Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

The Royal Court’s International Department: Transformative Processes, Impacts & Legacies

An interim report funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (Translating Cultures) August 2012

Elaine Aston and Mark O’Thomas

This report is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Project, 'Creating Cultural Exchange and Change', conceived in response to the 'Translating Cultures' developmental call and focused on the work of the International Department of the , England’s premier venue for new playwriting. Our Project aim was to enquire after and report on the process that underpins the Court’s commitment to supporting and developing playwriting internationally, looking to the challenges and risks this entails as well as the transformative possibilities, impacts and legacies that might arise for those involved in this method of cultural and creative exchange. Our findings draw on international meetings held in Brazil, Chile and Morocco (June-July 20012), and on a ‘Translating Cultures’ seminar hosted at the Royal Court (June 2012)

Report Contents

1.The Royal Court International Department in Context 2. Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council 3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries 4. The Role of the Translator 5. Guiding Principles & the Creative Process 6. The Challenge of Form 7. Impact on British Writers, Critics and Audiences 8. International Legacies

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Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

1.The Royal Court International Department in Context To contextualise: The Royal Court established its International Department in 1996, appointing Elyse Dodgson as Director. However, those involved in the theatre date its international vision back to 1956: to the arrival of the English Stage Company into the Sloane Square premises () that the Court continues to occupy today. Back in the mid-1950’s, Artistic Director George Devine’s mission was for a subsidised theatre as an alternative to the commercial mainstream, one primarily committed to developing new drama. His vision was both national and international: of wanting to nurture and develop a new generation of English dramatists and also to pursue a line of European work. In other words, for Devine international was rather narrowly conceived as Western , with Beckett and Brecht as seminal attractions and major influences. By the late eighties, the moment when the Royal Court began running the first of its international workshops, initially as an income generator for the theatre, its international horizon extended beyond Europe, although even so writers came mainly from the English-speaking continents of Australia and North America. As Dodgson, explains, international ‘meant the United States because at that time we were not more adventurous than that’.1 It was only with the appointment of Stephen Daldry as the new Artistic Director in the early nineties that the full potential of operating in the international realm was realised and Dodgson was given the green light to develop the work and go global. Daldry was determined on shifting international work to ‘the heart of the theatre’. This he claims is ‘because there is an energy there that generates new work around the world’.2 Staging an increasing number of international works he sought to capitalise on that ‘energy’ by formally establishing the theatre’s International Department’ in 1996, positing in retrospect ‘the international policy [as] the greatest single achievement of the Royal Court [from the mid- 1990s to the mid-2000s], as much as getting all the young playwrights to write plays’.3 Ian Rickson, Daldry’s successor in 1998, and , who followed Rickson in 2007, both kept faith with the ‘international policy’ that Daldry had reinvigorated and revitalised. For Rickson, the historical resonances and legacies of Devine’s ‘mission’ were those he deemed important to a contemporary vision of a theatre invested in cultural values that ‘embrace risk and are international’.4 And Cooke, who, prior to his directorship at the Court had worked in collaboration with Dodgson, began his term of office with the view that he would make ‘more airspace for [international] work to land on [the Court’s] stage’.5 These three successive directorial regimes at the Court have, albeit under different theatre conditions (such as changing personnel, refurbishment programmes, or funding changes), consolidated and more thoroughly realised the aspiration to be a truly international theatre. At the same time this move on the part of the theatre to internationalise needs to be set against the larger picture of globalization. As Patrick Lonergan argues in his lucid and insightful account of Theatre and Globalization, ‘[i]t is generally agreed ... that the current period of economic globalization began with the collapse of communism in Europe in the early 1990s’.6 Lonergan wrestles critically with the definitions or more precisely lack of a clear definition of globalization and with its principle discourses of global capitalism, social criticism, the nation state, global culture and ecology.7 Resisting the impulse to dismiss globalization in reductive terms as quite simply a ‘bad thing’, instead he urges critical (in both senses) considerations of how ‘dramatists producers, audiences and performers can choose to act’ within this phenomenon seen as ‘a process to which we contribute’.8 How the Court ‘choose[s] to act’ as it goes global is a crucial matter: how its cultural capital as England’s major new writing venue, as the writers’ theatre of a British theatrical paradigm that privileges the playwright over the director, writing over performance, becomes 3

Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

a brand export. As Lonergan observes, global branding ‘involves a relocation of power from a physical to a conceptual space, or a deterritorialization of power’.9 In the Court’s case, its new-writing ‘brand’ is no longer limited to its physical premises in Sloane Square, but goes global through its international theatre networking.10 A major risk here, however, is what we might term a reterritorialization of power, a symbolic claiming of new writing territories in the theatre’s own imperialist image, as it were. In order to minimalise this kind of risk, much depends on approach and process, which in turn have a bearing on the transformative impact and legacies for theatre cultures, locally and globally.

2.Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council At the outset of our AHRC project, we sought to enhance our understanding of what the Royal Court does when it wants to work in another country, with artists of that country, to develop their work further. How are partners and projects identified? While we gained insights into how various links have been established through informal and formal networks over extended periods of time, overall, it became clear to us that the British Council has a key role to play in terms of the Royal Court’s ability to form meaningful partnerships with theatre practitioners in new territories. The theatre’s relationship with the British Council, along with support from the Genesis Foundation,11 emerged as central to the development (and funding) of the theatre’s international initiatives. On reflection, this is not surprising given how the Court’s international ‘mission’ readily dovetails with that of the Council’s commitment ‘to build mutually beneficial relationships between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s creative ideas and achievements’.12 In helping foster these relations the British Council intends to promote the ‘engagement and trust between people of different cultures through the exchange of knowledge and ideas’.13 Mirroring the idea of cultural understanding arrived at through ‘the exchange of knowledge and ideas’ is the Court’s process and practice of nurturing, developing and exchanging cultures of playwriting.

3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries Working often with the support of the British Council, Dodgson is positioned to identify potential partner countries and projects. Alongside of the international sourcing of projects, however, the Court also hosts annual, four-week ‘International Residencies’ at the theatre’s Sloane Square, London base. The residential programme for international playwrights dates back to the summer of 1993, when the Court hosted its first truly international residency with writers and directors coming from twelve different countries. By 2003, the scope of the residency became restricted to just writers and while its form has continued to evolve over the past fifteen years, it remains a kind of summer training camp for new writers from around the world to explore their own work in translation with and in response to a range of British theatre practitioners. The residences take the form of a developmental, workshopping process. The idea of workshopping as a means to both initiating and developing plays for the stage has now become the standard practice of new-writing theatres across the UK. While established playwrights tend to work via commission and are generally entrusted to deliver a play in a performable condition subject to minor rewrites, first-time or novice writers are unlikely to see a play produced unless it has undergone a development process in conjunction with a new writing venue such as The Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre, or indeed The Royal Court Theatre itself. The emergence of this model is one that has mirrored the notion of ‘development’ within the screenwriting realm, too, and clearly situates the writing process within an industry 4

Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

that seeks to benefit from an early investment in talent that might grow into something of real aesthetic and financial value.

4. The Role of the Translator Unlike other major theatres such the National Theatre in London, or The Traverse, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Court does not commission English versions of a writer’s play. Instead, writers work in their own language and translators work closely with them on drafts. In sum, the Court’s policy and practice aims to be as inclusive as possible (Dodgson has famously declared ‘we don’t go shopping, we cook’),14 while its approach to translation is one that fosters close, dialogic exchanges between writers and translators. The role of the translator in this process was seminal to the ‘Translating Cultures’ AHRC seminar event hosted at the Royal Court Theatre in June 2012. This event attracted an audience of translators from a range of different languages, curious to discover more about the Royal Court’s work in drama translation and its specific methodology and approach to the translating of cultures for the stage. As an event it revealed how HEIs can successfully bridge a gap between a cultural institution (the theatre) and translation practice (the translators), while our project partner the Royal Court Theatre highlighted the benefit of this event for its own external engagement with translators and entering into a discourse into translation practice which is all too often an assumed and unproblematcial given. The event thus enabled the Court to develop new links to theatre translators in ways that would otherwise have been impossible. The brokering of these new relationships demonstrates the critical role universities can have in providing a forum for collaborations which may endure way beyond the scope of the project itself.

5. Guiding Principles & the Creative Process Dodgson adopts Court Director Dominic Cooke’s two primary questions for new writing – ‘Who are we now?’ and ‘What is a play?’ – as guiding principles for the international work.15 She elaborates ‘[w]e look for work that is original, hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary, but we never talk about its form - that's up to the individual writers. We positively discourage history plays or adaptations or writers who mimic British work’.16 ‘Hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary’ is a mantra that readily characterises the kind of new playwriting the Court endorses, irrespective of whether it belongs to a national or international repertoire. To look back over the theatre’s new playwriting history – and we use ‘look back’ deliberately here to gesture to the historical moment of Osborne’s ‘look back in anger’ in 1956 – is to see the theatre’s long-standing commitment to plays addressing socio- political questions of who we are, if not plays that allow for the possibility of imagining who we are in more socially progressive ways and contemporary worlds. And extending the invitation to be ‘hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary’ to international writers, appears similarly to ask for drama that treats and reflects the contemporary social realities of other nations. More specifically, how this is addressed in the international workshops is by inviting the international participants to work with British playwrights and to begin by thinking about what issues are directly affecting them; what as writers do they feel it is important to address. Where Dodgson often starts with an exercise that invites writers to think of the ‘big issues’, a follow through exercise might be to relate those big issues to personal stories, thereby writing towards the ‘particular’ rather than the ‘universal abstract’. British playwrights Mike Bartlett and April de Angelis, key speakers at the ‘Translating Cultures’ seminar and regular contributors to the international workshops, described their 5

Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

role as that of facilitator: of assisting an international writer to ‘get their story out’ and helping them to craft it. Inevitably, no one workshop will ever be the same, Bartlett observed, but what links them is the deceptively simple invitation to write a play. Summing up the workshop process, Bartlett drew attention to the emphasis placed on the value of the writer (noting that this is especially significant in theatre cultures and geographies where the playwright and new writing is virtually non-existent or devalued); to the space for opening up conversations with the writers; for offering craft-based techniques; for understanding the writer’s vision of what theatre could be, what they would like it to be or to do (rather than the writers having a vision imposed on their work). As a process it can and does throw up particular challenges. Bartlett recalled his first- time international experience of facilitating a workshop in Palestine where the invitation to draw on immediate, personal experience was far too painful as a writing task. Equally, at the outset of a project, there can be a suspicion on the part of the writers that they might be required to write for a global, international gaze that ‘others’: one that represents the ‘strange other’ in clichéd, stereotypical ways. In the Court’s major project in the involving seven countries, for example, there was an initial anxiety expressed by the playwrights that they might be expected to ‘write about terrorism’.17

6. The Challenge of Form The matter of form arguably represents more of a challenge than content, despite the Court’s desire to be open to the question of ‘what is a play’. This is not least because of the way in which the theatre’s evident interest in experimental and radically innovative styles of work, collides with the long shadow of social-realism cast by Osborne and successive generations of ‘angries’. That shadow has had the effect of fostering an idea of the Royal Court play and the likes of or Martin Crimp notwithstanding, stylistically experimental works have, as eighties Director Max Stafford-Clark explains, been subsumed by the way the theatre has ‘tended towards naturalism’.18 And this can occasion international criticism of the theatre. For example, Dodgson, in her contributions to the AHRC seminar, explained how setting up a project in met with initial resistance from participants committed to the idea of a postdramatic culture that rightly or wrongly they perceived the Court as antithetical to.

7. Impact on British Writers, Critics and Audiences Among those British playwrights involved in the Royal Court international workshops and play development there appears to be a widely held consensus that this also affords them the ‘privilege’, as de Angelis put it, of getting to know and learning about another country’s culture, politics and history from the perspectives of the writers involved. As Bartlett also elaborated, as a British writer/workshop facilitator, he felt encouraged to look back at his own country and to sharpen his own thoughts about the idea of what theatre, a play, is or could be. Hence, this signals the Court’s creative process as not a one-way but potentially a two- way process of cultural exchange. At this interim stage, we are uncovering plenty of evidence that attests to how many dramatists, including, for example, Michael Wynne, Mike Bartlett, April de Angelis, Mark Ravenhill and David Greig, find their own writing opened up through their participation in the international workshops. Ravenhill, for instance, was co- commissioned by both the Royal Court and the Schaubühne theatre in to write his 2009 post-fall-of-the-Berlin-wall play Over There, while David Greig acknowledges his play Damascus as ‘an unexpected by product of the artistic exchange [he had] been privileged to 6

Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

have with young theatre makers in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Palestine since 2000’.19 In terms of the reception of the Court’s international work in the UK and its potential impact, we also note that audiences’ and the critics’ appetite for international plays has grown in recent years. Back in 1997 when the Court’s International Season was inaugurated, it was hard to find an audience at all, whereas today the seasons sell-out. Theatre critics now regularly comment on and often commend the Court’s international repertoire for the opportunities this affords audiences to be informed about parts of the world they know little about, or to challenge cultural assumptions or preconceptions. A prime example to amplify this point is the Court’s 2008 season of plays from the Arab world, titled ‘I Come From There’. ‘Plays from the Arab world’ arguably represent an unfamiliar ‘there’ to the ‘here’ of Royal Court theatre audiences; from the perspective of an English ‘here’, the ‘Arab world’ often is (mis)perceived as a homogenous ‘other’. Hence, what was particularly important in this instance was the opportunity for the playwrights coming from very different parts of the Arab world to give dramatic expression to their quite different geographies of social and cultural experience. Ultimately if, on the one hand, reception of the Royal Court’s international work on the part of critics and audiences on occasion evidences a somewhat limiting horizon of expectation that a play from a particular country should in some way be about that country, on the other, aiming to be receptive to what writers want to offer as their ‘urgent’, ‘contemporary’ landscapes is seminal to getting to know, rather than presuming to know (in stereotypical ways) what it means to ‘come from there’.

8. International Legacies As a two-way process, then, the Court’s international work has the capacity to, on the one hand, impact on the work of British writers and, on the other, to help establish or enhance new-writing cultures in other countries (although we should be wary of assuming that any country’s playwriting or theatre practice has remained dormant or uninfluenced by practices from other countries prior to the Court’s arrival). To fully understand the legacies of this work outside of the UK, requires a case by case study. However, what the various meetings held in Chile, Brazil and Morocco as part of this AHRC project served to reveal were the potential benefits for the host/partner country of the Court’s process of creative and cultural exchange. For national theatre economies this can help to create: • The opportunity to develop and to promote the role of the playwright. The importance of this point to theatre cultures where the writer is undervalued (e.g. that give primacy to the director) cannot be understated. • The possibility of generating new theatres and audiences: establishing receptivity towards a new playwriting culture, encouraging a creative (drama-based) economy, one that might in turn be internationally recognised (and exported). For the participating writers this can facilitate: • An enhanced dramatic skills base; the opportunity to have dedicated time and space to develop a full-length work; writing towards social awareness and change. • The opportunity to benefit from working as part of a mutually supportive group, rather than as a lone practitioner.

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Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

• The possibility of gaining international recognition beneficial to a writing career (nationally and/or internationally).

In order to realise these benefits there are challenges, some of which are touched on earlier in this report, but finally to expand and to summarise these are: • Funding issues/limitations (for the British Council and other funding agencies) and the particular challenge of securing funding for new playwriting in theatre cultures where this is an emergent (or undervalued) field of work. • The risks (financial, social, cultural and political) of playwriting that probes contemporary landscapes and issues. • The practicalities, processes and practices of translation as a mode of creative-cultural exchange. • The assumptions made about the neutrality of translation and its role in the development of new writing for the stage • The sustainability of new playwriting groups and individual writers, beyond the time- line of a particular project.

Notes

1 Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (London: Oberon Books, 2007), p. 265. 2 Stephen Daldry, interview, in Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte and Pilar Zozaya, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.3-14, p.7. 3 Ibid. 4 Ian Rickson, interview in Aragay et.al, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s, pp.15-26, p.16. 5 Dominic Cooke, ‘I Like Dissent’, Interview with Paul Taylor, Independent, 2 November 2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/dominic-cooke-i-like-dissent- 422614.html. 6 Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.22. 7 Ibid, p.18. 8 Ibid, p.215. 9 Ibid, p.21, italics in original. 10 This is in line with Lonergan’s examples of the manufacturer Nike, the Irish state and the National Theatre of Scotland, three very different kinds of ‘institutions’ that he examines to reveal the effects of globalization and the lessening of power attributed to physical space in favour of a global concept or brand (ibid, pp.20-1). 11 http://www.genesisfoundation.org.uk/ . 12 Working for the British Council, 2003, http://www.britishcouncil.org/pakistan- workingforbc.pdf. 13 British Council - About Us - How We Run - Our Vision, Purpose and Values, 2010, http://www.britishcouncil.org/new/about-us/who-we-are/vision-purpose-and-values/. 14 Elyse Dodgson, quoted in Aleks Sierz, 'The World Stage', New Statesman, 2nd February 2004, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/147195 .

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Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012

15 ‘Interview with Elyse Dodgson’, Theatre Voice, recorded, 25 March 2011, http://www.theatrevoice.com/2660/interview-with-elyse-dodgson-of-the-royal-court/ . 16 Quoted in Aleks Sierz, 'The World Stage', 2nd February 2004. 17 Observation made by Dodgson, Interview, Theatre Voice, recorded, 25 March 2011. 18 Max Stafford-Clark, Interview, in Aragay et.al, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s, pp.27-40, p.28. 19 Greig quoted, ‘Places of the mind’, Nehad Selaiha, Al-Ahram, 9-15 April 2009, no.942, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/942/cu2.htm.

Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK. Her monographs include Caryl Churchill (1997/ 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). She is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000, with Janelle Reinelt); Feminist Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (2006, with Geraldine Harris), Staging International Feminisms (2007, with Sue-Ellen Case), and The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill (2009, with Elin Diamond). She currently serves as Senior Editor of Theatre Research International. Contact Email: [email protected]

Mark O’Thomas is Head of the Lincoln School of Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln UK, and has worked at the Royal Court Theatre as a translator and dramaturg for the past eight years. He recently translated a play for the ’s Connections season 2012 and continues to work at the interface between playwriting and translation, dramaturgy and ethics. He has published a range of articles around the issue of adaptation for the stage and is currently working on a book about the Royal Court’s international work with Professor Elaine Aston. Contact Email: [email protected]

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