Category Archives: Musings

Mind the Gap: Research Between the Lines

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings

This week our Artistic Director, Laura Elizabeth Rice, has been considering gaps in historical evidence and how this can affect both academia and theatre.

In my “other” life, I spend a lot of time working on my PhD thesis, which focuses on performances of medieval plays during the 1951 Festival of Britain. At first that must seem completely removed from HIDden. Actually, some days – many days – there isn’t that much difference between the two. I’ve written previously about some of the places I go to for theatrical inspiration, and it probably goes without saying that the first source of inspiration is, of course, the text itself: the play is the first place to look for ideas, suggestions, and what aspects catch your eye. I mention this because, while the text is the play, quite literally, it is also an artefact itself, a document which exists from some earlier point in time, and that’s where I start looking next for ideas: the past, the records, of what we know about that play from its previous incarnations. Research for my thesis or research for HIDden: in both cases, the documentation is similar, with frequently identical gaps in the record.

In both cases, a lot of the records that I have to work with are detached from the productions almost entirely: they’re actually civic records, minutes and accounts of city government which had some hand in organising and/or financing the plays. It’s more true for the medieval than more modern events, but in both cases, records from the people who actually worked on the plays are pretty limited. (This is especially true of the small towns which put on medieval plays in 1951. In many of those cases, the medieval records actually offer more information than is available for events just sixty years ago!) These records offer oblique information at best: for example, X amount of money was spent on the repair of an angel’s wings. That tells us that a) the angels had wings, and b) they were made of a material with a certain cost, which might hint at what that material was, but… that’s it. Put enough of these pieces together, where you can, and you can start to get a vague idea of what a play might have been like. (And to those who are really curious, I would direct you to the extraordinary Records of Early English Drama, a massive and ongoing compilation of these information nuggets.) You’ll never find a document that says, “This is what our play was like.” You always have to imagine it from the bits and pieces.

While the Middle Ages has been my area of speciality, the same concerns exist across most other eras as well. The need to create a documentary record of performances was never foremost in anyone’s mind, so what has been saved is haphazard rather than deliberate. “The play’s the thing”, not the archive. At some point, I hope to sit down and write about the issues, ideas, and debates around documenting performances deliberately (and whether we even should, or can), but for the present, suffice to say that for academic work, the random survival of records makes it very challenging to write accurately about what a play or performance might have been like. I confess that I was surprised by this: I had assumed that the 1950’s would be much better documented than the fifteenth century; just like that earlier period, it all depends on whether a performance happened in an area that was urban or rural, wealthy or impoverished, and whether the city government, rather than ad hoc groups of citizens, was the driving force behind a performance. In the latter case, even today, you can be pretty sure that it won’t leave much of a documentary trail.

For HIDden, unlike my thesis, in many ways I’m grateful for the gaps. I don’t want to re-create someone else’s production of a play, and if you know too much about the way things have been done before, you run that risk. I’ve been involved in productions that became, effectively, a staged version of a film, down to the way actors delivered lines; so even if there is a filmed or taped production available, I make a point of not watching it from the moment I contemplate working on a play to the day it closes. Where I’m reliant on limited documentation to understand a previous, historic performance, the gaps become the space where I have to make decisions and imagine, where the production becomes our own. The truth is that, in both my theatrical and academic work, it’s the missing pieces that intrigue. They can be utterly maddening at times, but those gaps are what keep us questioning, wondering, and dreaming.

Director’s Notes: Spaces

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Musings

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage” is the very start to Peter Brook’s book The Empty Space. Although the question of what constitutes a performance space is not really the point of the book, it seems a pertinent statement to a subject that has cropped up repeatedly of late.

Since live performance is always in three dimensions, it has to happen somewhere, and the question of where that will be is paramount in getting started on a project. A company that has residence somewhere will generally have the same answer, while the rest of us have an enormous degree of variability. The choice is usually the result of a list of circumstances and desiderata. Availability and cost are unavoidable factors, but there’s also a long list of artistic considerations. A play might work better with a small, intimate audience, or it might require a central aisle. Maybe the concept specifically requires an out-of-door space, or perhaps that desire is counterintuitive to a production scheduled for January. It’s about finding the right balance.

All of that, however, still considers space as a canvas which, if not entirely blank, has only a few specific sketched-in lines, and treats space as an entirely passive factor. And it’s not. Because the facts of a space – how large or small it is, whether it is indoor or out, whether the audience will be sitting in rows before a proscenium-arched stage or on cushions in a circle around the actors – will have enormous significance for how the play functions, what it says, and what the experience will be for all involved. A performance does not just fill a space; it is shaped by that space as well.

It’s easy to get into a chicken-egg debate about space. Do you choose a venue first and then create a performance to suit its capabilities, or do you come up with a concept for a production and then look for a space that will fit its demands? There is a certain comfort and ease in developing a production in a place that you know well, but there is also much to be said for the challenge of creating a performance with new or unexpected parameters. Either answer is acceptable; either will have significant implications for the final result. And, of course, it’s possible to split the difference and have to cope with aspects of both: a production that is designed to tour has to factor in the flexibility to cope with an almost infinite variety of potential spaces, which will result in the possibility of extremely different experiences for both audience and company as those variables come in to play.

Historical drama is an area where the question of space and staging has long been considered especially important. The Georgian and Victorian eras solidified the dominance of proscenium-arch staging, which inherently created an invisible wall and separation from the audience. At the turn of the twentieth century, director William Poel began to question whether historic plays- specifically Shakespeare, initially- wouldn’t work better if staged in a manner more akin to the circumstances for which they were created. He started to produce plays staged on an Elizabethan model, bringing the audiences closer to and around the stage. As the first person to resurrect medieval drama (1901’s Everyman is considered the birth of modern medieval drama performances), Poel was also first to realise what has come to be seen as at least a general truism of medieval drama: plays written to be played in close proximity to audiences genuinely do benefit from being staged in that manner; some of their power is lost if they are separated from that intimacy and immediacy. (The Victorian conventions for staging may be part of why they were so dismissive of the performative possibility of medieval plays.) By the same token, many Victorian plays would be very difficult to work out in-the-round, as they were written with the implicit assumptions of a stage with wings, backstage, and distance from viewers. It’s probably not coincidence that the over-the-top characteristics of melodrama came into vogue at the same time that performers moved to a distance from their audiences. This is not to say that historic plays can only work if their original conditions are re-created, which is obviously not the case. It is rather to point out that space has significant impact upon plays from the past, and that one should at least be aware of that when deciding how to stage them today.

The next time you’re at a performance, take a moment to contemplate not just what you’re seeing but where you are. How different would the production be under different spatial circumstances? How might you feel differently about the performance or its characters? Chances are, the people who’ve put the production together have given thought to what your answers might be.

Director’s Notes: Finding Inspiration

Posted on by under Mankind, Musings, Vital Spark

Not very long ago, I became acquainted with the monumental time-sink that is Pinterest. I’d heard of it for years, but – and this will tell you everything about my own worldview slant – I could not for the life of me understand why friends were going on about recipes on a webpage clearly named for a playwright (Harold Pinter for the uninitiated). A personal aversion to websites that make you sign up kept me off it for years. But looking at images of medieval demons for Mankind, that website just kept popping up. Curiosity got the better of me, and down the rabbit hole I went.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed, I started with searches that were in some way linked to the play we were working on. My initial thought was that it could be a sort of appendix to writing and talking about what we were doing. Want to know how medieval peasants appear in artwork, or what kind of chair Jenny Hill might have for The Vital Spark? Head on over. Even if I have no intention of staging a play in its original historical period and trappings, I always use them as a jumping off point for research. The idea that you have to know where a play began before you can start intelligently departing for that place is very central to HIDden in general; it’s the informed part of “historically informed drama”.

Informed, however, is not enough. I started seeing lots of other images that just seemed intriguing, apropos of nothing. Maybe it was a texture (something literally missing in virtual boards, which I regret), or a slant of lighting, or a type of lettering. I started filing those away, without having any intentions for them at all. Very possibly they’ll never find a use. But in the aggregate, they already have. Finding them was a reminder that you can’t just look for what you want to find. Sometimes you have to just… look. Wander. Without an agenda, intention, or map, you might find something that sends you down a different path. That’s the very definition of inspiration.

The challenge, in any artistic field, is making yourself find inspiration. We’re accustomed to thinking of it as a bolt of lightning, something miraculous from out of the blue, and very often it is. But when your work relies on its presence being something of a constant, you have to find ways to trigger that lighting off in the first place. Maybe you can’t always guarantee it to strike right when you need it, but you can create conditions under which it’s more likely to happen. There’s no universal recipe; for me it’s a constant and conscious exercise in trying to notice little, unusual details, casting the net wide in terms of reading and experience, and then making sure that I surround myself with people who keep me on my toes. Around the right people, mundane conversations can be catalytic, and that dynamic is something I always try to cultivate at HIDden, with actors and production teams alike.

When I’m feeling more introverted, I can sit down at the computer and explore some of the world from the seclusion of my office, complete with a cup of tea, and try to create a little bit of electronic brain-lightning. Then I can turn around and share at least a pale snapshot of that moment with you, so that if you are at one of our productions, you can imagine the connections between that initial idea and what ends up on stage. It’s not always a direct path, but from information to inspiration to creation, getting there is half the fun.

Why not stop by and visit these behind-the-scenes idea-gatherings on our Pinterest page?

Director’s Notes: Technical Difficulties

Posted on by under Musings

This week, instead of getting done with the work I’d intended to accomplish, I have been coping with technical difficulties in the form of a non-working laptop. Although I’m sure this is a familiar refrain to modern life, it’s no less irritating, nor is the timing ever convenient. In this case, it’s just stopped my research project dead in its tracks, unable to continue until the situation is resolved. Vexed as I am about it, the truth is that I would much rather deal with my own personal, private technological hang-up than have anything go wrong at work, when problems affect everyone.

Stuff goes wrong in theatre. And the rule about more moving parts resulting in more potential for things to go wrong, means that these days, in most productions, there’s a fair amount that is just one power hiccup away from a problem. When it happens, it gets resolved as soon as possible (and bless the adrenaline spikes that my more technically inclined colleagues must live through when fixing it is their job!), and the usual question thereafter is, “Did anyone notice?” This generally means the audience, as you can be pretty sure that everyone involved was sharing in at least a flutter of the palpitations. The real question, though, is “did it matter”, because although there will always be some people who are attuned to such things, if the actors are doing a good job and the subject matter is compelling, most people won’t care about minor glitches. We’ve all seen someone sing through a microphone glitch, or ad-lib brilliantly when a cue got dropped; there’s a reason performers carrying on through illness or injury is stereotypical theatrical lore. Whether it’s due to technology or people, things go wrong, and you want everyone to keep going as if nothing had happened.

Sometimes problems are instructive and useful. Of course you’d rather have those lessons learned when it doesn’t affect a performance or an audience, but even then there can be occasion when it turns out surprisingly well. Although I rarely remember problems I’ve witnessed six months later, I’ve never forgotten one glitch that I witnessed in a performance. At the very climax, rather than telling the audience that one of the characters had died, the entire theatre just went black, before the lights returned to normal for the final scenes. Though my description makes it sound rather heavy-handed, it actually worked in a surprisingly effective and delicate matter. Afterwards, I complimented my friend, who had done the lighting, on that choice. “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen!” she told me. “That was a power problem.” But it had been so much more effective than the intended cue a few moments later, that I believe she went back and altered it to make the ‘mistake’ an intentional event for the rest of the run.

It’s rare that things go wrong quite so advantageously, but I think sometimes we should look upon those moments as challenges rather than “problems”. “Keep calm and carry on”, the classic British axiom, is one of the basic laws of the theatre. (Or, to put it in the terms with which I was raised, “If there’s a dead body in the wings, step over it and get on stage on time and don’t you dare drop character!”) The truth is that, although it’s uncomfortable, limitations sometimes push us further and create something stronger in the long run. If we have every “easy” solution right at our fingertips, perhaps we miss out on seeing something new and different and more interesting. I’m not advocating for technical problems as a solution to creative stagnation; I’m just suggesting that, when they do arise, hopefully we rise to the occasion and find something new in ourselves that we’re able to use in future performance, even if it’s only a stronger resilience through adversity. Difficulties during a show have to be solved right now; they demand our nerves and quick creativity.

Ironically, this tension between striving for flawlessness and the realities of fallibility is part of what makes live performance so appealing, both to watch and to create. Unlike film, there is no second take, no “do-over”. Every moment is on a knife-edge, a breath away from chaos. I suspect this aspect is subliminal in most audience minds, but when people ask me why I prefer live theatre to the cinema, part of the answer is probably that feeling of potential danger. In the grand scheme of life, it’s generally pretty low-risk, but it still manages to be high-adrenaline, mixed in with the dynamism of creativity and collaboration.

Domestic technological issues do not, unfortunately, come with any of these redeeming features. So it’s off to the repair shop, and goodbye to the academic work I had hoped to get accomplished in the next few days. But “there is no problem which does not come with a gift in its hands”: at least I can read through the scripts that are sitting on my desk and not feel guilty about temporarily putting that work first! Even in the cloud of ordinary, non-dramatic technical problems, a silver lining can be found.