If teachers were honoured in the British theatre alongside directors, designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and the other young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 1950s. As head of the Court’s script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the ‘writers’ theatre’, but to the general public he was known only as the author of occasional and less than triumphant Court plays like Brixham Regatta and Performing Giant. As he recounts in this book, he started as a writer who lost the ability to write, and then ran into the same melancholy impasse again when he turned to directing.
What follows is the story of his escape.
I first met Johnstone shortly after he had joined the Court as a los-a-script play-reader, and he struck me then as a revolutionary idealist looking around for a guillotine. He saw corruption everywhere. John Arden, a fellow play-reader at that time, recalls him as ‘George Devine’s subsidised extremist, or Keeper of the King’s Conscience’. The Court then set up its Writers’ Group and Actors’ Studio, run by Johnstone and William Gaskill, and attended by Arden, Ann Jellicoe and other writers of the Court’s first wave. This was the turning point. ‘Keith’, Gaskill says, ‘started to teach his own particular style of improvisation, much of it based on fairy stories, word associations, free associations, intuitive responses, and later he taught mask work as well. All his work has been to encourage the rediscovery of the imaginative response in the adult; the refinding of the power of the child’s creativity. Blake is his prophet and Edward Bond his pupil.’
Johnstone’s all-important first move was to banish aimless discussion and transform the meetings to enactment sessions; it was what happened that mattered, not what anybody said about it. ‘It is hard now to remember how fresh this idea was in 1958,’ Ann Jellicoe says, ‘but it chimed in with my own way of thinking.’ Other members were Arnold Wesker, Wole Soyinka, and David Cregan as well as Bond who now acknowledges Johnstone as a ‘catalyst who made our experience malleable by ourselves’. As an example, he cites an exercise in blindness which he later incorporated in his play Lear; and one can pile up examples from Arden, Jellicoe, and Wesker of episodes or whole plays deriving from the group’s work. For Cregan, Johnstone ‘knew how to unlock Dionysus’ : which came to the same thing as learning how to unlock himself.
From such examples one can form some idea of the special place that teaching occupied in Devine’s Royal Court; and how, in Johnstone’s case, it was the means by which he liberated himself in the act of liberating others. He now hands over his hard-won bunch of keys to the general reader. This book is the fruit of twenty years’ patient and original work; a wise, practical, and hilariously funny guide to imaginative survival. For anyone of the ‘artist type’ who has shared the author’s experience of seeing his gift apparently curl up and die, it is essential reading.
One of Johnstone’s plays is about an impotent old recluse, the master of a desolate castle, who has had the foresight to stock his deep-freeze with sperm. There is a power-cut and one of the sperm escapes into a goldfish bowl and then into the moat where it grows to giant size and proceeds to a whale of a life on the high seas.
That, in a nut-shell, is the Johnstone doctrine. You are not imaginatively impotent until you are dead; you are only frozen up. Switch off the no-saying intellect and welcome the unconscious as a friend: it will lead you to places you never dreamed of, and produce results more ‘original’ than anything you could achieve by aiming at originality.
Open the book at any of the exercises and you will see how the unconscious delivers the goods. Here are a group of hippopotamuses knitting pullovers from barbed wire, and a patient suffering from woodworm who infects the doctor’s furniture. There are poems transcribed from thin air, masked actors magicked back to childhood, Victorian melodrama played in extempore verse. At the point where rational narrative would come to a stop, Johnstone’s stories carry on cheerfully into the unknown. If a desperate schoolmaster kills himself he will find a plenary session of the school governors awaiting him at the pearly gates. Or if our hero is swallowed by a monster, he will change into a heroic turd and soldier on to fresh adventures.
I have seen none of this material in performance, either by students or by Johnstone’s Theatre Machine company; and one of the book’s achievements is its success in making improvisations re-live on the page. Like all great advocates of the unconscious, Johnstone is a sturdy rationalist. He brings a keen intellect, nourished on anthropology and psychology, to the task of demolishing intellectualism in the theatre. And where no technical vocabulary exists, he develops his own down-to-earth shorthand to give a simple name to the indescribable. In rediscovering the imaginative world of childhood, he has re-examined the structural elements that bind that world together. What is a story? What makes people laugh? What relationships hold an audience’s interest, and why? How does an improviser think up what comes next? Is conflict dramatically necessary? (The answer is No.)
To these and other fundamental questions the book returns unexpected and invariably useful answers. Answers that extend theatre into the transactions of everyday life. One’s first impulse on reading about these actors’ games is to go and try them out on the kids, or to have a go yourself. Like this.
From anthills in the north
I come with wand in hand
to slay all people there
that I could understand.
At last one heap was left
Untamed by all my foes
until I caught the bees
and dealt them mighty blows.
That was a nonstop poem written in fifty seconds flat. It may not be much, but it is more than I have ever got from any other text-book on the imagination. The difference is that Johnstone’s analysis is not concerned with results, but with showing you how to do it; and his work ranks as a pioneer contribution to the exceedingly sparse literature of comic theory from which comic practitioners really have something to learn. It certainly has more to offer than Meredith, Bergson, or Freud, to whom the suicidal hero of Heathcote Williams’s Hancock’s Last Half Hour turns in his time of need; dipping hopefully into Jokes and their Connection with the Unconscious, and then dropping the book with the despairing cry, ‘How would he do second house at the Glasgow Empire?’ If Hancock had picked up this book, there might have been a happy ending.
IRVING WARDLE