Creating Theatre

Julian Bryant

Background

Having trained as a teacher in the early 70′s, and moving on to work as a performer, lighting technician and stage manager professionally, I came to Rose Bruford to teach in 1981. My interest had always been with a radical tradition, touching briefly on TiE with Perspectives; with diversity theatre with Temba; children’s theatre with Unicorn and Robert Cooper; but mostly shades of community through the rep movement, roadshows and main auditorium work.

Starting a family and becoming part of a community meant I was able to, and needed to, become politically active; campaigning with Labour through the Thatcher years, through into the heady days of Blair and seeing a left-of-centre agenda being played out locally; in Westminster and in Brussels. Seeing regeneration at work in poorer communities, and new visions of the role of the arts emerging that seek to engage a broader consensus, as Jack Lang did in France.

And professionally I see my work changing, taking into account a certain class bias; questioning assumtions of cultural value. Trying to be honest with students about the challenges that face them as practitioners; about ethical dilemmas on who is included, and who isn’t.

In 1974, while I was ‘resting’ I was employed by Labour to canvas Coalville, Leicestershire. As a town it did what it said on the tin. One night my last call was to a collier’s house (his description) – the guy was now a bus driver, having laid out an overseer over a professional disagreement. An emotional man; but as I though, not greatly cultured – I’d read Sons and Lovers so I had an idea. He then told me that his family knew to get clear when he got out his violin and played the Bruchner concerto.

Discussions about class culture are complex, and riven with contradiction, just like the collier violinist. Cultural capital varies from person to person; and one is constantly surprised by richness and dearth each springing up ide by side, in many different places. In the end one is searching for the value of a life well lived; of demonstrations of human kindness and compassion; of understandings of the world which may be expressed as easily, and as movingly, by the recollections of a pensioner as by a poet laureate.

Some issues:

• Poetics in performance. It’s not about the language content as such, more the structuring . May be this is the craft versus Art debate.
• Ownership – whose show is it anyway? The manager who put the deal together that made it possible, and who pays the wages and takes the, er, profit? The Director whose vision and foresight is n display, and who wrings the performance from their cast? The Actor who struts and frets every night, and whose timing and talent keeps the audience on the edge of their seats? The Audience member who bought the ticket, and without whom it would be so much more easy, and so much more onanistic to do the show? Or the Stage Manager, whose “unassuming control of that small empire” allows for an operational reality?

This post is being written in Blackpool, where I’m about to work with young people from the local FE college. From the hotel room I’ve a clear view of the Tower. Two days ago I was doing the same in Nottingham – from my room I could see the castle lit up, looking for all the world like the image on the old Players’ fag packet. The city of Raleigh bikes; of lace and the Huguenots; of DH Lawrence and coal miners. Tonight the pub quiz was about entertainment, with a few geography questions thrown in for good measure.

If you’d have asked the question in the fifties, those in the know would have said working class drama was about kitchen sink – Arnold Wesker; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; The Knack. Scripts written by aspirational writers, maybe a product of grammar school class mobility, keen to establish an alternative reality; the form of the drama set by precedents going back to GB Shaw or Miss Horniman, and watched by similar. A skilled working class, proud of its craft tradition, resentful of its exploitation in factories and at least one of two world wars, that had taken part in creating nationalised medicine, transport and energy. Plays were asking where were we to go, in effect.

Then these achievements become normalised (or of taken for granted, but that mis-states it). Education allows these working class kids to join the middle classes, but with a folk memory of a different value set. And the world of work changes too – out go the smokestack jobs, whether it be mining, or boilermaking, or cement – many exported overseas. In come the new jobs like retail – 1/8 of the British economy is run by Tesco? Or finance – 1/3 of GDP is created in the Square Mile or thereabouts. Or Creative Industries.

So where is working class drama now? I’ve slightly set it up; because working class drama is probably where it’s always been, not where academia looks for it. It’s in the pantomime, that 90% of the public go to watch. In the variety shows, full of camp and feathers – Blackpool still going strong. In stand-up comedy in so many forms, including bingo callers and quiz league hosts (excepting of course the university school, though even there one can trace influence). In seaside carnival, and processions around the Illuminations. In Gospel choirs, rock concerts and in clubbing, in hiphop, trance and garage, and on occasions stadium rock, as camp as it comes.

This is a theatre of Everyday Life in the sense Alan Read describes. Its rituals are about call-response rather than rapt attention. Audiences participate, usually actively rather than the passive sense that is implied by Peter Brook, when he points out the use in French of the verb assister. It tends to Bakhtin’s sense of carnivalesque; of a world (pretended to be) turned upside down.

The textuality of the fifties (as elsewhere) isn’t as important, it’s a much more visual world now. And it isn’t about content – fun though Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels might be, it’s a rich kid’s pastiche of working class life. It’s more to do with structures, and often with visuals. Where it gets interesting is in the negotiations with young working class people about the culture. Exploring creative process, rather than playtext, so that it becomes about doing – about crafting rather than analysing (except on the sense of reflecting-in-action). So ….

Let’s see if Blackpool rocks!