Investigating a process

I was working on a hunch again. It came to me when I was reading the introduction to Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking. After a brief warning that the script, as printed, probably wasn't going to be the script, as performed, Ravenhill mentions an ‘ecstasy workshop’ that he feels he ought to attend. Right there, I guessed that something was different about the way Max Stafford-Clark directed his shows. Sure, he’s been associated with a raft of celebrated authors – Caryl Churchill, David Hare, Howard Brenton, and William Shakespeare. But the way Ravenhill puts it, something more is going on in the studio than learning lines.

Let me go back to the beginning. I’d been trying to work out what ‘devised theatre’ meant. I keep seeing it about the place – coming out of the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, hanging out with the kids from the Contemporary Performance Practice course. And it has a heavy linguistic friend circle too: words like ‘problematize’ and ‘performativity,’ the kind of language to make a Latin scholar run to the etymological dictionary. There were rumours that Artaud was involved, maybe some of the guys from the San Francisco Mime Troupe – the ones who’d helped Eldridge Cleaver escape the heat in the 1960s, plus of a couple of the international heavy-weight crowd: Lecoq, even Brecht.

Like that time I decided to define ‘visual theatre’ for the manipulate festival, I was on shaky ground. Any attempt to pin down ‘devised’ to one definition only threw up exceptions that proved the rule was wrong. Using Complicite as a model, I got something close to physical theatre, based around movement: the British school of the 1990s, Frantic Assembly, DV8 supported the choreographic cross-over, but that left out things like Forced Entertainment’s Bloody Mess. That had been the tipping point that got me into the critical business in the first place, and damn if it didn't use text and speech more than movement or fancy visuals.

But Ravenhill’s evocation of a workshop process struck a chord. I’d been in the studio a few times already, once with The Ultimate Dancer to try and create a synthesis of dance and criticism. Ravenhill was signalling that there was a process going on here, one that opened up communication between the performers and the writer – and the director. Like Ravenhill nipping along to the rehearsal room for a wee taste, I was going to check out this Max Stafford-Clark character.