A Director's Journey
'These are things you remember all your life, I suppose. I didn't think it would be like this.'
My Mother Said I Never Should, Keatley, 1988.
'The ethnographer's being there can produce knowledge’
(Pink, 2009, 67).
There are more than fifteen years of prior experience leading up to the
development of As You Like It and the creation of this project. This relationship with space and place has undoubtedly formed a tangible presence within the practice, as well as helped to shape my own shifting identity as an artist. For the vast majority of this journey I have not wanted to exist in the peripherality of the mainstream, seeking desperately to be inducted into broader systems of artistic creation and legitimacy. This has, therefore, largely been a journey of resistance, not expression. The fact that it did not turn out as I expected helped to prolong the longevity of this existence, which in twists and turns has formulated the ideas that underpin this project.
What's more, it is not through the lens of obtained knowledge that this director's journey should be understood, but through a changing relationship with knowledge, craft and experience emerging from many years of new interests, experiences and exposures. Journeys are not logical, progressive, or smooth, but complex, confused and contradictory. Mine certainly has been.
Alongside this journey sits a world of doubt, potential, waste, excitement, mistakes and memory. Sarah Pink describes how ethnography 'involves the researcher self-consciously and reflexively attending to the senses throughout the research process' (Pink, 2009, 10) and it is certainly not a neutral position from which I sit as both reflexive practitioner and curator of a story that aims to make sense of the current practice. But nor are the ideas and craft of As You Like It divorced from the vast body of experiences that preceded it, presented here in no particular order and with little context to reflect something of that vague and unfixed relationship between the personal and the objective, the time and the place, the learnt and the forgotten.
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Shaping an Aesthetic
''I don't want realism, I want magic!'
A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams, 1947
Much of our early work was staged with very little material means, often in small impractical fringe spaces. As such, we were forced to work with the limitations of what we could afford through set, props and costumes. Our 2010 production of The Trojan Women was staged in a music venue, with what was essentially an in-the-round performance space. The neo-classical aesthetic of the space and the opportunities for lighting helped to broaden the concept of the production, which otherwise had no props or set to speak of. A range of productions at Liverpool's Lantern Theatre, a 60-seat fringe venue in a former flat (with kitchen still intact) provided a range of opportunities for utilising the real to enhance the aesthetic perception of the work as being more than amateur or more than low-budget.
A brief overview of the local context into which much of our work was made, and by which our practice was invariably shaped. After 2016, it wasn't until 2022 when we performed in Liverpool again due to a complete lack of viable venues in which to present the work.
The Stages
Are Open
'Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.'
Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare
Our RSC Open Stages experience was instrumental for numerous reasons, not least the way in which it introduced us to the opportunity economy, and the relationship between the professional and unpaid sectors of the theatre industry. In our attempt to make something which we hoped the RSC would deem worthy of inclusion in Open Stages, we also laid the seeds for understanding what the non-professional can bring to the stage beyond a lack of formal training.
What is captured here, thanks to the extensive archive PurpleDoor kept at the time, is a struggle on the one hand between a funded programme of outreach activity with a dedicated scope, aims and purpose, and our desperate and misjudged attempts to see the programme as a ladder of progression into the professional theatre sector, on the other.
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TITUS ANDRONICUS
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There's something fittingly melodramatic about just how battered and bruised my script from Titus looks today. We never liked to use the Arden editions of Shakespeare's plays as we found the notes too intimidating. One suspects that the Penguin editions were not made with performance in mind however, given the propensity for pages to fall out.
There are some interesting indications of craft here, though. On the one hand, the text has been heavily truncated, forcing the scene to become much more about the physical action rather than the spoken word. We would always cut what we described as the more 'flowery' language, ie, language which we felt our audience wouldn't understand, probably because we didn't understand it ourselves. In many ways this shows an interesting sense of seeing text as an obstacle rather than the fuel of performance.
Many of the notes are emotion based and not quite Actioning in the sense we might expect, with underlined words dictating emphasis. Eg 'a woman's face' or 'here me but a word.' This ignores the iambic in favour of delivery that is sense based, not verse based.
What this perhaps demonstrates is a directorial style reaching towards craft but without the knowledge to underpin and guide it.
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We produced this video during Open Stages as part of our attempt to convince the RSC to select us for the regional showcase. It's an interesting artefact for several reasons: it clearly demonstrates the passion we exhibited in the performance, whilst the appalling filming and sound quality capture the technical and material difficulty we met in trying to record the show after initially being promised an in-person visit from the RSC.
Meritocracy
Inc.
'We took a gamble when we set it in Las Vegas.'
Calum Green, Romeo and Juliet co-director
The set for Romeo and Juliet and the somewhat un-subtle homage to the 2011 RSC production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Rupert Goold.
Image (Kurtz).
It is a both a privilege and an opportunity to be humbled by looking back at our past selves to experience how our mindset and practice have both developed over time. Our production of Romeo and Juliet in 2012 was selected as part of the programme for the International Youth Arts Festival (IYAF), with performances to be given at the 900-seat Rose Theatre, Kingston.
This was our first time being programmed as part of a festival and our first time performing outside of Liverpool. It was to be our subsequent production after our Open Stages experience, and one which we invested a significant amount of time into. Romeo and Juliet is an excellent example to draw on as it encapsulates so well our mindset at a particular point in time - before I had engaged critically with debates around neoliberalism and materiality, ever chasing for bigger and better, and obsessed with 'opportunity' over art. Romeo and Juliet was the latest of our high-concept approaches to Shakespeare, relocating the action to modern-day Las Vegas, heavily influenced by Rupert Goold's 2016 Merchant of Venice for the RSC.
We were particularly intimidated by the size of the stage, and kept awake at night by the idea that we needed a professional large-scale production to match the significant scale of the auditorium. We launched our first crowd funder, where we were lucky enough to secure support from Stephen Fry, which was as extraordinary to us then as it is now. Given the scale of our ambitions, we also decided to film absolutely everything; something which is fortuitous now, at this distance, as it allows me to explore just how much our meritocratic mindset was essential to shaping our approach both positively and, perhaps, negatively. The uncompromising and guerrilla-style filming allows me to say with some confidence that we are seeing our unmediated selves opened up and examined here, making these insights even more useful for analysing just how powerfully our focus was dedicated towards ideas of opportunity, progression and legitimacy.