Michael Billington in Monday's Guardian writes about the Royal Court and its outgoing director Ian Rickson, praising them for their concentration on new writing instead of being seduced by the vogue for 'devised' performances by actors and directors.
Now, I have a few gripes about the Royal Court. Last year I described it as the Ryanair of theatreland for its attitude to its paying customers when something goes wrong. And I think the recent choice of plays has included some very substandard stuff, notably Tanika Gupta's Sugar Mummies. I can't think of any comedies I've seen at the Royal Court that come anywhere near the quality of Steve Thompson's Damages and Whipping It Up at the much smaller Bush theatre.
However Billington is right about devised theatre. Like him, I thought Katie Mitchell's Waves at the Cottesloe was technically brilliant but utterly pointless. My view is that actors can devise and improvise individual scenes, but there's no substitute for the individual writer in constructing a play. The reliance on improvisation by actors is one of the key strengths of Mike Leigh's work, but it's also one of his weaknesses. In a Mike Leigh film, often the overall story is much less than the sum of the individual scenes. I also remember being acutely disappointed by an evening at the National a few years ago when Peter Brook presented an evening of scenes devised by actors from the writings of psychologist Oliver Sacks. I think the title was The Man Who Thought His Wife Was A Hat. The lesson to me is that even a great director like Brook gets a bit lost without a proper text.
I don't want to knock the abilities of actors and directors, and I can understand that the lack of really good new plays may push them towards devising their own work. Sometimes the writer is a hired scribe whose job is to knock together the results of the actors' improvisations. I'm sceptical about this division of roles. My idea is that the writer provides a trampoline for the director and actors to bounce around on in any way they choose -- but it's not their job to share in building it.
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