Taking Stock –The Theatre Of Max Stafford-Clark – Philip Roberts and Max Stafford-Clark (Nick Hern Books) £14.99
The recent death of former Edinburgh Royal Lyceum Theatre director Clive Perry, alongside The Citizens Theatre’s revival of Roddy McMillan’s 1973 play, The Bevellers, highlighted how appallingly Scotland’s theatrical history has been archived. Major plays have simply been lost, while pivotal figures have been airbrushed from the annals. While such deficiencies are barely addressed in both these vital documents concerning two such major operators, they are nevertheless key documents of how contemporary theatre has developed over the last half-century in a hotbed of political and social change reflected, not just in its artistic concerns, but in the very modus operandi of directors Max Stafford-Clark and Bill Bryden.
Cutting his teeth at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in the late 1960s led Stafford-Clark directly to the collective working practises of Joint Stock in the early 1970s. The frustrating mechanics of existing within the status quo while remaining ideologically opposed to it marked Stafford-Clark’s time at The Royal Court throughout the 1980s. The seeming paradox of retaining a singular vision in fractured times, on the other hand, defined Out Of Joint as the flipside to Joint Stock in the 1990s in a still exploratory manner that continues today.
Greenock-born Bryden also spent time at The Royal Court before being poached by Perry to become an associate director at The Lyceum, though seems to have been in a different artistic faction. It was at The National Theatre on London’s South Bank, however, where Bryden would eke out the rough-cast spectacle we now know as promenade theatre, with a bullish ensemble that ruled the roost at the NT’s most flexible space.
Without Stafford-Clark, the current vogue for politically-inclined verbatim theatre would never have shifted onto the main stage. Without Bryden, who took his aesthetics to Govan shipyards for The Ship, it’s unlikely that a triumph such as The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch could have happened. With much of playwright Gregory Burke’s material taken from real-life transcripts, Stafford-Clark’s laborious methodology too is clearly an unconscious influence.
Stafford-Clark’s book is a mixture of diary entries, reflection and interviews, along with case studies of three defining productions from each era, from David Hare’s Fanshen at Joint Stock, to Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money at The Court, and Mark Ravenhill’s neglected Some Explicit Polaroids with Out Of Joint (The Traverse days are relegated to a brief prologue). Dewhurst and Shepherd, as writer and actor respectively, were key collaborators of Bryden, as well as chief plotters and drinking buddies en route from early experiments to the mammoth staging of The Mysteries (again, outlines of Lyceum days are frustratingly brief).
Both volumes are a mix of professional candour and myth. As war babies born just over a year apart, the hunger to create was often a volatile affair for both men, and both books paint vivid pictures of seemingly crazy times. There’s failure, burn-out, and, in The Cottesloe’s case, a lot of booze besides, and if anything, you want to understand more about the struggles it took to arrive at brilliance.
Stafford-Clark and Roberts’ is the better book, simply because it’s told from the horses mouth. There are far too many moments where Dewhurst and Shepard are simply off doing other things, so a through line of Bryden’s experience is never quite achieved. One is keen too, to hear Bryden’s own thoughts, both in the moment of a production, and with the wisdom of hindsight, as Stafford-Clark and Roberts so successfully frame things.
Reading the books back to back, one becomes conscious that, while Stafford-Clark and Out Of Joint are still at the centre of British theatrical life (despite Stafford-Clark’s recent stoke), Bryden is a less consistent figure who’s never quite managed to move on from his youthful triumphs. Part of this is down to Stafford-Clark’s steely tenacity, whereby he observed previous outgoing artistic directors of institutions sucked into a world of freelancing on workaday touring theatre, whereby reputation alone could never hope to recapture former glories.
It is for this reason that Out Of Joint was founded and, moving as it does with the times, it is why it still exists. Bryden’s Cottesloe Company, on the other hand, was a brilliant but brief adventure stymied by circumstance. Both books, however, remain vital reading, both for today’s theatrical practitioners in search of batons to pick up, and anyone fascinated by the now seemingly tamed rough and tumble of the recent artistic past.
The Herald, June 2007
ends
Cutting his teeth at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre in the late 1960s led Stafford-Clark directly to the collective working practises of Joint Stock in the early 1970s. The frustrating mechanics of existing within the status quo while remaining ideologically opposed to it marked Stafford-Clark’s time at The Royal Court throughout the 1980s. The seeming paradox of retaining a singular vision in fractured times, on the other hand, defined Out Of Joint as the flipside to Joint Stock in the 1990s in a still exploratory manner that continues today.
Greenock-born Bryden also spent time at The Royal Court before being poached by Perry to become an associate director at The Lyceum, though seems to have been in a different artistic faction. It was at The National Theatre on London’s South Bank, however, where Bryden would eke out the rough-cast spectacle we now know as promenade theatre, with a bullish ensemble that ruled the roost at the NT’s most flexible space.
Without Stafford-Clark, the current vogue for politically-inclined verbatim theatre would never have shifted onto the main stage. Without Bryden, who took his aesthetics to Govan shipyards for The Ship, it’s unlikely that a triumph such as The National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Black Watch could have happened. With much of playwright Gregory Burke’s material taken from real-life transcripts, Stafford-Clark’s laborious methodology too is clearly an unconscious influence.
Stafford-Clark’s book is a mixture of diary entries, reflection and interviews, along with case studies of three defining productions from each era, from David Hare’s Fanshen at Joint Stock, to Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money at The Court, and Mark Ravenhill’s neglected Some Explicit Polaroids with Out Of Joint (The Traverse days are relegated to a brief prologue). Dewhurst and Shepherd, as writer and actor respectively, were key collaborators of Bryden, as well as chief plotters and drinking buddies en route from early experiments to the mammoth staging of The Mysteries (again, outlines of Lyceum days are frustratingly brief).
Both volumes are a mix of professional candour and myth. As war babies born just over a year apart, the hunger to create was often a volatile affair for both men, and both books paint vivid pictures of seemingly crazy times. There’s failure, burn-out, and, in The Cottesloe’s case, a lot of booze besides, and if anything, you want to understand more about the struggles it took to arrive at brilliance.
Stafford-Clark and Roberts’ is the better book, simply because it’s told from the horses mouth. There are far too many moments where Dewhurst and Shepard are simply off doing other things, so a through line of Bryden’s experience is never quite achieved. One is keen too, to hear Bryden’s own thoughts, both in the moment of a production, and with the wisdom of hindsight, as Stafford-Clark and Roberts so successfully frame things.
Reading the books back to back, one becomes conscious that, while Stafford-Clark and Out Of Joint are still at the centre of British theatrical life (despite Stafford-Clark’s recent stoke), Bryden is a less consistent figure who’s never quite managed to move on from his youthful triumphs. Part of this is down to Stafford-Clark’s steely tenacity, whereby he observed previous outgoing artistic directors of institutions sucked into a world of freelancing on workaday touring theatre, whereby reputation alone could never hope to recapture former glories.
It is for this reason that Out Of Joint was founded and, moving as it does with the times, it is why it still exists. Bryden’s Cottesloe Company, on the other hand, was a brilliant but brief adventure stymied by circumstance. Both books, however, remain vital reading, both for today’s theatrical practitioners in search of batons to pick up, and anyone fascinated by the now seemingly tamed rough and tumble of the recent artistic past.
The Herald, June 2007
ends
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