The joy in being hit in the face...

Being hit by the obvious is both a revelation and a humiliation.  It happens to me a lot and I like that it does, as it means that I’m open to having my opinion changed…open to the fact that I can get things wrong…open to the truth that sometimes I don’t see what’s important…just open really.

There are two obvious things that hit me squarely in the face this week…the first has to do with Brecht, the second with Stanislavski…an ideal combination for a youth theatre blog in every possible way.

Brecht first then.  Gold Company are ambitiously constructing an entire history of the theatre in 15 minutes.  A Brecht section is obviously included, he being a theatre practitioner extraordinaire in early to mid 20^th century Europe.  Brecht is famous for his bad temper but more importantly he gave us the legacy of verfremdungseffekt, a term lazily translated as alienation but which is actually a theatrical technique to make events in a play strange to the audience so that they question them.  His ambition in this was to make sure the audience took nothing the characters did in his plays for granted.  He wanted the audience to look at the decisions characters made and the inherent consequences and in so doing learn something about their own lives.  Clear so far?  Good.  Now coming up with examples of this is the trickier part of explaining Brecht’s vision and obviously if we have a section on Brecht in a play the cast need to understand it/him.  Imagine my delight when it suddenly hit me like a brick that we have just staged a performance with verfremdungseffekt entirely at the centre of it. 

A lot of people have come out of “Tomorrow I’ll Be Happy,” praising it hugely and then adding the comment that they don’t know how to feel about it.  Do you see where we’re going here?  That’s because the playwright, Jonathan Harvey, has purposefully in his construction of the play made us think rather than feel.  In the way he offers the story (it runs chronologically backwards for those who haven’t seen it) we can’t get carried away with the fate of the characters.  We are forced instead to look at the decisions they make, why they make them and what should/could have happened instead.  When you’re dealing with a subject such as hate crime this is vital stuff…Jonathan is a clever, clever man…and of course Brecht needs to take a small bad tempered bow too.

For my second revelation I promised you some Stanislavski.  In Black Company we are staging Princess of Glass – a storytelling physical theatre piece.  The first thing that happens in the production is that the actress playing the central character walks down the centre of the space.  I’d been so fixated on making the following physical sequence work that I hadn’t paid much attention to this opening moment, until this week when I looked at it and realised it wasn’t working.  Cue another brick in the face.  The actor who had been asked to do it had no idea why she was doing it…there was nothing in the text to tell her why, I’d just given it as a direction.  I knew why but how was she supposed to get that information unless I told her?   In the old cliché of theatre the moment wasn’t working because the actor had no motivation.  As soon as I talked to her about the why instead of just the what the problem was solved.

Which neatly brings me round to the closing thought of this weeks blog…in theatre,  as in life, understanding is important, realisations are important, both are as vital as openness and a perfect way of achieving that is asking the questions…is asking, “Why?”