Fifty Key Theatre Directors

Shomit Mitter, Maria Shevtsova, Shomit Mitter, Maria Shevtsova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134661954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theater

Fifty Key Theatre Directors covers the work of practitioners who have shaped and pushed back the boundaries of theatre and performance. The authors provide clear and insightful overviews of the approaches and impact of fifty of the most influential directors of the twentieth and twenty-first century from around the world. They include:

• Anne Bogart
• Peter Brook
• Lev Dodin
• Declan Donnellan
• Jerzy Grotowski
• Elizabeth LeCompte
• Joan Littlewood
• Ariane Mnouchkine.

Each entry discusses a director's key productions, ideas and rehearsal methods, effectively combining theory and practice. The result is an ideal guide to the world of theatre for practitioners, theatregoers and students.

REX CRAMPHORN (1941–91)

In 1985, Rex Cramphorn staged Hamlet and Measure for Measure in repertory at the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne.

The plays were presented on a bare stage, around which the actors and one musician sat or knelt on small Japanese stools and were visible to the audience throughout. The stage was lit with a broad wash of white light, and the only lighting change was a low light state for the night scenes. The actors and musician supplied music and sound effects using small percussion instruments and tuned wine glasses … the minimal setting, props and lighting meant that the actors' and audiences' concentration was entirely on words and position….¹

The stage itself was painted with an interlocking red, green, silver and black pattern characteristic of Cramphorn's over-coding of spatial relations. Many of his projects featured such designs marked out on the bare platform stage, schematising and activating spatial semiotics, and foregrounding the proxemic relations between characters. Across this bare space, transected by vectors and tangents, the characters would move with geometric precision. As Mark Minchinton, an actor who worked extensively with Cramphorn, notes, this rigorous stripping back of theatrical apparatus made huge demands upon actors and audience alike, a reflection of Cramphorn's desire to make theatre hard - an exacting experience. Minchinton recalls that ‘[t]ypically, he had little interest in what audiences made of the productions, remarking that he thought audiences should have to sit an exam before attending’.²

The 1985 Hamlet and Measure were the culmination of The Actors' Development Stream at the Playbox, one of Cramphorn's ill-fated attempts to establish an ensemble company of actors committed to a sustained, intensive examination of the actor-director relationship. A desire to work with such a company drove Cramphorn throughout his career. Towards the end of his life, he was still pursuing that goal, seeking funding for an ensemble company which would work towards the

establishment of a performance style which arises directly from a close study of classic texts (i.e. a style in conscious reaction to or developed in full awareness of current naturalism) with an aesthetic which is appropriate to an heir of English-speaking tradition with a multicultural future in a Southeast Asian location … a classic company, capable of drawing from the best available academic and professional resources and developing a valid Australian contribution to world theatre.³

The company was never set up. Cramphorn, having spent close to two decades struggling against a tide of theatrical conservatism, instead enrolled as a student at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, pursuing his love of cinema instead.

Cramphorn's was a career characterised by sustained attempts to establish a vital, new theatre within what he saw as an oppressively conservative, anti-intellectual and institutionally unsupportive milieu. In 1968, Cramphorn took stock of the state of play in local theatre, writing of the ‘free-for-all commercial struggle with no security of any kind, no opportunity for learning’:⁴

No one here is experimenting with acting … [a] nation as politically and socially apathetic as we are is unlikely to have anything serious to say in a theatre. Until theatre has something serious to say, or a distinctive statement to make — that is, until it demands to be taken seriously — it will remain a withering mistletoe on our gum-tree culture.⁵

As Cramphorn observed, ‘in Australia, the “newest” theatre comes from overseas … it begins and ends with the Time review. Like sex-educated children we know it all without experience’.⁶ The only counter-model of theatre available in Australia at the time was that of the Melbourne Theatre Company, where George Ogilvie — a student of Lecoq, and an acting tutor under Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s — was able to maintain an ensemble of ‘twenty or so actors’ engaged in daily classes and working in an environment in which ‘actors can develop and directors experiment’.⁷

Rather than yielding to the temptation simply to stop wasting his time writing about such a desolate theatrical culture, Cramphorn instead composed a manifesto for a new Australian theatre:

I take theatre's unique asset to be the actor's physical presence, and I take its major misdirection to be the foisting of psychological realism, what Artaud calls ‘storytelling psychology’ on him.⁸

Alternatives to the sclerotic insularity of emergent Australian naturalism — the ‘gum-tree culture’ — would require ‘an elastic training scheme as a basis for arduous research and experiment, resulting in an original stylistic communication of an unforeseeable nature, but relevant to its Australian environment in the way that, say, Grotoski's [sic] is to Poland’.⁹ Cramphorn's was to be an indigenous Australian theatre, but one based upon the revolutionary training, practices and ensemble ideas of Grotowski and Copeau, the writings of Artaud and a repertoire built on a balance of devised work and European classical texts — in particular, those of Shakespeare and the French neo-classicists (which he translated for himself).

Towards the end of 1969, Cramphorn and a group of recently graduated actors got hold of a photocopy of the just-published English translation of Grotowski's seminal text, Towards A Poor Theatre. Spurred by their collective distaste for the professional and commercial theatre, the group worked systematically through Grotowski's exercises. In 1970 this core group joined with three other graduates to form a company for a season of productions at the Jane Street Theatre. Generous funding from the Australian Council for the Arts allowed the company of seven actors and three directors to work as an ensemble with commissioned writers on new texts. Rehearsals started in March 1970 with eight weeks of full-time classes in yoga, movement, mime, singing, voice work and ‘Brechtian’ acting. The classes continued for a further four weeks as the company moved into improvisations with preliminary script ideas. Each of the season's three productions was then rehearsed full time for two weeks. Cramphorn directed the season's second work, a meditation on themes of exploration titled 10,000 Miles Away. The company worked with the Grotowskian model, developing from a range of tumbling and falling exercises a physical language of flight, flow and continuous movement, generating in turn a percussive performance rhythm. This was augmented by a series of texts contributed by Willy Young, reflecting his own particular interests: space travel, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and endurance cycling.¹⁰

10,000 Miles Away began with the cast, dressed in white judo suits, meditating on a square white mat as the audience entered, taking seats on two sides of the performance space. A narrative developed out of apparently meaningless chanting: four of the performers — the core ‘Grotowski group’ — were space travellers in search of distant radio signals, the ‘Siren Song’ that drew them away from ‘Home Base’. Their journey was rendered as a clockwise running around the central mats. The actors ran

till their feet blistered and bled…. Their running vibrates the building, giving a constant percussive accompaniment to speech in which the words are often just sounds … the performers test the limits of human endurance. They go beyond speed, beyond death, and in [a section titled] ‘Supersex’ in countless bouts of lovemaking, beyond pleasure. The limitations of their flesh are left behind.¹¹

One reviewer suggested that ‘Grotowski from 10,000 miles away’ might have been a more appropriate title (The Australian, 8 July 1970) — certainly the work contrasted markedly with the talk-heavy, naturalistic Australianness dominating local stages.

More importantly, the whole experience suggested a sustainable model for innovative, actor-based work. Cramphorn and the core members of the company applied to the Australian Council for the Arts under the name ‘Performance Syndicate’, the first of Cramphorn's four attempts to create ensemble companies which would provide financial and artistic stability for actors, writers and directors. Performance Syndicate is best remembered for The Tempest (1972), set on a flat stage, surrounded by the audience, with the cast sitting around the edges providing musical accompaniment. ‘Asian in music, in look … the performance astonished utterly’, wrote one reviewer:

Each gesture of finger, of foot, of body, was mannered…. Drums reverberated; flutes played; bells and finger cymbals clanged and tinkled; a dulcimer, guitar and harmonium lent plagency. The tempest broke, symbolized by thunder on the drums, and by lightning — banners of white cloth zigzagging through the air…. The island [was] marked out by a [chalked] magician's circle.¹²

In the course of preparing and touring The Tempest, the ensemble discovered ‘a new unifying interest in the development of musical skills … learning to play a new instrument and improvising together were seen as a parallel to the actor's skill’.¹³

At the same time, however, the ensemble-as-commune ideal was fraying: the lack of a secure rehearsal and performance venue, the pressures of touring, the lack of sustained funding, and drug use were taking their toll. A decision to accept a residency at St Martin's Theatre in Melbourne for six months in 1973 proved disastrous: the Syndicate found itself at loggerheads with a management fearful of losing its conservative subscribers, pressuring the company to deliver commercially viable productions and unwilling to provide the promised financial resources to sustain class work. By 1975 the experiment was over. By the late 1970s Cramphorn was moving increasingly towards academic circles, within which, he noted, ‘I seem to be a raffish experiment’ although ‘in practical circles I get branded as an academic’.¹⁴ Another attempt to establish an ensemble company — the Paris Theatre, with Jim Sharman — failed, and Cramphorn went to work as a freelance director for major subsidised companies.

In 1980 Cramphorn received a major grant to work with a group of actors for six months on Shakespeare. ‘A Shakespeare Company’ was Cramphorn's experiment with what he called an ‘anti-interpretational focus’ and an ‘unimposed directorial style’. Salaried for twenty-four weeks, nine actors were able to withdraw from the busy routine of normal demands made on them and to participate in an administrative and artistic ‘democracy’. In many ways the project was a critique of the director as auteur. A few years later, Cramphorn quoted Copeau to explain his approach:

Nothing is more frightening than a director who has ideas. The director's role is not to have ideas but to understand and communicate those of the author; not to force t...