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Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 The Royal Court’s International Department: Transformative Processes,
Impacts & Legacies
An interim report funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council
(Translating Cultures) August 2012
Elaine Aston and Mark O’Thomas
This report is an outcome of the AHRC-funded Project, 'Creating Cultural Exchange and
Change', conceived in response to the 'Translating Cultures' developmental call and focused
on the work of the International Department of the Royal Court Theatre, England’s premier
venue for new playwriting. Our Project aim was to enquire after and report on the process
that underpins the Court’s commitment to supporting and developing playwriting
internationally, looking to the challenges and risks this entails as well as the transformative
possibilities, impacts and legacies that might arise for those involved in this method of
cultural and creative exchange. Our findings draw on international meetings held in Brazil,
Chile and Morocco (June-July 20012), and on a ‘Translating Cultures’ seminar hosted at the
Royal Court (June 2012)
Report Contents
1.The Royal Court International Department in Context
2. Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council
3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries
4. The Role of the Translator
5. Guiding Principles & the Creative Process
6. The Challenge of Form
7. Impact on British Writers, Critics and Audiences
8. International Legacies
2 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 1.The Royal Court International Department in Context
To contextualise: The Royal Court established its International Department in 1996,
appointing Elyse Dodgson as Director. However, those involved in the theatre date its
international vision back to 1956: to the arrival of the English Stage Company into the Sloane
Square premises (London) that the Court continues to occupy today. Back in the mid-1950’s,
Artistic Director George Devine’s mission was for a subsidised theatre as an alternative to the
commercial mainstream, one primarily committed to developing new drama. His vision was
both national and international: of wanting to nurture and develop a new generation of
English dramatists and also to pursue a line of European work. In other words, for Devine
international was rather narrowly conceived as Western Europe, with Beckett and Brecht as
seminal attractions and major influences. By the late eighties, the moment when the Royal
Court began running the first of its international workshops, initially as an income generator
for the theatre, its international horizon extended beyond Europe, although even so writers
came mainly from the English-speaking continents of Australia and North America. As
Dodgson, explains, international ‘meant the United States because at that time we were not
more adventurous than that’.1
It was only with the appointment of Stephen Daldry as the new Artistic Director in the
early nineties that the full potential of operating in the international realm was realised and
Dodgson was given the green light to develop the work and go global. Daldry was
determined on shifting international work to ‘the heart of the theatre’. This he claims is
‘because there is an energy there that generates new work around the world’.2 Staging an
increasing number of international works he sought to capitalise on that ‘energy’ by formally
establishing the theatre’s International Department’ in 1996, positing in retrospect ‘the
international policy [as] the greatest single achievement of the Royal Court [from the mid1990s to the mid-2000s], as much as getting all the young playwrights to write plays’.3 Ian
Rickson, Daldry’s successor in 1998, and Dominic Cooke, who followed Rickson in 2007,
both kept faith with the ‘international policy’ that Daldry had reinvigorated and revitalised.
For Rickson, the historical resonances and legacies of Devine’s ‘mission’ were those he
deemed important to a contemporary vision of a theatre invested in cultural values that
‘embrace risk and are international’.4 And Cooke, who, prior to his directorship at the Court
had worked in collaboration with Dodgson, began his term of office with the view that he
would make ‘more airspace for [international] work to land on [the Court’s] stage’.5
These three successive directorial regimes at the Court have, albeit under different
theatre conditions (such as changing personnel, refurbishment programmes, or funding
changes), consolidated and more thoroughly realised the aspiration to be a truly international
theatre. At the same time this move on the part of the theatre to internationalise needs to be
set against the larger picture of globalization. As Patrick Lonergan argues in his lucid and
insightful account of Theatre and Globalization, ‘[i]t is generally agreed ... that the current
period of economic globalization began with the collapse of communism in Europe in the
early 1990s’.6 Lonergan wrestles critically with the definitions or more precisely lack of a
clear definition of globalization and with its principle discourses of global capitalism, social
criticism, the nation state, global culture and ecology.7 Resisting the impulse to dismiss
globalization in reductive terms as quite simply a ‘bad thing’, instead he urges critical (in
both senses) considerations of how ‘dramatists producers, audiences and performers can
choose to act’ within this phenomenon seen as ‘a process to which we contribute’.8
How the Court ‘choose[s] to act’ as it goes global is a crucial matter: how its cultural
capital as England’s major new writing venue, as the writers’ theatre of a British theatrical
paradigm that privileges the playwright over the director, writing over performance, becomes
3 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 a brand export. As Lonergan observes, global branding ‘involves a relocation of power from
a physical to a conceptual space, or a deterritorialization of power’.9 In the Court’s case, its
new-writing ‘brand’ is no longer limited to its physical premises in Sloane Square, but goes
global through its international theatre networking.10 A major risk here, however, is what we
might term a reterritorialization of power, a symbolic claiming of new writing territories in
the theatre’s own imperialist image, as it were. In order to minimalise this kind of risk, much
depends on approach and process, which in turn have a bearing on the transformative impact
and legacies for theatre cultures, locally and globally.
2.Finding Partners: the Role of the British Council
At the outset of our AHRC project, we sought to enhance our understanding of what the
Royal Court does when it wants to work in another country, with artists of that country, to
develop their work further. How are partners and projects identified? While we gained
insights into how various links have been established through informal and formal networks
over extended periods of time, overall, it became clear to us that the British Council has a key
role to play in terms of the Royal Court’s ability to form meaningful partnerships with theatre
practitioners in new territories. The theatre’s relationship with the British Council, along
with support from the Genesis Foundation,11 emerged as central to the development (and
funding) of the theatre’s international initiatives.
On reflection, this is not surprising given how the Court’s international ‘mission’ readily
dovetails with that of the Council’s commitment ‘to build mutually beneficial relationships
between people in the UK and other countries and to increase appreciation of the UK’s
creative ideas and achievements’.12 In helping foster these relations the British Council
intends to promote the ‘engagement and trust between people of different cultures through
the exchange of knowledge and ideas’.13 Mirroring the idea of cultural understanding arrived
at through ‘the exchange of knowledge and ideas’ is the Court’s process and practice of
nurturing, developing and exchanging cultures of playwriting.
3. Residencies, the Developmental Workshop and Growing Creative Industries
Working often with the support of the British Council, Dodgson is positioned to identify
potential partner countries and projects. Alongside of the international sourcing of projects,
however, the Court also hosts annual, four-week ‘International Residencies’ at the theatre’s
Sloane Square, London base. The residential programme for international playwrights dates
back to the summer of 1993, when the Court hosted its first truly international residency with
writers and directors coming from twelve different countries. By 2003, the scope of the
residency became restricted to just writers and while its form has continued to evolve over
the past fifteen years, it remains a kind of summer training camp for new writers from around
the world to explore their own work in translation with and in response to a range of British
theatre practitioners.
The residences take the form of a developmental, workshopping process. The idea of
workshopping as a means to both initiating and developing plays for the stage has now
become the standard practice of new-writing theatres across the UK. While established
playwrights tend to work via commission and are generally entrusted to deliver a play in a
performable condition subject to minor rewrites, first-time or novice writers are unlikely to
see a play produced unless it has undergone a development process in conjunction with a new
writing venue such as The Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre, or indeed The Royal Court Theatre
itself. The emergence of this model is one that has mirrored the notion of ‘development’
within the screenwriting realm, too, and clearly situates the writing process within an industry
4 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 that seeks to benefit from an early investment in talent that might grow into something of real
aesthetic and financial value.
4. The Role of the Translator
Unlike other major theatres such the National Theatre in London, or The Traverse, in
Edinburgh, Scotland, the Court does not commission English versions of a writer’s play.
Instead, writers work in their own language and translators work closely with them on drafts.
In sum, the Court’s policy and practice aims to be as inclusive as possible (Dodgson has
famously declared ‘we don’t go shopping, we cook’),14 while its approach to translation is
one that fosters close, dialogic exchanges between writers and translators.
The role of the translator in this process was seminal to the ‘Translating Cultures’
AHRC seminar event hosted at the Royal Court Theatre in June 2012. This event attracted an
audience of translators from a range of different languages, curious to discover more about
the Royal Court’s work in drama translation and its specific methodology and approach to the
translating of cultures for the stage. As an event it revealed how HEIs can successfully bridge
a gap between a cultural institution (the theatre) and translation practice (the translators),
while our project partner the Royal Court Theatre highlighted the benefit of this event for its
own external engagement with translators and entering into a discourse into translation
practice which is all too often an assumed and unproblematcial given. The event thus
enabled the Court to develop new links to theatre translators in ways that would otherwise
have been impossible. The brokering of these new relationships demonstrates the critical role
universities can have in providing a forum for collaborations which may endure way beyond
the scope of the project itself.
5. Guiding Principles & the Creative Process
Dodgson adopts Court Director Dominic Cooke’s two primary questions for new writing –
‘Who are we now?’ and ‘What is a play?’ – as guiding principles for the international work.15
She elaborates ‘[w]e look for work that is original, hard-hitting, provocative and
contemporary, but we never talk about its form - that's up to the individual writers. We
positively discourage history plays or adaptations or writers who mimic British work’.16
‘Hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary’ is a mantra that readily characterises the kind
of new playwriting the Court endorses, irrespective of whether it belongs to a national or
international repertoire. To look back over the theatre’s new playwriting history – and we use
‘look back’ deliberately here to gesture to the historical moment of Osborne’s ‘look back in
anger’ in 1956 – is to see the theatre’s long-standing commitment to plays addressing sociopolitical questions of who we are, if not plays that allow for the possibility of imagining who
we are in more socially progressive ways and contemporary worlds. And extending the
invitation to be ‘hard-hitting, provocative and contemporary’ to international writers, appears
similarly to ask for drama that treats and reflects the contemporary social realities of other
nations.
More specifically, how this is addressed in the international workshops is by inviting the
international participants to work with British playwrights and to begin by thinking about
what issues are directly affecting them; what as writers do they feel it is important to address.
Where Dodgson often starts with an exercise that invites writers to think of the ‘big issues’, a
follow through exercise might be to relate those big issues to personal stories, thereby writing
towards the ‘particular’ rather than the ‘universal abstract’.
British playwrights Mike Bartlett and April de Angelis, key speakers at the ‘Translating
Cultures’ seminar and regular contributors to the international workshops, described their
5 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 role as that of facilitator: of assisting an international writer to ‘get their story out’ and
helping them to craft it. Inevitably, no one workshop will ever be the same, Bartlett observed,
but what links them is the deceptively simple invitation to write a play. Summing up the
workshop process, Bartlett drew attention to the emphasis placed on the value of the writer
(noting that this is especially significant in theatre cultures and geographies where the
playwright and new writing is virtually non-existent or devalued); to the space for opening up
conversations with the writers; for offering craft-based techniques; for understanding the
writer’s vision of what theatre could be, what they would like it to be or to do (rather than the
writers having a vision imposed on their work).
As a process it can and does throw up particular challenges. Bartlett recalled his firsttime international experience of facilitating a workshop in Palestine where the invitation to
draw on immediate, personal experience was far too painful as a writing task. Equally, at the
outset of a project, there can be a suspicion on the part of the writers that they might be
required to write for a global, international gaze that ‘others’: one that represents the ‘strange
other’ in clichéd, stereotypical ways. In the Court’s major project in the Middle East
involving seven countries, for example, there was an initial anxiety expressed by the
playwrights that they might be expected to ‘write about terrorism’.17
6. The Challenge of Form
The matter of form arguably represents more of a challenge than content, despite the Court’s
desire to be open to the question of ‘what is a play’. This is not least because of the way in
which the theatre’s evident interest in experimental and radically innovative styles of work,
collides with the long shadow of social-realism cast by Osborne and successive generations
of ‘angries’. That shadow has had the effect of fostering an idea of the Royal Court play and
the likes of Caryl Churchill or Martin Crimp notwithstanding, stylistically experimental
works have, as eighties Director Max Stafford-Clark explains, been subsumed by the way the
theatre has ‘tended towards naturalism’.18 And this can occasion international criticism of
the theatre. For example, Dodgson, in her contributions to the AHRC seminar, explained how
setting up a project in Cuba met with initial resistance from participants committed to the
idea of a postdramatic culture that rightly or wrongly they perceived the Court as antithetical
to.
7. Impact on British Writers, Critics and Audiences
Among those British playwrights involved in the Royal Court international workshops and
play development there appears to be a widely held consensus that this also affords them the
‘privilege’, as de Angelis put it, of getting to know and learning about another country’s
culture, politics and history from the perspectives of the writers involved. As Bartlett also
elaborated, as a British writer/workshop facilitator, he felt encouraged to look back at his
own country and to sharpen his own thoughts about the idea of what theatre, a play, is or
could be.
Hence, this signals the Court’s creative process as not a one-way but potentially a twoway process of cultural exchange. At this interim stage, we are uncovering plenty of evidence
that attests to how many dramatists, including, for example, Michael Wynne, Mike Bartlett,
April de Angelis, Mark Ravenhill and David Greig, find their own writing opened up through
their participation in the international workshops. Ravenhill, for instance, was cocommissioned by both the Royal Court and the Schaubühne theatre in Berlin to write his
2009 post-fall-of-the-Berlin-wall play Over There, while David Greig acknowledges his play
Damascus as ‘an unexpected by product of the artistic exchange [he had] been privileged to
6 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 have with young theatre makers in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Palestine since
2000’.19
In terms of the reception of the Court’s international work in the UK and its potential
impact, we also note that audiences’ and the critics’ appetite for international plays has grown
in recent years. Back in 1997 when the Court’s International Season was inaugurated, it was
hard to find an audience at all, whereas today the seasons sell-out. Theatre critics now
regularly comment on and often commend the Court’s international repertoire for the
opportunities this affords audiences to be informed about parts of the world they know little
about, or to challenge cultural assumptions or preconceptions.
A prime example to amplify this point is the Court’s 2008 season of plays from the Arab
world, titled ‘I Come From There’. ‘Plays from the Arab world’ arguably represent an
unfamiliar ‘there’ to the ‘here’ of Royal Court theatre audiences; from the perspective of an
English ‘here’, the ‘Arab world’ often is (mis)perceived as a homogenous ‘other’. Hence,
what was particularly important in this instance was the opportunity for the playwrights
coming from very different parts of the Arab world to give dramatic expression to their quite
different geographies of social and cultural experience.
Ultimately if, on the one hand, reception of the Royal Court’s international work on the
part of critics and audiences on occasion evidences a somewhat limiting horizon of
expectation that a play from a particular country should in some way be about that country,
on the other, aiming to be receptive to what writers want to offer as their ‘urgent’,
‘contemporary’ landscapes is seminal to getting to know, rather than presuming to know (in
stereotypical ways) what it means to ‘come from there’.
8. International Legacies
As a two-way process, then, the Court’s international work has the capacity to, on the one
hand, impact on the work of British writers and, on the other, to help establish or enhance
new-writing cultures in other countries (although we should be wary of assuming that any
country’s playwriting or theatre practice has remained dormant or uninfluenced by practices
from other countries prior to the Court’s arrival).
To fully understand the legacies of this work outside of the UK, requires a case by
case study. However, what the various meetings held in Chile, Brazil and Morocco as part of
this AHRC project served to reveal were the potential benefits for the host/partner country of
the Court’s process of creative and cultural exchange.
For national theatre economies this can help to create:
• The opportunity to develop and to promote the role of the playwright. The importance
of this point to theatre cultures where the writer is undervalued (e.g. that give primacy
to the director) cannot be understated.
• The possibility of generating new theatres and audiences: establishing receptivity
towards a new playwriting culture, encouraging a creative (drama-based) economy,
one that might in turn be internationally recognised (and exported).
For the participating writers this can facilitate:
• An enhanced dramatic skills base; the opportunity to have dedicated time and space to
develop a full-length work; writing towards social awareness and change.
• The opportunity to benefit from working as part of a mutually supportive group,
rather than as a lone practitioner.
7 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 •
The possibility of gaining international recognition beneficial to a writing career
(nationally and/or internationally).
In order to realise these benefits there are challenges, some of which are touched on
earlier in this report, but finally to expand and to summarise these are:
• Funding issues/limitations (for the British Council and other funding agencies) and
the particular challenge of securing funding for new playwriting in theatre cultures
where this is an emergent (or undervalued) field of work.
• The risks (financial, social, cultural and political) of playwriting that probes
contemporary landscapes and issues.
• The practicalities, processes and practices of translation as a mode of creative-cultural
exchange.
• The assumptions made about the neutrality of translation and its role in the
development of new writing for the stage
• The sustainability of new playwriting groups and individual writers, beyond the timeline of a particular project.
Notes
1
Ruth Little and Emily McLaughlin, The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (London: Oberon
Books, 2007), p. 265.
2
Stephen Daldry, interview, in Mireia Aragay, Hildegard Klein, Enric Monforte and Pilar
Zozaya, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s: Interviews with Directors, Playwrights, Critics
and Academics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.3-14, p.7.
3
Ibid.
4
Ian Rickson, interview in Aragay et.al, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s, pp.15-26, p.16.
5
Dominic Cooke, ‘I Like Dissent’, Interview with Paul Taylor, Independent, 2 November
2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/dominic-cooke-i-like-dissent422614.html.
6
Patrick Lonergan, Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p.22.
7
Ibid, p.18.
8
Ibid, p.215.
9
Ibid, p.21, italics in original.
10
This is in line with Lonergan’s examples of the manufacturer Nike, the Irish state and the
National Theatre of Scotland, three very different kinds of ‘institutions’ that he examines to
reveal the effects of globalization and the lessening of power attributed to physical space in
favour of a global concept or brand (ibid, pp.20-1).
11
http://www.genesisfoundation.org.uk/ .
12
Working for the British Council, 2003, http://www.britishcouncil.org/pakistanworkingforbc.pdf.
13
British Council - About Us - How We Run - Our Vision, Purpose and Values, 2010,
http://www.britishcouncil.org/new/about-us/who-we-are/vision-purpose-and-values/.
14
Elyse Dodgson, quoted in Aleks Sierz, 'The World Stage', New Statesman, 2nd February
2004, http://www.newstatesman.com/node/147195 .
8 Royal Court International; AHRC Interim Report; August 2012 15
‘Interview with Elyse Dodgson’, Theatre Voice, recorded, 25 March 2011,
http://www.theatrevoice.com/2660/interview-with-elyse-dodgson-of-the-royal-court/ .
16
Quoted in Aleks Sierz, 'The World Stage', 2nd February 2004.
17
Observation made by Dodgson, Interview, Theatre Voice, recorded, 25 March 2011.
18
Max Stafford-Clark, Interview, in Aragay et.al, eds, British Theatre of the 1990s, pp.27-40,
p.28.
19
Greig quoted, ‘Places of the mind’, Nehad Selaiha, Al-Ahram, 9-15 April 2009, no.942,
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/942/cu2.htm.
Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK. Her
monographs include Caryl Churchill (1997/ 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and
Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). She is the co-editor of The Cambridge
Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (2000, with Janelle Reinelt); Feminist
Futures: Theatre, Performance, Theory (2006, with Geraldine Harris), Staging International
Feminisms (2007, with Sue-Ellen Case), and The Cambridge Companion to Caryl Churchill
(2009, with Elin Diamond). She currently serves as Senior Editor of Theatre Research
International. Contact Email: [email protected]
Mark O’Thomas is Head of the Lincoln School of Performing Arts at the University of
Lincoln UK, and has worked at the Royal Court Theatre as a translator and dramaturg for the
past eight years. He recently translated a play for the Royal National Theatre’s Connections
season 2012 and continues to work at the interface between playwriting and translation,
dramaturgy and ethics. He has published a range of articles around the issue of adaptation for
the stage and is currently working on a book about the Royal Court’s international work with
Professor Elaine Aston. Contact Email: [email protected] 9