The Contemporary Ensemble

Interviews with Theatre-Makers

Duška Radosavljević, Duška Radosavljević

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136283536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

'Dr. Radosavljevi? has an excellent and extensive grasp of her subject, and deep understanding of not only the history of these groups, but how they function, and how each contributes to the field of ensemble theatre.' – David Crespy, University of Missouri, USA

Questions of ensemble – what it is, how it works – are both inherent to a variety of Western theatre traditions, and re-emerging and evolving in striking new ways in the twenty-first century. The Contemporary Ensemble draws together an unprecedented range of original interviews with world-renowned theatre-makers in order to directly address both the former and latter concerns. Reflecting on 'the ensemble way of working' within this major new resource are figures including:

Michael Boyd, Hermann Wündrich, Yuri Butusov, Max Stafford-Clark, Elizabeth LeCompte, Lyn Gardner, Adriano Shaplin, Phelim McDermott; and Emma Rice;

representing companies including:

The RSC; The Berliner Ensemble; The Satirikon Theatre; Out of Joint; The Wooster Group; Kneehigh Theatre; Song of the Goat; The Riot Group; The Neo-Futurists; Shadow Casters; and Ontroerend Goed.

All 22 interviews were conducted especially for the collection, and draw upon the author's rich background working as scholar, educator and dramaturg with a variety of ensembles. The resulting compendium radically re-situates the ensemble in the context of globalisation, higher education and simplistic understandings of 'text-based' and 'devised' theatre practice, and traces a compelling new line through the contemporary theatre landscape.

Part I

Redefinitions of ensemble

1

A ‘contingent community’ in a free market economy

Michael Boyd (Royal Shakespeare Company)

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was founded in 1961 at the initiative of Peter Hall who had been running the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford since 1 January 1960. Hall is considered to have been inspired by the European art theatre model – the Moscow Art Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble – to embrace the ensemble way of working, but wished to remain cautious about the associated ‘institutional drawbacks’ of rigidity, tyranny of seniority and complacency (Chambers 2004: 9). He managed to obtain the commitment of prominent actors for his project – such as Peggy Ashcroft who was ‘the first to sign on’ (Adler 2001: 4) – and launched the first RSC season with a stellar line up.

The RSC thrived throughout the 1960s under Hall and throughout the 1970s under Trevor Nunn, but entered a crisis period from the mid-1980s onwards. A recent Demos report about the company notes that:

An Arts Council appraisal carried out in 1990 had warned that the management of the RSC was unusually centralised, and that communications within the organisation were poor.

(Hewison et al. 2010: 33)

The downward turn culminated with serious economic problems under Adrian Noble (1991–2003) and the company’s loss of its London base in 2002. Michael Boyd, who had joined the RSC as Associate Director in 1996, took over as the Artistic Director in 2002/03 and resolved to return the company to its founding principle of ensemble.

Unlike most of his predecessors, Boyd had absorbed influences from the experimental and regional scene, as well as Scottish and European theatre. He attended the University of Edinburgh and trained at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. His first assistant directing job was at the Belgrade Theatre Coventry in 1979, followed by an Associate Directorship at Sheffield Crucible in 1982. In 1985, he returned to Scotland and founded the Tron Theatre in Glasgow.

The first three-year ensemble company at the RSC was assembled under Boyd in 2006 to coincide with the year-long Complete Works Festival where all of Shakespeare’s plays were presented within one year at Stratford through a combination of visiting international companies and RSC productions. Part of the ensemble project was an implementation of the Artist Development Programme, designed to provide ongoing systematic in-house training for the acting companies, directors, designers and members of the education department. With the so-called Histories Company, Boyd directed the monumental cycle consisting of Henry VI Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, Richard III, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V. Simultaneously, part of Boyd’s mission was to have the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, originally built in 1932, refurbished in order to create a more inclusive atmosphere in the auditorium. For five years between 2006 and 2011, a temporary theatre – the Courtyard – was rigged up in Stratford to replace the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The second ensemble company, the ‘Long Ensemble’, was assembled in 2009. The new, refurbished Royal Shakespeare Theatre opened in 2011, in time for the 50th anniversary of the RSC. The company has also reinstated its annual London season. Despite these successes, Boyd’s journey of innovation was not without its struggles.

This interview, which took place in November 2010 – about a year before Michael Boyd and Vikky Heywood announced that they would step down from their respective positions as Artistic and Executive Directors of the RSC – highlights aspects of Boyd’s vision that challenge cultural preconceptions, focusing specifically on his ideas of ensemble and the kinaesthetic approach to text.

Interview

RADOSAVLJEVIĆ: You’re a strong advocate of the ensemble way of working. I would be interested to know which formative influences have shaped your particular methodology? I’m guessing your Russian experience has been quite significant in that respect?

BOYD: Yes, spending some time with Anatoly Efros’ company at the Malaya Bronnaya, witnessing six-week readthroughs, and an integrated approach to mind and body that was possible because of the time spent and because of the mutual understanding already earned over years between the director and the company, was very influential. Seeing mature work at the numerous Young People’s Theatres in Moscow and Leningrad, work that stayed in the repertoire for years, and just sensing the depth and the detail and the virtuosity that was possible over that length of time, it all seemed very different from the hurried ‘hair ‘em scare ‘em’ approach to preparation that was usual in British theatre. At that time I was most inspired in the UK by the powerful, visual theatre work of Phillip Prowse at the Citizens Theatre which engaged with a poetry of mise-en-scène that I didn’t see in most text-bound British theatre at that time. I was inspired by the clarity and simplicity of Peter Gill’s work at the Riverside Studios and the dogged pursuit of talented new playwrights at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, the emergence of a new native voice in Scottish theatre, and by the political activism of 7:84 and their musical theatre offshoot – Wildcat. There was a sense of ensemble amongst them although they put their work together very quickly – both in terms of members of the team who worked together over a decade, informally, but also a strong sense of connection with their audience in community centres and working men’s clubs around Scotland and at their height, with civil society – because they were engaging directly with the headlines of the day. But none of these UK models revealed any such depth or rich attention to the work that I witnessed in my time in Moscow. Living in Edinburgh, of course, I was exposed every year to interesting work from abroad. The work of Kantor, for instance, was a revelation. His Dead Class coming to Edinburgh offered us a different idea of what narrative might be, a shocking theatrical modernism that was enormously powerful and actually very accessible. Compared with much of contemporary classical music for instance, which had rather lost its traction on audiences at the time, this was a modernist theatre work which was palpably powerful and effective for its audience.

I went to Russia a year after university. And while I was at university I realised that Scottish theatre at its best was still a highly socialised community art form, either through the populist variety tradition or through the overtly political agenda of companies in the 1970s – like 7:84.

RADOSAVLJEVIĆ: How would you define the RSC as an ensemble at this moment in time?

BOYD: We’re in the middle of our second sustained experiment with long-term ensemble, which is a reaction to our first experiment with the Histories. We felt that the experience of the Histories, however successful, had been too intense for the actors and had not left enough time for reflection or just rest. One way we have addressed this problem has been to enlarge the company so that one half of the company can play ‘opposite’ the other and give people nights off and rehearsal periods off. That has been valuable but also tricky because it has split the company. Everyone has worked with everyone else by now but it took much longer for the company to start firing on all cylinders with each other, because for months they had worked in different tribes within the larger tribe. When I first took on the RSC as artistic director, I had an instinctive feeling that the company size should relate to class size in a school, which should not be more than 30, and I think the 44 of our current ensemble is too big. The 90-strong companies that the RSC used to employ were so large that actors tended to disappear, just not being noticed, not being developed. To give the actors in our current company a less exhausting time we expanded the company size. The second company is also the ‘difficult second album’ because the first company was enormously successful. A lot of actors who would have or did say ‘no’ to the Histories were saying ‘yes’ to this, because of the success of the Histories. There’s a different expectation from a company of actors who share an understanding of the almost impossibility of the task of the Histories, and from one made up of actors who think the path has been trod, so the task will be easier. Then they’re shocked when it’s hard. I think we have a larger number of profoundly gifted individuals in this company than we had in the Histories company, because more leading actors were willing to commit. And we perhaps can see a little more self-interest creeping in; there are more people who feel a need for a greater degree of control of their destiny. Managing those different conflicting desires – was very robust on the Histories – but it has been a harder journey on this one.

RADOSAVLJEVIĆ: What struck me during the brief time that I was here was that there was a strong emphasis on training together. The ensemble members, whoever they were and at whatever point in their career, were all training together for that first period of time and that was structured into the rehearsal process. But also there were emphases on particular ideas, such as kinaesthetics and embodiment and experiential learning. And I just wonder – how did these ways of thinking about the work ethos come about? Was this something that you felt was very important in an ensemble?

BOYD: I was inspired by the rigour of Russian training, by the visceral connection between the profession and training in Russia that simply doesn’t exist in this country. Practical experience has also taught me that it requires time to develop deep skills, and the more intangible things like rapport, understanding, mutual instinct. With Shakespeare the artists are addressing an alien culture and an unfamiliar seventeenth century form of English that we have to address, because increasingly drama schools are not addressing it. There was a deficit at the RSC of exploiting the actor’s full physical potential. Perhaps British theatre has been too text-bound, too discursive and too cerebral. At the RSC it should be possible to grow out from the text, to be both brilliantly lyrical and aspire to a stage poetry that was not just about words, where we could celebrate total theatre.

RADOSAVLJEVIĆ: And how did you and the company proceed to develop those skills; what kinds of influences or elements of learning were brought into the company to facilitate that?

BOYD: The work of Liz Ranken was influential in the early period, and her marriage of different physical disciplines and methods that she had acquired over the years working with DV8 and through her dance training, with an almost spiritual approach. There was a greater emphasis on physical fitness. There were specific skills that were required at different times that the new way of working allowed us to learn. There was a genuine rigour, for instance, about the rope work and the trapeze work that we did on the Histories that would have been impossible if we hadn’t stayed together for that length of time. We were able to make the demand of accomplished actors that they become strong physical performers as well; we brought artists with skills in physical theatre into the company when previously they had been regarded as a risk because: ‘Can they speak verse?’. We have the resources in the company to work on language with physical performers – they work with Cis Berry, Greg Doran, John Barton, Alison Bomber, so they need not be horribly exposed outside their existing expertise. I bumped into a real appetite for language and narrative at places like Circus Space in Hoxton, a desire to sustain an idea beyond the theatrical equivalent of a three-minute pop song. They were yearning to express more, through sustained narrative, to find a larger vessel in which to express the things that they were feeling, that they wanted to say. We were able to offer them a chance t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Themes table
• Part I Redefinitions of ensemble
• Part II Working processes
• Part III Ensemble and the audience
• Index