Jessica Swale - Drama Games For Devising (NHB Drama Games)

Jessica Swale

Foreword by Mike Leigh

NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

CONTENTS

For Jill and Robin Swale
and Muriel Norman,

who taught me that playing games
can be the best form of education

No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main.

John Donne

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto
the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat,
a song, a dragon and a fountain of water. One can
dare anything in the theatre and its the place
where one dares the least.

Eugne Ionesco

FOREWORD

Far from being an anomaly invented in the Swinging Sixties, so-called devised theatre is as old as society itself. Millennia before the birth of the formal literary script, we can be sure that folk got on their feet and made things up. Long nights round ancient campfires would be filled by endlessly inventive home-made entertainments. Singers of songs, tellers of stories and jokes, and groups of performers acting out yarns they had cooked up collaboratively, sometimes led by prehistoric versions of directors, often not, would light up the darkness.

It is inconceivable that the theatrical companies of Ancient Greece and Rome put together their productions of Sophocles and Plautus without group experiment and improvisation, and we know from the Folios that much extemporisation and collaborative creativity took place in Shakespeares theatre.

From Commedia dellArte to Victorian burlesque, from music hall and pantomime to the silent cinema of Keaton, Chaplin, Griffiths, Feuillade, von Stroheim et al., from the agit-prop theatre of the 1930s to the Goons and Pythons, making it up is as natural as laughing and crying.

A play in performance is an organic, visceral, three-dimensional thing. It isnt, by definition, the reading out of a text. So it is entirely logical to create live theatre directly. The currency, the medium, is people: physical action in time and space not merely words on a page.

And the world is out there, waiting for us to depict it, in all its joy and pain.

Just make up a play. Its easy. Or is it? Well, it is, once you get the ball rolling. But kicking off can often be difficult. For some, its just the question of having an idea, and getting on with it. But for others, especially when we remember that we are talking about group creativity, ways are needed to stimulate ideas to release the collective imagination.

And that is the unique value of this highly original and massively useful book. With impressive thoroughness, Jessica Swale has assembled a remarkable compendium of games and exercises.

Everything here qualifies as a lively starting point for rich invention. But, as an experienced and talented director, Jessica knows that the building of a solid ensemble is as important as the play itself, so much of what you will find in these pages will be equally useful for that purpose alone.

This book is a great achievement, and you will have much fun with it. Happy play-making!

Mike Leigh

INTRODUCTION

If you take the time to stop by a park or a playground anywhere in the world, you will observe the same phenomenon. Groups of youngsters making believe. Darting about as aliens, swaggering around on a pirate ship or leaping over logs as if they are horses, children love to make things up. There is a creative spirit deep-rooted in the human psyche, which yearns for just this kind of spontaneous fun. Yet somehow, as we grow up, the increasing demands on us to plan and prepare not only limit our opportunities for spontaneity, but reinforce a belief that to ad-lib or behave impulsively is less worthwhile.

Perhaps, in some walks of life, this is the case. But theatre is a live performance art and relies on a sense of immediacy and imaginative freedom, which is born out of extemporisation. The children in the park were not recreating stories they had been told. They were making things up, on the spot. They were devising. The joy of make-believe is its lack of constraints; a story that begins on a pirate ship might equally as well end on the moon as it might in the discovery of treasure.

Children find endless amusement in the act of improvisation, so it makes sense that if we strive to create entertaining theatre, we should follow suit. There is something profoundly satisfying about creating a story from scratch, and often plays developed within an inventive and supportive environment reflect this, to their benefit.

This book explores the devising process and looks at how to foster imaginative freedom in a rehearsal room, in order to create work that is organic, original and dynamic.

What is Devised Theatre?

Devised theatre is created during the rehearsal process, as opposed to a staged version of an extant script. In a conventional rehearsal process, while the director and actors have the liberty to play with interpretation, ultimately their aim is to deliver a faithful version of the text.

In contrast, on day one of a devising project, the participants jump into the abyss of the unknown. They may have starting points in mind a text, an object, music, a space, a concept or issue but at this stage no one will have an idea of what the final production will be like. Those factors which we imagine to be the building blocks of a play plot, characters, structure, style, form are all yet to be decided. Unsurprisingly, this element of risk can be daunting. However, it also engenders an immense sense of fun and freedom, the opportunity to try things out, to experiment and to play.

Devised theatre can be fresh, original, captivating and thrilling. Whilst the prospect of devising might initially provoke panic What do you mean, we have to create a play from scratch?! it is, I think, often the most exciting way of working. Theres the palpable danger, the thrill of the unknown, the excitement of the adventure, and the satisfaction of creating something entirely original. Actors and students learn invaluable skills during the devising process. Indeed, some of the most successful productions in the contemporary canon are devised, or use devising techniques in their development. Complicites playful devising strategies are visible in their productions; they work as an ensemble under the auspices of director Simon McBurney, experimenting with visual media, object manipulation, text and narrative to create theatrically innovative work, like