another matter. Others will have found it difficult to do these exercises. These students may well be those who are most honest about 'feeling' and 'believing' themselves. Encourage this honesty. Encourage them to see the difference between 'pretending' and 'believing'. How many, when challenged, honestly believed in what they were doing?

Belief is helped by facts. Remind them how many found it easier to believe in the bird the more detail about the bird was added.

This is the same relationship that 'magic if and 'given circumstances' have to one another. 'If is the plunge that the imagination is taking - 'if this piece of paper were a bird that had fallen from its nest ' - the imagination then asks questions - what? why? how? etc., it needs more detail, more facts, more 'given circumstances' - beak, bright eyes, colour, etc. Each new fact acts as an aid, a kind of fixative, to the imagination.

5. Use a stick, a strip of stiff cardboard or similar. The stick is a knife. It is used in an exercise that in some way involves life and death: you are contemplating killing a rival, or freeing a condemned captive, or performing an operation under difficult circumstances in which the patient may die.

You will need to build up a whole scenario answering the questions who? why? when? where? how? etc. Each one of these invented facts, or circumstances, will help the process of belief and make it easier.

It will be helpful to build up belief in the 'knife' by starting with a kind of meditation on the object. Concentrate totally on it till you see its shape, size, feel its weight, test its sharpness and so on. Only when you really believe in the knife should you complete the exercise and perform the scene.

After the exercise is finished, jot down how many elements of the System are used and interrelated here. Magic if, given circumstances, concentration, imagination. All the elements feed into one another.

6. Test the inter-relationship of imagination/magic if with given circumstances to aid belief in another series of exercises:

Find your own space. You are cooking. There is your stove in front of you, saucepans and so on. Now begin.

For a moment they will look flummoxed; this is because they have so little to go on. Then they'll begin. Let them all carry on in their own space for a little, then stop them and ask a few questions: who are they? where? etc. By the readiness of their answers you will know if they have already felt the need to do this process for themselves. Hopefully, some of them will have found it impossible to proceed without inventing circumstances.

Now start the exercise again, but this time give them more specific scenarios with more detail:

You are an older sister/ brother having to prepare supper for awkward younger siblings. They are fussy; neither eat the same things; Mum, however, has specified they must have a balanced meal...

You are a busy chef in a popular restaurant at half past ten on a Saturday night. Orders are coming from all directions, it is hot, the noise level is terrific...

You are preparing a supper for a boy/ girl friend, wanting very much to impress with your capability; your parents are out for the evening, your special visitor is due to arrive in half an hour...

They should see at the end of this:

a] how important detail is to aid belief- The fuller the circumstances, the easier it is to believe.

b] how different circumstances will change the basic action and prevent the actor from acting 'in general'. The first instruction, simply 'to cook' will lead to acting 'in general'. The different given circumstances will dictate how the actor cooks, in quite a unique fashion according to each set of circumstances.

Explain how this exercise needs to be used when studying a playtext for such directions as 'Enter George'. The details of: from where? to where? what time of day? what state of mind is George in? and so on, will all affect the way George enters.

7. Try some enter/exit exercises. Treat it as a game with volunteers performing from the following categories in turn. Others must guess, for instance, where they are coming from.

a] a series of entrances showing -

where you are coming from what has happened offstage to affect mood [argument with boss, for instance]

when - what time of day it is

a letter calling off the engagement

news of the death of a rich old aunt from whom you are due to inherit

why you are entering [to look for lost purse, for instance]

b] a series of exits showing -

where you are going off to when - time of day

why - the reason for going

what you are feeling [ e.g. you are psyching himself up to face a dreaded interview with the headmaster]

Finish this section by setting a number of tasks for which the individual students must invent their own 'if and 'circumstances'. Remember that the 'if is 'magic' because it gives the imagination that stimulatory nudge which will excite the actor into action. The 'circumstances' which he will 'give' or invent for himself are the facts needed to give substance to that imagined person and situation. Take them through the process first by sending one student up on the stage. Tell him to sit and wait. Then tell him to invent a reason for sitting there. Next he must add as many details as he needs - who is he? where is he? why is he there? what is he feeling about it? [How does this feeling make him sit?] This latter question is verging on the over-analytical at this stage. Analysis is useful but after the event. At this analytical stage discuss, too, a] how much of the feeling was stimulated by the invention of detailed information and b] how much the expression of that feeling, i.e. body language, facial expression, came naturally out of the inner state. Were any of these physical signs consciously imposed?

8. Try inventing an 'if' and 'given circumstances' for the following:

writing a letter tidying a room

digging a hole

STYLETASTERS 1 : Stanislavski, Artaud, GrotowskiIntroductionWith an awareness that some syllabuses require less detailed knowledge of practitioners but rather an understanding of different styles in more general terms, this series is designed to serve that purpose. The emphasis, as in all my work on practitioners, is on understanding the work through practice. Once again, theories are dearly explained in terms that any student can understand and each theory is then explored and tested through practical exercises. The practical work helps fix the understanding of the theory.

The work of Artaud and of Grotowski are in some ways very similar but you may find the grouping of these two with Stanislavski an odd choice. In my view, though, any practitioner can be bracketed with Stanislavski, even if their end-styles are completely dissimilar because, consciously or unconsciously, every twentieth century practitioner's starting point is Stanislavski. No one before Stanislavski had investigated and identified the art and technique of acting in such a complete way so that no practitioner after him can be unaware of his findings and theories. He is thus a starting point for all the practitioners, who often use him as a platform either from which to spring out or against which to react.

The main link I see between the three practitioners introduced in this handbook is that all three are concerned with the inner state of the actor. The theatrical effect of the end-result springing from this central concern is very different in each case but nonetheless these three practitioners are interested in the actor's personal journey whilst most other practitioners are more concerned with the medium of theatre and its role in society or of the theatrical result of which the actor is merely a part.

The format of the book is as follows:

1. Such biographical details as help with an understanding of the practitioner are given and followed by a clear exposition as to how those details help explain the theories.

2. The essential theories of each practitioner are clearly explained. These are easily photocopiable should you want students to have a copy in front of them.

3. Each theory is then explored with one or two excercises. Students should be encouraged to try the theories through practical work in an enquiring manner, seeking to understand the reasons for the practitioner's emphasis on such and such a theory, but not being afraid to find the limitations of a theory either.

4. A final project is set in which the students are expected to explore the practitioner as fully and as 'truthfully' as possible.

The work on each of these practitioners should take between four and six weeks. This is sufficient for an informed tester but may not have enough detail for an 'A' level in-depth essay on that practitioner alone; it would be sufficient, though, for comparisons between practitioners and the work throughout invites this approach.

Note: should you want to cover a particular practitioner in more depth there are Study Programmes on Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud where all the theories are very thoroughly explained and explored through a wealth of practical exercises. The work in each of these Study Programmes is sufficient for one term's exploration of that practitioner. The Study Programmes apply the theories in each case to a variety of texts, something which this series can do no more than suggest.

Two samples from the Stanislavski section1. STANISLAVSKI [1863 - 1938]: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

There are many biographies of Stanislavski in existence and many text-books too that give excellent resumes of his life, influences and the progression of his ideas. In the present context, I believe that this just confuses students who then do not know how to pick and choose amongst the material for those facts that are relevant to them when answering essay questions in an examination. I propose only to put down those facts that tell us something important about Stanislavski as a practitioner.

1. He had a passion for the theatre from his earliest years. Born into a privileged family, he put on amateur theatricals from an early age. All his own acting experience until he was into his twenties was in the amateur theatre.

These facts tell us:

a] He had to start from scratch exploring the art and techniques of theatre. Having no professional training [and at first little skill but a tendency to 'ham] he started from the most basic 'what's and 'how's and 'why's of the actor's craft. His passion and youthful lack of skill were the two vital ingredients to carry him through a prolonged period of trial and error to come up with a detailed analysis of the problems actors face and, eventually, ideas on how to tackle those problems - problems with which, because of his own early ineptitude he himself had had to grapple and through which he had had to work.

b] The fact that his family was wealthy gave him both the financial backing for a life devoted to such an expensive 'hobby' - which it was at first - and the social status to allow him to meet influential backers and theatre 'buffs' of all kinds, vital to the trial and development of his ideas.

2. The theatre of his time was a mixture of the broad over-the-top gestures of those one-dimensional characters suitable for melodrama and the early 'realism' of playwrights like Gogol as explored by actors like Shchepkin, who believed in finding the source for his characterisations by studying life itself. There was no actor training as such; actors were adopted into a company and served apprenticeships where they observed older actors and their techniques. This, of course, encouraged a perpetuation of the same style of acting; few

young actors would dare risk being expelled from a company by 'doing something different;' far more likely, they would copy 'tricks' that an older actor had found effective - in, for instance,gaining a laugh or creating an impression of grandeur.

In addition, apart from one or two exceptions, most popular theatre made actors into stars, known for particular types of role whilst writers were often hacks, often forgotten and there simply to create the roles for the star actor.

Costumes and settings were taken from the theatre stock without reference to historical authenticity or suitability to the play. A scene in a forest, for instance, would bring out the stock 'trees' and painted backcloths used many times before.

This state of affairs in the theatre of his time explains:

a] why Stanislavski set out to put down a detailed actor's training, identifying all the areas of body, voice and approach to a character that he would need to use in playing a role effectively and believably.

b] his emphasis on studying life and his search for truthfulness in portraying a role rather than resorting to empty "tricks' and tried and tested methods from the past.

c] his work towards creating ensemble work with all actors equally important within the team. Stanislavski refused to use the idea of the 'star' actor to draw in an audience. Whether playing Hamlet or a gravedigger each actor was of equal importance to the creative unity of the finished production.

d] his insistence on the importance of the playwright and his text. He made every effort always to be true to the text and what he perceived to be the intentions of the playwright [This is despite arguments with Chekhov over interpretation, which stemmed from a basic misunderstanding of Chekhov's intentions - something he only gradually came to understand. Nonetheless, his intentions were always honourable even when wrong!]

e] his insistence on historical accuracy and the research that a company should make into the background of any play. Settings, costumes, properties, should be accurate and created fresh for the particular production.

f] At first this obsession with detail led him to become overwhelmed by these minutiae, to the detriment of sincere characterisation. In other words, external details became for a time, in the earlier part of his career, more important, until he realised that truth comes from an understanding of the inner workings of a character, i.e. what a characters says is less important than why he says it. It took Stanislavski a little time to understand this.

3. In 1897 Stanislavski met Nemirovich-Danchenko, a theatre critic, teacher and director, very well-connected in both the social and theatre world and together they devised a manifesto for a new type of theatre. Nemirovich-Danchenko also put Stanislavski in touch with Chekhov, recognising that here were two kindred spirits in their aspirations for theatre. The new theatre was called the Moscow Art Theatre and it took as its symbol a seagull, which was the title of the first Chekhov play performed there.

The Moscow Art Theatre became a centre for the growth of the Naturalistic style of acting but this was not easily achieved. First the earlier training of the established actors they invited to form the ensemble group at the new theatre had to be broken down. This took years of work, not always successful, and caused Nemirovich and Stanislavski to realise that a new type of actor was needed for the 'slice of life' style of playing. Thus the Studio was formed, the first of a number, as a means for practical experimentation into the art of acting and into discovering new ways to approach character. In addition, Stanislavski started to formulate what became known as 'the System', which for the rest of his life he experimented with, using it to improve his own acting and to teach other actors and acting students.

These facts tell us that:

a] Stanislavski's System arose out of practical trial and error over a long period of time b] though he often seems to present-day students 'old hat' and 'obvious' he was truly

innovative in his own time

c] the System was constantly evolving and elements of it were being tested out all through his life. This explains the contradictions that are within much of Stanislavski's writings - he changed his mind about a number of things, most notably the use of Emotion Memory.

d] his long life devoted entirely to theatre and the improvement of acting practice tells us that he was a true enthusiast and it is this obvious passion for his subject that made him a great teacher and that inspires us when we read his books today.

2. COMMUNICATION

The actor is of course in the business of communicating at all times. His body needs to be so finely tuned that he can communicate a world of meaning just by the shrug of a shoulder or a flicker of the eyes.

Practical Exercise

Using the same pairs as before, ask the group to go back to the previous idea of the two people locked in a room. They are to try the following brief scenarios:

One person notices a poisonous snake above the other's head. Not wanting to alarm the other in to making a sudden move that might cause the snake to strike, alert him to the danger and direct him out of harm's way.

A guard [imaginary] comes in. One is to approach the guard and make friendly overtures [the guard is not allowed to speak], whilst the other tries to work his way round to the escape route whilst trying to look as natural and casual as possible.

Last night, the two had a terrible argument. Now one wants to make up but the other is still huffy and difficult. Gradually the difficult one is wooed into changing, but it is an uphill struggle.

Watch a few of these and try them both with and without words, so as to observe the role of body language and faical expressions as well as the role of vocal tones. Ask the group to analyse the tones of voice used. When is the 'sub-text' different from the actual words spoken? How does this subtext communicate? For example, I would expect the audience to be aware of the change of heart of the difficult one in the last scenario before the actual words of reconciliation are voiced.

Stress that the feelings inside must be genuine for any of the above to work properly. If anyone has imposed, say, fear of the snake, from the outside, it should be obvious to the audience. Ask the group to analyse the difference between those that are believable in performance of any of the above and those who are not and try to determine why.

Two samples from the Artaud section1. BEING CRUEL TO ONESELF

Artaud says ..."cruelty means strictness, diligence, unrelenting decisiveness, irreversible and absolute determination."

Practical Exercise 1

Taking this as a starting point, try an exercise where they imagine the whole room divided up in large squares like a huge grid. They can move only along the imagined straight lines.

Each student is to think of something that they want to reach - something that is so important that it is imperative they keep it uppermost in their minds. For example, they could have a loved one they are trying to reach, or a desperately important object such as the medicine that will save a loved one's life.

Whatever they choose as the person or object they are trying to reach, It is an impossibly long way off. Nonetheless it must be reached and this can only be done by keeping that thought uppermost in the mind: focus on the thing being attempted with the whole concentration. And then start walking along any of the straight lines of the grid, avoiding all obstacles and not bumping into people, nor stopping on the way for any reason.

The pace of the movement must be steady and relentless.

Most importantly It must carry on beyond the point when the students would want to stop.

Keep them moving with strictness; keep them focusing on what they are striving for. They must keep moving until they are exhausted mentally and physically.

Then stop them and talk about the breaking down of barriers, mental and physical. What does this mean in fact? Did they begin to get a glimmer of the rigour of concentration needed? If they were Artaudian actors what would they need to improve on?

This exercise is good for breaking down those physical and mental barriers as well as for the discipline needed to stick to walking in straight lines without bumping into anything or anyone. Part of the mind is concentrated on the desired object, part on keeping in touch with the surroundings and avoiding accidents.

Practical Exercise 2

Try further pushing the limits by giving the students a series of actions to repeat over and over again.

For instance, stretch towards the ceiling, down to touch the floor, push out to one side with both arms stretched and then the other.

Repeat and keep repeating, establishing a fast rhythm in which to do this, until well beyond the point where they are looking fed-up and exhausted.

If you keep going they will go beyond the point of being fed-up and move onto a different physical plane where they are acting under a sort of automatic pilot.

Two samples from the Grotowski section6. EXPLORING DIALECTICS

In a sense the plastique exercises are already exporing the realm of dialectics: the parts of the body are put in contradiction to each other. Grotowski was particularly fond of exercises that used opposites in the plastique exercises, such as beautiful versus ugly or fast versus slow.

Practical Exercises

1. Start with an idea that is In Grotowski's section called "Exercises in Composition.' In it he suggests an exercise that in its early stages will be familiar to all drama students: walking over a variety of different surfaces [imaginary] with bare feet and then with shoes but reacting as if with bare feet. Thus, one can start on familiar ground:

walk over Ice; hot coals;

on a slippery surface;

on a sticky surface.

Try as far as possible to stick to opposites like this: wet and dry, hard and soft, and so on.

Ask the students to show their reaction with their feet and let it reverberate from feet up through the whole body, a section at a time.

2. Next try to react with hands to touching different Imaginary surfaces; once again stick to opposites:

rough and smooth; furry and scaly;

wet and dry;

soft and hard.

3. Then try reacting with feet and hands alone to, say, a prickly surface or a slimy one.

4. Finally try to use hands and feet reacting at the same time but to opposite stimuli, e.g. :

the hands react to touching a furry surface while the feet experience slime; the hands pack snow Into a snowball whilst the feet dance on hot coals.

These exercises will seem intensely difficult and even perverse to some students. Perhaps there are some pianists amongst them. It is common practice for a pianist to be moving their fingers to one rhythm with their right hand whilst following another with their left. Reminded of this, the pianist will realise that he doesn't even think about this skill. In fact, it is a mistake to think too consciously about what one is doing - that is when the blocks start preventing you from achieving. If you can block out the mind which tells you the skill is difficult then you will achieve far more.

5. Move on to some visual Images which explore opposttes. An example might be a tableau in which some are starving to death whilst others are feasting. Perhaps the tableau could be made more powerful still if those who are feasting are mindlessly eating the body parts of the starving. Make sure that facial expressions contrast the greed and jollity of the feasters and the agony and horror of the starving.

This could be done as a frozen picture, a tableau, or as a moving 'moment'. Personally, I prefer the latter because then sounds can be employed and the contrasting movements of the two factions can be explored.

Try some others too:

guilt and innocence creation and destruction

freedom and repression

Bear in mind whilst producing these that Grotowski is keen to expose the contradictions within our society - and by society I mean the society of the whole world. Is there a way of showing the fatness' of the West to put it in cruel contrast to the starving masses in the third world? This way of working is a shockingly visual way of exploring the ills in society.

Note that before attempting this work it might be a good idea to go through the short part on symbolic language in the Artaud section. Just as pertinent to Grotowski is this way of working through powerful visual imagery which leaves a lasting impression on the audience's mind.

Working 'dialectically' is a very immediate theatrical way of using irony. Take for example, a scene where a politician meets his potential voters and speaks sincerely about all he is going to do for them; add someone, or a number of people, jeering and undermining everything he says, casting in doubt the sincerity of what he is saying through mockery.

We have social comment; we are offered more than one viewpoint. But Grotowski is not really like Brecht, trying to lead an audience to a particular point of view; rather we are being shown alternative viewpoints, different truths. Grotowski, just as he wants actors to strip the masks away from themselves wants them to expose the masks in the world around us and attempt to strip them away too to find whatever truths, even uncomfortable ones, lie behind the fabric of society.

IntroductionWith an awareness that some syllabuses require not so much a detailed knowledge of practitioners as an understanding of different styles in more general terms, this series is designed to serve that purpose. The emphasis, as in all my work on practitioners, is on understanding the work through practice. Once again, theories are dearly explained in terms that any student can understand and each theory is then explored and tested through practical exercises. This practical work helps fix the understanding of the theory.

The grouping together of Brecht with Brook and Boal makes some good sense. All three practitioners are interested in the social function of theatre, though with Brook it is an interest that he experimented with only as part of his extensive journey into the whole range of theatre experience, past and present, Western and Eastern.

Brecht saw theatre as a tool to explore man as a social animal and to show how we are both manipulated by social conditions into behaving the way we do, and able, through recognition of these social conditions, to change them for the better.

Human beings as interesting characters in their own right are not in his brief, but human beings as alterable cogs in the social machine are. Thus the actor's ability to convince an audience of the believability or reality of a character is of no interest to Brecht; instead it is the actor's task to show human behaviour under different circumstances and, more importantly, that if the circumstances can be altered then so can human behaviour. The thieves and beggars of 'The Threepenny Opera' only behave in this way because of the social inequality of the classes, the division of wealth and the corruption of those elements of society, such as the police, who should be working for the greater good of all society. Social conditions are alterable and this will cause an alteration m the behaviour of human beings.

Brook in his early experimental work used many of the tools of Brecht's epic theatre, combining them - as in 'The Marat/Sade - with the ideas of Artaud to create a new synthesis. But his work with Brechtian theories is only a small part of his testing of world theories in his all-consuming quest for 'What is theatre?'

Boal takes the Brechtian idea of theatre as a tool to alter the human condition into logical - but ultimately non-theatrical - routes that are closer to therapy and personal self-discovery. However, his most interesting and passionate work follows the Brechtian ideal of freeing the 'Oppressed' layers of society - women, the poor, anyone who is, in fact, an underling of any kind. By exposing the mechanisms and workings of society around our daily lives and showing, through working with the oppressed', that they themselves can alter these things, Boal comes perhaps closest to a development of theatre in a way that Brecht might approve.

The format of the book is as follows:

Such biographical details as help with an understanding of the practitioner are given and followed by a clear exposition as to how those details help explain the theories.

The essential theories of each practitioner are clearly explained. These are easily photocopiable should you want students to have a copy in front of them.

Each theory is then explored with one or two exercises. Students should be encouraged to try the theories through practical work in an enquiring manner, seeking to understand the reasons for the practitioner's emphasis on such and such a theory, but not being afraid to find the limitations of a theory either.

A final project is set in which the students are expected to explore the practitioner as fully and as 'truthfully' as possible.

The work on each of these practitioners should take between four and six weeks. This is sufficient for an informed tester but may not have enough detail for an 'A' level in-depth essay on that practitioner alone; it would be sufficient, though, for comparisons between practitioners and the work throughout invites this approach.

Note: should you want to cover a particular practitioner in more depth, there are Study Programmes on Stanislavski, Brecht and Artaud where all the theories are very thoroughly explained and explored through a wealth of practical exercises. The work in each of these Study Programmes is sufficient for one term's exploration of that practitioner. The Study programmes apply the theories in each case to a variety of texts, something which this series can do no more than suggest.

This file of work is a companion to Styletasters 1, which covers Stanislavski, Artaud and Grotowski in a similar fashion.

The approaches in both these Styletasters files is different from that of the more detailed Study programmes dealing with a single practitioner. There may be an occasional exercise found in both, but on the whole Styletasters offers a different selection of practical work. Those teachers aiming at exploring Brook or Grotowski, who already have Study Programmes on the 'main' practitioners can rest assured that they are not paying for 'repeats.'

Extract from Brecht: Causes & EffectsBERTOLT BRECHT [1898 - 1956]: CAUSES AND EFFECTS

Brecht was a colourful, charismatic character who has been the subject of many biographical studies, which I do not intend to repeat. The smoker of foul-smelling cheroots, boiler-suited

style-setter - he had a following of young men involved in a range of arts who dressed identically in the 'worker's uniform' of the boiler-suit - leaps off the page of any biography. His musicianship, enjoyment of pub-culture, politics, womanising, famous intolerance - all are important to building up a fiery but very human portrait of Brecht the man and perhaps should be borne in mind when students grumble about Brecht's 'coldness', 'lack of emotion', 'dryness', as they will somewhere along the line. Then it is best to remember that this man made his mark through passion: passion for the theatre, for his own political beliefs, for the rights of the working classes, on top of which he had a passionately bohemian and noisy personal life. Despite his interest as a person, however, I intend to pick out only those biographical details that help the student to understand why his theories evolved as they did. Like all practitioners, Brecht's theories are the product of the times he lived in.

1. Brecht lived through two World Wars, the First as a medical orderly [after school he began training as a doctor, though he did not complete] and the Second from the 'safe' distance of exile in the United States. In neither war, then, did he fight and the sights he saw as a medical orderly in the First World War confirmed him as a life-long pacifist.

The Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War One, in which Germany was forced to make expensive and humiliating reparation for the damage caused by the war provoked a deep-seated desire to rebel. Nobody likes his nose rubbed into the dirt and the constant reminders of their defeat :- no armed forces; huge sums paid to all countries deemed to be damaged by Germany during the war, [e.g. France on whose land much of the fighting had taken part], which were not just lump sums but crippling amounts of money paid out over years; parcels of German territory given out to nations allied to the victors, and so on - all these factors combined to keep Germany down in the dust. But the Versailles treaty paid scant attention to human nature and human nature is to grin and bear such humiliations as long as it is politically expedient, whilst nurturing bitterness and anger inside. Not surprising that a Hitler, whipping up pride in Germany, real benefits such as efficient roads, schools and the other structures of society, as well as promises of revenge for all those years of humiliation, could achieve such power.

What was Brecht's position through all this? Like many intellectuals of the twenties and thirties, his response to the growth of fascism was to look beyond the immediate 'benefits' that this seemed to offer to an alarmed realisation of the lack of personal and intellectual freedom it also entailed. Fascism was sweeping through many countries in Europe and seemed unstoppable - except possibly by Communism - the only party with sufficient numbers to oppose it Many intellectuals, like Brecht, became Communists in the 1920s and 30s.

A proof of how strong the Communist Party in Germany was at this time is Hitler's actions on being made Chancellor: almost his first act was to make membership of the Communist Party illegal and to arrest all known Communists and put them in concentration camps. Brecht himself narrowly escaped by fleeing Germany on the day after Hitler became Chancellor. A further attempt to discredit the Communist Party in the eyes of the ordinary German people was to arrange for the burning of the Reichstag Building [the German equivalent of our Houses of Parliament] and to blame the crime on the Communists. This caused an emotional charge of revulsion against Communism amongst ordinary people. By these actions, Hitler had won an unseen political skirmish and eliminated a potential threat to his new power.

These facts tell us

a] that Brecht's starting-point, quite understandably, is a critical one of the world and society that he knew. People needed to be warned. And theatre could both show society and its faults and suggest that it is within the audience's power to alter it. In fact, the growth of Hitler and his party is a model of how people's minds can be altered through propaganda and brain-washing; Brecht's theatre seeks to keep an audience fully aware at all times and conscious of its own power to judge, to make decisions and to alter events - the opposite of brainwashing, since awareness and choice are involved.

b] It becomes understandable why Brecht embraced Communism as his creed. To the end of his life, and despite Stalin, whose tyranny, especially in the field of the Arts, must have made him uncomfortable, he held firm to the Communist ideal and recognised that society was a long way from this ideal so that sometimes extreme 'means' were justified to bring about an 'end' that is desirable and for the 'greater good.' Hence, many plays from Brecht's middle period of writing, the Lehrstucke [teaching/ learning plays], are attempts to grapple with hard tests to his own natural inclination - tests posed by Communism. Many of these plays are 'what if's.' What if there was a choice between the life of a child and the lives of a whole village? ['He Who Says Yes']. In the short term, we are betrayed by our emotional inclination to wish to save the child - in any case, the child is 'there' in front of us on stage so our emotions are engaged by that fact. Yet, unless the child is sacrificed, the others cannot cross the mountain, fetch the medicine and save the whole village. 'The whole village' are unknowns to the audience - their 'emotions' are not therefore engaged - a fact of human nature well understood by Brecht. [Don't we have more sympathy for the photograph of the one starving African child than the huge numbers of dying in a famine, numbers that we cannot comprehend and so which cannot capture our emotional interest in the same way?] This fact of human nature - our short-sighted emotional response is one that Brecht is always challenging, probably because he found this the hardest thing to conquer in himself. Intellectually, it is obvious that the 'greater good' is more important than the fate of a single individual but emotionally? Hence, we have the start of the whole emotion versus reason debate that forms so much of Brecht's theory.

The emotional hysteria of the Fascist 'message' as delivered by Hitler, which stirs up an extreme response by manipulating its audience emotionally, would be very suspect to Brecht, bypassing, as it does, the reason. Brecht's plays and methods of production always appeal to our reason and our intellectual understanding.

Extract from Brecht: The TheoriesBrecht's own writing about his theories are often not helpful or easy to read. You will find that trying out the practical work for each theory given in this file will make things very dear - and the theories themselves are, surprisingly, far easier to understand than it would seem from Brecht's own essays.

The starting point needs to be extracted from the above 'facts' given in Causes and Effects. They are:

1. Brecht is a Marxist, who believes that the Communist creed may hold the answers for a horribly flawed and class-ridden society, where the poor are kept poor by the uncaring rich who exploit them.

2. Having discovered this creed, Brecht is keen to expose the faults in society and show that there are choices to make and that the world as it is is alterable.

3. For this to be evident, Brecht needs a thinking and aware audience, who can see what a play is getting at and will at least debate the issues and at best try to after injustices.

4. To keep the audience thinking and aware, the actor needs to be conscious at all times of what he is doing and why. The Brechtian actor is acting from his reason, his intellect and not from his heart, his emotions.

ALL THE THEORIES HANG ON THE ABOVE. Most of the theories are either about:

a] keeping an actor at one remove from his character, so that he can himself point out that character's faults and identify what choices he has along the way. To do this properly, the actor cannot be 'in character' - that is absorbed in the skin of the part, as in Stanislavski.

or

b] keeping an audience aware of his surroundings - that he is just in a theatre - so that he can watch for the messages being shown him, realise that the world is alterable and act on this realisation.

1.THE WORLD IS ALTERABLE. THE FAULTS OF NATURALISM. BRECHT PROPOSES PLAYS APPROPRIATE FOR THEIR TIME.

Brecht is aware of the power and temptation of Stanislavski. Many actors do not feel they are acting unless they become totally immersed in their character and achieve, if possible, the state of 'I am.' "I am' Hamlet, who had a mucked-up childhood losing his father, felt emotionally betrayed by his mother ... and so on. Naturalistic acting is dependent on the whys and wherefores of the emotional state of the character - the psychology, the motives - and every one of the actor's moves have to be justified by being tied into the inner emotional state of the character: I sink to the floor, because I am so gutted by the news of my mother's betrayal that my legs won't support me ... etc.

Frustrated by working with actors trained in Stanislavski, Brecht set out first to 'debunk' the System and then to put something in its place - a new set of possibilities for an actor to follow, to achieve a different effect.

Debunking the System consisted of pointing out the absurdities of believing that man and society is unalterable. Naturalism shows a state of mind that is just so 'because it is.' The audience are invited to feel along with the characters, to laugh or weep with them, to nod or shake their heads sadly, to see Hamlet's or Juliet's deaths as inevitable, to make links with their own lives. Love in the Fifteenth century is just like it is today - how wise of Shakespeare - how well he understands the world. Hamlet is a portrait of any ditherer; again and again he is given the opportunity to right a wrong, but it is his destiny to dither - that is just the way things are; his tragedy is inevitable and unchangeable; there are people just like him today.

What good is such an attitude, says Brecht? What does it do to theatre and the world it should portray, ultimately, to say that mankind is the same wherever and whenever - to look for the similarities in people and events over the centuries rather than to recognise that this needn't be so. If Hamlet is a victim of political chicanery, Juliet a victim of a society oppressive to young women, what good is it to say that things haven't changed? To look for links with our society, rather than pointing out the differences - young girls of fourteen are not forced into marriages any more in the West - is a waste of time. Instead of celebrating a defunct social tradition and shaking our heads over the sadness of it, we should be turning our minds to areas of our own society that are oppressive or wrong. Re-interpreting 'Romeo and Juliet's' story as in West Side Story, for instance, which shows the evils of gang warfare and the oppressive nature of some Hispanic cultures to their own womenfolk in the 50's, was a legitimate use of the original story because it was made relevant to the sub-culture of New York.

To clarify: Brecht was not interested in plays that have no relevance to our time. Each society is different, living in different conditions and with different problems; the plays written and performed should be relevant to that society and not showing things as they are, inviting the `oh dear, what a shame - shaking of the head sadly' approach, but rather showing how things

could be altered. His plays tend to expose a problem - sometimes many problems. The main characters in the play make decisions that we are made aware of which alter the circumstances. Often answers are not given; the audience is simply shown the problem and it is left to them to decide what would be the best way of dealing with it. For instance, in 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle' we are given a judge who is not really a judge at all, who allows Grusha the baby because she will be 'good for it.' Yet in the real world - our world - where judges abide by laws set in stone, that outcome could never have happened. It is part of Brecht's charm [and possibly naivete] that he leaves the working out and connections with our own society up to us, the audience. He does not rub our noses in it. Even the referral back to the valley and how it should be used - i.e. the part that was relevant to Brecht's post-war world, where land was being re-allocated everywhere and traditional ways challenged - is dealt with in one line at the end of the play. An audience that is not listening - that is 'carried away' by the story could miss the connection altogether. And yet it is crucial.

Thus, given the problems Brecht poses for us with his own legacy of plays, an actor taking part in one of his plays must be very aware of the point of the production at every moment. Never should he drift out of his own 'head' in to the 'head' of the character. The two must never be confused. How is this done? Through a dear 'demonstrative' style of acting, through the use of 'gest' and through distancing exercises designed to keep the actor at one remove from his part.

Extract from Brecht: The Theories Explored through Practice2. DEMONSTRATION, NARRATION, BREAKING THE FOURTH WALL

In order to make dear how an audience should respond to a character or a situation, it is often necessary to break that fourth wall - the imaginary boundary between audience and actors put so firmly into place by Stanislavski and his followers.

Taking the last example from the previous section on 'gest', the dodgy car salesman and the streetwise customer, the latter may well have to break that barrier and tell the audience his reactions: 'Does he really think I'm taken in? Look at his toothy smile; look at the way he steers me away from looking underneath the car - so that I don't see the rust... etc.'

This kind of explanation would be a legitimate - and often amusing - way of exposing the faults in a social situation, keeping an audience aware both of what is going on in the scene and also showing them the 'outward signs' of duplicity for themselves to guard against.

a.Take any of the scenarios suggested in the gest exercise above, this time clarifying the reaction the audience should have by having one or more of the characters in the scene pointing things out to them. Note that it would be just as legitimate for either of the two characters in the dodgy salesman and the streetwise customer scenario to explain what they are doing or feeling to the audience. E.g. the salesman could warn:' Look at my toothy smile; listen to my unctuous tones. I am trying to put this customer at ease.'

Try expanding one of the pair scenes you have attempted before in this way: explaining to an audience why you are gesturing in such a way, using a particular tone of voice, and so on. Try it with both characters explaining in this way. This will have the double benefit of showing how actors can include the audience and making them justify each gest - each outward sign of voice or gesture.

Doing this should make them realise how effective their chosen gest is - or show them the need to reassess their gest and come up with a better one.

b. In order to help the students understand the meaning of demonstrative acting - demonstrating a character rather than 'being' it - try an exercise that is based on the acting style imposed on performers by Brecht's play `The Measures Taken.'

This should be done in small groups.

The scenario is that a burglary has taken place in a small corner shop, selling food and general supplies. The alarm went off and the police arrived, arresting the burglars before they could escape. Now the police have been accused of unnecessary force. One of the burglars suffered quite severe injury - or says he did. The trial takes place some months after the events described.

i. Two students act as if they were the two burglars. As if relating the events to the jury - the audience - they describe what happened on that night.

ii. Having been asked by the jury to re-enact the events of that night, the two first of all act out their version of events - switching into other roles as necessary - e.g. one of them may demonstrate the policeman who beats him up.

iii. Two policemen give their version of the events of that night. The burglary itself will be told second-hand - as told them by the shopkeeper, perhaps, since they were not there until after the alarm called them to the scene. Use a mixture of re-enaction and explanation / narration.

Note: it might be useful to use the words used in 'The Measures Taken' for introducing the idea of re-enacting events - 'We will show you...' The audience thus knows that the events are merely a re-enactment and that the actors are not playing themselves but other characters in the scenario; the policemen give their version of the burglary playing the burglars in such a way that they are obviously guilty [and the police violence - if there was any - is justifiable]; the burglars will obviously colour the story to present themselves in a better light and the police in the worst light.

Obviously, both the sets of characters in the above scenario have their own viewpoints - and will select a gestic language accordingly - to sway audience opinion. Now try the following:

iv. a passer-by was a witness to the whole thing, though not seen by either burglars or police. He gives his version of the events, mixing narration - a clear exposition of the facts - and demonstration of the actions and speech of a character where necessary.

It is this last version which is the dearest example of the Brechtian style of acting. The actor is not directly concerned in the story. He does, however, want to convince the jury - the audience - of the truth of the matter, so that justice is done. He therefore selects the appropriate gest for his portrayal of each of the characters involved, to make certain the audience will understand and come to the right conclusions. If the policeman is guilty of using too much violence, then the witness may portray him as a bit of a brute perhaps, selecting the appropriate body language and rough way of speaking accordingly. If the burglar is trying to steer the jury away from his own crime to focusing instead on supposed police brutality, then the shifty and over-exaggerated opportunistic writhing on the floor when hardly touched

needs to be shown. It is this selection of detail and exaggeration of it, to create 'gest', which is the Brechtian acting style.

Sample page from Boal sectionExtract from Boal: The Theories

1. OPPRESSED PEOPLES NEED A NEW TYPE OF THEATRE WHICH OFFERS THEM THE HOPE OF CHANGE.

Boal sees traditional theatre and the plays that are performed as part of it as stultifying to the audience. Such plays only offer images of the world as unchanging - and by inference unchangeable. A play is a finished artefact, leaving no room for argument or for other options. Oedipus, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet die; each performance of such plays carries an audience into acceptance of a fait accompli - an act that is finished.

In this respect, his beliefs are very similar to those of Brecht, who continually wanted to show that the world was changeable and that human beings had a duty to change it. People have free will - choice - and they must be galvanised into exercising that ability. What good are visions of the world showing the fate of individuals as unalterable? How depressing that is for ordinary people in terrible social circumstances - the people who Boal calls the 'oppressed.'

Brecht answered this problem by writing plays himself that focused on individuals and the ways they can change the wrongs in society. Mainly his solutions were simple: Communism seemed to him to contain all the obvious answers.

Boal opens this idea out much further. ANY finished piece of theatre is too hide­bound. It may offer solutions for some, but others will be left disappointed. If bourgeois theatre - which is all established theatre that appeals mostly to the upper stratas of society - offers only images of the world as it is and gives no room for change, then meaningful theatre for the working classes - for the oppressed - must show 'images of transition.'

At what point is a play in transition? When it is in rehearsal. Therefore the plays Boal would offer his audiences would be plays in rehearsal - plays that could be altered. This idea was further fuelled by Boal's observation of how the ordinary people of his country, not trained to go to theatre, received plays. Boal had already taken plays out to villages and poor areas of Brazil away from the big cities. There his actors performed and he noticed that these untrained audiences liked to participate - heckling, interrupting, seeking to engage actors in conversation or argument - much like the groundlings m Shakespeare's time, perhaps - with whom, particularly the stage 'fools' often engaged. [A habit which Shakespeare comments on when Hamlet asks the players to perform only what is written for them.] Actors of 'popular' theatre - from travelling players in ancient times, through the medieval period and beyond - encompassing the Commedia dell Arte and others - have always ad libbed, allowing parts of the play to go where a particular audience wants. In those times, a play was a living and changeable organism. It is only with the birth of the idea that the playwright and his text is sacred [something Stanislavski earnestly fought to bring about] that theatre becomes formalised and audiences become, as Boal puts it, 'passive spectators.'

Boal began to take his actors into these areas with a play which was a starting­point only. The actors then improvised according to suggestions thrown out by their active participatory audience.

2. THE 'SPECT-ACTOR.' ACTIVE PARTICIPATION OF MEMBERS OF AN 'AUDIENCE'.

Boal took the ideas begun above further once he realised that as soon as people perceived themselves as members of an audience, they became passive. The separation of actors and audience instantly causes this passivity; the spectator is incapable of action. He is impotent.

How could individuals within an audience be made 'potent'? By making them actors. Boal observed that persons without the ability to act have become 'less than men.' Again, this is similar to Brecht's scathing comments on Stanislavskian audiences who 'hang up their brains with their hats' in the theatre cloakrooms and watch the play they have come to see without questioning it or criticising its view of the world in any way. Boal simply takes this idea further, to a logical solution. He changes the unthinking members of an audience into individual 'spect-actors', with the power to interrupt or to take the place of any of the actors in a piece, to show how things could be altered.

Boal takes the verb 'to act' and restores it to its original meaning. There is no mystery in acting - anyone can do it. 'Acting', in his terminology, is quite different from 'performing', which remains in the realm of professional actors and which no longer really interests him as something for its own sake.

3. FORUM THEATRE, AN ANSWER TO OPPRESSION. THE VARIOUS ROLES OF THE JOKER.

Forum Theatre is the most famous form of Boal's ideas in practice. Its origins are in the form of theatre described above where a group of actors took an idea, only partly rehearsed, to some location and then improvised alternative ways of completing the play according to the ideas proposed by their audience.

In the form it is now, Forum Theatre has become formalised as a kind of theatre activity with its own set of rules, like a game - though a game with a very serious intent. A group of actors take a particular problem which deals with some form of oppression, let us say, for example, a factory owner who is working his men too hard and for too little pay. First of all, the actors go in with a rehearsed piece which is called 'the model.' If possible, the actors should all have experienced the type of oppression they are exposing; it should be 'real' for them.

Having seen the action once, the model is repeated in a somewhat speeded-up version. At any point, any member of the audience can shout, 'Stop.' The actors then freeze and the member of the audience steps into the place of the main person - who is the oppressed one in the play, in this case the over-worked, underpaid employee. Perhaps in this, our imaginary scenario, there are two other actors in the scene - the factory owner and the manager in over-all charge of the workers. These two actors will try their best to impose the same ending as before on the scene - with the employee meekly accepting his oppression. But the new protagonist - the 'spect-actor' who has stepped in - will try to find a different solution, one that gains him some freedom from his oppression. It becomes a kind of game - the oppressors seeking to uphold their oppression and the oppressed seeking to free himself by changing something about his working conditions, or the way he is perceived by the bosses.

If it all starts to go wrong again, or another member of the audience thinks he can see another way, then he can shout 'Stop,' step in, and the scene begins again from that point. In this way, a variety of solutions can be explored.

Because this kind of theatre could easily relapse into anarchy, the Forum Theatre exercise is presided over by 'the Joker.' The idea of the Joker becomes very important in all forms of Boal theatre and therapy. In Forum Theatre he is a kind of referee who teaches the rules of the `game' to the audience and ensures that audience debate does not become chaotic; otherwise it could so easily become another form of 'oppression' for those quieter ones who

want to speak but are easily defeated into silence. At other times, the Joker is the title of the director, the workshop leader or the facilitator of a major Boal techniques project. His role is to be quietly in charge, without imposing his will on the proceedings. In Forum Theatre, if the audience think that the Joker's ruling has been unfair in any way, they can debate the issue and replace him by majority consent.

Rules too can be changed, through debate and consent. In fact, the whole basis of Forum Theatre is to invite audience debate in every area - so long as the outcome is satisfactorily explored and a variety of ways of changing the form of oppression under scrutiny are exposed. It is the Joker's job to ensure this happens and to see that the debate sticks to the point.

Rules will mainly be free but sensible, such as allowing people to finish what they have to say, and so on. One other rule that is of interest and worth mentioning is this: if a spect-actor tries to alter the outcome of a scene through unrealistic means, through resorting to fantasy, the audience can shout out the word 'Magic.' An example would be if a spect-actor says to his boss 'Actually, you can stuff your job because I've just won the lottery.' This solution might be seen as a cop-out - not likely to happen - therefore not a 'real' solution to the problem. Someone could call 'Magic' and that solution would then be debated by the audience as to whether it should be allowed.

From this, you can see how the Brechtian ideal of promoting an intellectually aware audience and the Piscatorian idea of a play about a moral problem [such as his one about abortion] leading to a debate between actors and audience have been taken to very logical conclusions by Boal.

Extract from Boal: The Theories Explored Through PracticeFirst, I would suggest that the group discuss the whole idea of `Masks', around the following questions. We are, of course, talking about the imaginary masks people use to cope with different situations e.g. at work, with family, with friends, most people play different roles - wear different masks. A mask is simply the outward signs people employ to cope with a particular situation, to blend in with a group, and so on.

Discuss the following:

What kind of `masks' do people `wear' in different situations, in general? Think of as many as possible. What kind of masks do individuals within the group feel that they employ? How do they think people perceive them?

What has `forced' their own particular `masks'? e.g. is it a social ritual that has determined them?

a. In pairs, ask each person in the pair to imitate the mask they perceive in their partner. Care must be taken here - showing the same sensitivity to others as in all the previous work done on Boal. Perceived masks can be ones a close partner has seen employed in a particular situation, e.g. In the classroom - or the mask they perceive in their partner at that moment - which might be anxiety, defensiveness or whatever.

b. To help identify the normal social masks people use - father, son, boss, interviewer, etc. - each of which will have identifying features: gestures, expressions and so on - try the following:

A volunteer goes into the playing area and starts an action. A second volunteer, having understood the action, goes up and establishes without words - only using visible signs and the kind of realistic gestures used by whichever `mask' he has adopted - a relationship with the first actor, appropriate to the actions of the first. e.g. If the first actor was miming sitting at a computer, the second could come in as his father - which would mean the first actor, recognising this, would respond as his son; or the second actor could come is as his employer or a work colleague, each possibility eliciting a different response from the first actor.

The scene can then be added to, bringing in other actor­volunteers - and can now progress into speech. Alternatively, the Joker could decide when speech can be employed, ensuring that people are reading the signs of gesture, body language and facial expression, in order to identify the masks.

Try one or two of these, using different volunteers from the group.

c. Try a series of greetings between different characters, to identify the rituals involved:

husband and wife boy and new girlfriend

two boys

two girls

teacher and pupil

employer and employee

doctor and patient

interviewer and interviewee

two Heads of State

two soldiers

colonel and sergeant

See if as well as identifying the rituals through discussion and observation, the class can also identify the social masks used.

d. Now try swapping masks in one or two of the following scenarios:

a teacher ticks off a pupil. At a clap from the teacher, the actors swap masks [swap roles.]

a headteacher reprimands a young new teacher for being too informal and friendly with his class. Once again, swap roles on a signal.

two homeless people, one old and one young, try to persuade the social services [represented by one or two people] to give them shelter over Christmas at a special shelter. There is only room for one. Swap roles so that everyone has at least played a social services person and a homeless person.

at a school reunion there are two people who have done well in business and achieved some wealth and status; one housewife and mother and one who is on the dole. Explore their possible inter-action. Swap as many times as possible, to explore all the possible permutations of 'masks' and 'rituals'.

Once again, make sure that the findings from all the above are thoroughly discussed. For instance, was there a difference of response between the two social services people in the third scenario? Why?

The students should have enough understanding of the idea of masks - which can be translated roughly as 'facades adopted under certain social conditions' - and rituals - which can be roughly translated as `modes of behaviour adopted under certain social pressures or conditions' to proceed from this into Image Theatre.

Sample page from Brook sectionExtract from Brook: Causes and Effects

2. From the rehearsals of 'King Lear' , Brook began to realise two main things: that an actor crossing an empty space is more charged with meaning than any background setting could be and that a truly creative actor, such as Paul Schofield who played the part of Lear, needs freedom to grow into the part. Central to this was Schofield's refusal to play Lear as 'old' in any traditional sense. One can see this in the film version to this day. Schofield's Lear is upright, strong-voiced and strides about the stage, the very essence of self-confident certainty in his own power and might. Eschewing aging make­up and other traditional trappings, the audience saw Lear's age - especially as he aged in suffering - through their imaginations alone. They did not need physical aids, other than the power of the actor to convince with his own body. This realisation was an important one for Brook.

From these realisations we can see:

a. How it was that Brook became intrigued by the essence of theatre - an actor, an empty space, an audience. The rest of his career has been devoted to discovering as much as possible about the potentials of these three elements.

b. the seeds of his principles about allowing free rein to his actors to create their own characters - though within the confines of a central core of ideas. This 'freedom within boundaries' idea is central to theatre traditions of the Far East and was confirmed for Brook once he had started to work with international actors.

3. 1964 was an important year for Brook. This was the year of the Theatre of Cruelty season funded by the RSC, in which Brook experimented with the ideas of Artaud in particular. Many pieces of theatre were performed as part of this season, including Artaud's own play 'Spurt of Blood.' The most notable production of the season was Brook's production of 'The Marat/Sade*', which used a blend of theories from Artaud and from Brecht.

Also in this year, Brook began to conduct his first proper investigations into theatre. The Theatrical Research Group, run by him, used the LAMDA theatre in which to conduct their experiments, focusing on the basic essentials of 'What is theatre?' Working in strong white light with a piece of carpet for a performance area, Brook wanted to concentrate on what made up that unique concentrated energy which is built up, without the distractions of theatre trappings, between an actor and an audience.

From these events we can see:

a. How enormously eclectic Brook is. He draws - and still does - from all and any sources. Here we see him putting Artaud and Brecht together, on the face of it an unlikely combination - yet it worked. Brook wrote about the play: 'Everything about the 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... It's not exactly Brecht and it's not Shakespearian

either, but it's very Elizabethan and very much of our times.' The quote is enlightening - showing what it is about the piece that Brook found so fascinating. He was [and is] always looking for plays that will create a similar energy to that achieved by the Elizabethan theatre, a similar blend of soaring heights and passion [Holy Theatre] and crudity [Rough Theatre.]

* The full title of the 'Marat/Sade' by Peter Weiss is: 'The Persecution and Murder of Marat as performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Cherenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.'

The play combined shocking violence, strange cries and noises from the inmates, the audience being threatened, startling make-up - much that is familiar from studies of Artaud about Total Theatre and Cruelty - with a singer/ narrator, placards, political slogans, and four singer/commentators who break up the flow of the action - all familiar features of Brechtian theatre. The blend of the two created this startling effect of being alternately horrified and forced to think, as Brook's quote shows.

b. The beginnings of Brook's ongoing researches to which he was to end up devoting all of his energy. The LAMDA experiments show the start of his reductions - theatre without excess, seemingly quite the opposite of what the Marat/Sade was all about. Yet, about his rehearsal for that play, Brook stated he had encouraged his actors to all sorts of excesses, in order to explore the idea of untrammeled madness as well as the excesses of Artaud, but that then much of the rehearsal period was devoted to trimming down these excesses to essential outlines, what he described as a 'gradual withering away of excess.' This method of rehearsal became normal for him and he still uses it. The idea is that the actors should first of all unleash everything they have - glory in an excess of ideas, allow themselves complete freedom to play with their characters. From this 'excess', a number of useful ideas will emerge and these form the basis for the eventual realisation of the character. All the other ideas will gradually fall away and be seen as unnecessary, quite naturally.

4. 1964 saw Brook's production of 'US', which dealt with both the USA's involvement in Vietnam and the British lads of awareness of it. It was an attempt to confront a British audience with truths about that war - the title 'US' stands for both 'us, the British people' and the United States - and as such was a one-off, a kind of 'Happening' that evolved out of fifteen weeks' intense work. The work evolved out of the group themselves, who all brought stories they had found out about events in Vietnam, photographs and other items round which to evolve their work. The work had an intensity and vitality about it at the beginning, which, Brook reports, gradually fizzled out with constant repetition over a five-month performance period.

A significant feature of the devising process was Brook's invitation to Grotowski to spend ten days working with the actors - with mixed results. Not all of the actors found Grotowski's methods helpful, but Brook was fascinated by the man and his dedication.

This work helps us to understand:

a. Brook's open-mindedness, his constant willingness to challenge himself and his confident expectation that others will want to be similarly challenged. Grotowski draws him because of their many similarities - not of style or subject-matter - but of dedication and research. Brook points out that no one since Stanislavski has so closely investigated the phenomenon of acting - a credit which can now apply to Brook himself. Grotowski's ideas were probably too steeped in Catholic/ Polish roots to be truly applicable to British actors, but some of Grotowski's ideas did spill into 'US' nonetheless: the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk reminds me of the kind of 'sacrifice' that Grotowski demanded of his actors; the huge uniformed model of a marine commando, which hung over the stage, a napalm shell in its belly - reminds me both of the huge brooding shapes advocated by Artaud and the symbols constructed out of pieces of rubbish into outsize religious icons in some of Grotowski's work. The lads of setting and props were both an imperative, since the action of the finished piece moved from an English lawn to the steps of the Pentagon to a square in

Saigon, for example, and an exploration of the ideas inherent in 'Poor Theatre' where limited items can be used again and again to represent anything at all and are made convincing by the way the actors use them. The ending of the play, which involved the ritual burning of a white butterfly is the kind of shocking symbol with which Grotowski's work abounds.

Extract from Brook: The Theories6. SEEKING FOR THE 'MAGICAL' IN THEATRE: 'THE GOLDEN FISH.' CONCLUSIONS ON 'WHY THEATRE AT ALL?'

The main aim for Brook in any theatre presentation is to 'net the golden fish', which means to come up with an image or a symbol that transforms life, that is unforgettable. These images have been found by such playwrights as Beckett - who gave us two tramps and a single tree and a woman half buried in the detritus of her life, both potent metaphors. Other powerful symbols that became, as Brook points out, part of the Twentieth Century consciousness - archetypes in their own right - are Brecht's old woman pulling a cart [Mother Courage], Arden's dancing sergeant, Sartre's people trapped on a sofa in hell [Huis Clos]. These, and others, are all memorable images that transform our way of thinking about life. It is this sort of symbol that Brook too searches for. He wants to transform our thinking, translate life for us, make something so memorable that we will never forget it; this is to 'net the golden fish.'

In order to achieve this kind of magic in theatre, the ground must be prepared. Hence the work on creating an ensemble of actors who are so in tune with each other that the slightest ripple of reaction from one is picked up and reflected in all the others.

Hence, too, the preparation of the audience for a ritual which puts them in a frame of mind for the revelation of wonders. Participating in a ritual, very much a feature of all Brook's more recent work, creates a sense of sharing between audience and actors and heightens the intensity - that special sort of electricity - which is part of the ongoing creative process. The disparate fragments of life which are the different individuals that make up an audience are brought together in the simple focusing of shared attention on a ceremony such as the ritual lighting and blowing out of a candle, twice. It is an act, too, that crosses cultures - being understood by all cultures and religions. It brings people together - and that, too, is very much a part of what Brook is about. And because people are brought together and share in something, a healing takes place - the same kind of healing as was originally effected by participating in a shared religious ceremony - where people shed the complications of their lives outside the theatre and find a kind of innocence, regaining their childlike sense of wonder.

Brook sees himself now as part of a world tradition - not just a European one - and one that will continue beyond him. Just as the African storyteller slaps his bare palm on the ground to signify the end of his story, Brook has adopted many such simple touches from his investigation in world theatre traditions and his mingling of actors from different cultures into his performance group - for just as the slapping of the palm on the bare earth means the end of the story, it also is an invitation. The story is placed on the earth by the storyteller for another storyteller to pick up and carry on.

Brook's starting point was to ask' Why theatre at all? What for? Is it an anachronism?.... Has the stage a place in our lives? What function can it have? What could it sense? What could it explore? What are its special properties?' And, after a lifetime's research and scientific investigation his response is a resounding affirmation of the role of theatre in our lives. There

is a way to go, he acknowledges; people must be given a hunger for art and see it as necessary to life itself and to achieve this, deadliness must be overturned and living theatre put in its place with its ability to transform life through startling images and through a blend of the spiritual and the real. But it has and should have a place in our lives, because it is always in the present, because it shows life in an intense form, but above all because it can bring people together, in delight, in laughter, in the gasp of awe at wonders revealed, in a realisation of our shared humanity.

Extract from Brook: The Theories Explored Through Practicec. Ask for volunteers to come in alone, or in pairs, with the Instruction that they must `fill the space' for the audience. The space is empty - how easily can they make an audience see it as a particular place? Challenge the actors to come up with as imaginative Ideas as possible. Some may fulfil the criteria by performing actions, such as pushing an imaginary shopping trolley around and pulling objects off shelves to load it; some may simply `take us' to a place they love - by the sea, in the woods - and paint the scene for us with words and actions. If they see their place in their mind's eye, they will translate their feeling for the place and bring it alive for us by the subtlest of movements to accompany their description of it.

d. Challenge the space.

i. Without actually changing the size of the space that has been defined, ask groups to plan a short scenario which, when performed In the playing area will convince the audience that the space is either much larger or much smaller than it is. They could be lost In an endless desert.... stuck In a lift.... in a cell ... be tiny creatures on a table.... be huge creatures in a tight spot....ii. Try a simple realistic scene .... a family ... a couple having a conversation ... and having quickly planned it, try it in different configurations of the allotted space. What difference does it make to the scene if the couple, for instance, are having to communicate with the whole width of the stage between them? What difference, again, does it make if they are practically eyeball to eyeball?

Try other different spatial relationships too: back to back, one behind the other, standing at strange angles to each other.

Experiments like this can sometimes cast unusual light on ordinary things, making us see things in unexpected and often enlightening ways. It can work well with naturalistic conversations out of play texts being studied, too.

Make sure that all of the above is discussed. Have the students more of an awareness about the potentials of the empty space that is the playing area? They should never forget that it is an area for 'playing' in - for experimentation and for challenging everything.

e. Ask all the students to find some object in the room and use it as something for which it is not Intended. A shoe can become a mobile phone, for instance. Keeping to the same object, ask them on a given signal to change its use again - and again - a minimum of three times.

f. Put an empty cardboard box - preferably large - into the centre of the playing space. Ask a number of volunteers to come up one at a time and demonstrate its potential use.

g. Finally, divide the class up into small groups - of three or, at the most, four. Each group is to have a simple object which must not be too complex or too rooted to a particular period in time. Timeless objects, then, are allocated. The following would be suitable:

a stone a box

a piece of rope

a pair of shoes

a bowl

They are to come up with a simple scenario based around their object. The principle around the composition of the scene is that it should be as like a folk-tale or street story as possible, simply told, with characters that are straightforward and broad in outline.

What would it be like, for instance, for a barefoot beggar to find a pair of shoes - or a bowl of food?

What if a thief or trickster conned him out of his find?

What if a quarrel then ensued and a third person entered in to try and sort out the rights and wrongs of the quarrel - recognised the shoes and claimed them as his own?

Their stories should be as simple as this, use the space well, seek to draw in the audience by, perhaps, direct address, as well as by the interest of the story and the ability of the actors.

This last exercise, as well as using 'the empty prop', mimics the kind of work Brook was doing with his actors on their travels around the world, particularly in Africa.

Extract from Brook: Using The Theories A Final Group ProjectI am aware that there are theories that have not been explored. All of the sections so far have, in any case, tried to cover more ground than is really possible in a limited period. Brook, like all of the practitioners, has spent all his life coming to some of the conclusions he has done and any experimental work we do will be only scratching the surface - but will hopefully help us understand something of the nature of those theories nonetheless.

The area I have largely left out is that of the training of the actors, especially the eradication of their personal blocks and how to achieve this. If you have Styletasters 1, this is touched on in the section on Grotowski, which may be useful here, since Brook's ideas largely concur with Grotowski's in this area.

In addition, the work with canes, in particular, is relevant to this area, as are much of the teamwork building exercises in 'Freedom Within Boundaries.' Any of these can be referred to as back-up work for this area of Brook theory, when writing essays.

For a final project which uses as many of Brook's ideas as possible, give the group the title 'Creation.' They are to come up with a piece that involves the following 'ingredients':

a story-line that is mythic - that uses legend/ myth as its basis

an empty space

a ritual to open and to close the show - this may be the same ritual or different ones. Remember, the ritual is to focus the audience attention - to bring them in and to generate that special 'electricity'; it may or may not be a direct part of the action of the story itself. It would be quite acceptable to use Brook's own ritual of blowing out a candle, relighting it and blowing it out a second time, if nothing more apt suggests itself.

a story and presentation that is stripped down to the barest of essentials

It would be hard to be more specific than this, without imposing too much on the potential of the finished piece. I think it is important that the group should try to work in as Brookian a manner as possible, i.e.­

Starting with games and free improvisations that come out of the group's own ideas and objects left around in the room, plus ideas from the teacher or director himself - fed in only judiciously and it the group's own creativity is flagging. For instance, leaving around coloured balls of different sizes might lead to 'playing with the idea of balls as planets; brainstorming different Creation stories might come up with free improvisations around Adam and Eve, Prometheus, and many others from world religions and legends. Always encourage adventure, play, using musical instruments, voices m different ways, pieces of cloth, canes, and so on - all around the free association of ideas around 'Creation'. Plunder the actors' own associations - which might have nothing to do with legends or religions at all - allow anything at this stage: the craftsman's creation - the mother's....

There does need to be a 'director' who is a unifier - whether that is the teacher or a member of the group. In the end, the director will piece together the final product by working his way through all the creative work on offer from this early stage, finding a startling image or series of images that would work together. This is the stage where any 'set' used starts to be created too or music, light, and so on.

Once all parts have been allocated, care must be taken to allow the actors' creativity still to freely develop, within the confines of their role in the piece.

If possible, it would be good to try out some of it on another group - or some younger children, before finalising the material.

The group should aim for a `final' piece of around fifteen minutes.

Brecht Through PracticeBrecht's gift to modern theatre is to allow it a social usefulness; he liberates theatre from slavish imitations of life and allows different styles of acting to co-exist: naturalism gives way to clear outlines, comic exaggeration and a collage approach to production, to put over a particular message.

The background from which Brecht's style emerged is important to understanding why Brecht comes up with the theories he does, but at the end of the day it is what his theatre proposes as an acting style that is our concern. Whatever the means by which he arrived at his theories, there is a recognisable style when these theories are put together into one body, called 'epic theatre' and this style is as valid and useful today as it ever was.

The epic style can be adapted to any form of theatre that puts a social or political message before the exploration of character. Once character is less important than message and the

intricacies of human motive less intriguing than storytelling and the exploration of situation, you have Brechtian theatre.

Every effort has been made to order the theories into a logical framework so that they can be easily followed and understood by students and to translate them into purely practical terms so that each theory can be tested through practice. Students may thus pick up the points made and turn them easily into essays backed up with practical knowledge.

The first section of Brecht Through Practice explores Brecht's theories in their final state, always recognising that, unlike Stanislavski, Brecht does not have a clear System to follow which takes an actor on a path from A to B. The second section places the historical context and influences on his work and explores Brecht's theories through some of his plays.

Sample Pages from Brecht Through Practice:

Clarity - Putting over a Message - GestBrecht's principal concern is to put over a message in such a way that an audience can be in no doubt as to the intentions of the performance. That is the reason he and his actors spent so much time poring over photographs of the plays in rehearsal - each moment of the play was photographed - checking that the still moment captured on film delivered clearly what was supposed to be happening on stage. Was it clear that so-and-so was about to tell a lie? Would the audience be able to tell that the judge was in the pay of the gangsters and that the defendant had been beaten? Just by looking at the stage picture? The language of gesture and facial expression is clearly very important then to the Brechtian technique.

Practical Work1. The class should pair up and then face their partners with the furthest distance possible between them, e.g. the extreme ends of the hall or studio. Thus you have the whole group divided into half with one half facing the other. Without telling their partners, each individual thinks of a well- known nursery rhyme or the words of a song with which they are familiar. Then, on a signal from the teacher, everyone speaking at once tries to communicate their rhyme to their partner; so everyone is talking and listening at the same time. The result will be pandemonium! Stop it very quickly, after only a few seconds. Ask them how many understood what their partner was saying. Very few will, unless you have a tiny group. Then, talking strictly, tell them it is life and death that they communicate their 'message' to their partners, but give them no clues as to how to do this. They must stay where they are and they are still both communicating and listening. What should happen, and usually does, is that more and more individuals start to use gesture and pantomime their rhymes. Let it run for a little longer, but not long enough for people to reach the end of their rhymes, because that will leave some voices exposed. Now ask how many understood their partners. Far more will, if not the whole group. Emphasise the importance of gesture and body language to communicate a message.

2. Still in pairs, ask the students to find three different body positions and facial expressions to communicate the following: love; respect; disbelief; regret; admiration; intimidation. In each case one partner will have to be the one 'doing' and the other one will be 'receiving' or reacting. Test these out by using the rest of the class as an audience, perhaps not having known the stimulus.

Now develop this by making a sequence of the three 'stills', linked together with brief narration, which one of the pair, A or B, supplies. e.g. taking 'love', first 'still' shows A's admiring gaze on B, who is dancing. Narration = 'Andy first saw Beth at the party. He had never seen anyone so attractive before. He determined to talk to her.' Second 'still', A asking B for a date...etc.

Brecht believes that social situations change the way people behave, unlike Stanislavski, who showed through his System that people are the same the world over, sharing the same emotions in whatever period of history they may be born. Thus Oedipus, Othello, and Dr Stockmann, though they come from entirely different periods of time and social and cultural backgrounds, are basically the same. Their pain is the eternal pain of human suffering.

Brecht was anxious to disprove this. He believed that human beings are formed by their society and culture and their behaviour is appropriate to their time; in consequence, he wanted to create theatre that was appropriate to 'the modern age' and characters that react in a twentieth century way: "theatre for the scientific age," and since the scientific age is a rational one, character, like everything else should be put under the microscope.

3. With the students in small groups, each group is given a situation. They are to discuss the different responses to their situation and then compile three short scenes which demonstrate three different responses, or, if they are able, all three responses could take place in the same scene from three different characters.

Suitable situations:

the battlefield when the side you are on is losing e.g. of different responses to demonstrate: fighting heroically till death; running away from the battlefield; keeping head down in a bombcrater and responding as necessary to anyone else, friend or foe, entering that crater with you.

the factory when the management has awarded themselves a payrise but not the workers

a group of patients whose doctor has been arrested for possible murder

members of a small community whose village is threatened by the building of a huge out-of-town shopping centre nearby

Discuss afterwards the difference it makes when characters are responding directly to situations. Would it make a difference if the characters had been built up from the inside, Stanislavski fashion? Does a meek man always respond meekly? Or might he discover a lion inside him if his family was threatened? At what point does the pacifist become ready to kill?

There is much food for debate here with your groups and I believe it is fruitful, because there will be many who are reluctant to let go of their Stanislavskian background [ or at least the kind of 'realism' offered by some of their favourite soaps]. Many students will prefer not to challenge the concept that characters behave consistently and that they can be given a 'through-line' from birth to death.

But are real life people consistent? Of course they are not. People contradict themselves the whole time, with perfect sincerity. People in literature, however, often are consistent - they are made so by their authors - and that is why Stanislavski's System can work for so many plays of a certain naturalistic type, because the truth about life he is aiming to show on stage is "artistic truth", i.e. life in a tidied up form.

I am certainly not suggesting that you should undermine such work as you have done on Stanislavski, but it should be stressed that naturalism works for plays of a certain type and there are many other genres of play around. All this above work is necessary to establish the different standpoints of Stanislavski and Brecht and to open the students' minds to other forms of theatre than naturalism. Brecht's sprawling choice of theatrical expression, his 'epic theatre', is ideally formed to show characters over a wide span of years in a number of situations, responding directly to these situations, as their reason or the needs of the moment dictate. His form of theatre is therefore in many ways more 'realistic' than Stanislavski's tidy naturalism.

Working in this way, with situation rather than character as the basis for action, Brecht needed a different theatre language than that established by naturalism. So far we have explored the need for clarity and the establishment of situation, without taking this further into establishing a message for the audience. This is of course what gives Brechtian theatre its particular slant. A Brechtian play must have an 'attitude' and that attitude will be political in the broadest sense of the word. This 'attitude' demands a group of actors who are consciously projecting the message by means of their characters and their staging. Throughout the entire performance, the actors must not lose sight of their true objective, whether it is to provoke debate or to educate the audience and so they must never become immersed in their characters or this will muddle the intention. Further, they must know at every moment of the play what attitude that scene or moment of the play is putting over. Hence we have the Brechtian word 'gest' or 'gestus'; the two mean the same and are interchangeable.

'Gest' is gesture plus attitude. Brecht defines it in this way: a group of soldiers marching across the stage is merely 'gesture'; the soldiers are not conveying anything to the audience other than that they are soldiers. Put a number of dead bodies on the stage and have the soldiers marching over them and you have 'gest'. The picture shown to the audience is that the soldiers are uncaring, deadened to war and the results of it, so that is conveying an 'attitude.' "Gest' is the main area that students seem to find difficult to grasp. It is, of course, much easier to do that to describe. The following exercise is particularly helpful in identifying the difference between gesture and gest.

4. The students all move around the room [I tend to use my familiar grid exercise for this, because it sharpens their attention and has them moving in a more purposeful manner]. The floor is divided up with imaginary lines like graph paper. Individuals may only move along the lines, in silence, at a crisp pace, making only sharp turns, not stopping, not slowing down, taking evasive action if someone is coming towards them on a collision course; bumping is not allowed.

Having established the rhythmic way of moving, they will be concentrated and quickly warmed up. Then tell them that when you clap your hands they partner up with the person nearest to them. Without talking, they should make instant statues of the following. Between each statue they should move back to the grid so that the next statue is done with someone else as partner.

Romeo and Juliet summer and winter

cat and mouse

hero and coward

song and dance

rich and poor

war and peace

On the last one, 'rich and poor', get them to look around at each other. I would almost guarantee they will have come up with nearly identical poses: the rich person looking snootily in the air and avoiding contact with the poor person, who is down in a begging position, looking pitiful.

Find out if they can see the difference between a statue for, say, summer and winter, and this one. It is the difference between gesture and gest. Unconsciously, each one of them is showing an opinion, an attitude: the rich are snobby and uncaring, the poor are needy and to be sympathised with. Their poses have been 'gests'. Of course, then it needs explaining that what a Brechtian actor is doing is making gests consciously. A true gest cannot really be unplanned, unconscious. But though they have been 'tricked' into doing a gest, you will find they remember it and it makes a good example.

5. Divide the class into groups. Explain that gest covers individual body language and facial expression [also voice tone when necessary] but it is also a term to describe the whole stage picture. Gest is about attitude, but it is also about clarity. The attitude of the actors and the play must be put over as clearly as possible, whether there is one actor alone on the stage or a huge number. Gest is being used all the time.

Ask the groups to make two contrasting gestic tableaux of the following:

a] a picture entitled 'War, the maker of heroes' and a picture entitled 'The waste of war' b] a picture showing one member of the group as the most popular person in the school

and a picture showing that same person as the least liked member of the school

c] a picture entitled 'the trustworthy politician, friend to the people' and a picture entitled ' the insincere face of politics', or 'do not trust this person'

If gest is the whole stage picture, discuss what other things could be added to, say, the first two on war, to help communicate the gest? Costume additions, props, is what you want as the answer, for instance shiny uniforms and medals for the first picture; rags and tatters, bloody bandages, etc. for the second one.

6. Return to the earlier exercise on situation rather than character. Here the students presented three possible responses to a given situation. Now ask them to choose an attitude that they as a group wish the audience to understand. Perhaps that attitude may be, using the first scenario as an example, that it is better to keep your head low in that bomb crater, keeping your options open. What adjustments would be needed to the characters and their different responses to make your attitude to them clear? Perhaps the hero becomes stupid, exaggeratedly gung-ho and not bright enough to see that death is not necessarily glorious. The man keeping his head down may become rational, thinking things through and sharing his thoughts with the audience in a humorous fashion, because he wants - as do the rest of the cast - the audience to be on his side and to see his solutions as the best option in a difficult situation. Get the students to repeat their final presentation, making clear the attitude they have to the three responses.

It is necessary to start with gest, because, as you will quickly find, it is something that the actor is using all the time. A Brechtian actor cannot perform without deciding on the attitude

he is taking to the piece and the character. In any performance this will be a group decision; each actor will be absolutely clear as to the viewpoint the whole scene is conveying and the way he must interpret his character in consequence, in order to contribute correctly to the whole piece.

Artaud Through PracticeOf all the main twentieth century practitioners of the theatre, Artaud seems to frighten many teachers the most. This is because he doesn't set down a system of acting or production that one can follow through and which makes sense in a logical satisfying way, as Stanislavski does. Nor does he have a clear political and social aim which results in a style and manner of production to further that aim, as does Brecht. No, Artaud writes like a poet and visionary, sending off arrows of fire into the night: he fires up the reader as he has fired up many theatre practitioners, such as Grotowski and Brook. He generates excitement in those who seek to follow his ideas, acting as a catalyst, a liberator, and it is that which makes him both frightening and fascinating.

Arguably what Artaud has to offer is more influential to modern day theatre than either Stanislavski or Brecht.

Translating Artaud's ideas into a practical followable form for a teacher and a class of students is challenging, not because the work itself is difficult, but because at best any practical work we propose is guesswork. Would Artaud have proposed this way of working? Would he, if given the chance to form a System, have translated his visionary ideas into this exercise or that? We have no way of knowing.

No excuses are made for the fact that many of the exercises are inventions. Jeni has genuinely attempted to understand and translate Artaud's writings into workable and practical exercises that build into a logical and recognisable 'style'. Aspects of this 'style' can be found in Physical Theatre, Visual Theatre and other similar theatre forms in current practice today, but none really embrace the Total Theatre of Artaud's visions. Perhaps because it is impossible, or unworkable or simply would be 'too, too much'. Any interpretation or effort at 'translation' into ordinary or workable terms is, of necessity, a reduction and Jeni is very conscious of that. But, ultimately, students must write about him and so his ideas, to be made embraceable, have to be reduced, interpreted, translated into normal theatre language.

Sample Pages from Artaud Through Practice:Finding a Concrete Language of SymbolsImages or symbols have the power to evoke an emotional response which is often not logical. The intellect tends not to rationalise 'I am feeling this and this. because of the powerful suggestiveness of the image I have read or seen'; it just feels. As in the word association game played in the last section, imagery sets up a chain reaction of emotional responses in each of us that is both individual and universal. That is why it is so potent in poetry. For example, the word 'night' sets up a chain reaction of responses which are shared in most areas of the world: darkness, death, fear, destruction, evil, etc. Test out the connotations for your students with the following series of words.

horizon tree

water

sap

sea

flower

cloud

Each of these, if they are prodded a little, should evoke responses which are not literal. For instance, I would expect 'horizon' to stimulate ideas of goals, aims, adventure, etc. 'Tree' might provoke Christian responses as well as ideas of strength.

How much more powerful does this all become when it is visual, not tied just to a word or words in a particular context. The poet works often by appealing to the visual inner eye of the listener or reader but Artaud proposes bringing that rich world of allusion to the visual art form of the theatre. And this proposal is enormous in its repercussions; the effect on the audience of visual imagery is extraordinary, providing it is accompanied by all the other areas of Total Theatre: light, sound, colour, etc, to help block out the impulse to question. Visuals work intensely on the brain and are far more memorable than anything heard. Test this out by asking, after the class have seen any show, what they remember about the show. It will nearly always be something visual; very rarely a memorable line or speech. Couple, then, the power of visuals with the ability the brain has to spiral off into its own series of allusions, sparked off by a particular image, and you have an extraordinary ability to influence and affect the audience, as it were subliminally - that is, bypassing the intellect which would seek to explain and thus reduce the effect of what it has seen.

I remember the billowing black cloth that engulfed the stage and swallowed the actors, as an image of the Holocaust, in Theatre de Complicite's "The Street of Crocodiles'; I will never forget it. Nor shall I ever forget Peter Schumann's huge sorrowing female puppet figure as the symbol of Vietnam, when I caught his 'Bread and Puppet Theatre' at the end of the 60s. Images stick.

Practical Work1. After an initial discussion about symbols and their connotations, as suggested above, divide the students into smallish groups, four or five, and ask them to come up with visual symbols for the following stimuli. From the beginning encourage the use of sound where appropriate.

anger sympathy

frustration

despair

boredom

deceit

defensiveness

rejection

loneliness

It might be a good idea to brainstorm a few first. Encourage the use of the word 'like'.... Boredom is 'like' a clock ticking very slowly..... a droning fly underlined by the droning voice of a teacher..... leaves drooping in heat..... etc.

2. Now take this a little further. A symbol for non-conformity might be a group of people marching, or doing a strict routine of movements in a robotic repetitive manner, with one person beginning to dance slowly and dreamily. Adding sounds to this, extend the idea. What happens next? How do the conformers react to the non-conformist? Using wherever possible the whole of their small group, find more extended symbols to show:

the sudden flaring up of a street-fight a group of friends trying to calm the anger of one of their number

idealised romantic love punctured by reality

captivity followed by liberation

the protectiveness of mother love

courtship of an innocent by a practised seducer

someone suspecting their friends of treachery

Symbols can be mixed. For instance, an argument could involve the slinky moves and hisses of big cats at one time, the snarling and howling of a dog-fight at another, the fizzing and explosiveness of a match igniting at another. The idea is to hit the audience hard and fast with a whirligig of impressions, not all of which will resonate for every person but enough will.

Discuss what other additions might have helped too - sounds, lights, visual images back-projected on the cyclorama, props, costumes, colour washes, or anything else. It is time to start feeding them towards the idea of Total Theatre.

3. Try now expressing a whole simple story-line in a symbolic way. The idea used in the First Lessons section could be re-explored. It might be useful to compare the results of the work then with the present, now that so much more has been learned. Or, one of the following ideas might work:

Boy meets girl. They fall in love. Angry parents try to keep the two apart. The two find a way of escaping and run off together.

A young girl is seduced by an older man who then deserts her, leaving her pregnant. Her brothers vow revenge. They track down the man and murder him. Meanwhile the girl has her baby. The brothers want to take the baby from her but she fiercely protects it.

Bored by the humdrumness of his life, a young man rebels, overthrowing all the chains of work, family and society.

Before beginning, the students need to talk through how to prepare a storyline in an Artaudian way. The story cannot be approached in a logical, naturalistic manner, with single characters allocated to individual members of the group. Certainly two people have to be, for instance, the young lovers but the rest of the group will be taking an active part throughout, expressing symbolically the emotional states of mind of one or other of the lovers, as well as taking on parts of the storyline as other characters where necessary, even becoming physical things such as doors slamming, bubbles bursting.

Remind them too of the arsenal of other tools they have already learned about for making a physical piece effective: breathing, rhythm, sound, repetition, chanting, music, ritual, masks, words used as sounds, concrete language.

a] Breakdown the story into small sections. b] Brainstorm each section looking for startling and individual ways of expressing

something symbolically. Make each symbol as complete as possible, i.e. if the use of a large

black cloth would enhance a particular image, then try as far as possible to provide that. It is important that the students feel free to use the whole range of potential theatrical effectiveness and if it cannot be done in your particular space, then they should at least be aware of what they want and how it could be achieved in more ideal circumstances.

c] Choreograph each section to maximise the use of the whole group as they move from image to image, from impression to impression. Check that physical expression is large enough.

d] Add whatever can be added in your particular circumstances to enhance the action and the moods: amplified sound, light or whatever, bearing in mind that the group themselves can probably do a lot of at least the sound live.

e] Aim for a finished piece of around ten minutes. Make it as powerful as possible and finish by trying it out on an audience, in a lunchtime perhaps.

The insistence throughout this study programme on performance and trying ideas out on an audience is for a number of reasons. Firstly, Artaud himself is concerned with trying to affect an audience in a very profound way. He tenders many experimental ideas as to how this effect can best be achieved, some of which we have explored already but many are to come in the next few sections. Mainly, though, some of his ideas are so extraordinary that it takes a particular type of courage to carry them through. This attitude of daring, of risk-taking, must be built in to the students from as early as possible. It is inherent, I believe, anyway, in any form of theatre - actors put themselves on the line by the very nature of live theatre, which can fail for any number of reasons and is for ever changing, subtly, from performance to performance [something which frustrated practitioners like Craig intensely - he wanted to pin theatre down to exactitude and consistency, refusing to accept the volatile changeability of actors and of audiences]. On top of the natural fluctuation of atmosphere between actor and audience, Artaud imposes another risk: the risk of the extraordinary and the extreme. So as not to cripple your students with fear, they must become used to performing throughout the course, even if it is just little snippets to other groups of their peers. They must understand that sometimes things will not work, but instead of feeling foolish, they should use the whole experience as an ideal opportunity for discovering why things work or do not, and for pushing themselves into braver and braver experiments.

Sample Pages from Year 7 Drama Plan:Lesson Nineneeded: drum or tambourine

In this and the following lesson more specific dance/drama ideas are begun, which will culminate in Lesson Eleven with a short piece of Movement Theatre. Once again, boys and girls should feel equally happy with the work; there is not even any need to use music. A drum or tambourine for rhythm and, for Lesson Eleven, a variety of percussion instruments is all that is necessary.

1.* Warm-up with a quick game of tag - only with a difference. In this version, the chaser chooses the style of movement and each new 'it' must change the way of moving. Thus the first 'it' may choose hopping as his movement. Everyone needs to hop also to escape him. When someone is caught, he becomes the new 'it' and changes the movement to, for instance, wriggling on the belly.

2. Tags are always brief and active. Follow up with a tangle chain. Choose someone sensible as a leader and everyone links on behind so that the whole class is in one long chain holding hands. Moving slowly, the leader takes the whole class on a journey over, under and around

each other. Tell them right from the start that the challenge is to continue as long as possible without breaking the chain or becoming so tangled up that no further progress can be made. It thus becomes an exercise in problem-solving as well, since the group must try to see how to untangle the knots without breaking the line. They should feel free to offer advice to each other.

The game continues until it is impossible to move any further or until the chain is broken.

3.* Hypnotism. With this exercise, the group needs to form into pairs, calling themselves A and B. A holds the palm of one hand up and B must put his nose very close to A's palm. [With an odd number an A can have two Bs and both palms up.] Remind them of their earlier mirror exercises; this requires the same kind of concentration and close working together.

Making sure that all movements are slow and fluid, A exercises B's body, by forcing it to bend this way and that, to go right down to the ground and up high. B is as if hypnotised by A's hand, and will keep his nose a consistent distance away from A's palm, wherever it goes. A must never try to catch B out; it must be a genuine partnership. After a couple of minutes, swap over so that each have a turn.

Now divide the class into smaller groups of around ten. Each group forms a circle around one volunteer. This volunteer bends and sways and slowly moves his whole body. Others in the circle fix onto a part of the central person's anatomy by which to become hypnotised / fascinated. Once they have watched for a little and have kept their eyes fixed on their spot as it moves in front of them, they move in and put their nose very close to that spot. Now whatever the centre person does with his body, those on the outside, keeping a consistent distance away at all times, move with him. Centre people must move at all times very slowly and evenly.

After the initial giggles, this exercise works very well and they quickly settle to It. It does a lot to further our mission of close co- operative work with no embarrassment about touching [even though touch does not actually figure here!]

4. Divide the class up into four large groups. Each group is to work on a still tableau depicting an outdoor sport, or outdoor sport in general, i.e. a single sport like football could be done by the whole group together, or several different sports could be represented at the same time by different members of the group within a single tableau. See these.

Follow this by tableaux depicting indoor activities, e.g. cardgames, board games, watching television, darts, snooker and so on. See these.

Now ask them to move their positions from one still picture to the other in six moves using a drumbeat as control. Try it again but in one slow-motion fluid change.

Watch both these and discuss the difference within the whole group. Once again encourage positive comments about each others' efforts.

This exercise is a good teaching point to demonstrate the importance of a whole stage picture. A tableau needs to look visually interesting and encourage the eye to wander over it. There is opportunity in these tableaux to use space inventively and to use a variety of levels: low, medium and high. Interest can be captured by strong facial expressions and a sense of

action, albeit frozen. All these things need discussion and emphasis. Make sure that they know you expect them to be thinking along these lines for any further tableaux.

Now try the same kind of work with a couple more tableaux, seeing if they have learned from their first efforts. Ideas are:

the beginning of the battle and the end before the party and after the party

queueing for the cinema and enjoying the film

in the spaceship and the arrival at a new planet

Almost any idea can be done in this way and it is fun and satisfying to do.

Sample Pages from Year 8 Drama Plan:Lesson FiveThis lesson continues the work begun last week on focus. They should have learned from last week that there are a number of ways to emphasise an entrance or pin- point a moment of action. The following work will take them further down this route.

1. Start with a game that involves passing the focus from one person to another in the simplest way. The group stand in a circle. A volunteer goes into the circle and does something - anything at all, recites a verse, sings a song, performs a dance-step or an acrobatic move. Whatever he does is applauded loudly by the rest of the class, both for encouragement and for purposes of underlining the fact that the central figure is the centre of their focus. After completing his act, the performer makes eye contact with someone else in the circle and that person joins him. They both perform together the same 'act', the newcomer copying the originator exactly. Then the first performer steps back into the circle. The next person must either perform his own act now or repeat the former person's with one significant change. Once again he is applauded, makes eye contact with a third, and so on.

2. *This game translates well into a simple form of quick improvisation in which the focus is passed in a similar way. Sit the group as an audience or in a horse-shoe shape which leaves one area free for performing. Start by picking two people and giving them a simple situation to act upon. They could be for instance, customer and client in a hairdresser's. They are instructed to play the scene up to the point where they feel it is beginning to flag, when one or the other should bring someone else into the scene, at the same time finding a reason for leaving the scene themselves. For instance, the aforementioned scene could reach a point where the customer is complaining about the ruination of her hair and the hairdresser could at that point say/Do you want to speak to the manager? I can see her over there.' And she goes to someone in the audience and brings them out to act as manager.

This exercise is good for passing focus as well as seeing how they fare in spontaneous improvisation, something we shall be looking at in more detail later in the year. Confident members of the class will extend the scene quite creditably but less confident ones will quickly 'pass the buck.' Nonetheless, they will have had to say something and will have experienced what it is like to be in the audience's focus, which is no bad thing for early training in oral work and similar lessons for 'life.'

Some situations will play out quite quickly and need changing before they become too stale or difficult. Other ideas of situations you could give them as starting points are:

salesperson and client with complaint

policeman and criminal caught in the act

vet and customer with unusual pet

dentist and nervous patient

foreigner and passer-by asked for directions

foreigner and passer-by asked for directions waiter and impatient customer

3. Ask half of the class to go up onto the stage or into the performing half of the studio. The rest remain as audience. The acting half must go into the wings or to the side of the playing area. Then each in turn must make an entrance, remaining on stage once they have done so. Instruct them to find a way of keeping the focus on themselves if they can. Then allow the other half to do the same.

It is important to discuss the findings of this exercise. What kept people watching someone more than another? They should come up with a variety of responses, amongst which I would expect:

the first person entering an empty stage has, obviously, full attention on him. at first, people making 'look-at-me gestures and generally acting the idiot will keep

interest until there are too many of them trying to outdo each other. Then the audience switches off and looks at anyone who is acting differently.

someone who is staying very still attracts attention.

someone staring directly out at the audience and keeping still.

someone on a different level, higher or lower than the rest,

some parts of the playing area attract more attention, especially Centrestage, or far Down Right or far Down Left.

Of course, they may add other discoveries to this list.

4. As a finishing exercise, see if they can act on the knowledge learned from the above. They are to devise a scene, in groups of about five or six,in which one person is behaving differently from the rest, keeping that person in focus all the time even when other people need to be temporarily in focus themselves. Examples of scenes could be:

a cheerful party with one person crying a group of tourists with one partially-sighted or blind person

a solemn ceremony with one person laughing

school break in the playground with one newcomer

business people on train platform with one tramp

people at a smart function with one person dressed inappropriately

Playing scenes like this teaches them that there are various ways of keeping attention on someone, using grouping both around the person and apart from them - let them try to find the best stage positions too for their individual - as well as by the behaviour of that individual, through stillness or just through different activity.

There may not be time to play all of these in front of the others as audience, but there will be enough if you don't insist on a beginning, middle and end for the scene. In other words, give

them time to tackle the problems of focus but not so much time that there is none left for showing and feed-back.

In the closing discussion, which should be very full today, see if they have also spotted - from the opening exercise - the power of eye contact for drawing audience's attention. The next two lessons will be on the importance of eye contact.

Sample Pages from Year 9 Drama Plan:This is the second lesson of two which deals with some everyday 'practical' situations. Once again, the focus should be on appropriate tone and language as well as strategies for dealing with these things. The outcome should be increased awareness in the students and, hopefully, increased confidence in knowing how to deal with awkward moments.

1. Start with a quick round of greetings as a warm-up. The students mill around the room not ail going in the same direction. Teacher instructs them to greet everyone they see with, one at a time: Hello; Hi; Yo, dude [or similar up-to-the-minute phrase]; a handshake; a handslap; How are you?; air-kissing; a handshake using both hands; a short grip on the shoulder; a slap on the back; a hug. When completed, briefly sit them down to discuss who might use these greetings and when they might be appropriate. Also discuss briefly what would not be appropriate.

2. Start with the students standing in two equal lines at opposite ends of the room, facing each other. As the person opposite them comes towards them they are to greet him in the following ways, according to the teacher's instructions. Each meeting should lead into a brief conversation:

As the best friend you haven't seen since yesterday As a stranger you meet in the street - perhaps you have lost your way

As a relative you are very fond of

As a relative who you don't know well

As an adult stranger you have been asked to show around the school

As a stranger of your own age you have been asked to show around the school

As someone your own age who you don't like very much but who you must remain on good terms with

As a prospective employer you are meeting for the first time

As the headmaster to whom you have been sent to fetch something for your teacher

Obviously,you will have to allocate roles, e.g. one side to be the headmaster one the pupil, but do alternate these, so the same side is not always the adult, where an adult is indicated.

Use the strategy of asking them to freeze at times, to allow focus on a particular pair. Or ask one or two to demonstrate their conversations before moving onto the next one. Make sure they begin to see what is appropriate and what not, including comments on the 'headmasters', for instance, choice of language. Can they accurately use adult-style conversation?

3. Allow them a little fun now by calling for a group improvisation in groups of three, four or, maximum, five. The subject matter of the improvisation is up to them but it must contain the following:

a telephone conversation, a meeting with someone and an awkward situation.

Make clear that you expect the following from them:

A shape to the piece - beginning, development, ending; characters that are realistically portrayed [remind them to think of some details about each character]; and appropriate language from all characters throughout

In the final discussion/evaluation inform them that you expect far more awareness of appropriate language and behaviour from all characters in improvisation from now on. This will be just another area to watch out for and will enhance the believability of their work. This, of course, also reminds the class that though the strategies explored In the last two lessons are ones that they might have to employ in their own lives, they are also in the process of exploring a 'performance' subject. The two things are not mutually exclusive.

Lesson Sixteen and Lesson Seventeenneeded: paper and pen for each group - or their drama notebooks if you have them

The session on crowds leads us nicely into some work on 'choosing the right style' for an improvisation or a devised piece. Students often find this a very hard choice and, unless constantly reminded of other options, will stick to naturalism because that is what they are familiar with In the TV soap drama most of them watch If the class have previously used the Year 8 book, the styles of narrative theatre and physical theatre are explored there; remind them of this work. First of all, I propose working through an idea all together, to point out the many different approaches that could be made for a simple, very 'typical', story- line. So as to explore this thoroughly and not make them feel rushed I suggest taking two periods over the work.

A young person is being bullied at school. The bullying occurs in and out of the school premises and gets so bad that he [or she] is near the end of his tether.He tries to turn to his family but Dad tells him to stand up for himself and Mum is sympathetic but proposes making a complaint at the school. This worries the victim, who fears worse torment if the bullies get into trouble. He tells Mum he can cope after all. The ending is left unresolved: does he turn to a teacher? Does he find the courage to stand up for himself? Does he start not going to school, making for himself a whole new set of problems? There are many possible endings.

1. In groups of around six or seven, ask each group to do the following:

1 Decide on an ending 2 Allocate the characters ...

3 Decide on the number and order of scenes with roughly what happens in each.

The results of this should be written down by each group.

2. Coming back into the circle, each group should run through the decisions they have made so far Then ask them what sort of dramatic impact they would like the story to have:

Would they like people to be thoroughly involved with the characters? sympathise with the victim? feel an understanding of - if not necessarily sympathy with -other points of view within the piece, eg. teacher, parents, the bullies?

Would they like the audience to see the case as typical, something that happens to more than one individual? A problem that must be tackled universally?

Would they like the audience to feel shocked? angry?

It must be understood that choosing one set of options does not exclude the others. For instance a group might decide that they want an audience to feel thoroughly involved with this individual's story but also to understand that the problem is a larger one which needs to be tackled They may want to shock the audience and horrify them in general, as well as showing the victim and his family as real people. STYLES CAN BE MIXED. In fact, the mixture of styles will often lead to more interestingly shaped devised work.

3. Ask them in their groups again to work on just a bullying scene. They should try it in a number of different ways:

a. naturalistically: the victim is 'real' and the kind of language used by all is recognisably possible in the situation.

b. exaggerate features of the previous scene with a view to shocking or horrifying the audience as much as possible. This could be done in a number of ways but here are three good examples:

i.the style remains realistic and the characters believable but the things they say are truly terrible and actually, if analysed, not very likely in reality - threatening various tortures, for instance, etc. The bullying is thus far more terrible than it would be if administered by your average school 'topdog' and his cronies. The things they come up with make one wince and sympathy for the victim is increased

ii.the bullies begin the scene in a realistic style but then turn on the audience and seek to intimidate them by hurling taunts, moving amongst them and so on -so the audience is given a taste of being the victim 

iii.the nastiness of the bullies is exaggerated and pointed out by making the bullies move together like in our crowd exercise, physicalising the contortions of their bodies and translating the horror of what they are saying into animal-like sounds, howls, shrieks etc. me victim, too, could move from speech to sound reactions - groans, cries and so on.

c. start the scene naturalistically but freeze it at a certain point and use a narrator to broaden the picture. Point out 'typical' features of bullying by fast-forwarding, freeze-framing, reversing bits of action so that the narrator can 'stop' things and point out features he wants the audience to notice. The effect of this style will be to give it more universality and to allow the audience to think and make judgements about what they are seeing.

Follow up by watching and analysing the results of the experiment: each group perhaps to show the scene in two or three different ways.

When all have been watched, ask the class to analyse and evaluate the results thoroughly. Discourage judgements of one style being better than another. Point out that when devising, experimenting amongst a number of different approaches is best before deciding which style is right for their particular piece.

Can each group decide which was the most effective style for their particular scene?

Lesson Twenty Two and Lesson Twenty Threeneeded: scripts, notebooks and pencils - from now until the end of term

The rest of the year is going to be devoted to script-work. For this I have chosen four extracts from plays with enough characters amongst them to suit even the biggest of classes. All of these plays are written in a quite simple narrative style.

Part of the process of this work will be for each person to plan and record his personal 'journey.' For this reason, every one will need a notebook for the purpose and, in addition, a group 'book' - preferably an additional copy of their script interleaved with pieces of blank paper to record movement, group positioning, and so on.

Remind them first of the style of narrative theatre and for what dramatic purposes it is most often used. In brief, this is:

a. lt tells a story. Characters are less important than the story itself, so may be simple, lacking depth and could be stereotypes. Many characters can be taken by quite a small cast, who show a change of character with a simple change of physical mannerisms and/ or a characteristic hat or prop. Asking the class to scatter into a space on the floor, throw them a number of stereotypes and see if they can come up with 'typical' poses / statues: heroine; lame old man; hard-working old woman; hero; villain; witch; magician; policeman; teacher; criminal. This should be enough to remind them. Ask one or two of these to 'come to life' and show these characters walking and talking.

b. Characters are straight-forward and easily recognisable. To aid the story- telling idea and to make characters and their motivations even clearer narration may be used. This may be from someone standing outside the action and commenting or by the characters themselves dropping role to introduce themselves.

Remind them of this with a quick exercise in which the class are divided into threes or fours. 

Give them a simple scenario, or they can choose their own, along the lines of: 

Boy is late to a date with his girlfriend. The girl is fed-up and leaves him on his own. 

Two young people are idling on the street when an old lady passes with a heavy bag. The youngsters offer to help. She refuses, thinking they mean her harm. 

As above, only the youngsters do not offer help and the old lady 'has a go' at them because they don't. 

Old person loses a pound coin in the gutter. A passer-by offers to help him. A policeman enters and also joins in. 

Any simple scene will do. They can do one of the above situations or choose their own. The characters must be straight-forward and be clearly recognisable when they enter as kind, friendly or mean - whatever - and in each case the scene is narrated by another member of the group. Narration happens whilst the characters freeze perhaps, at key moments, but the characters can speak in between. When they have done this, ask them to experiment with performing a little part of the_ scene another way: with the characters turning to the audience and narrating themselves. This can be done either: 'I came in and saw the old woman...' or 'He came in and saw the old woman... 'These exercises represent the main forms of direct address used in this style of theatre Make sure they genuinely look out at their audience, perhaps seeking to make eve contact with one or two people. The style of address could be friendly and chatty, inviting the audience to participate by giving back warmth laughter or whatever - similar to a stand-up comedian - or it could be strict, more formal like a teacher informing a class of something. The style should be appropriate to the scene.

c. Awkward parts of a story or gaps of time may be sketched in quickly through the use of a narrator. In the same groups as before ask them to choose a well-known fairy-story, folk- tale or legend They are to tell' the story, or a part of the story, using any of the narrative method showing how narration can fill in details that are hard to 'show' on stage eg Snow White's flight through the forest might simply be narrated or narrated whilst an actor runs on the spot, terror written on her face. But the scene in which she's nearly killed by the huntsman, just prior to the flight, may be acted out more fully.

This brief reminder of the main features of the style should stand them in good stead when confronting the pieces of script In Lesson Twenty-Three.

You will probably need the whole of this lesson to read the four scripts and allocate parts to every member of the class. I have printed the scripts on separate pages for ease of photocopying.

Exploring Physical TheatreExploring Physical Theatre is a resource that explores the many strands of this dramatic form. Though it credits the work of numerous practitioners and Theatre Groups where appropriate, it is more a hands-on how-to book for teachers to introduce and develop ideas with classes of all ages, though particularly for GCSE and sixth form level courses.

INTRODUCTION 

All theatre is physical - how can it not be, when the actor's body is involved in a setting which is also a physical space? The term 'Physical Theatre' is as absurd as 'polished improvisation', but both terms have come to mean particular things to artists and practitioners. Polished improvisation is not as fully developed as devising, but has been worked on from improvisational beginnings until it is some way towards a finished product. It may be a devised piece in miniature. Physical Theatre [which has also been called Visual Theatre in an attempt to pin-point it further - a definition which appears not to have stuck] is a style of theatre where the actors' bodies are given more importance than is usual in, for example, Naturalistic Theatre. It may be that the actor's gestures and movement are exaggerated, or certain features are emphasised. This might be to make a particular point, or for comedic purposes. In addition, the expectation of an audience watching a group who are performing a piece of Physical Theatre, is that the group should work together in a more extraordinary way, showing a unity, a refinement of group awareness over and above what is obvious from a piece of more conventional theatre.

In the next section, I explore the origins of Physical Theatre, those influences which have inspired groups and practitioners working today. Because I have not dealt with them elsewhere, there is some explanation of the working methods of Meyerhold and Michael Chekhov, neither of whose work have been more than brief mentions in other resources I have already written. As a more recent influence, I have also spent a little time on Jacques LeCoq, who taught so many of our practitioners working today, notably Stephen Berkoff, many members of Theatre de Complicité including Simon McBurney himself, Footsbarn Theatre and Julie Taymor [who staged The Lion King], to name but a few. Of course, major influences like Artaud, Grotowski, and Brook are given credit where appropriate, but I have not attempted to explore their theories fully. I have done that elsewhere. This book is more about the rich amalgation of all the influences - those whose sources we can trace and those which have just been picked up en route [via a workshop here, an exercise passed around till it becomes common practice there] into the modern melting-pot which we loosely call Physical Theatre. 

Today there are many groups practising a physical or more movement-based style of theatre. Kaos Theatre, Frantic Assembly, Shared Experience, Told By An Idiot, Foursight Theatre Company and Kneehigh are just some of the more mainstream examples, along with Complicité as mentioned above. Then there are a whole realm of Dance Theatre groups from DV8 to Hofesh Shechter and on... too many to mention. There are amalgams of acrobatics, visual story-telling and movement like Cirque du Soleil or Fuerza Bruta. The field is vast.

So what do they all have in common? What all Physical Theatre groups share is collaboration between all the members in the creation of the product, whether working with a text as the base or devising. The creativity of the actors is of paramount importance. And this creativity comes from the actors' bodies. From the start of rehearsal, the impetus is from the physical - the bodies' ways of telling a story, or expressing emotion. Companies are experimental and playful in approach, seeking for the accidental discoveries that they make which will create a link with the audience's imagination.

There is a demand on the audience to, as it were, fill in the spaces with their own imaginations. Just as some works of art, notably that from the Far East, will leave a large part of the canvas bare so that from the painted branch of cherry-blossom our minds fill in the tree, the sky, the mood, so too the Physical Theatre group will supply the images made by their bodies and the links with our own experience are filled in by ourselves. It is a two-way process. In Physical Theatre the energy created by the live relationship with an audience is essential. For this reason I often call Physical Theatre the poetic form of theatre because , like poetry, where the poem is often a starting point for a journey into the reader's own experience, Physical Theatre images are suggestive, not tied down by verbal or logical explanation. This is different from Naturalism where our imaginations are left sleeping, where all the details are supplied and where what is woken in the audience is satisfaction at the recognition of life or of a character's reality. We may feel sympathy for a character on the Naturalistic stage, but we do not experience the sensory frissons, the kaleidescope of emotions and sensations supplied to us by the best of Physical Theatre.

In the end, the field of Physical Theatre is so vast, so varied, that there are no real definitions one can give which will embrace all that is out there. The attempt I have made above will be clarified, I hope, by the explanations within this resource, and the many practical exercises throughout. By the end, especially if you and your students seek out some of the excellent companies around, you will come to your own understanding of the term. 

Above all, by giving routes into practice for a teacher to follow, this book attempts to demystify what, to some teachers, is still a source of anxiety. Pressure is on to incorporate more Physical Theatre practices into examinations. Teachers are aware that examiners applaud and are excited by physical ideas that work. Hopefully, the large range of practical exercises, and the section on Physical Theatre uses in devising and in the approach to text will prove helpful in encouraging teachers to experiment further with their own students. Be brave! The results can be electrifying!

Excerpt from The origins of Physical Theatre:d] Vsevolod Meyerhold

Vsevolod Meyerhold [1874 - 1940 - shot in prison, a victim of Stalin's purges] was the other one of Stanislavski's students to break away from the restrictions of Naturalism and work towards making the actor's body more physically expressive.

His first disagreement with Stanislavski is about attitude towards the audience. For Stanislavski, the actor's attention must never stray beyond the edge of the stage. Much of his System is devoted to keeping the actor's attention on the stage and the illusion he is creating on it that this space is a real place. For Meyerhold, this was a sticking point. He felt that something magical happened between audience and actors that was the very essence of theatre. Peter Brook also talks of this magical act of creation which is a kind of two-way

process between the active participation of the audience and the active participation of the actor. This does not mean that the audience has to get up off his seat - no, the participation is one of concentration. Both the actor and the audience focus so completely on what is happening that something electrical and wonderful happens that is unforgettable theatre. And though it doesn't happen always, it should always be aimed for. Peter Brook calls this 'netting the golden fish'; Meherhold calls it 'the fourth dimension.' If the other three dimensions are the playwright, the director and the actor, the vital fourth dimension - without which the spark of theatre is not ignited - has to be the spectator.

This creation of that magical, theatrical dimension, the active inclusion of the mental energy of the audience, takes Meyerhold away from Naturalism and propels him all at once into something else: the beginnings of a 'poetical' form of theatre, what we now call Physical Theatre. Interestingly, Meyerhold was even more delighted if an audience became more actively involved, by shouting, catcalling, whistles and so on. He was so pleased the first time this happened to one of his productions, the symbolist playwright Blok's The Fairground Booth, that forever after he sought to bring out this kind of active response in an audience - the response of people watching something at a fair, music hall or circus. This takes him closer to Brecht's approach to audience [which Brook in his early days also emulated] and away from the idea of 'magic', which the later Brook seeks through his creation of rituals in which audience and actors participate together.

Meyerhold began to be interested in the old forms of theatre that encouraged a raucous and active kind of audience: those very same travelling troupes of players who included amongst the actors, acrobats, jugglers and showmen of all kinds. To fit with his investigations, he began to formulate an actor's training which involved the kind of plasticity of the body of clowns, acrobats and the like. Amongst other things he turned to Commedia for inspiration, admiring the technical ability that both drew an audience along into its world of make-believe whilst at the same time 'entertaining him ... with the brilliance of his technical skill' [Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. Braun].

Meyerhold's students learned an extraordinarily wide set of skills, including gymnastics, dance, fencing, music and juggling, as well as theatre history, a variety of styles of acting, Commedia and, of course, what he called Bio-mechanics, of which more later. The students were expected to end up proficient in at least one instrument. They did many 'études' in which the bare bones of a scenario would be set and they must improvise with it. And the voice was not neglected either, depite his emphasis on the body. Meyerhold tried to train all-round actors, good at anything and able to perform playfully and at once, as the Commedia artists did.

So what is Bio-mechanics? The truth is, that Meyerhold himself failed to give any one adequate explanation. He contradicts himself often. Certainly it is not just a set of exercises; it is also an acting philosophy. At first it was about teaching the actor economy of movement, awareness of his own body in space, and rhythmic expressiveness. Then, attempting to define his ideas further, Meyerhold talked about movement as action and reaction; mood can create action, but also, more importantly for the physical theatre student, action can create mood. A clear example is one that Meyerhold gave: if the actor is put into a slumped, sad position on a chair he begins to feel sad. Mood is affected by externals and works from outside in. This is the opposite of what Stanislavski had been teaching him, though to give Stanislavski credit - the old master spent his entire life learning and adapting his ideas on theatre - towards the end of his life Stanislavski came round to this thinking too.

The final 'definition' of Bio-mechanics included Meyerhold's fascination with the art of Far-Eastern acting techniques. Japanese Noh Theatre, for instance, takes place physically close to the audience and uses a series of calculated gestures, along with rhythmic movement to create an alternative language for the theatre that goes beyond words - that stands instead of words - to create poetic and visual symbols. 

You can see how this chimes in with Artaud. This calculated and precise language of gesture also inspired Brecht, who, with Meyerhold, had an enduring admiration for the visual language of Far-Eastern drama. It forms part of the background to his theory of Gestus.

If you watch a Noh play, you will notice how expressive it is. The acting is full of grotesque grimaces, strong, economical movements, repetitive actions. The actor is a combination of dancer and acrobat, along with the expressive skills of feeling and story-telling. He creates visual symbols, such as repeated shrugging of the shoulders to indicate crying.

Training in Bio-mechanics was devised through a series of exercises or 'études', starting with ones for solo actor and proceeding to exercises for two or more, ending up with full-blown improvised productions. The simplest movements were broken down into units which allowed the actor to investigate exactly what was happening to his body when, for example he reached to pick up an object. The actor observed how his balance changed from one moment to the next, the tiny adjustments that he was making all the time. Movements were broken down into moments of action and reaction, as well as moments where pauses were sandwiched between movement. This awareness of pacing and pausing contributed to the rhythm which Meyerhold exposed in every movement. And of course the rhythms of a movement and the length and variety of the pauses would also be affected by mood and character. It is a complex system which analyses the fine details of every move an actor makes. It, of course, creates a kind of super-awareness in the actor - a self-consciousness [not in the bad sense] which Meyerhold called 'mirror-gazing'. This awareness of what you are doing at all times is not unlike Brecht's insistence that the actor stands outside himself. With Brecht as with Meyerhold too, his insistence on this is a reaction to the immersion of the actor in his inner self which Naturalism encouraged. The actor should calculate at all times the effect he is having on an audience.

The extreme of this calculative approach is at odds with some of modern Physical Theatre practice which, following LeCoq and the later work of Brook encourages a more accidental approach through playfulness. The idea with both of these practitioners is to see what happens when objects and ideas are played with, only 'fixing' them into a performance when it becomes clear that an exciting symbol has been happened upon. Though, of course, after that, more calculation has to come into play, to give a cohesion to the final production.

I have used a number of Meyerhold's exercises later in the resource, though they have sometimes been adapted and updated. The influence of his work is enormous.

excerpt from TRAINING THE BODYb] Control

The second part of body training is about control. Controlling your movement is the hardest part of these activities.

Start with a simple yoga position. Grotowski was fond of yoga positions as a training. This one is easy but needs good balance to hold the position still.

Put your right foot up against the outside of your right knee. If possible, the foot should be above the knee, but being against the knee will serve. Then fold the palms of your hands together on prayer position. Hold still as long as possible, or for the length of a count of ten, and then swap legs.

Practice walking and running movements with a smooth loping movement that would not spill a glass of water if you were carrying it. To help you with this, start by using canes balanced longways on the top of the head. Focus the eyes on the tip of the cane ahead of you. Now walk from one end of the room to the other. Try this with single people and then with the whole group. Finally, remove the cane from the top of the head but remember exactly how you walked to keep it still. This is the kind of walking the exercise requires. End by keeping that rolling movement of the feet, but speed up the pace until you are able to do a Meyerhold 'lope'.

Shooting from the Bow and Throwing the Stone are very famous bio-mechanical études. They are classic Meyerhold training exercises, using forward actions balanced by what he called 'rejects'. 

In the mime of shooting the bow, the actor holds an imaginary bow in the left hand. He runs towards the prey with smooth loping strides, as you did in the last exercise, and jumps, landing two-footed, to a halt when the prey is spotted. Then there are a couple of forward actions balanced by rejects: the forward action of the jump is balanced by the reject action of drawing the arrow from a quiver on his back. Loading the arrow against the string is a forward movement balanced by drawing back the string - a reject movement. The étude ends with the actor firing the arrow and leaping forward to land in a two-footed jump, accompanied by a loud cry.

Try this out,slowly at first, observing the rhythm of the movements. Repeat it until the whole sequence is clear and rhythmical.

Throwing the stone is a similar étude. It too breaks down an action into units of forward or reject actions. Try it out: run - as with the bow-shooting étude - smoothly, a controlled loping run. Stop. Feel the weight of the body transferring as you move through the following sequence. Meyerhold wanted the actor to feel the reverberation of every movement vibrating through his whole body. After stopping, crouch down, then lean backwards to pick up the imaginary stone. Stand back up again and lean forward to take aim. With the imaginary stone in the right hand, sweep your arm backwards in a wide curve, pause and balance, then throw, finishing, as with the bow exercise, with a leap forward to land on both feet, with a cry. 

As you did with the bow étude, try out the whole sequence very slowly at first, feeling what your body is doing at all times. Then play with different speeds until the whole sequence is smooth and rhythmical.

Try out a bio-mechanical -style exercise for yourself. It is about deconstruction of movement and seeing every set of movements in a sequence as a combination of forward actions and rejects. In pairs, deconstruct a short sequence of moves in a game of tennis. A typical game shows a variety of rhythms - the attacking forward moves of a run to the net, the brief reject as the racquet is prepared to smash the

ball, and so on. Or the slower rhythm of a long lob shot from the back of the court, the series of reject retreating movements to get there, and so on.

A useful tool for control is slow motion. Having practised loping walks and runs, you will have an idea of how to do a slow motion walk. For this exercise, though, to practise controlling your balance, you need to lift each leg high - the foot up to knee-level - before placing it down in a rolling motion on the floor. Try doing this first as a whole group, and then have half the class show the end of an Olympic sprint in slow motion. 

Canes or a rope on the floor indicate the finishing line and beyond the finishing line the other half of the class cheer on the runners in slow motion too. This results in sounds like a record or tape being played at the wrong speed, accompanied by slow motion punching of the air, etc. 

When one half has run, swap places. 

two excerpts from TRAINING IN ENSEMBLE WORK AND SPATIAL AWARENESSfrom b] spatial awareness

You need to be aware of space as a physical thing. An easy exercise proves how solid the invisible air is.

Have the group gather at the far end of your hall or studio. A larger room is best for this. Then all together they run as fast as they can towards the wall at the other end of the room. Stop dead just before colliding with the room and feel the wave of air bouncing back from the wall. If you have a good size room and have been able to move fast, the wind created is enough to stir the hair on your head. You can certainly feel the effect even in a smaller room.

Standing in a space, cleave the air with hands and arms with strength and energy enough to move the air so that you can feel the wind you make.

Imagine the air as thick and glutinous, something you have to push and pull aside to move through it. Try what it is like to walk through this substance. Engage your whole body in the fight to get through.

Next imagine the air is pulling and tugging at you, as if you were light as a feather and liable to be pulled in any direction the air wants you to go. Be playful with this, imagining the air is tweaking at a foot, an arm, the top of your head, a shoulder ...

Imagine yourself very big, a giant. All around you are huge structures that fit your size. Hold yourself and move around as if you fitted this large size landscape you have created in your mind. It is not a matter of striding about with huge steps; it is more a matter of the whole body thinking big.

Now try yourself as very small. Again, this is not a matter of crouching or taking tiny steps, but the whole body behaving as if you are a tiny person surrounded by tiny things your own size. 

Analyse how your body copes with both these ideas. Which part of you 'led' - the chest perhaps when you were large, the shoulders, hands, top of the head when you were small?

Try altering the perceived size of your surroundings so that you are a giant surrounded by small things, and a tiny person surrounded by huge ones. How does this alter your body?

from c] Group movements 

In this exercise the group mills around the room at a calm slowish pace to begin with. As you mill you pass by others in the group. Every time you come close to someone you greet them in a friendly way. Instead of speech, use the sounds and intonations of greeting through gobbledy-gook language. Gradually however the friendliness grows and becomes more obsessive; at the same time, the pace steps up a little. The aim is to reach a state of obsessiveness, where people cannot leave the person they are with - they are in a frenzy of excitement, hugging, jumping on shoulders in their joy, and so on. The noise level at this point is tremendous!

Really experienced groups can hear when the level has reached as high as it can go: number 10 on a scale of one to ten. At that point everyone stops dead, goes silent, and moves to the outer edges of the room facing the walls. 

To do this exercise successfully, for each step up in pace and in obsessiveness the students need to remain aware of the whole group all the time; they need to be listening to the sound levels around them all the time so as to stay in tune with what's going on; they need to be watching, using that peripheral vision, to make sure their pace and the size of their movements correspond with everyone else's.

If you think your students have had no previous experience of gobbledy-gook, you may need to precede this exercise with some quick pair-work. I usually ask for volunteers and give them a situation: 

neighbours gossiping; 

someone bullying or teasing another; 

a shy person plucking up courage to approach a confident one he/shefancies; 

someone complaining about a faulty product to a bored sales assistant; 

a person nagging another for failure to do something they were askedto do; 

someone outraged at the behaviour of another, and so on. 

Those who have difficulty inventing a rich gobbledy-gook language [some are very good at it whilst others struggle] suggest a particular sound-word they can use like 'enna', or 'fala'. Stress it is the intonation that is important in any case. Often confidence grows quite quickly and they start to be more inventive. Finish with an argument in which they are invited to use sounds rather than gobbledy-gook - clicks with the tongue; 'whee's up and down the scale; raspberries; na-na-na-nana's; tch's and so on. Berkoff used a similar idea when Mr Samsa and the Lodger[s] fall out in his production of Metamorphosis. Gobbledy-gook and intonational/sound exploration is very useful anyhow to cross the language barriers in a way which Artaud hoped for.

excerpt from MIME AND CLOWNINGThe following happens after quite a lot of training in mime work.

Try performing the following actions:

pulling 

pressing

lifting

throwing

crumpling

coaxing

separating

tearing

touching

brushing away

opening

closing

breaking

taking

giving 

supporting 

holding back 

scratching. 

Now try them with different Qualities [as Chekhov would call them]: 

violently 

quietly 

surely 

carefully 

staccato 

legato 

tenderly 

lovingly 

coldly

angrily 

superficially

painfully

joyfully 

thoughtfully 

energetically. 

Make the movements broad, wide and beautifully executed - larger than life - and keep them rhythmical, with a feeling for the tempo of the movement, which will depend upon the Quality you are using.

This is a slightly adapted Chekhov exercise. Note the similarity with some of Meyerhold's work - the emphasis on rhythm, for example and on making the movement beautiful.

Add emotions/ Qualities to some of the following activities. Try the Qualities of:

care

tenderness 

anger 

carelessness 

joy

with 

playing a piano

laying a table

writing a letter

eating a meal

reading a newspaper

Use some of the skills you have learned already: establishing surfaces and 'bounce back' to establish solidity.

Now, choosing any of the activities you have done, build in something going wrong: 

the wind blows your letter away; 

the food is disgusting or someone else is picking the chips off your plate; 

you drop the pile of plates when laying the table; 

the newspaper has reported something terrible about yourself - and there is a photo of you in it which the people around you might recognise.

Once again, it is a case of starting with something recognisable, making sure the audience is with you - they are understanding what you are doing. Clock them again when something goes wrong. Build in a moment when you think everything is going to be all right after all - a clock of relief or triumph - but then a final disaster, also shared with the audience. Changes of mood are essential with clear body language and facial expression to communicate each change.

Some solo mimes. 

Remember clocking, remember sharing moments of change of mood, apprehension, etc. with the audience. remember to carry the audience with you by starting with the familiar.

You are practising your juggling skills and are rather pleased with yourself. Share your pleasure with the audience. You become more and more daring, but then ... 

The buckets of water. A man has to fill a hole in the ground with a bucket of water. The bucket has a leak so that by the time he reaches the hole, little or no water is left. He examines the bucket. He tries ingenious ways to fill the hole so as to complete his task. He shares each idea with the audience.

A man is sitting reading. The book is a horror story. He is absorbed by it and terrified. Sometimes he can hardly bear to read on. He starts to hear a sound somewhere nearby. Dare he investigate? If you like, make this a pair exercise and have someone providing the sound or sounds.

There are a number of solo mimes with supplied sound effect you could try, such as the person driven mad by a dripping tap. He goes to turn it off. It seems to have worked, but every time he settles to do something else, like read or sleep, the drip starts again. 

A similar one with the woman with her baby is also effective. It becomes a game between sound effect provider and actor. Every time the woman creeps away, thinking the baby has at last settled, baby cries again.

Pair mimes:

Try flying a kite in pairs. It is a windy day. Unfortunately, a number of other pairs are also flying their kites on the top of this windy hill. What happens? 

In pairs - one is an imperious lady, the other a porter. The lady has a number of cases. She looks around for someone to carry them for her. She beckons the porter, who is lounging around and generally keeping a low profile. He approaches and seeing the huge mound of bags, he tries a number of reasons not to do it [not hearing, not understanding, very urgent need to go elsewhere, etc.] all of which are fielded by the increasingly annoyed lady. He sighs; he'll have to move those cases to the taxi rank as asked. The lady watches throughout the following, sharing with the audience her exasperation and impatience. Establish the different weights and awkwardnesses of the luggage, e.g. having to drag the heaviest in short bursts, balancing one or two on his head, one is maybe unexpectedly light and he overbalances and falls over, etc. Find a conclusion, such as the lady pummelling him with one of the cases.

Group mimes:

Have the whole group walking around the room. First of all they are walking with dogs on leads. Establish the reality of the dog first: pet it, communicate with it, be consistent with its size! Next, using the presence of the rest of the group with their dogs, take your dog for a walk in this park where a number of other people are also walking. Allow all sorts of incidents to happen in this walk in the park.

You are a group of children who have each bought a balloon from the balloon seller. It is a gas-filled balloon. First of all, establish your pleasure in feeling and seeing your balloon bobbing along on its string. Without choosing who is going to create the drama that happens next, one person in the group will find that they are too small to be carrying such a big balloon. There are one or two alarms - you almost leave the ground once or twice but settle again and all seems all right. But then you take off completely. The rest of the group notice and behave as if this person is up above them. What happens next?

Approaches to Unseen Text 

FOREWORDThe more I have worked on this book, the more I have become convinced that this is the right approach to the whole syllabus - and the best starting-point for ANY syllabus. All syllabuses require an understanding of all aspects of theatre and of styles and that is what this book tries to do. Of course, there are many references to the AQA examination, since that was my starting-point, but the work in these pages would be an invaluable starting-point to any theatre course, because of its emphasis on both practical work and play analysis from the director's, designer's and actor's point of view.

Also, though the Unseen Text AQA test occurs as part of the A2 examination process, I would suggest that the work here is started long before - right at the beginning of a sixth form course - whether you are studying this syllabus or another. The work is useful for all and will teach any student a lot about theatre in general and about how to approach a text of any kind. The wide variety of plays covered will be an eye-opener to many students and be a useful resource for any drama department.

 

INTRODUCTIONThe Unseen part of the AQA syllabus has always been a stumbling block for many candidates. Often quite high-flyers in other areas will fall down on their marks in this section of the exam alone. This guide is an attempt to address this problem and give some methods of working for this difficult part of the exam.

As always with all areas of this 'A' level, the best approach is to be as practical as possible. This exam tests the students' ability to read a piece of playtext and to be able instantly to visualise it - to see it coming to life in the mind's eye. It is a sophisticated test and one that many adults without much practical experience would balk at. But it is a fair test providing the students have been trained throughout their course to do everything in a hands-on practical fashion.

Yes, I know that in the actual examination, the students will have to sit and write, but the ability to visualise a script is not a natural skill for many - it is something that should be learned through experience - as much experience as possible with as many different styles of script as you can lay your hands on. And this experience must be carried out practically, for then the students have much to call on. Note the insistence always that: 'You should refer explicitly to relevant experience of drama and theatre in your answer.' This is stated as a part of every question and should help you realise that to answer this question successfully, the students need to be crammed with as much 'experience' as possible in the hopes that some part of it will prove 'relevant' when the time for the test comes.

Experience of course covers both 'seeing' and 'doing.' Schools who are not in an area rich with all types of drama should not worry too much; of course a variety of professional productions would be helpful but the students need also to experience what it is like to participate in as many styles as they can - exploring acting, directing and technical application. And no, I am not suggesting that the poor over-stressed youngsters should put on numerous productions - that would clearly not be feasible. What I am suggesting could fit into a short course, which this book aims to give you.

Any other experience over and above this can only be beneficial. Encourage them to see anything they can - other schools' productions [I still don't understand why more schools don't tell neighbouring schools about anything they are putting on - sharing experience like this would be so helpful], amateur productions and, of course, as many professional pieces as they can. Most areas are within reach of a number of the excellent touring productions that go around the country every year. If you can't always organise trips, at least encourage the students to go under their own steam whenever they can. And take in the strange and wacky as much as the more traditional offerings. In fact, the wackier the better - this will give the kind of variety of experience these studentsneed.

 

GAINING EXPERIENCE: THE VARIETY OF STYLESIn my opinion, the right approach to this area of the course is once again, and always, through practice first and only then is the time , out of the understanding gained practically, to move into written work.

To start the course, try to cover as many styles of theatre as you can. Of course, you are free to use your own library of plays, but for those who do not have extensive resources, I have tried to include snippets from as many plays as possible. The board tend not to use period plays - though the syllabus does not state that they won't. I suspect anything where the language is too difficult at a first reading would be considered unfair to use as an unseen. I have concentrated therefore on plays from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - at least through a modern translation.

Covering as many plays and styles in this way will increase the students' particular personal 'file' for reference and enable the part of the syllabus that states 'They must refer explicitly to other plays, practical experience and/or theatrical ideas encountered throughout the course to illustrate their answers....' to be broached.

There is not a great deal of point in expecting students to identify all the kind of labels that critics are fond of: kitchen sink drama, anger, absurd, cruelty etc. This would be expecting too much. However, it is possible to identify broader styles of theatre and this will be very helpful. This is the starting point, then; establishing the main ingredients of a particular style. It must always be recognised, though, that there are cross-overs at all times; this is why simple labels do not work. Many plays, best approached with a naturalistic acting style will share features of other styles in their presentation. For the purpose of this examination, that is all to the good. An unseen play may contain Brechtian features and those of Stanislavski, for instance, AT THE SAME TIME. Indeed many modern plays are a rich mixture of styles and influences which should be seen as a help, not a hindrance, to the students. Providing they are trained throughout at spotting these influences and cross-referring with their own experience all the time, they will have no problem.

 

NATURALISM: FOR WHICH STANISLAVSKI WOULD BE APPROPRIATELooking at the broad scope of the purely naturalistic play first, here are a few extracts: A, B and C. In all three cases, as I have done throughout this first half of the course, I have quoted the opening of the play.

Read all three of the following first:

A. THE OPENING OF 'ROOTS' BY ARNOLD WESKER first performed in 1960

A rather ramshackle house in Norfolk where there is no water laid on, nor electricity, nor gas. Everything rambles and the furniture is cheap and old. If it is untidy it is because there is a child in the house and there are few amenities, so that the mother is too overworked to take much care.

An assortment of clobber lies around: papers and washing, coats and basins, a tin wash-tub with shirts and underwear to be cleaned, Tilley lamps and Primus stoves. Washing hangs on a line in the room. It is September.

Jenny Beales is by the sink washing up. She is singing a recent pop song. She is short, fat and friendly, and wears glasses. A child's voice is heard from the bedroom crying 'Sweet, Mama, sweet.'

JENNY good-naturedly Shut you up Daphne and get you to sleep now. [Moves to get a dishcloth.]

CHILD'S VOICE Daphy wan' sweet, sweet, sweet.

JENNY going to cupboard to get sweet My word child, Father come home and find you awake he'll be after you. [Disappears to bedroom with sweet.] There - now sleep, gal, don't wan' you grumpy wi' me in mornin'.

Enter Jimmy Beales. Also short, chubby, blond though hardly any hair left, ruddy complexion. He is a garage mechanic. Wears blue dungarees and an army pack slung over his shoulder. He wheels his bike in and lays it by the wall. Seems to be in some sort of pain - around his back. Jenny returns.

JENNY Waas matter wi' you then?

JIMMY I don' know gal. There's a pain in my guts and one a'tween my shoulder blades I can hardly stand up.

JENNY Sit you down then an' I'll git you your supper on the table.

JIMMYBlust gal! I can't eat yit.

Jimmy picks up a pillow from somewhere and lies down on the sofa holding pillow to stomach. Jenny watches him a while.

JENNYDon't you know what 'tis yit?

JIMMY Well, how should I know what 'tis.

JENNYI told mother about the pain and she says it's indigestion.

JIMMY What the hell's indigestion doin' a'tween my shoulder blades then?

JENNY She say some people get indigestion so bad it go right through their stomach to the back.

JIMMY Don't be daft.

JENNYThat's what I say. Blust Mother, I say, you don't git indigestion in the back. Don't you tell me, she say, I hed it!

JIMMYWhat hevn't she hed.

Jenny returns to washing up while Jimmy struggles awhile on the sofa. Jenny hums. No word. Then -

JENNY Who d-you see today?

JIMMYOnly Doctor Gallagher.

JENNY wheeling round You see who?

JIMMY Gallagher. His wife driv him up in the ole Armstrong.

JENNYWell I go t' hell if that ent a rum thing.

JIMMY rising and going to table; pain has eased What's that then?

JENNY moving to get him supper from oven We was down at the whist drive in the village and that Judy Maitland say he were dead. 'Cos you know he've hed a cancer this last year and they don't give him no longer'n three weeks don't you?

JIMMYOle crows. They don' wan' nothin' less than a death to wake them up.

JENNY No. No longer'n three weeks.

GIRL'S VOICE off Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!

JIMMYThere's your sister.

JENNYThat's her.

GIRL'S VOICE off Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?

JENNY calling Come you on in gal, don't you worry about yoo-hoo.

Enter Beatie Bryant, an ample, blonde, healthy-faced young woman of twenty-two years. She is carrying a case.

JIMMYHere she is.

JENNY with reserve, but pleased Hello, Beatrice - how are you?

BEATIE with reserve, but pleased Hello, Jenny - how are you? What's that lovely smell I smell?

JENNY Onions for supper and bread for the harvest festival.

BEATIE Watcha Jimmy Beales, how you doin' bor?

JIMMYNot so bad gal, how's yourself?

BEATIE All right you know. When you comin' to London again for a football match?

JIMMYO blust gal, I don' wanna go to any more o' those things. Ole father Bryant was there in the middle of that crowd and he turn around an' he say [imitating], Stop you a'pushin' there, he say, stop you a' pushin'.

JENNY Where's Ronnie?

BEATIEHe's comin' down at the end of two weeks.

JIMMYEnt you married yit?

BEATIE No.

JIMMY You want to hurry then gal, a long engagement don't do the ole legs any good.

 

B. THE OPENING OF 'CHEKHOV IN YALTA' BY JOHN DRIVER & JEFFREY HADDOW, first performed in 1978

Lights up on the patio terrace of Anton Chekhov's villa in Yalta. Downstage Left, a path leads off towards the sea. Upstage Left is a stone wall beyond which is a Tartar cemetery. Stage Right, a walkway skirts the side of the villa leading off Upstage towards the front of the house. Farther Right can be seen the edge of a sub-tropical forest bordered by a well-tended row of acacia trees. The rear facade of the three-storey villa dominates the Upstage area. Two entrances lead from the patio into the house, one small entrance Stage Right to the kitchen, and one larger double-door arrangement opening into the parlour. On the terrace is a grouping of wicker furniture - armchairs, sofa, table - Downstage left is a small gazebo. It is spring. Morning fog covers the ground. In the distance can be heard the sound of the sea. A boat whistle blows.

Masha Chekhov appears at a second floor window in a frumpy housedress. She is a plain, hard-working woman who has devoted much of her life to looking after her brother's welfare. Looking off to the right, she becomes very excited.

MASHA Fyokla! [She disappears into the house, still yelling.] Fyokla, get up! He's coming. Up, up, up, up, up! [Brandishing a broom, she chases Fyokla, the maid, an unself-consciously voluptuous creature.] Come on, come on, he's here. Get the samovar. *

FYOKLA going into the kitchen Tired.

MASHA sweeping Fyokla out of the house with the broomTrollop! Strumpet! You should have thought of that last night.

FYOKLA from kitchen Last night, miss?

MASHA wiping the dew from the patio furnitureI saw you sneaking back from the cemetery.

FYOKLA returning with the samovar No, miss.

Sound of carriage approaching.

MASHAI watched you climb in through the window.

FYOKLA setting down the samovar It wasn't me.

MASHA Liar! Go get his blanket. [She shoos Fyokla back into the house.]

Anton Chekhov enters with medical bag. He is forty, but looks much older. He is in a highly energised state common to sufferers of consumption, a state which, though giving the appearance of robust health, is in reality an exhilaration brought on by fever.

CHEKHOVWhat a night!

MASHA wiping off the chair Antosha, come, sit. Rest.

CHEKHOV pacing around But it was worth it. On the way back here I saw a curious thing. A drunken ice merchant had run his cart into a ditch. He was sitting on a block of ice, sobbing and tearing his hair out. I can probably turn that into a very amusing story.

Masha is trying to lead him to the chair without success. Fyokla enters with blanket.] Fyokla, there's a crate in the droshky. * Fetch it here, will you?

MASHA snatching the blanket and sending Fyokla off. Leading Chekhov to chair. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Out all night in your condition. Why does God give me such a brother? [She finally gets him seated, places the banket over his legs.] Where were you?

CHEKHOVAt Tolstoy's estate. It's all very generous of him to go about preaching independence of spirit to his peasants, but it's only succeeded in making them afraid to ask for medical help when they need it.

Fyokla enters with a crate containing a live chicken.

MASHAWhat is that?

CHEKHOV My fee. These people have no money. [Fyokla takes the chicken to the kitchen.] I delivered a baby, set a few limbs, pulled a tooth ... Then for the rest of the night, I had to sit and listen to Tolstoy expound on the simplicity of the Russian soul. [He pops up out of the chair.] God, I'm hungry. Must be the sea air. Fog is burning off. The weather is going to be perfect today. I'm so bored here, unimaginably bored. [He coughs as he takes a cigar from his pocket and pats his jacket for matches.] Masha, do you have some matches?

MASHA disapprovingly, indicating cigar Anton ...

CHEKHOVIt was a gift from Tolstoy.

MASHAPlease, you promised. [He reluctantly hands the cigar to her. She leads him off once more to the chair.] Antosha, I know you're having one of your good days, but you know very well all this exhilaration is not natural. Your cheeks are flushed with fever. It'll catch up with you. It always does.

Fyokla has fallen asleep over the samovar. Chekhov takes out his notebook and begins writing as Masha takes a bottle of medicine and spoon from her apron. Seeing Fyokla, Masha bops her on the head with the spoon.

FYOKLA Ow!

CHEKHOVSemyon! That's a good name for an ice merchant.

MASHA reaching for the notebookNo writing. Just rest.

CHEKHOV jerking notebook back angrily No, Masha, no! Now just go away and leave me alone.

MASHA stops Chekhov's speech by shoving a spoonful of medicine in his mouthI'd appreciate it, Anton, if you would use some of your boundless energy to speak to Fyokla. She was in the cemetery with her corporal again last night.

Masha exits into the house. Fyokla serves tea, starts to go.

CHEKHOVFyokla, come here. What were you and that soldier doing in the cemetery last night?

FYOKLA We were ... picking mushrooms, sir.

CHEKHOV You know how much that upsets my sister.

FYOKLAPicking mushrooms, sir?

CHEKHOV Masha tells me your nocturnal harvesting companion is known throughout the district as a notorious cad. Now, believe me, I understand the temptations and the joys of your midnight trysts...

FYOKLAThank you, sir.

CHEKHOVBut if you cause a scandal, Masha will make all of our lives a living hell. Do you understand?

FYOKLA I think so, sir.

CHEKHOV That will be all, Fyokla. By the way, I'm looking forward to mushrooms for lunch.

FYOKLAYes, sir, I'll go to the market and buy some. [She exits.]

CHEKHOV Hm. The body of a goddess, the brain of a flea. [He takes out notebook again. Writes.]

* Samovar = Russian tea-urn Droshky = Russian four-wheeled open cart

 

C. THE OPENING OF ' A DOLL'S HOUSE' BY HENRIK IBSEN, first performed in 1879

A comfortably and tastefully, but not expensively furnished room. Backstage right a door leads to the hall; backstage left, another door to Helmer's study. Between these two doors stands a piano. In the middle of the left-hand wall is a door, with a window down-stage of it. Near the window, a round table with armchairs and a small sofa. In the right-hand wall, slightly upstage, is a door; downstage of this, against the same wall, a stove lined with porcelain tiles, with a couple of armchairs and a rocking-chair in front of it. Between the stove and the side-door is a small table. Engravings on the wall. A what-not with china and other bric-a-brac; a small bookcase with leather-bound books. A carpet on the floor; a fire in the stove. A winter day.

A bell rings in the hall outside. After a moment we hear the front door being opened. Nora enters the room, humming contentedly to herself. She is wearing outdoor clothes and carrying a lot of parcels, which she puts down on the table right. She leaves the door to the hall open; through it, we can see a Porter carrying a Christmas tree and a basket. He gives these to the Maid, who has opened the door for them.

NORAHide that Christmas tree away, Helen. The children mustn't see it before I've decorated it this evening. [To the porter, taking out her purse.] How much - ?

PORTER A shilling.

NORA Here's a pound. No, keep it.

The Porter touches his cap and goes. Nora closes the door. She continues to laugh happily to herself as she removes her coat, etc. She takes from her pocket a bag containing macaroons and eats a couple. Then she tiptoes across and listens at her husband's door.

NORAYes, he's here. [Starts humming again as she goes over to the table, right.]

HELMER from his room Is that my skylark twittering out there?

NORA opening some of the parcelsIt is!

HELMER Is that my squirrel rustling?

NORAYes!

HELMERWhen did my squirrel come home?

NORAJust now. [Pops the bag of macaroons in her pocket and wipes her mouth.] Come out here, Torvald, and see what I've bought.

HELMERYou mustn't disturb me!

Short pause; then he opens the door and looks in, his pen in his hand.

HELMER Bought, did you say? All that? Has my little squander-bird been overspending again?

NORA Oh, Torvald, surely we can let ourselves go a little this year! It's the first Christmas we don't have to scrape.

HELMERWell, you know, we can't afford to be extravagant.

NORAOh, yes, Torvald, we can be a little extravagant now. Can't we? Just a tiny bit? You've got a big salary now, and you're going to make lots and lots of money.

HELMERNext year, yes. But my new salary doesn't start till April.

NORAPooh; we can borrow till then.

HELMERNora! [Goes over to her and takes her playfully by the ear.] What a little spendthrift you are! Suppose I were to borrow fifty pounds today, and you spent it all over Christmas, and then on New Year's Eve a tile fell off a roof on to my head -

NORA puts her hand over his mouth Oh, Torvald! Don't say such dreadful things!

HELMERYes, but suppose something like that did happen? What then?

NORAIf anything as frightful as that happened, it wouldn't make much difference whether I was in debt or not.

HELMERBut what about the people I'd borrowed from?

NORA Them? Who cares about them? They're strangers.

HELMEROh, Nora, Nora, how like a woman! No, but seriously, Nora, you know how I feel about this. No debts! Never borrow! A home that is founded on debts and borrowing can never be a place of freedom and beauty. We two have stuck it out bravely up to now; and we shall continue to do so for the few weeks that remain.

NORA goes over towards the stove Very well, Torvald. As you say.

HELMER follows herNow, now! My little songbird mustn't droop her wings. What's this? Is little squirrel sulking? [Takes out his purse.] Nora; guess what I've got here!

NORA turns quickly Money!

HELMER Look. [Hands her some banknotes.] I know how these small expenses crop up at Christmas.

NORA counts them One - two - three - four. Oh, thank you, Torvald, thank you! I should be able to manage with this.

HELMERYou'll have to.

NORAYes, yes, of course I will. But come over here, I want to show you everything I've bought. And so cheap! Look, here are new clothes for Ivar - and a sword. And a horse and a trumpet for Bob. And a doll and a cradle for Emmy - they're nothing much, but she'll pull them apart in a few days. And some bits of material and handkerchiefs for the maids. Old Anne-Marie ought to have something better, really.

HELMER And what's in that parcel?

NORA criesNo, Torvald, you mustn't see that before this evening!

HELMER Very well. But now, tell me, little spendthrift, what do you want for Christmas?

NORA Me? Oh, pooh, I don't want anything.

 

Now, consider the following question as a whole group, through discussion:

What features do these three extracts have in common? Consider what you notice about the stage directions - in general - and what you notice about the characterisation - in general.

[Here is a teacher's check-list for the above:Detailed stage directions, often with very specific moves suggested. Detailed descriptions of setting, which in all three cases suggest 'real' places, detailed furniture and props, etc.The characters depict 'real' people in that the playwright has made every attempt to give them credibility through the language they use [appropriate to status and class, for instance] and the descriptions given of them in the stage directions.]

These two areas are the ground-base for the naturalistic style - and the style can usually easily be spotted through the detailed stage directions alone. For those who do not study

Stanislavski, it is important here that they should have some idea of what naturalism as approached by this practitioner stands for.

Stanislavski believed in making every attempt to discover and illumine what the playwright was trying to do with his play. In other words, he believed in being true to the text, not in imposing a directorial idiosyncratic slant on it.He wanted to give characters depth and psychological reality, by seeking to disclose their hidden motivations and what is going on in their head - which will then be revealed by the manner in which they act on stage and will dictate how the lines are delivered.Every effort was made to make characters, their dress and the settings 'real' and accurate as to period detail. Naturalistic plays are supposed to be 'slices of real life'.

In each of the three extracts quoted, a Stanislavskian approach would be entirely appropriate and those who have studied Stanislavski could refer to his System in their written answers as part of the proof of their 'theatrical ideas encountered...'

Bearing this in mind, without the need to labour through the System, help the students realise the psychological implications of a character through the following:

Look at the last few lines of the first extract from where Jenny asks 'Where's Ronnie?' Ask them to read it aloud as if:

Jenny dislikes Ronnie, suspecting him of mucking her sister around Jenny is in awe of him and excited about the prospect of him as part of the family

Beatie knows the relationship is on the rocks but doesn't want to talk about it

Beatie trusts Ronnie absolutely and is sure he will eventually marry her

In extract B, look once again at the last part, after Masha exits.

Try Fyokla's character once she is alone with Chekhov:

flirtatiously, saucily - she is the sort of person who will flirt with and tease any man really not very quick in the brain area at all, as well as being very tired, so that she is

struggling for answers that will not get her into trouble

In extract C, look at just after the opening, from where Nora tiptoes across and listens at her husband's door.

Choose someone to act this move out, plus the line following, as if:

Nora is feeling guilty and is frightened of her husband Nora is happy and excited about her presents and can't wait to share her pleasure with

him.

This brief exercise should be enough to prove to the students how important interpretation is. What the Unseen Test is doing is asking students to expose not just the obvious surface of an extract but also what lies underneath. This is particularly true of a piece written in the naturalistic style and justified interpretation is part of what they are going to have to do if their examination piece is in that style.

Take the last exercise a little further now. Discuss in each case how each of the two interpretations suggested changes the responses of the other characters involved. Remember that responses are not necessarily part of the written piece - Jenny does not speak after her

question, for instance - but her face and body language will reflect what she perceives from Beatie's answer.

How does Chekhov respond if Fyokla is being saucy and flirtatious? He could take on a bit of light flirtatiousness into his tone too - even though he seems to be ticking her off. This would give the impression that they are in a sort of temporary conspiracy against Masha, which would work very well. Or you could try to make him sterner - but he is not succeeding very well - and see how that feels.

In the final excerpt - how does Nora's hum get affected by each suggested sub'text? If she is a little frightened of her husband, how will her following two lines in response to his teasing come out? And what is the motivation behind the putting her macaroons in her pocket and wiping her mouth?

Try all the above out practically. It is important that the students realise that though interpretation is imperative and a large part of what is being tested - it cannot be arbitrary. It needs to be tested out by examining how it affects the next few lines and actions, to see if it is workable and justifiable.

It is this skill that can only come with practice - and it is why I suggest that most of your early work on Unseens is done mainly 'through practice' - getting up and trying things out. This will go a long way towards training the ear and eye of the students and get them into the all-important habit of testing everything out and not going necessarily for the first impression.

Now divide the class up into small groups and allocate one of the excerpts to each group. With the excerpt, they should all do the following:

1.Using whatever is lying about in your studio - even if it is only chairs, blocks, or whatever - map out, by following the directions in the text, the setting for the extract.Prepare a short statement, to read out to the rest of the class, describing this setting. This statement should include imaginative details which will add to the atmosphere of the extract, e.g. colour scheme, general condition of the furnishings, any additions you would like to make that would further set the piece in its period, or its social class, or would contribute to the atmosphere of the piece as the group perceives it. This last may be hard early on, especially since these particular extracts are so short - but they could at least decide whether their piece has a light feel to it - or whether there are darker hints [Beatie and the absent Ronnie, Chekhov's TB, the unequal relationship between Nora and Torvald Helmer, for instance.] Even if they cannot as yet think how a setting could reflect or hint at darker issues within the play, they should at least show an awareness of its potential to do this.

2.Without words, move through the scene, following the stage directions carefully and using the set they have 'built' as best as they can.Prepare a brief statement to read out about what this exercise revealed. Did it raise any questions, for instance as to how an action was performed? Were other movements than those the playwright suggests necessary? Why? Aim to give a justification to each move made. E.g. Jimmy struggles awhile on the sofa - he is manipulating his back because of the pain in it, but perhaps with some extra irritation because of his mother-in-laws words on which he has just commented.

3. Work through the lines of the play, trying to decide what the characters are thinking, what the lines and actions reveal about them and their feelings about the other people in the scene.

Once this is done, have each character taken by two people [if you have enough students] one to deliver the line in the way that has been decided, the other to say what the character is showing through the line.

4. For the sake of completion, you could act it out 'properly' if you like.

5. Prepare a final statement which gives a brief synopsis of each character and its 'journey' through the extract. Make sure that this, MOST IMPORTANTLY, includes any decisions you have had to make as to INTERPRETATION, i.e. selection of one state of mind [Fyokla flirtatious or brainless, for instance] and how that has affected the final result.