Theatre of the Absurd

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One of the joys and difficulties of my job is the uncertainty of knowing how a group are going to respond to a task or idea…you can never predict what a company will pick up and run with or what will get a luke warm response…this was illustrates very clearly on Monday…

I’d decided to do Absurdist theatre, something that in my college lecturer phase I had specialized in to some extent…I’ll be honest, I was in two minds right up until I gave out the excerpts of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” as to whether my plan was a good idea or not…Sapphire are made up of many talented individuals but some of them are only 11 and very much at the start of their Yew Tree climb to greatness…I had a horrible feeling it might turn out to be too challenging for them…

Turns out it was a brilliant idea…the group responded so creatively and with such integrity their shared work at the end was a pleasure to behold…some of them struggled in the making but were happy to follow advice and ideas which guided them to success.  There was a mixture of realizations of the script and devised responses and all of them had something to say about the genre of theatre we were exploring (you can read about what it felt like as a participant in some of this week’s guest blogs.)  In fact the only bad thing about the workshop was that we ran out of time and didn’t get chance to see every piece that had been created…

It occurred to me as the week went on that one of the reasons for the success of the workshop may well be the genuinely open attitude of the participants…this openness and the assumption that something can be made out of anything coupled the ambition to make the most out of every opportunity given is in abundance in Sapphire.  It is something to be treasured as I’ve noticed there is sometimes a tendency for it to lapse in the older groups…whether through complacency, a lack of motivation, a more complicated relationship with life’s demands or a stifled imagination there is a risk that older actors lose this fresh faced curiosity…this is a shame and something worth evaluating about yourself…

At the end of the workshop I was left fulfilled and fired up by the work I’d enjoyed and the process I’d participated in as I watched over 30 young people leave the building in a similar state…not bad for an evenings work.

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