Text-Based’/‘Non-Text-Based’ Divide in Contemporary English Theatre
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Are We On The Same Page? A Critical Analysis of the ‘Text-Based’/‘Non-Text-Based’ Divide in Contemporary English Theatre Catherine Love Submitted for the degree of PhD Royal Holloway, University of London March 2018 1 Declaration of Authorship I Catherine Love hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 21 March 2018 2 Acknowledgements The seeds of this project were first sown while I was seeing, talking and writing about theatre as a blogger and critic. I therefore want to open with thanks to the editors and publications that supported my writing and the theatre-makers and fellow writers who constantly prompted me to think better and more deeply about many of the issues addressed in this thesis. As a supervisor, Dan Rebellato has regularly stretched my mind and soothed my anxieties. Huge thanks for his immediate belief in this project, his support and cheerleading throughout the research process, and his ever rigorous and incisive notes. I am also grateful to my two advisers, Elaine McGirr and David Overend, who provided fresh and insightful eyes on various drafts. I am thankful, too, for the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded this research. There are many academic colleagues who, both directly and indirectly, have inspired and supported the work of the following pages. Particular thanks to staff and fellow PhD students in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, to my teaching colleagues and students at the University of York and the University of Manchester, and to all the scholars who have been kind enough to 3 listen to, encourage and gently interrogate my work at conferences over the last four years. I am forever grateful to all the friends and family members who have indulged my passionate waffling on the subject of this thesis and supported me throughout the stresses and joys of the PhD process. I want to give special thanks to my parents, who have been unfailingly supportive of my every mad scheme and ambition (even – and especially – the ones they have struggled to understand). I doubt I would be writing these words were it not for their love, belief and encouragement. Finally, and most sentimentally, I have to somehow find the words to thank my partner, Mark Smith. It is thanks to this project that we met, and it is largely thanks to Mark that I have reached the end of this process in a state of relative calm and sanity. Massive thanks for his love, his support, his eagle-eyed proofreading and his unerring faith in me. 4 Abstract In recent years, debates about new work in the English theatre sector have often centred on a perceived divide between so-called ‘text-based’ and ‘non-text-based’ work. This thesis offers a fresh perspective on this debate, arguing that this division rests on a misrepresentation of the relationship between text and performance embodied in, and perpetuated by, (a) the structures of Arts Council funding, (b) higher education and (c) theatre criticism. As such, I argue that the division between ‘text-based’ and ‘non-text-based’ work is not a straightforward reflection of divergent theatre-making practices; rather, it has been shaped by these theoretical and institutional contexts. Chapter One makes an original intervention in theoretical discussions about text and performance, showing that there remains something conceptually unresolved about the ontology of the playtext. I argue against any hierarchy of text and performance, proposing that each is supplemental to the other, in a Derridean sense, thus endlessly deferring authority. I also reposition the notion of artistic intentions, which I suggest are indeterminate, multiple and embedded in creative processes. With this theoretical framework in place, Chapter Two draws on extensive research in the Arts Council archive to argue that an 5 effort to support new playwriting, paired with an erratic approach to the funding of alternative theatre, created a division between different kinds of new work. In Chapter Three, I analyse how an opposition between text and performance has frequently been used to define Drama as a discipline in higher education, while Chapter Four identifies conventions in mainstream theatre criticism that have perpetuated a hierarchical understanding of plays and performances. The thesis concludes by examining a series of brief case studies, demonstrating both the diversity of approaches to text in contemporary English theatre-making and the restrictive implications of the ‘text-based’/‘non-text-based’ divide for the ways in which new work is funded, taught and discussed. 6 Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................... 3 Abstract ............................................................................................. 5 Contents ............................................................................................ 7 Introduction ....................................................................................... 9 Situating English theatre ............................................................... 17 Theoretical divides ........................................................................ 34 Defining the terms ......................................................................... 45 How did we get here? ................................................................... 54 Chapter One - Rethinking Texts and Performances ................... 67 Intention ........................................................................................ 70 The absent work ........................................................................... 86 Context ......................................................................................... 96 Open and closed texts ................................................................ 105 Chapter Two - The Arts Council: Money, Policy and Priorities 117 Response or initiation? ............................................................... 126 A victim of its own success ......................................................... 137 ‘Text-based’ vs ‘non-text-based’ ................................................. 153 New theatre in the new millennium ............................................. 164 Chapter Three - Drama/Theatre/Performance in the Academy 175 Drama as a discipline ................................................................. 179 Performance Studies and the ‘broad spectrum’ .......................... 191 7 Theory and practice .................................................................... 202 Training and craft ........................................................................ 212 Chapter Four - Critical Reception ............................................... 230 The discourse of criticism ........................................................... 234 The case of Three Kingdoms ...................................................... 245 The play’s the thing ..................................................................... 256 Criticisms of devising .................................................................. 266 Bloggers vs critics ....................................................................... 276 Chapter Five - From Theory to Practice ..................................... 287 The theatre ecology today .......................................................... 288 Tim Crouch ................................................................................. 298 Action Hero ................................................................................. 310 Open Court at the Royal Court ................................................... 325 Conclusion .................................................................................... 343 Bibliography .................................................................................. 356 Appendix A - Arts Council funding snapshots .......................... 391 Appendix B - Theatre criticism sample ...................................... 415 Appendix C - Selected openings of new work in 2017.............. 418 8 Introduction The English theatre sector of recent years has frequently been framed as an artistic and ideological battlefield. On one side – depending on the preferred terminology – is ‘new writing’ or ‘text- based theatre’; pitted against it is ‘new work’, ‘devised theatre’ or ‘non-text-based theatre’. Throughout the twenty-first century, this oppositional vocabulary has permeated opinion articles, theatre reviews, conferences, panel discussions, and academic books and articles.1 Concurrently, and contrastingly, theatre practice itself has increasingly confounded simple divisions on the basis of text. The proliferation of new forms – interactive, immersive, site-specific, one- to-one, among others – renders a two-pronged understanding of English theatre insufficient, while the sustained drive towards collaborations of various kinds continues to blur the already porous boundaries between practices of writing and devising. As Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling assert, ‘any simple binary opposition of devising to script work is not supported by the briefest survey of the actual practice of companies who choose to devise’ (6). In spite of this, though, the perceived distinction between ‘text-based’ and ‘non- text-based’ work has continued to divide theatre practice and its 1 Examples include Alex Chisholm’s article ‘The End of “New Writing”?’,