Max Stafford Clark presentation

I had the good fortune, in my early 30s, to be sitting on the steps of the Royal Court with Bill Gaskill pondering where the future lay. I had just left the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh, and he had just left the Royal Court, and we decided to set up a workshop together. My experience had been of the wild, anarchic US theatres, where plays might be performed on table tops. He, on the other hand, brought political acuity and the experience of working in a proscenium theatre. His hallmark is economy, and I learnt from him a precision of stagecraft and imagery that I hadn't previously encountered. It was thanks to him and a production of David Hare's Fanshen, about the bringing of communism to a Chinese village, that our company Joint Stock became politicised.

Plays should be investigative, and Bill taught me not to be afraid of ignorance. When you are a young director you think you have to win every argument; when you are older and wiser you learn it is better to lose a few.

Max Stafford-Clark is founder and director of the Out-of-Joint Theatre company.

Taken from the Guardian Nov 2011

Joint Stock /Royal Court Theatre and Out of Joint

Max Stafford-Clark, DirectorFounded Joint Stock Theatre group in 1974 following his Artistic Directorship of The Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh. From 1979 to 1993 he was Artistic Director of The Royal Court Theatre. In 1993 he founded the touring company, Out of Joint.His work as a Director has overwhelmingly been with new writing, and he has commissioned and directed first productions by many of the country’s leading writers.

Playwright Sir David Hare was born in Bexhill, East Sussex, England on 5 June 1947, and was educated at Lancing College and Jesus College, Cambridge.

He co-founded Portable Theatre Company, acting, directing and writing plays. Slag was first produced in London in 1970 at the Hampstead Theatre Club. He was Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1970-1 and Resident Dramatist at the Nottingham Playhouse in 1973. He co-founded Joint Stock Theatre Group with David Aukin and Max Stafford-Clark in 1975, and held a US/UK Bicentennial Fellowship in 1977. He has been Associate Director of the National Theatre since 1984. He was knighted in 1998 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His plays include Knuckle (1974), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; Fanshen (1975), based on the book by William Hinton; Plenty (1978), a portrait of disillusionment in post-war Britain, first staged at the National Theatre in London; Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy (1985), an attack on the English press written with Howard Brenton; The Secret Rapture (1988); the trilogy Racing Demon (1990), Murmuring Judges (1991) and The Absence of War (1993), about three British institutions: the Anglican church, the legal system and the Labour party; Skylight (1995); Amy's View (1997); and The Judas Kiss (1998).

The Permanent Way (2003), the story of a political dream turned sour, explores the privatisation of British Rail, and opened at the Royal National Theatre in January 2004. His play Stuff Happens (2005), was premiered at the same theatre in 2005, and is about the invasion of Iraq.

Max Stafford Clark

Techniques

David Aukin served as the literary adviser at the Traverse Theatre (1970–73). From 1970 to 1974, he served as Chairman of the Oval House Arts Centre. Along with David Hare and Max Stafford-Clark, Aukin co-founded the Joint Stock Theatre Company in 1974. During this period he presented The Open Theatre and two seasons of Le Grand Magic Circus all at the Roundhouse Theatre and presented numerous fringe companies in the UK and abroad, including The Freehold, The People Show, Pip Simmons Theatre Group and the premiere of Pam Gems' first stage play at the Cockpit Theatre. From 1974 through 1975, Aukin was an administrator with Anvil Productions in Oxford. In 1975, Aukin became an administrator at the Hampstead Theatre.[3] Three years later he was appointed to the position of Artistic Director there, a position he held until 1984.The numerous premiers he produced there include Translations by Brien Friel, Abigail's Party, Goose-Pimples, and Ecstasy, all by Mike Leigh, The Hothouse written and directed by Harold Pinter and Dusa Fisg Stas and Vi by Pam Gems.[4] He was then appointed Artistic Director of the Haymarket Theatre, Leicester where he premiered Me and My Girl which went on to win many awards on the West End and Broadway. In 1986 he was appointed Executive Director of the National Theatre which he ran with Richard Eyre until 1990 when he was head hunted to be Head of Film at Channel 4. He subsequently has produced intermittently in the West End, including Dance of Death with Ian McKellen, and Onassis by Martin Sherman with Robert Lindsay. In 2002, Aukin produced the 2002 Broadway revival of The Elephant Man.[5]

The starting point was a three- or four-week workshop with the actors and the writer, in which the themes of the book were researched and explored by the whole group. But although we intruded dangerously into the writer’s creative process, Joint Stock’s success was in knowing when to stop. The four-week workshop was followed by a nine- or ten-week gap during which the writer wrote the play, free to draw on whatever aspect of the research they chose. Towards the end of this period the first draft would emerge, and the dialogue with the rest of the company would begin again. During the more conventional rehearsal period that followed, the play would often go through several drafts before emerging in its final form. It’s a hazardous and demanding way of working. Hazardous for the writers because they have to surrender a certain degree of autonomy and because their work is constantly open to question and examination. For the actors, it’s alarming because they commit to the workshop and endure the unpaid gap without ever knowing what part they will play, how large it will be and how rewarding. And for the director it is nerve-racking because there is no script; no map of the journey he is making. But it is also thrilling. The commitment of the whole group is powerful, and there is a heady excitement as the actors discover previously untapped researching and interviewing skills.”

31 March 2011

“Yesterday, Out of Joint was told it would have its Arts Council England (ACE) funding cut by 27.9%, which means we will have £138,218 less from 2012. Liz Forgan says there is a clear intellectual framework and rationale behind the cuts. I must say it is hard to see that from our perspective. We are commended for excellence, yet condemned to mediocrity by removing the structure that makes excellence possible.

“We are determined to survive, and not to substantially change the work we do. What makes Out of Joint’s work special is the ambition and scope of the plays we produce, by some of the country’s leading and most exciting writers, and the resources we have been able to focus on creating them.

“We pay our writers fairly (we guarantee a minimum of £20,000 for a produced play). We pay our actors slightly over the equity minimum, which enables us to attract established actors to tour with us, to deepen and dignify the work.

“If the Arts Council is genuinely committed to touring it needs to support tours of this scale and ambition. Our own cut, combined with cuts to the theatres to which we tour (such as the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, and Exeter’s Northcott Theatre), will restrict the reach of our work.

“This has provoked a crisis for Out of Joint, but it’s also a crucial point for the Arts Council itself. Does it really wish to destroy one of the few companies which can create important new plays that find a place in the national – and international – repertoire, and which performs that work at the same high quality in venues ranging from major London theatres to playhouses and community centres throughout the UK?”

Max Stafford-Clark, Director, Out of Joint

Joint Stock Theatre

cloud nine

The Royal Court

Founded in 1974 by Max Stafford Clark, David Hare, David Aukin and William Gaskill.

As far as I am concerned, the Artistic Director of the Royal Court is the leader of the Western World

— MAX STAFFORD-CLARK

Artistic director from 1979-1992

Max Stafford-Clark became Artistic Director in 1979 and steered the Royal Court through the turbulent 1980s. In a period of funding cuts and rising costs, he nurtured a new group of emerging playwrights such as Andrea Dunbar, Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Daniels and Jim Cartwright and presented seminal productions including Victory by Howard Barker, Insignificance by Terry Johnson, Our Country Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker and Rat in the Skull by Ron Hutchinson.

The heart of George Devine’s vision was to bring the nation to the stage and to produce plays that examined the challenges and possibilities of the time. One play that realised this vision was Top Girls by Caryl Churchill, which opened in 1982 and captured the spirit of the age. Throughout the 1980s, the Royal Court swam against the tide of lavish West End musicals and comfortable comedies, staging writers who questioned and challenged.

Joint Stock working methods and ideals

Fanshen means Literally "to turn over"

and in revolutionary China it meant the process of change from feudalism to communism, a peasant person who was effectively "politicised" was said to have "fanshened"

William was Artistic Director of the Royal Court 1965-1972. He was also Associate Director of the National Theatre at the Old Vic, 1963 and Founder-Director of Joint Stock Theatre Company, 1974, along with Max Stafford-Clark.

The Gorky Brigade by Nicholas Wright; Yesterday’s News by Jeremy Seabrook (co-directed with Max Stafford-Clark); The Sea, Lear, Saved and Early Morning by Edward Bond; Big Wolf by Harald Mueller (co-directed with Sam Brighton); Man is Man by Bertolt Brecht; Cheek by Howard Barker; Beckett/3: Come and Go and Play by Samuel Beckett; The Double Dealer by William Congreve; Fill the Stage with Happy Hours by Charles Wood; Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov; Macbeth by William Shakespeare; Their Very Own and Golden City by Arnold Wesker; The Performing Giant by Keith Johnstone (co-directed with Keith Johnstone); A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton; That’s Us by Henry Chapman; The Happy Haven by John Arden; One Way Pendulum, The Hole and A Resounding Tinkle by N.F. Simpson (also Criterion); Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp by Keith Johnstone and William Gaskill (co-directed with Keith Johnstone); Brixham Regatta by Keith Johnstone; Sugar in the Morning by Donald Howarth; Epitaph for George Dillon by John Osborne and Anthony Creighton.

Carver, an adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories (Arcola); Fanshen by David Hare, The Speakers, based on the novel by Heathcote Williams (both co-directed with Max Stafford-Clark) and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Stephen Lowe (all Joint Stock); Mother Courage by Bertolt Brecht, Philoctetes by Sophocles and The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar (all National); Cymbeline by William Shakespeare and The Caucasian Chalk Circle by Bertolt Brecht (both RSC).

"We used workshops and went to Plymouth for a month and actually painted and decorated as preparation for the finished play."

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists 1977

"The basic image of the play is work. The play wouldn't make any sense except within the context of work"

" Joint Stock provided an opportunity to work in a way that other theatre can't offer- to control their own working conditions."

"We are not a group that has set out to indoctrinate" William Gaskill 1979

Serious money

One of the things that makes the play powerful is that the cast are what Joan Littlewood wanted actors to be rather than what Lee Strasberg wanted actors to be. There's a sense in which any one of the nine actors knows as much about the railway system as John Prescott does. They have researched it as deeply. Joan Littlewood's idea was that actors should not look inside but outside themselves. The American tradition is that you search inside yourself for the emotion. I don't think at any point actors in this play said “Oh, this is very like when my auntie died.” Much more they were trying to find out from the people they were working with what it was they had experienced, in order that they could convey that to the audience. I find that approach to acting incredibly moving, something that is an ideal of what an actor should be. In Eastern Europe, people used to talk about actors and intellectuals as a group, and didn't think that was silly. Actors and intellectuals belonged together. What I love about what Max is doing is that he's restoring that idea and giving it its weight.

Out of Joint Theatre company

Productions/books 1993-present

David Hare

Discussing

The Permanent

way

B) Status games

Caryl Churchill

In "Light shining in Buckinghamshire" by Caryl Churchill Although this was a play already written, in rehearsals devising was used to problem solve.

"Using tarot cards Max gave out tarot cards to each partcipant saying that the number on the card would govern whether we were to support or oppose the preacher".

They became politicised by the working methods of the rehearsals for the play. It was based on applying the same dialectical methods :

A)making group decisions on everything.

B) working on every scene of the play from a political point of view

When you say" What is the political point of the scene to an actor, he then tries to demonstrate it. And you start to get Epic acting"Gaskill

C) different exercises: Once a week , a meeting to discuss what the play meant and what was the point of the book" David Hare

D)Politicised acting/lighting/design.

"I discovered there is a politics in the way you place people on the stage, in the way actors act, in the way you design your plays" Gaskill had watched the Berliner Ensemble in Berlin in 1956 and been greatly influenced by them."

Actor Robert Hamilton states " It's quite simply that Joint Stock directors assume you have a mind and demand that you use it."

Out of £325m distributed by ACE, £168m goes to London. Put simply, the founding vision of JM Keynes for the Arts Council "to decentralise and disperse the dramatic and musical and artistic life of this country" has not materialised.

Indeed, since the 1980s the gap has widened rather than closed. As the House of Commons culture, media and sport select committee inquiry into the funding of the arts and heritage recently observed: "After 30 years of steadily increasing public and lottery funding and rhetoric of regional development, the situation is actually worse." In 1980/81 Arts Council expenditure in London was £3.37 per head of population against £0.66 per head of population in the rest of England, or 19.6% of London levels. For 2011/12 the estimated figures are £21.92 per head of population against £3.44 for the rest of England, which represents just 15.7% of London levels. In other words: the gap has actually widened, not shrunk.

Subsequent working methods adapted in Joint Stock Theatre Company

A)The beginning of Verbatim Theatre

Out of Joint Theatre company explores "hidden worlds" in an implicit political debate

In the production 'Yesterday's news' to prepare for a production in 1976 on the recruitment of british mercenaries for Angola and the effect it had on people at home.

Two actors went to interview mercenaries involved and then played back the recordings to the rest of the group. from hundreds of pages of recorded conversation the company through the process of self criticism built up characters " letting the words speak for themselves"

Theatre is “veering towards entertainment rather than to provocative debate. Plays that take on public issues may no longer carry the public with them. But as a political solution to the Left’s problems seems increasingly remote, so the voice of theatre becomes more important. Its value in illuminating different corners of society and in explaining ourselves to ourselves has never been more needed.”

Max 1989