Then What Happens?

Storytelling and Adapting for the Theatre

Mike Alfreds

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788502061
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Schreiben von Theaterstücken

A practical investigation into story-theatre and the art of telling stories through theatre, by the renowned director who founded Shared Experience Theatre Company.

In Then What Happens?, Mike Alfreds makes the case for putting story and storytelling back at the heart of theatre. He explores the whole process of adapting for the stage, and investigates the particular techniques - many of them highly sophisticated - that actors require when performing 'story-theatre'.

The book includes over two hundred exercises, improvisations and workshops dealing with the practical aspects of story-theatre, such as building an ensemble, creating a physical vocabulary, and transforming written narrative into drama. It draws on examples ranging from traditional legends and folklore, through the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, to contemporary fiction. Alfreds shows how each story demands its own particular set of dramatic choices, opening up endless possibilities for performance.

Then What Happens? - like the author's tremendously successful first book, Different Every Night - will be invaluable to directors and actors, to dramatists working in the field of adaptation, to those devising and working from improvisation, and to any theatregoer who has been moved by the power of an unfolding story to ask: 'Then what happens?'

'All theatre directors know that good narrative is the secret of good theatre, but few have as distinctive, rigorous and exceptional a method of exploring that secret as does Mike Alfreds. His system of working, and his thoughts on the making of theatre in our time, are as crucial and illuminating as those of Stanislavsky and Peter Brook have been to generations of theatre enthusiasts and practitioners.' Michael Coveney

'both fascinating and instructive for the general reader as well as practitioners... will prove invaluable to directors, actors and even designers and choreographers... a must have' - British Theatre Guide

'Alfreds' substantial book provides a fascinating insight into [his approach], which has been adopted by many other directors and companies since the 1970s.... This is an ideal read for anyone who is keen to put storytelling at the heart of performance' - Drama Resource

'Comprehensive, rigorous and practical... a heavyweight book from a heavyweight author' - Theatre in Wales

'Practical and thorough... a very useful book for playwrights and directors' - The Stage

Part One

THOUGHTSHOPS FOR STORYTELLING

SECTION 1

THIS STORY OF MINE

TO BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING…

HAVE I GOT NEWS FOR YOU!

Tell me! What?

I hardly know where to begin.

Oh, for God’s sake! What??

Look, I’ve been sworn to secrecy. So…

Yes, yes, I promise!

Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have –

Well, you did.

Forget I said anything.

Too late now. You’ve got to tell me!

Your words have triggered an instant reflex that arouses my need to know. And any delay increases it. The suspense might even kill me. You’ve tempted me with the promise of a story, a temptation that’s hard to resist. If the offer’s withdrawn, the story withheld, I’m left dangling: off-balance and incomplete. The need to tell and be told stories seems as essential to our existence as breathing. Stories transcend time and space, travelling down generations and across borders, cutting through the otherness of cultures and languages. Prehistory pieces together whatever evidence it can find to tell us possible stories about our earliest selves. Stories beckon us in pursuit of the unanswerable ‘why’, the relentless quest of that Holy Grail: to make sense of our lives and give them shape. But there are times when we want stories to take us in the opposite direction – out of ourselves. Is it possible to conceive of a world without stories? Without beginnings, middles and ends? Without manga, Man Booker and myths? Sagas and scandals and soaps? Stories nourish our imagination. Imagination nourishes our empathy.

How a story reaches us obviously affects its impact on us. Reading is an altogether private activity, done at our own speed and in circumstances of our own choosing. Nothing intrudes between the page and our imagination. But the process is totally one-way: from the story to us. We respond to it but we have no effect on it. More to the point, our response is to rewrite the story in our imaginations, but it remains unchanged on the page. But being told or read a story face to face creates the possibility of an exchange between teller and listener in which the listener’s reactions may well affect the teller’s telling. Inevitably, there must be some degree of interaction. Storytelling in theatre lifts this interaction onto another level of possibilities entirely. Plays, of course, act out stories, but most often indirectly, at a slight remove. Storytelling refreshes theatre by restoring it to its roots: stories first, plays after.

Some people disapprove of the theatrical appropriation of texts not originally conceived for theatre. But theatre survives by a magpie existence, helping itself from other arts, crafts and disciplines to whatever seems useful for its own purposes. Its uniqueness and vitality reside not so much in the provenance of its materials as in the form of its expression: the phenomenon of performance. This is the domain of the actor. Only actors can bring life to the stage. They transform productions into performances. Actors are the performance. Acting is the élan vital of theatre, its breath, its pulse, its source of energy. And storytelling actors epitomise theatre at its purest and acting at its most multifaceted.

Actors exhibit our potential to transcend ourselves: to imagine what it’s like to be someone else. Storytellers manifest our potential to transcend the moment we chance to live in: to imagine what it’s like to be somewhere else in time and place, actual or speculative. Story’s plot is theatre’s action. Nothing offers a more inviting point of departure on an empathy-expanding journey of the imagination than a company of storytellers entering a space to greet the other company gathered there with the irresistibly seductive incantation:

ONCE UPON A TIME…

A Thousand and One Nights

I happened upon storytelling by chance. I came upon it in pursuit of an entirely different preoccupation: defining for myself precisely what I believed to be the essence of theatre. It was one of those rare and serendipitous occasions on which two seemingly separate paths of enquiry synthesise into one. Storytelling drew me into an entirely unexpected world where many of my questions about the nature of theatre were answered, and many of my instincts on the matter confirmed.

It happened through A Thousand and One Nights. I made the acquaintance of this cornucopia of stories while working in Israel. A friend suggested that they might be adaptable for the theatre. Reading a bunch of kids’ stories didn’t fill me with the greatest enthusiasm. To my surprise, the thirty or so I did read were far from the familiar tales of magic and adventure I’d expected. Since their first appearance in the West, many of them had been heavily expurgated and subsumed in that guise. These I read were altogether more sophisticated and revealed much of the life that would have been experienced in the cultures from which they’d evolved. What’s more, they were flagrantly, joyfully carnal and their women, confounding some current burqa’d and niqab’d impressions of Islamic culture, clearly the more enterprising and dynamic of the sexes. These tales were immediately alluring: rich in plot, character and action, replete with city life, daily toil, landscapes, philosophical ruminations, religious proselytising, prayer, myth, magic, verse, romance, adventure, history, moral fables, shaggy-dog stories, dirty jokes and, as noted, celebratory eroticism; all human life was there. But they didn’t seem to lend themselves to conventional adaptation into scenes of extended dialogue. Possibly because I was then living in the Levant, where there were still pockets of traditional public storytelling – not that I’d experienced this myself, but nonetheless romantically visualised it – it occurred to me that the ideal presentation of these stories might be to retain them in their natural form: as stories. The challenge was to find the dramatic means of doing so.

Initially, I was somewhat deterred by having seen too many dull adaptations with the undernourished narrator unimaginatively stuck in a corner of the stage making colourless links between scenes, a lazy way of conveying information that the dramatist had failed to resolve within the drama itself, one that offered the actor in question a thankless task in a boring role, remarkable only for its missed opportunities. From a practical standpoint, these stories roamed so frequently from one exotic location to another and involved such vast casts of characters that their adaptation as plays would have defeated the means of the most spiralling Defence Budget. What helped me to make a leap of imagination was that this challenge coincided with my own personal concern at that time with what exactly constituted an act of theatre. I was becoming more and more convinced this had to be the creative presence of the actor, the one ingredient in theatre that cannot be dispensed with; the only one necessary, together, of course, with an audience and their shared imaginations, for theatre to exist. The actor was the defining element of theatre. I began to visualise actors in an empty space, transforming themselves into concubines and caliphs, wise women and wazirs at the demands of a story and somehow, out of nothing, conjuring up to order souks and palaces, hammams and harems, fields of battle and the djinn-infested Upper Air. Looking back now, it all seems obvious, but then the solutions came slowly and piecemeal.

The eventual production, literally called A Thousand and One Nights, comprised some ten stories that most appealed to me. They had no thematic or dramatic connection. I linked them together in a rather obvious sequence of alternating long and short, dramatic and comic pieces, ending with the most elaborate. What held them together was the set, a large black box containing a sequence of smaller black boxes from which bolts of material were variously drawn, one for each story. In one, about a dyer who only knew of the colour blue, his moment of revelation came when, by the tug of a cord, the frieze of blue cloths festooning the black box was transformed into all the colours of the rainbow. But my moment of revelation was seeing the possibility of actors both playing their characters and telling us about their characters, moving to and fro between those two functions as the narrative required. From that discovery came the challenge to find unanticipated ways of rendering all types of narrative stage-worthy. The dramatic potential of narrative and narration opened up endless questions about attitude, viewpoint and role that eventually came to be explored in great detail when I returned to London and formed Shared Experience Theatre Company.

The Book of Esther

Before my return I created another piece of storytelling theatre based on the Old Testament Book of Esther, though, at the time, I didn’t realise I was doing that. As part of my efforts to learn Hebrew, I’d acquired a bilingual Bible padded with footnotes quoting the conflicting, highly disputative interpretations of the text by very ancient rabbis (Here Rabbi Akiba says. But Ibn Ezra finds evidence… Less acceptable is Rashi’s view…). The Book of Esther, one of the shortest in the canon, has considerably more than its fair share of such commentary. For these sages, it was also the most problematic. In the story, Esther, a nice Jewish girl, marries out of the faith (the King of Persia – to save her race from ethnic cleansing, it should be noted); but, more worrying than this, the name of God is never once invoked: two definite strikes against this story’s right to belong amongst such scriptural company, one that needed a lot of explaining. I suddenly had the image of the characters in the story trying to get on with their lives, surrounded by a group of rabbis, draped in prayer shawls, constantly interrupting them with contradictory interpretations of their behaviour and demands for them to change their ways, all the while squabbling amongst themselves over some recondite point of scholarship. This image became the starting point for an eventual piece of theatre called The Persian Protocols. Researching the material, I found that, in keeping with the need for so many justificatory footnotes, there were more exegeses and versions of Esther than of any other book in the Old Testament. The final production was a retelling of the story five times, starting with the biblical version – complete with footnotes and rabbis – and moving through four variations (children’s folk tale, agit-prop, ecstatic vision, and archetypal ‘Everyman’ legend), each written at a different period in the evolution of the Hebrew language, and manipulating the story to fit the prevailing needs and values of its community.

As my own footnote to this, I somewhat wistfully acknowledged to myself that whereas in Israel the entire population, religious and secular, could relate – and relate to – the story of Queen Esther, having studied it in school and celebrated it during Purim (the one playful holiday in the Jewish calendar), there was not now in our British culture a single narrative I could think of that would have the same communal, unifying familiarity, not Genesis, not the Gospels (despite their Christmas Story), nor the Arthurian legends, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, David Copperfield, Pride and Prejudice (coming pretty close), not World Wars One and Two, not even 7/7.

Sharing the Experience

I started Shared Experience Theatre Company to convince myself – and anyone else who cared – that all you needed to create theatre were actors with stories to tell and audiences to tell them to. What made theatre unique was one group of human beings transforming themselves into a second group of human beings in the actual – not virtual – presence of a third group of human beings who fulfilled – completed – this act of transformation by accepting and believing in that second group. This was the essence of pure theatre: the shared imaginations of actors and audiences conjuring up characters who really weren’t there: bringing the non-existent into existence. Nothing and nobody else was necessary. Our boast was that we could perform anywhere at any time for anyone.

But what were we to perform? Plays tell wonderful stories, but they car...