I’d learned perspective, and about balance, and composition. It was as if I’d learned to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what ought to be there, which of course is much inferior to what is there. The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.
At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it was convenient. I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true. This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it any more.
One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep. I was astounded. I’d had no idea that literature could affect me in such a way. If I’d wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.
From then on I noticed how warped many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.
‘Let him model it in clay.’ The implication of Stirling’s attitude was that the student should never experience failure. The teacher’s skill lay in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to succeed.
Almost all teachers, even if they weren’t very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it’s difficult for them to identify with the children who fail. My case was peculiar in that I’d apparently been
Almost all teachers, even if they weren’t very bright, got along reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it’s difficult for them to identify with the children who fail.
I’d argue that a director should never demonstrate anything to an actor, that a director should allow the actor to make his own discoveries, that the actor should think he’d done all the work himself.
As ninety-nine per cent of the plays submitted were just cribs from other people, the job was easy. I had expected that there’d be a very gentle graduation from awful to excellent, and that I’d be involved in a lot of heart-searching. Almost all were total failures—they couldn’t have been put on in the village hall for the author’s friends. It wasn’t a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation.
I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.
Edward Bond said, ‘The writers’ group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters.’
Nowadays everything is very easy to me (except writing didactic things like this book). If we need a cartoon for the programme, I’ll draw one. If we need a play I’ll write it. I cut knots instead of laboriously trying to untie them—that’s how people see me; but they have no idea of the turgid state I used to be in, or the morass from which I’m still freeing myself.
When I give workshops, I see people frantically scribbling down the exercises, but not noticing what it is I actually do as a teacher. My feeling is that a good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher can wreck any method.
It’s essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren’t in a good state.
The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is (probably) to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I’ll explain that if the students fail they’re to blame me. Then they laugh, and relax, and I explain that really it’s obvious that they should blame me, since I’m supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong material, they’ll fail; and if I give them the right material, then they’ll succeed. I play low status physically but my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself.
They’ll want to test me, of course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them to be patient with me, and explain that I’m not perfect. My methods are very effective, and other things being equal, most students will succeed, but they won’t try to win any more. The normal teacher-student relationship is dissolved.
When (in 1964) I read of Wolpe’s work in curing phobias, I saw a clear relationship with the ideas I’d got from Stirling, and with the way I was developing them. Wolpe relaxed his phobic patients and then presented them with a very dilute form of the thing that scared them. Someone terrified of birds might be asked to imagine a bird, but one in Australia.
Instead of seeing people as untalented, we can see them as phobic, and this completely changes the teacher’s relationship with them.
Students will arrive with many techniques for avoiding the pain of failure. John Holt’s How Children Fail (Penguin, 1969; Pitman, 1970) gives examples of children learning to get round problems, rather than learning to find solutions to problems.
I explain to the students the devices they’re using to avoid tackling the problems— however easy the problems are—and the release of tension is often amazing.
No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such as attitude, but when they are children it probably worked. As adults they’re still doing it. Once they’ve laughed at themselves and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students who look ‘ill’ suddenly look ‘healthy’. The attitude of the group may instantly change.
Most students haven’t realised—till I show them—how inefficient such techniques are. The idea that a teacher should be interested in such things is, unfortunately, novel to them.
I’m teaching spontaneity, and therefore I tell them that they mustn’t try to control the future, or to ‘win’; and that they’re to have an empty head and just watch.
When it’s their turn to take part they’re to come out and just do what they’re asked to, and see what happens. It’s this decision not to try and control the future which allows the students to be spontaneous.
While he describes himself in this pathetic way he leaps about, and expresses manic happiness, thus absolving the audience of the need to pity him. We want people to be very low-status, but we don’t want to feel sympathy for them—slaves are always supposed to sing at their work.
Terrible things can happen to the high-status animal, he can poke his eyes out with his wife’s brooch, but he must never look as if he could accept a position lower in the pecking order. He has to be ejected from it.
Again I change my behaviour and become authoritative. I ask them what I’ve done to create this change in my relation with them, and whatever they guess to be the reason—‘You’re holding eye contact’, ‘You’re sitting straighter’—I stop doing, yet the effect continues. Finally I explain that I’m keeping my head still whenever I speak, and that this produces great change in the way I perceive myself and am perceived by others.
people have a preferred status; that they like to be low, or high, and that they try to manoeuvre themselves into the preferred positions. A person who plays high status is saying ‘Don’t come near me, I bite.’ Someone who plays low status is saying ‘Don’t bite me, I’m not worth the trouble.’ In either case the status played is a defence, and it’ll usually work. It’s very likely that you will increasingly be conditioned into playing the status that you’ve found an effective defence. You become a status specialist, very good at playing one status, but not very happy or competent at playing the other. Asked to play the ‘wrong’ status, you’ll feel ‘undefended’.
It isn’t necessary for an actor to achieve the status he’s trying to play in order to interest an audience. To see someone trying to be high, and failing, is just as delightful as watching him succeed.
Once the status becomes automatic, as it is in life, it’s possible to improvise complex scenes with no preparation at all. The status exercises are really crutches to support the actor so that instinctual systems can operate. The actor then feels that everything is easy, and he doesn’t experience himself as ‘acting’ any more than he does in life, even though the actual status he’s playing may be one very unfamiliar to him.
Non-defence is exploited by the wolf who exposes his neck and underbelly to a dominant wolf as a way of ending a losing battle. The top Wolf wants to bite, but can’t. Some Congolese soldiers dragged two white journalists out of a jeep, shot one and were about to shoot the other when he burst into tears. They laughed and kicked him back to the jeep and let him drive away, while they waved and cheered. It was more satisfying to see the white man cry than to shoot him.
It’s also important that the student who succeeds at playing a status he feels to be alien should be instantly rewarded, praised and admired. It’s no use just giving the exercises and expecting them to work. You have to understand where the resistance is, and devise ways of getting it to crumble.
This means that when two improvisers pass on a bare stage it may be possible to say where they are, even though they may not have decided on a location. The class will agree that the actors look as if they’re in a hospital corridor, or in a crowded street, or passing on a narrow pavement. We judge this from the distance at which they make the first eye contact, and from the moment that they ‘switch off’ from each other before passing. The class may not know why they imagine the actors in a particular environment, but there is often a general agreement.
The great advantage in working in the street is that you can’t dismiss real people’s reactions as ‘untruthful’.
I ask students (for homework!) to watch groups of people in coffee bars, and to notice how everyone’s attitude changes when someone leaves or joins a group. If you watch two people talking, and then wait for one to leave, you can see how the person remaining has to alter his posture. He had arranged his movements to relate to his partner’s, and now that he’s alone he has to change his position in order to express a relationship to the people around him.
Intelligence is proportional to population, but talent appears not to be related to population numbers. I’m living in a city at the edge of the Rocky Mountains; the population is much greater than it was in Shakespearian London, and almost everyone here is literate, and has had many thousands of dollars spent on his education. Where are the poets, and playwrights, and painters, and composers? Remember that there are hundreds of thousands of ‘literate’ people here, while in Shakespeare’s London very few people could read. The great art of this part of the world was the art of the native people. The whites flounder about trying to be ‘original’ and failing miserably.
You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture. It’s easy to play the role of ‘artist’, but actually to create something means going against one’s education.
Many ‘well adjusted’ adults are bitter, uncreative frightened, unimaginative, and rather hostile people. Instead of assuming they were born that way, or that that’s what being an adult entails, we might consider them as people damaged by their education and upbringing.
Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is. Schiller
Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticised not only for his skill or lack of skill, but simply for being what he is.
uncreative people ‘are ashamed of the momentary passing madness which is found in all real creators
Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.
People may seem uncreative, but they’ll be extremely ingenious at rationalising the things they do.
if I hadn’t thrown away everything that my teachers taught me, I could never have written it. These teachers, who were so sure of the rules, didn’t produce anything themselves at all. I was one of a number of playwrights who emerged in the late 1950s, and it was remarkable that only one of us had been to a university—that was John Arden—and he’d studied architecture.
Most people I meet are secretly convinced that they’re a little crazier than the average person. People understand the energy necessary to maintain their own shields, but not the energy expended by other people. They understand that their own sanity is a performance, but when confronted by other people they confuse the person with the role.
sanity is a matter of interaction, rather than of one’s mental processes, students are often hysterical with laughter. They agree that for years they have been suppressing all sorts of thinking because they classified it as insane. Students need a ‘guru’ who ‘gives permission’ to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness. A ‘guru’ doesn’t necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically.
We all know instinctively what ‘mad’ thought is: mad thoughts are those which other people find unacceptable, and train us not to talk about, but which we go to the theatre to see expressed.
(Sheila Kitzinger, The Experience of Childbirth, Gollancz, 1962.) She adds that women with prolonged labours tended to be ‘inhibited’, embarrassed by the processes taking place in their bodies, ladylike in the extreme, and endured what they were undergoing stoically as long as they were able, without expressing their anxieties. It was not these women’s bodies that were causing them difficulties; they were being held up by the sort of people they were. They were not able to give birth.’
The most repressed, and damaged, and ‘unteachable’ students that I have to deal with are those who were the star performers at bad high schools. Instead of learning how to be warm and spontaneous and giving, they’ve become armoured and superficial, calculating and self-obsessed.
The improviser has to understand that his first skill lies in releasing his partner’s imagination. What happens in my classes, if the actors stay with me long enough, is that they learn how their ‘normal’ procedures destroy other people’s talent. Then, one day they have a flash of satori—they suddenly understand that all the weapons they were using against other people they also use inwardly, against themselves.
The trick is not to think of getting the assistant to do things, but of ways of getting each other into trouble.
Good improvisers develop action: ‘Sit down, Smith.’ ‘Thank you, Sir.’ ‘It’s about the wife, Smith.’ ‘She told you about it has she, Sir?’ ‘Yes, yes, she’s made a clean breast of it.’ Neither actor is quite sure what the scene is about but he’s willing to play along, and see what emerges.
When Pinter directs his own plays he may say ‘We may assume that what the author intended here is . . .’—and this is a sensible attitude: the playwright is one person and the director another, even when they share the same skull.
Recent films in which the good lawman comes to grief when he tries to fight the system (Walking Tall, Serpico) have the moral ‘Don’t stick your neck out’, but this may not be what their directors intend.
In the old days the honest sheriff was triumphant; nowadays he’s crippled, or dead. Content lies in the structure, in what happens, not in what the characters say.
A story is as difficult to interpret as a dream, and the interpretation of a dream depends on who’s doing the interpreting. When King Lear really gets going—the mad King, the man pretending to be mad, the fool paid to be mad, and the whole mass of overlapping and contradictory associations—what can the spectator sensibly do but be swept away on the flood, and experience the play, instead of trying to think what it ‘means’.
My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with.
in the end I said ‘yes’ all the time because she was getting discouraged. We used to play this game at parties, and people who claim to be unimaginative would think up the most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they weren’t responsible for them.
It must be obvious that when someone insists that they ‘can’t think up a story’, they really mean that they ‘won’t think up a story’—which is OK by me, so long as they understand it’s a refusal, rather than a ‘lack of talent’.
Once people have learned to play each stage of this game with no effort or anxiety, I let them play both halves themselves. I say ‘Free-associate’, and then when they’ve produced unconnected material, I say ‘Connect’, or ‘Reincorporate’.
A knowledge of this game is very useful to a writer. First of all it encourages you to write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you’ve shelved, and then reinclude them.
One way to bypass the censor who holds our spontaneity in check is to distract him, or overload him. I might ask someone to write out a paragraph on paper (without premeditation) while counting backwards aloud from a hundred. I’ll try it now as I’m typing: ‘Extra. I fall through the first storey of the car park. The driver throughout the night thought the soft concrete slit his genitals thoughtfully. Nurse Grimshaw fell further . . .’ I got to sixty until I felt my brain was going to explode. It’s like trying to write after a severe concussion.
You might try drawing a picture with two hands at once. The trick is to keep your attention equally divided, rather than switching quickly from hand to hand. Also you shouldn’t decide what to draw; just sit down with a blank mind and draw as quickly as possible. This regresses your mind to about five years of age. Curiously, each hand seems to draw with the same level of skill.
Nonsense results from a scrambling process, and takes time. You have to consider your thought, decide whether it gives you away, and then distort it, or replace it with something else. The student’s ‘trap’ and ‘dark cellar’ were threatening to release some anxiety in him. If he’d continued with the list, speaking as quickly as possible, he’d have revealed himself as not quite so sane and secure as he pretends.
The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited.
It’s easy to switch from ‘automatic reading’ to my form of ‘automatic writing’. You just look at a blank sheet of paper, and ‘see’ a word, and then write it where you ‘saw’ it. I’ve filled many exercise books using this method, partly to see where it led me, and partly to know what happens if you go past the point where you feel impelled to stop.
If I ask someone to invent the first line of a short story, he’ll unconsciously rephrase the question. He’ll tense up, and probably say ‘I can’t think of one.’ He’ll really act as if he’s been asked for a good first line.
Word-at-a-time letters usually go though four stages: (1) the letters are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full of religious feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and loneliness. Improvisations go through similar stages if you don’t censor them, and if you work with the same group day after day.
Some people avoid getting involved in action. All they’ll produce is stories like ‘We-are-going-to-the-market-where-we-buy-bread-and-now-we-walk-to-the-beach-where-we-watch-the-seagulls . . .’ It’s a good idea to start such people off inside a womb, or on another planet, or being hunted for murder, or some other dramatic situation.
If I say ‘Make up a story’, then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it’, people see no problem.
Many people think of finding more interesting routines, which doesn’t solve the problem.
It’s no good the knight killing the dragon and deflowering the virgin any more. Killing the virgin and deflowering the dragon is more likely to hold the audience’s attention.
A student of mine wrote a scene in which a girl friend messed up her ex-boy friend’s apartment in an act of revenge. He arrived and they had a row. Once the row was over and she had left, the playwright had a sensation of ‘failure’, or having done nothing—which was true. When I told the writer to consider the row as a routine which needed to be broken, she wrote a scene in which at the height of the row the girl suddenly injected the ex-boy friend with a syringe, and locked herself in the bathroom. One moment there was a row going on, and the next the man was suddenly terrified of what she might have done to him.
An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors.
At this point the ‘playwright’ becomes confused, so I stop him and explain that he’s cancelled everything out. He introduces the idea of sickness, and then he removes it.
There’s nothing very profound about such stories, and they don’t require much imagination, but people are very happy to watch them.
The rules are: (1) interrupt a routine; (2) keep the action onstage—don’t get diverted on to an action that has happened elsewhere, or at some other time; (3) don’t cancel the story.
You have to trick students into believing that content isn’t important and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere. It’s the same kind of trick you use when you tell them that they are not their imaginations, that their imaginations have nothing to do with them, and that they’re in no way responsible for what their ‘mind’ gives them. In the end they learn how to abandon control while at the same time they exercise control. They begin to understand that everything is just a shell. You have to misdirect people to absolve them of responsibility. Then, much later, they become strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves. By that time they have a more truthful concept of what they are.
Many Masks are beautiful or striking, but that’s not the point. A Mask is a device for driving the personality out of the body and allowing a spirit to take possession of it. A very beautiful Mask may be completely dead, while a piece of old sacking with a mouth and eye-holes torn in it may have tremendous vitality.
We distrust spontaneity, and try to replace it by reason: the Mask was driven out of theatre in the same way that improvisation was driven out of music.
I can’t imagine anyone in a normal state of consciousness sitting motionless in shop windows day after day and doing the evening show. How much then are we to trust what anyone tells us about their state of mind?
In the middle of a dark night I wake up, how do I know I’m awake? I test for consciousness by moving a muscle. If I block this impulse to move I feel a tremendous anxiety. The control I exercise over the musculature reassures me that ‘I’m me’. By tensing muscles, by shifting position, by scratching, sighing, yawning, blinking, and so on, we maintain ‘normal consciousness’. Entranced subjects will sit quite motionless for hours.
Mask teachers, priests in possession cults, and hypnotists all play high status in voice and movement. A high-status person whom you accept as dominant can easily propel you into unusual states of being.
Once you understand that you’re no longer held responsible for your actions, then there’s no need to maintain a ‘personality’. Student improvisers asked to pretend to be hypnotised, show a sudden improvement.
Such trances may be rare, or may pass unrecognised in this culture, but we should consider them as a normal part of human behaviour.