Royal Court: International

E. Aston, Mark O'Thomas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137487728
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

The first ever full-length study of the Royal Court Theatre's International Department, covering the theatre's unique programming of international plays and seasons, its London-based residences for writers from overseas, and the legacies of workshops conducted in more than 30 countries.

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Royal Court: International – Histories and Contexts

The Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs is a small studio space with a huge and significant history. Now formally called the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, it first opened in 1969 and became established as a much needed space for writers to present new plays. Without it, the rich history of modern British playwriting would be significantly poorer. But it is also the space in which another comparatively less acclaimed, or less well known new-writing history has unfolded: this is the space which largely chronicles the Royal Court’s commitment to contemporary plays by international writers.

When in June 2012 we facilitated a breakfast seminar on the work of the theatre’s International Department, it was therefore fitting that it should take place in the Theatre Upstairs.¹ Elyse Dodgson, director of the international work since the inception of the department in 1996, opened the event with a historical snapshot of the theatre’s international activities by acknowledging and drawing our attention to the space as being a ‘very important part’ of the story she had to tell. Her story is pivotal to our story in this first, and arguably long overdue, full-length study of the theatre’s international work.

The idea for the project was seeded some two years earlier in the summer of 2010. Significantly, the idea of collaborating on this venture grew out of conversations between ourselves at the International Federation of Theatre Research’s (IFTR) World Congress held in Munich,² and it is also fitting, therefore, that this study should appear in Palgrave’s ‘Studies in International Performance’ series, affiliated to IFTR. The emergent idea that this might be a project on which we could collaborate was based on shared – albeit differing – interests in both the Royal Court and the internationalisation of theatre scholarship. Mark came to the task primarily as a translator who had worked at the theatre for a number of years and, to some extent, as an insider attempting to externalise and objectify his own subjective experience of working with writers and being part of a development process that had seen the rise of playwriting in Brazil, and particularly São Paulo, as a new and urgent cultural phenomenon. Elaine came to the project following a body of work she had completed on Caryl Churchill, one of the Royal Court’s most successful playwrights, whose work is known around the globe, and during her editorship of IFTR’s Theatre Research International, a journal committed to internationalisation and engaging with theatre scholarship from different parts of the world.

As a collaborative project this study has, however, involved many more people than just the two of us. Back in 2010, we had not fully appreciated the enormity of the task that we were proposing to undertake – that the Royal Court had worked in so many different countries for so long – nor had we really taken account of the large numbers of people involved in the Royal Court’s work at home and abroad, each of whom had different perspectives on its activities. Embarking on preliminary research to propose the book project and with a glimmer of understanding about what lay ahead, we arrived at the idea that a selection of those perspectives should appear in the study and not as an annexed or appended series of reflections at the back of the book, but in the centre, at its core. Hence the middle section of our monograph provides an important touchstone for the book: a series of ‘Conversations’ with some of the key personnel and participants who have in their various ways come into contact with the Court’s international agenda over the past twenty years.

Because the work of the Royal Court’s International Department has been so extensive, no single volume – especially the first to provide an overarching view of and critical engagement with the subject – could do justice to all of the richness and complexity of its multifarious activities. Attempting to condense that richness and complexity into some two hundred plus pages was, along with the job of piecing together or puzzling out work in different theatre geographies, one of the hardest tasks of all. Ultimately we conceived two distinct parts, one to precede and the other to follow the ‘Conversations’. The first part includes this opening chapter on the history of the Royal Court’s engagement with an internationalist agenda and a second chapter on the process developed by the theatre for the workshop projects it has undertaken in different parts of the world since the late 1990s. Following the ‘Conversations’, our final two chapters are concerned respectively with the reception of the international work on the Royal Court’s London stage and the legacies of the theatre’s activities in some of the countries with which it has worked. What we hope is that this first study to critically assess the Royal Court for its significant – if not unsurpassed – contribution to engaging with new writing from outside the UK will not be the last: that our first steps towards such a critical assessment will encourage future, further studies concerned with the idea of the ‘Royal Court: International’.

We begin the engagement with the idea of the ‘Royal Court: International’ by exploring the history of the Royal Court Theatre through an international lens. Historicising and investigating the Court’s subscription to an idea of ‘international theatre’, in this chapter we look to critically assess the motivation behind the need to produce theatre internationally as well as the parallel desire that leads to theatre from around the world being brought to the UK stage. To this end, we use a loose chronological structure which charts the rise of the Royal Court Theatre through the tenures of its various artistic directors but also contextualises their periods of office by looking beyond the Court to the social and political landscape of the day and the work of other UK theatres that have embraced the ‘international’ as part of their ethos and programming. Our aim is to provide a contextualising framework through which to begin to account for and understand the international directions which the Court has historically taken, providing a backdrop for our primary focus on the work of the International Department (from 1996 to 2013) and the critical questions which emerge from the cultural politics of working outside national borders.

At this opening juncture we should further note that the interface between culture and internationalism invokes a long history that is bound up with the forging of empires and nationalisms, as well as the emergence of new communities and cultures that cross borders and provide a challenge to more reactionary ideas of nationhood. Notions of ‘internationalism’ and the ‘international’ gained ground in the later twentieth century as markers of a growing cosmopolitan impetus to engage socially, culturally and politically with others. Yet despite the apparent rise of internationalism, it would be difficult to argue that culture has achieved the widespread appeal that is visible in areas such as sport where, it should be observed, competition rather than cooperation defines the encounter between cultures, languages and nation-states. The events of the Cultural Olympiad in relation to the Olympic Games held in London in 2012, for instance, evince internationalism of the cultural kind as a worthy adjunct to the main programme. Similarly, the fact that the Royal Court’s Theatre Upstairs acts as the central locus for its international work while its main house is largely (albeit not exclusively) the preserve of UK new writing, appears as an iteration of how the international ‘competes’ with the national for cultural attention. That said and as this chapter will elucidate, the growing cultural vortex of international plays staged at the Court from the mid-1990s onwards does reflect an encouraging shift in cosmopolitan interests on the part of the theatre’s audience. For the Royal Court itself, however, internationalism was far from a late twentieth-century aspiration but fundamental to its very establishment in 1956.

George Devine and the English Stage Company

In the mid-1950s, George Devine, the first Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre, conceived the Court as a writers’ theatre. His vision was predicated on the idea of establishing a theatre dedicated to presenting ‘hard-hitting, uncompromising writers [whose] works are stimulating, provocative and exciting’ (qtd in Devine, 2006: 3).³ Crucially, his idea was that those new plays would be by both national and international playwrights: the Court would support both British writers and dramatists and those from outside the UK.

Devine’s role in establishing the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre has become something of a theatrical legend. As the founding father of the Court as a writers’ theatre, Devine has been both the beneficiary and the victim of this legend, which is inherently bound up with the impact in 1956 of the third play in his first season, Look Back in Anger, by the young and then relatively unknown playwright John Osborne. However, as Dan Rebellato among others has shown (Rebellato, 1999), history, and this particular phase of theatre history, has a habit of skewing past events in the creation of familiar, popular narratives and myths. Thus, although Devine’s conception of a writers’ theatre is now heralded as a watershed moment in the history of British theatre, it is interesting to note that his Oxford rival and nemesis Giles Playfair had actually failed in a parallel venture at the very same Sloane Square theatre some four years before Devine took up residence in February 1956. In other words, the idea of developing new British playwriting through the establishment of a theatrical base was coming into vogue during the early 1950s; Devine was not alone in recognising this.⁴ That said, through the unprecedented success of Look Back in Anger he turned out to be the first to make it achievable.

Two World Wars had ravaged London’s theatres and by the time the Royal Court belatedly became an option for the newly formed English Stage Company more than a fifth of theatres had been lost or were beyond repair.⁵ Hence, with theatre ownership consolidated into the hands of the powerful few, clear tensions existed between the need to make theatre pay its way and the artists who sought to practise their craft on the stage. Further, while the West End was largely characterised by home-grown commercial hits, it would be erroneous to conclude that during this time there was no knowledge or interest in theatre originating from outside the UK. Productions of Jean Anouilh’s work remained popular throughout this period,⁶ as did the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre and to some extent Bertolt Brecht. Devine’s artistic vision for the Royal Court and its in-house repertory company was also far more complex than was later assumed to be the case: it was not built solely on a one-track orthodoxy of the development and presentation of new writing. Rather, influenced by the French theatre-maker Michel Saint Denis and the Russian director Fyodor Komisarzhevsky, Devine wanted to create something much closer to a European art theatre⁷ that would offer an eclectic programme of work within five main strands. Firstly, he wanted to produce playwrights who had ‘had an important influence on contemporary theatre’; secondly, ‘significant plays “never performed in London”’; thirdly, ‘short plays from the art theatre’; fourthly, a ‘modern play each season of [an epic] nature’; and, finally, adaptations of the work of major writers such as Dickens (Doty and Harbin, 1990: 2).⁸ European influences are writ large into these artistic intentions and in many ways the agenda is almost identical to that of Saint Denis’s earlier repertory company which had established itself at the Phoenix Theatre in 1938 and in which Devine had served as an actor. Advocating a programme that included works by Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, and modern adaptations of Russian classics, Saint Denis’s company had also promised theatrical experiments on Sundays and included the support of notable actors such as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave and Edith Evans. Devine remained highly influenced by Saint Denis throughout his life, but never quite managed to create the international programme of new work by foreign playwrights hitherto unknown in Britain as originally planned. This was because while Look Back in Anger enabled the Court to establish itself as a theatre of importance, in the making of its modern mythology and in the quest to find its replacement at a time when public funding for the arts was minimal, something had to give.

However, there were two international plays in the first season: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan. The former, although a partial critical success, did not generate huge box office returns, playing to houses of only 45 per cent. By this time Miller was an established playwright; The Crucible had already won awards at its premiere in New York in 1952 and had received its UK premiere in 1954 at the Bristol Old Vic. The reasons for its inclusion in the first season were, ironically, related far more strongly to the need for a financial safety net than to a desire to open up the Court’s stage to new writing from America. However, if Miller’s play was only a partial nod towards an internationalist agenda, then the only foreign language play presented within the season arguably ought to have made admirable recompense. November 1956 saw the Court stage the British premiere of Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan, with Peggy Ashcroft in the title role and Eric Bentley providing a Brecht-approved translation. However, despite a longer than usual rehearsal period, the show ultimately received lukewarm reviews and was dwarfed by the enormity of its Osborne predecessor which continued to make waves. Just as Look Back in Anger had fortuitously managed to evoke and articulate the impact of the end of the British Empire before, during and after the Suez Crisis unfolded (thanks to its frequent returns to the Royal Court programme), Devine’s first Brecht offering coincided with a world event that engendered quite different domestic consequences. Good Woman opened on 31 October, the same week that the Soviets sent the tanks in to quell the anti-communist uprising in Hungary. The post-war, socialist dream was fading as fast as the box office receipts at the Royal Court; Devine hailed the reviews as ‘murderous’ and laid the blame largely on ‘the international situation’ (qtd in Roberts, 1999: 53).⁹

Devine’s inaugural season at the Royal Court is significant for a number of reasons. It demonstrated that a writers’ theatre could be more than a theoretical possibility and, largely due to the belated success of Look Back in Anger,¹⁰ served to put new writing for the stage on the map in a way that had never occurred before. Devine had succeeded where Playfair had failed, and yet the season also marked a significant incremental move away from Devine’s Saint Denis-inspired manifesto. Economic necessity dictated that the Court’s adoption of a repertory system be abandoned and replaced by short runs (Wardle, 1979: 187). Equally, the idea of having a repertory company had to be dispensed with in favour of a regular band of favoured actors who might be available to commit to a run. But most significant of all, Devine had come to recognise the risks of presenting international work on the British stage even when the playwrights were as firmly established as Miller and Brecht.

With his first season at the Royal Court, Devine had shown that it was possible to survive, but not without concessions to his overall vision. In point of fact, the season was saved financially not by Look Back in Anger but by the final production: William Wycherley’s restoration comedy The Country Wife, which transferred to the West End. Thus a pragmatically arrived at template was created: to keep the theatre financially afloat and to retain some kind of commitment to international plays depended on programming new British writing and box office winners from the classic repertoire. Indeed, Devine’s directorial commitment to the international work subsequently prospered, in part facilitated by his newly found partnership with the Paris-based, bilingual Irish playwright Samuel Beckett whose Fin de Partie had both a world premiere at the Court in 1957 and an English language premiere (Endgame) the year after. This partnership came at a time when the idea of the international was largely conceived as what was happening just across the English Channel, and by the end of Devine’s term of office in 1965, a total of 43 plays had been produced that originated from outside the UK (Findlater, 1981), the majority of which were from Europe and included major new works by Beckett, Sartre, Eugene Ionesco and Max Frisch. Within this European mix of writers and plays were embryonic signs of a much broader geographical horizon which would open up most significantly with the inception of the International Department in 1996: the Nigerian born Wole Soyinka was one of the writers to have a first play staged through Devine’s ‘Sunday Night “productions without decor”’ (Findlater, 1981: 42). Soyinka’s The Invention, directed by the playwright, had a ‘Sunday Night’ performance in Novembe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Preface
• Preface by Stephen Daldry
• Foreword by Elyse Dodgson
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Royal Court: International – Histories and Contexts
• 2 International Workshops and Residencies
• 3 Conversations
• 4 International Plays and UK Receptions
• 5 International Impact and Legacies
• Afterword Vicky Featherstone
• Timeline: Royal Court International (1989–2013) compiled by Elaine Aston and Elyse Dodgson
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index