As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age—just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.
I’ve since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours. For example, if I have a group of students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, I get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for everything that their eyes light on. Maybe there’s time to shout out ten wrong names before I stop them. Then I ask whether other people look larger or smaller—almost everyone sees people as different sizes, mostly as smaller. ‘Do the outlines look sharper or more blurred?’ I ask, and everyone agrees that the outlines are many times sharper. ‘What about the colours?’ Everyone agrees there’s far more colour, and that the colours are more intense. Often the size and shape of the room will seem to have changed, too. The students are amazed that such a strong transformation can be effected by such primitive means—and especially that the effects last so long. I tell them that they only have to think about the exercise for the effects to appear again.
My own rediscovery of the visionary world took longer. At a time when I seemed to have lost all my talents as a creative artist I was driven to investigate my mental images. I started with the hypnagogic ones—the pictures that appear to many people at the threshold of sleep. They interest me because they didn’t appear in any predictable sequence; I was interested in their spontaneity.
It’s not easy to observe hypnagogic images, because once you see one and think ‘There!’ you wake up a little and the image disappears. You have to attend to the images without verbalising about them, so I learned to ‘hold the mind still’ like a hunter waiting in a forest.
One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of anxiety on the musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?). I was relaxing myself and conjuring up horrific images. I had recalled an eye operation I’d had under local anaesthetic, when suddenly I thought of attending to my mental images just as I had to the hypnagogic ones. The effect was astounding. They had all sorts of detail that I hadn’t known about, and that I certainly hadn’t chosen to be there. The surgeons’ faces were distorted, their masks were thrusting out as if there were snouts beneath them! The effect was so interesting that I persisted. I thought of a house, and attended to the image and saw the doors and windows bricked in, but the chimney still smoking (a symbol for my inhibited state at the time?). I thought of another house and saw a terrifying figure in the doorway. I looked in the windows and saw strange rooms in amazing detail.
When you ask people to think of an image, their eyes often move in a particular direction, often up and to the side. I was placing my mental images upwards and to the right—that’s the space in which I ‘thought’ of them. When I attended to them they moved into the ‘front’ of my mind. Obviously, at some time in my childhood my mental images had frightened me, and I’d displaced them, I’d trained myself not to look at them. When I had an image I knew what was there, so I didn’t need to look at it—that’s how I deluded myself that my creativity was under my own control.
After a lot of practice at attending to the images I conjured up, I belatedly thought of attending to the reality around me. Then the deadness and greyness immediately sloughed off—yet I’d thought I’d never move through a visionary world again, that I’d lost it. In my case it was largely my interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me. 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.1
Contrariness
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. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out—especially in drama, where everything is supposition anyway. When I began teaching, it was very natural for me to reverse everything my own teachers had done. I got my actors to make faces, insult each other, always to leap before they looked, to scream and shout and misbehave in all sorts of ingenious ways. It was like having a whole tradition of improvisation teaching behind me. In a normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.
Cripples
I made a two-minute film for a TV programme. It was all in one shot, no cuts. Everyone who saw it roared with laughter. There were people rolling on the cutting-room floor, holding their sides. Once they’d recovered, they’d say ‘No, no, it’s very funny but we can’t show that!’
The film showed three misshapen but gleeful cripples who were leaping about and hugging each other. The camera panned slightly to reveal that they were hiding around a corner and waiting for a normal person who was approaching. When he drew level, the cripples leaped on him, and bashed him to pulp with long balloons. Then they helped him up, as battered and twisted as they were, and they shook hands with him, and the four of them waited for the next person.
A Psychotic Girl
I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed ‘mad’ when she was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me. I treated her rather as I would a Mask (see Masks, page 143)—that is to say, I was gentle, and I didn’t try to impose my reality on her. One thing that amazed me was her perceptiveness about other people—it was as if she was a body-language expert. She described things about them which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be true, although this was at the beginning of a summer school and none of us had ever met before.
I’m remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few minutes, so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would look after her. We were in a beautiful garden (where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower and said: ‘Look at the pretty flower, Betty.’
Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, ‘All the flowers are beautiful.’
‘Ah,’ said the teacher, blocking her, ‘but this flower is especially beautiful.’
Betty rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her. Nobody seemed to notice that she was screaming ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see!’
In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent. She was insisting on categorising, and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers, but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort the perceptions of the child in this way. Since then I’ve noticed such behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to it.
‘Education’ as a Substance
People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his students on the floor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the concrete.)
Growing Up
As I grew up I began to feel uncomfortable. I had to use conscious effort to ‘stand up straight’. I thought that adults were superior to children, and that the problems that worried me would gradually correct themselves. It was very upsetting to realise that if I was going to change for the better then I’d have to do it myself.
I found I had some severe speech defects, worse than other people’s (I was eventually treated at a speech hospital). I began to understand that there really was something wrong with my body, I began to see myself as crippled in the use of myself (just as a great violinist would play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad). My breathing was inhibited, my voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my imagination—it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas. How could this have happened when the state had spent so much money educating me?
Other people seemed to have no insight into my problems. All my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner. I wanted to stand like Gary Cooper, and to be confident, and to know how to send the soup back when it was cold without making the waiter feel obliged to spit in it. I’d left school with worse posture, and a worse voice, with worse movement and far less spontaneity than when I’d entered it. Could teaching have had a negative effect?
Emotion
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 have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled. I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.
(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film they’re watching, and crossing their arms tightly, and tilting their heads back. Such postures help them to feel less ‘involved’, less ‘subjective’. The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)
Intelligence
I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my intelligence was the most important part of me. I tried to be clever in everything I did. The damage was greatest in areas where my interests and the school’s seemed to coincide : in writing, for example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency). I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect. In the end I was reluctant to attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed good enough. Everything had to be corrected and brought into line.
The spell broke when I was in my early twenties. I saw a performance of Dovzhenko’s Earth, a film which is a closed book for many people, but which threw me into a state of exaltation and confusion. There is a sequence in which the hero, Vassily, walks alone in the twilight. We know he’s in danger, and we have just seen him comforting his wife, who rolled her eyes like a frightened animal. There are shots of mist moving eerily on water, and silent horses stretching their necks, and corn-stooks against the dusky sky. Then, amazingly, peasants lying side by side, the men with their hands inside the women’s blouses and motionless, with idiotic smiles on their faces as they stare at the twilight. Vassily, dressed in black, walks through the Chagall village, and the dust curls up in little clouds around his feet and he is dark against the moonlit road, and he is filled with the same ecstasy as the peasants. He walks and walks and the film cuts and cuts until he walks out of frame. Then the camera moves back, and we see him stop. The fact that he walks for so long, and that the image is so beautiful, linked up with my own experience of being alone in the twilight—the gap between the worlds. Then Vassily walks again, but after a short time he begins to dance, and the dance is skilled, and like an act of thanksgiving. The dust swirls around his feet, so that he’s like an Indian god, like Siva—and with the man dancing alone in the clouds of dust something unlocked in me. In one moment I knew that the valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who dances might be superior to myself—word-bound and unable to dance. 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.
Anthony Stirling
I felt crippled, and ‘unfit’ for life, so I decided to become a teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my work stemmed from his example. It wasn’t so much what he taught, as what he did. For the first time in my life I was in the hands of a great teacher.
I’ll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and completely disorientating.
He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn’t like, but which I thought I understood—‘He’s letting us know what it feels like to be on the receiving end,’ I thought.
He made us mix up a thick ‘jammy’ black paint and asked us to imagine a clown on a one wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to our sheets of paper. ‘Don’t paint the clown,’ he said, ‘paint the mark he leaves on your paper!’
I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I’d always been ‘good at art’, and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student. This exercise annoyed me because how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown, but who cared about the tyre-marks?
‘He cycles on and off your paper,’ said Stirling, ‘and he does all sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very interesting …’
Everyone’s paper was covered with a mess of black lines—except mine, since I’d tried to be original by mixing up a blue. Stirling was scathing about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated me.
Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had made.
‘What kind of colours?’
‘Any colours.’
‘Yeah … but … er … we don’t know what colours to choose.’ ‘Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you like.’
We decided to humour him. When my paper was coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the outlines black.
‘Johnstone’s found the value of a strong outline,’ said Stirling, which really annoyed me. I could see that everyone’s paper was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody else’s—but no better.
‘Put patterns on all the colours,’ said Stirling. The man seemed to be an idiot. Was he teasing us?
‘What sort of patterns?’
‘Any patterns.’
We couldn’t seem to start. There were about ten of us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this madman.
‘We don’t know what to do.’
‘Surely it’s easy to think of patterns.’
We wanted to get it right. ‘What sort of patterns do you want?’
‘It’s up to you.’ He had to explain patiently to us that it really was our choice. I remember him asking us to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which it didn’t. Somehow we finished the exercises, and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor, and it was the same exercise done by other students. The colours were so beautiful, and the patterns were so inventive—clearly they had been done by some advanced class. ‘What a great idea,’ I thought, ‘making us screw up in this way, and then letting us realise that there was something that we could learn, since the advanced students were so much better!’ Maybe I exaggerate when I remember how beautiful the paintings were, but I was seeing them immediately after my failure. Then I noticed that these little masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘these are by young children!’ They were all by eight-year-olds! It was just an exercise to encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they’d done it with such love and taste and care and sensitivity. I was speechless. Something happened to me in that moment from which I have never recovered. It was the final confirmation that my education had been a destructive process.
Stirling believed that the art was ‘in’ the child, and that it wasn’t something to be imposed by an adult. The teacher was not superior to the child, and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: ‘This is good, this is bad …’
‘But supposing a child wants to learn how to draw a tree?’
‘Send him out to look at one. Let him climb one. Let him touch it.’
‘But if he still can’t draw one?’
‘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. Stirling recommended that we read the Tao te Ching. It seems to me now that he was practically using it as his teaching manual. Here are some extracts: ‘… The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words …. When his task is accomplished and his work done the people all say, “It happened to us naturally” …. I take no action and the people are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of themselves. I am free from desire and the people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block … One who excels in employing others humbles himself before them. This is known as the virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of others …. To know yet to think that one does not know is best. … The sage does not hoard. Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer still. The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.’ (Translated by C. D. Lau, Penguin, 1969.)
Being a Teacher
I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new teachers avoided—but I’d been a postman there, and I loved the place.
My new colleagues bewildered me. ‘Never tell people you’re a teacher!’ they said. ‘If they find you’re a teacher in the pub, they’ll all move away!’ It was true! I’d believed that teachers were respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or hated. I liked my colleagues, but they had a colonist’s attitude to the children; they referred to them as ‘poor stock’, and they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive. If a child is creative he’s likely to be more difficult to control, but that isn’t a reason for disliking him. My colleagues had a poor view of themselves : again and again I heard them say, ‘Man among boys; boy among men’ when describing their condition. I came to see that their unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a feeling that they were irrelevant, or rather that the school was something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if you could educate one of these children you’d remove him away from his parents (which is what my education had done for me). Educated people were snobs, and many parents didn’t want their children alienated from them.
Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted. Mine was a mix of twenty-six ‘average’ eight-year-olds, and twenty ‘backward’ ten-year-olds whom the school had written off as ineducable. Some of the ten-year-olds couldn’t write their names after five years of schooling. I’m sure Professor Skinner could teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I couldn’t believe that these children were really dull: it was more likely that they were putting up a resistance. One astounding thing was the way cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look intelligent when they weren’t being asked to learn. When they were cleaning out the fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence, they looked numb and defeated.
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 exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven, winning all the prizes (which embarrassed me, since I thought they should be given to the dull children as compensation) and being teacher’s pet, and so on. Then, spectacularly, I’d suddenly come bottom of the class—‘down among the dregs’, as my headmaster described it. He never forgave me. I was puzzled too, but gradually I realised that I wouldn’t work for people I didn’t like. Over the years my work gradually improved, but I never fulfilled my promise. When I liked a particular teacher and won a prize, the head would say: ‘Johnstone is taking this prize away from the boys who deserve it!’ If you’ve been bottom of the class for years it gives you a different perspective : I was friends with boys who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as ‘useless’ or ‘ineducable’. My ‘failure’ was a survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my way out of the trap that my education had set for me. I would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from me than now.
I was determined that my classes shouldn’t be dull, so I used to jump about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up—which is exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims. However idealistic he is, he tends to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline. My problem was to resist the pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher. I had to establish a quite different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity that was so apparent in the children when they weren’t thinking of themselves as ‘being educated’.
I didn’t see why Stirling’s ideas shouldn’t apply to all areas, and in particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on, but the results were nil. One day I took my typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I’d type out anything they wanted to write about the pictures. As an afterthought, I said I’d also type out their dreams—and suddenly they were actually wanting to write. I typed out everything exactly as they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me. Typing out spelling mistakes was a weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)—but it worked. The pressure to get things right was coming from the children, not the teacher. I was amazed at the intensity of feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to be correct because no one would have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates were getting their friends to spell out every word for them. I scrapped the time-table, and for a month they wrote for hours every day. I had to force them out of the classroom to take breaks. When I hear that children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I’m amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span of bored children, which is what they usually are in school—hence the misbehaviour.
I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children wrote. I’d never seen any examples of children’s writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!). By far the best work came from the ‘ineducable’ ten-year-olds. At the end of my first year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation. He’d found my class doing arithmetic with masks over their faces—they’d made them in art class and I didn’t see why they shouldn’t wear them. There was a cardboard tunnel he was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk around. I’d stuck all the art paper together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored he’d leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning forest.
My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher : ‘You’re not the right type,’ he said, ‘not the right type at all.’ Now it looked as if I was going to be rejected officially. Fortunately the school was inspected, and Her Majesty’s Inspector thought that my class were doing the most interesting work. I remember one incident that struck him as amazing : the children screaming out that there were only three chickens drawn on the blackboard, while I was insisting that there were five (two were still inside the hen-house). Then the children started scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard. I shouldn’t think half of them had ever seen a chicken, but it delighted the Inspector. ‘You realise that they’re trying to throw me out,’ I said, and he fixed it so that I wasn’t bothered again.
Stirling’s ‘non-interference’ worked in every area where I applied it: piano teaching for example. I worked with Marc Wilkinson, the composer (he became director of music at the National Theatre), and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my typewriter had. He soon had a collection of tapes as surprising as the children’s poems had been. I assembled a group of children by asking each teacher for the children he couldn’t stand; and although everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be very talented, and they learned with amazing speed. After twenty minutes a boy hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, ‘It’s the Japanese soldiers from the film on Saturday!’ Which it was. We invented many games—like one child making sounds for water and another putting the ‘fish’ in it. Sometimes we got them to feel objects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so that the others could guess. Other teachers were amazed by the enthusiasm and talent shown by these ‘dull’ children.
The Royal Court Theatre
In 1956 the Royal Court Theatre was commissioning plays from established novelists (Nigel Dennis, Angus Wilson), and Lindsay Anderson suggested that they should stop playing safe and commission an unknown—me.
I’d had very bad experiences in the theatre, but there was one play I’d liked : Beckett’s Waiting for Godot which seemed entirely lucid and pertinent to my own problems. I was trying to be a painter at the time, and my artist friends all agreed that Beckett must be a very young man, one of our contemporaries, since he understood our feelings so well. Because I didn’t like the theatre—it seemed so much feebler than, say, the films of Kurosawa, or Keaton—I didn’t at first accept the Royal Court’s commission; but then I ran out of money, so I wrote a play strongly influenced by Beckett (who once wrote to me, saying that ‘a stage is an area of maximum verbal presence, and maximum corporeal presence’—the word ‘corporeal’ really delighting me).
My play was called Brixham Regatta, and I remember Devine thumbing through the notices and saying that it was sex that had been intolerable to the Victorians, and that ‘whatever it is now, Keith is writing about it’. I was amazed that most critics were so hostile. I’d been illustrating a theme of Blake’s : ‘Alas! The time will come when a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family …’ But in 1958 such a view was unacceptable. Ten years later, when I directed the play at the Mermaid, it didn’t seem at all shocking: its ideas had become commonplace.
I’ve been often told how weird and silent I seemed to many people, but Devine was amused by my ideas (many of which came from Stirling). 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. I objected to the idea that the director should work out the moves before the production started. I said that if an actor forgot a move that had been decided on, then the move was probably wrong. Later I argued that moves weren’t important, that with only a couple of actors on a stage, why did it matter where they moved anyway? I explained that Hamlet in Russian can be just as impressive, so were the words really of first importance? I said that the set was no more important than the apparatus in the circus. I wasn’t saying much that was new, but I didn’t know that, and certainly such thoughts weren’t fashionable at the time. I remember Devine going round the theatre chuckling that ‘Keith thinks King Lear should have a happy ending!’
They were surprised that someone so inexperienced as myself should have become their best play-reader. Tony Richardson, then Devine’s Associate Director, once thanked me because I was taking such a load off them. I was successful precisely because I didn’t exercise my taste. I would first read plays as quickly as possible, and categorise them as pseudo-Pinter, fake-Osborne, phoney-Beckett, and so on. Any play that seemed to come from the author’s own experience I’d then read attentively, and either leave it in Devine’s office or, if I didn’t like it, give it to someone else to read. 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 gradation 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. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life. My play had been influenced by Beckett, but at least the content had been mine.
Sometimes I’d read a play I liked, but that no one else would think worth directing. Devine said that if I was really convinced they were good I should direct them myself on a Sunday night. I directed Edward Bond’s first play in this way, but the very first play I directed was Kon Fraser’s Eleven Plus (which I still have a fondness for, although it hasn’t prospered much). I was given advice by Ann Jellicoe—already an accomplished director—and I was successful. It really seemed that even if I couldn’t write any more—and writing had become extremely laborious and unpleasant for me—at least I could earn a living as a director. Obviously, I felt I ought to study my craft, but the more I understood how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were. Then as now, when I’m inspired, everything is fine, but when I try to get things right it’s a disaster. In a way I was successful—I ended up as an Associate Director of the theatre —but once again my talent had left me.
When I considered the difference between myself, and other people, I thought of myself as a late developer. Most people lose their talent at puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties. I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children. But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry.
Writers’ Group
George Devine had announced that the Royal Court was to be a ‘writers’ theatre’, but the writers weren’t having much say in the policies of the theatre. George thought a discussion group would correct this, and he chaired three meetings, which were so tedious that he handed the job over to William Gaskill, one of his young directors. Bill had directed my play Brixham Regatta, and he asked me how I would run the group. I said that if it continued as a talking-shop, then everyone would abandon it, and that we should agree to discuss nothing that could be acted out. Bill agreed, and the group immediately began to function as an improvisation group. We learned that things invented on the spur of the moment could be as good or better than the texts we laboured over. We developed very practical attitudes to the theatre. As Edward Bond said, ‘The writers’ group taught me that drama was about relationships, not about characters.’ I’ve since found that my no-discussion idea wasn’t original. Carl Weber, writing about Brecht, says: ‘… the actors would suggest a way of doing something, and if they started to explain, Brecht would say he wanted no discussion in rehearsal—it would have to be tried ….’ (A pity all Brechtians don’t have the master’s attitude.)
My bias against discussion is something I’ve learned to see as very English. I’ve known political theatre groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a discussion. My feeling is that the best argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter, rather than to the excellence of the solution advocated. Also the bulk of discussion time is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like Edison’s, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were approaching the problem theoretically.
The Royal Court Theatre Studio
Devine had been a student of Michel Saint-Denis, who was a nephew of the great director Jacques Copeau. Copeau had been an advocate of studio work, and George also wanted a studio. He started it with hardly any budget, and as I was on the staff, and full of theories, he asked me if I would teach there. Actually William Gaskill was the director, and they agreed that I should teach there. I’d been advocating setting a studio up so I could hardly refuse; but I was embarrassed, and worried. I didn’t know anything about training actors, and I was sure that the professionals—many from the Royal Shakespeare, and some who shortly afterwards went into the National Theatre Company—would know far more than I did. I decided to give classes in ‘Narrative Skills’ (see page 109), hoping I’d be one jump ahead in this area. Because of my dislike of discussion I insisted that everything should be acted out—as at the Writers’ Group—and the work became very funny. It was also very different, because I was consciously reacting against Stanislavsky. I thought, wrongly, that Stanislavsky’s methods implied a naturalistic theatre—which it doesn’t, as you can see from the qualifications he introduces as to what sorts of objectives are permissible, and so on. I thought his insistence on the ‘given circumstances’ was seriously limiting, and I didn’t like the ‘who, what, where’ approach which my actors urged on me, and which I suppose was American in origin (it’s described, in Viola Spolin’s Improvisation for the Theatre, Northwestern University Press, 1963; fortunately I didn’t know about this book until 1966, when a member of an audience lent it to me). Lacking solutions, I had to find my own. What I did was to concentrate on relationships between strangers, and on ways of combining the imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than subtractive. I developed status transactions, and word-at-a-time games, and almost all of the work described in this book. I hope this still seems fresh to some people, but actually it dates back to the early sixties and late fifties.
My classes were hysterically funny, but I remembered Stirling’s contempt for artists who form ‘self-admiration groups’ and wondered if we were deluding ourselves. Could the work really be so funny? Wasn’t it just that we all knew each other? Even considering the fact that I had some very talented and experienced actors, weren’t we just entertaining each other? Was it right that every class should be like a party?
I decided we’d have to perform in front of real audiences, and see if we were funny. I took about sixteen actors along to my contemporary theatre class at Morley College, and said we’d like to demonstrate some of the exercises we were developing. I’d thought that I’d be the nervous one, but the actors huddled in the corner and looked terrified. Once I started giving the exercises, they relaxed; and to our amazement we found that when the work was good, the audience laughed far more than we would have done! It wasn’t so easy to do work of a high standard in public, but we were delighted at the enthusiasm of the spectators. I wrote to six London colleges and offered them free demonstration classes, and afterwards we received many invitations to perform elsewhere. I cut the number of performers down to four or five and, with strong support from the Ministry of Education, we started touring around schools and colleges. There, we often found ourselves on a stage, and we automatically drifted into giving shows rather than demonstrations. We called ourselves ‘The Theatre Machine’, and the British Council sent us around Europe. Soon we were a very influential group, and the only pure improvisation group I knew, in that we prepared nothing, and everything was like a jazzed-up drama class.
It’s weird to wake up knowing you’ll be onstage in twelve hours, and that there’s absolutely nothing you can do to ensure success. All day you can feel some part of your mind gathering power, and with luck there’ll be no interruption to the flow, actors and audience will completely understand each other, and the high feeling lasts for days. At other times you feel a coldness in everyone’s eyes, and deserts of time seem to lie ahead of you. The actors don’t seem to be able to see or hear properly any more—they feel so wretched that scene after scene is about vomiting. Even if the audience are pleased by the novelty, you feel you’re swindling them. After a while a pattern is established in which each performance gets better and better until the audience is like a great beast rolling over to let you tickle it. Then hubris gets you, you lose your humility, you expect to be loved, and you turn into Sisyphus. All comedians know these feelings.
As I came to understand the techniques that release creativity in the improviser, so I began to apply them to my own work. What really got me started again was an advert for a play of mine in the paper, a play called The Martian. I had never written such a play, so I phoned up Bryan King, who directed the theatre. ‘We’ve been trying to find you,’ he said. ‘We need a play for next week, does the title The Martian suit you?’ I wrote the play, and it was well received. Since then I’ve deliberately put myself in this position. I get myself engaged by a company and write the plays as I’m rehearsing the actors. For example, in eight weeks I did two street theatre plays lasting twenty minutes, plus a three-hour improvised play called Der Fisch, plus a children’s play lasting an hour—this was for Salvatore Poddine’s Tubingen theatre. I don’t see that the plays created in this way are inferior to those I struggle over, sometimes for years.
I didn’t learn how to direct again until I left the Royal Court Theatre and was invited to Victoria (on Vancouver Island). I directed the Wakefield Mystery Cycle there, and I was so far away from anyone whose criticism I cared about that I felt free to do exactly what I felt like. Suddenly I was spontaneous again; and since then, I’ve always directed plays as if I was totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions possible.
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.
Getting the Right Relationship
If you want to apply the methods I’m describing in this book, you may have to teach the way that I teach. 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.
There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members, and that it’s more powerful than the individuals in it. A great group can propel its members forward so that they achieve amazing things. Many teachers don’t seem to think that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all. If they’re working with a destructive, bored group, they just blame the students for being ‘dull’, or uninterested. It’s essential for the teacher to blame himself if the group aren’t in a good state.
Normal schooling is intensely competitive, and the students are supposed to try and outdo each other. If I explain to a group that they’re to work for the other members, that each individual is to be interested in the progress of the other members, they’re amazed, yet obviously if a group supports its own members strongly, it’ll be a better group to work in.
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. At this point they almost certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don’t want to be higher than me. I have already changed the group profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more. 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 be trying to win any more. The normal teacher–student relationship is dissolved.
When I was teaching young children, I trained myself to share my eye contacts out among the group. I find this crucial in establishing a ‘fair’ relationship with them. I’ve seen many teachers who concentrate their eye contacts on only a few students, and this does affect the feeling in a group. Certain students are disciples, but others feel separated, or experience themselves as less interesting, or as ‘failures’.
I’ve also trained myself to make positive comments, and to be as direct as possible. I say ‘Good’ instead of ‘That’s enough’. I’ve actually heard teachers say ‘Well, let’s see who fails at this one’, when introducing an exercise. Some teachers get reassurance when their students fail. We must have all encountered the teacher who gives a self-satisfied smile when a student makes a mistake. Such an attitude is not conducive to a good, warm feeling in the group.
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. At the same time that the image was presented, the patient was relaxed, and the relaxation was maintained (if it wasn’t maintained, if the patient started to tremble, or sweat or whatever, then something even less alarming would be presented). Relaxation is incompatible with anxiety; and by maintaining the relaxed state, and presenting images that gradually neared the centre of the phobia, the state of alarm was soon dissipated—in most cases. Wolpe taught his patients to relax, but soon other psychologists were using pentothal to assist the relaxation. However, there has to be an intention to relax (muscle-relaxant drugs can be used as a torture!).
If we were all terrified of open spaces, then we would hardly recognise this as a phobia to be cured; but it could be cured. My view is that we have a universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds very well to ‘progressive desensitisation’ of the type that Wolpe advocates. Many teachers seem to me to be trying to get their students to conceal fear, which always leaves some traces—a heaviness, an extra tension, a lack of spontaneity. I try to dissipate the fear by a method analogous to Wolpe’s, but which I really got from Anthony Stirling. The one finding of Wolpe which I immediately incorporated into my work was the discovery that if the healing process is interrupted by a recurrence of the total fear—maybe a patient being treated for a phobia of birds suddenly finds himself surrounded by fluttering pigeons—then the treatment has to be started again at the bottom of the hierarchy. I therefore constantly return to the very first stages of the work to try to pull in those students who remain in a terrified state, and who therefore make hardly any progress. 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. If you screw your face up and bite on your pencil to show you’re ‘trying’, the teacher may write out the answer for you. (In my school, if you sat relaxed and thought, you were likely to get swiped on the back of the head.) 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. University students may roll about in hysterical laughter. I take it that the relief comes from understanding that other people use the same manoeuvres as they do.
For example, many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in a rather feeble way. It’s as if they’re ill, and lacking in vitality. They’ve learned to play for sympathy. However easy the problem, they’ll use the same old trick of looking inadequate. This ploy is supposed to make the onlookers have sympathy with them if they ‘fail’ and it’s expected to bring greater rewards if they ‘win’. Actually this down-in-the-mouth attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them. No one has sympathy with an adult who takes such an attitude, but when they were 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.
Another common ploy is to anticipate the problem, and to try and prepare solutions in advance. (Almost all students do this—probably it started when they were learning to read. You anticipate which paragraph will be yours, and start trying to decipher it. This has two great disadvantages : it stops you learning from the attempts of your classmates; and very likely you’ll have calculated wrongly, and will be asked to read one of the adjacent paragraphs throwing you into total panic.)
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 also explain strategies like sitting on the end of the row, and how it isolates you from the group, and body positions that prevent absorption (like the ‘lit-crit’ postures which keep the user ‘detached’ and ‘objective’).
In exchange for accepting the blame for failure, I ask the students to set themselves up in such a way that they’ll learn as quickly as possible. 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.
If I’m playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain. A very gentle smack that he perceives as ‘serious’ will have him howling in agony. A hard ‘play’ slap may make him laugh. When I want to work and he wants me to continue playing he will give very strong ‘I am playing’ signals in an attempt to pull me back into his game. All people relate to each other in this way but most teachers are afraid to give ‘I am playing’ signals to their students. If they would, their work would become a constant pleasure.
NOTE
1. If you have trouble understanding this section, it may be because you’re a conceptualiser, rather than a visualiser. William Grey Walter, in The Living Brain (Penguin, 1963) calculated that one in six of us are conceptualisers (actually in my view there is a far smaller proportion of conceptualisers among drama students).
I have a simple way of telling if people are visualisers. I ask them to describe the furniture in a room they’re familiar with. Visualisers move their eyes as if ‘seeing’ each object as they name it. Conceptualisers look in one direction as if reading off a list.
Galton investigated mental imagery at the beginning of the century, and found that the more educated the person, the more likely he was to say that mental imagery was unimportant, or even that it didn’t exist.
An exercise: fix your eyes on some object, and attend to something at the periphery of your vision. You can see what you’re attending to, but actually your mind is assembling the object from relatively little information. Now look directly, and observe the difference. This is one way of tricking the mind out of its habitual dulling of the world.