Julian Maynard Smith

Written for Firefly Performance Journal

This is partly the zeitgeist in contemporary theatre- people are searching for content. Why? The world is full of content, you just have to breathe in and you’ll be full of it.

Firefly talks to Julian Maynard-Smith about his collaboration with first year BATP Performance Arts students at Central School of Speech and Drama on their site project, inspired by Michael Haneke’s film The Seventh Continent, devised for and performed in a shop in Brixton Market.

All photography ©Neil Keating

Diana Damian: How did you start? What were the first things you thought about?

Julian Maynard Smith: the students went to see the film, and wrote down a lot of the ideas they had. It’s interesting because a lot of these ideas and impressions they took from the film were very much to do with the medium of film; a lot of what they talked about were cinematic issues rather than performance issues.

There was not very much performative content in the immediate impression of watching a film. That doesn’t surprise me- it’s very much a film- there were a lot of conversations about the framing of the film in formal terms: shots of hands, bits of bodies, repetition, absence of psychology in it- were very much part of the conversation. There’s little psychological expression in the film- there’s no sense of getting an explanation for the events.

At the start there was a sense of uncertainty, really, about how to start- how to even think about the subject of suicide, for instance, in performative or theatrical terms- so a big content issue. And then the formal issue of the medium. What the film was doing is very hard to translate into performance- it works in a different way.

It was interesting that in the end, none of the students decided to try and imitate the film in any kind of way. They worked quite well at taking something from a film but not letting it warp into a performance. That was my concern- I wasn’t interested in a representation of the film.

DD: Do you feel that the film has dramatic elements which are quite problematic to represent onstage? Suicide, destruction, death… Did you find that became a problem to solve?

JMS: Yes. In some ways, representing suicide onstage has to emerge out of a narrative, out of character motivation and so on. It’s a completely different tradition than I was working in, and the students were working in. Representation per se wasn’t part of what we were trying to do- we weren’t interested in believable characters or representation of suicide- but the kind of notion of frustration. The film has formal structures- the sheer boredom of it, the fact that almost nothing happens- which bring that sense of ennui out. That is a formal device Haneke uses, which is not about representation in terms of plot development- this allows you to work with performance exercises which were quite old, from the seventies- but in some ways I think theatre has got less radical- they seemed very appropriate in many ways.

DD: What were the exercises?

JMS: They were formal exercises, rule based. You can use these simple rules to make things happen. You don’t have to do predetermined things, but there is a minimal, restrictive aspect to the work. The primary sense for someone watching is to see something played out and developed, a game, and you get to understand the structure of the game. Choices are then not arbitrary. Normally, choices on a stage have to be driven by plot device or character, yet this has nothing to do with character or plot- this was an interesting connection in relation to the film. The kind of exercises we worked with definitely produced meaningful work, in the sense that you can apply meaning when you watch it - that’s one aspect of the film, it teases you into suggestion. In the end, you’re left asking questions. Of course there’s no real answer. The exercises were also relevant to the kind of work I do- I wanted to teach them what I practically knew.

DD: So was it a good way for them to build a vocabulary with which to explore the film, whether formally or thematically?

JMS: That was the idea. There were reactions from some students who found the exercises unsatisfying, because they felt empty, they weren’t meaningful. This is partly the zeitgeist in contemporary theatre- people are searching for content. Why? The world is full of content, you just have to breathe in and you’ll be full of it. Some people felt disturbed by the empty exercises- they weren’t about expressing meaning, the meaning was there in the eye of the beholder, not the mind of the doer.

DD: Was the cinematic context of looking behind the glass affective to the performance?

JMS: Just doing it in a shop front- it’s more the mode. In that sense, the glass was hindrance, not a facilitator. We could have made a lot more mess, broken a lot more stuff without the glass. It was a problem in terms of if you do anything uncontrolled it could actually damage the audience. But the idea was not to allow for uncontrolled behaviour onstage- the bit where everything is wrecked is unpredictable but very controlled. It’s not improvised in a traditional way, it’s a rule bound improvisation. There were guidelines- no real physical fight, for example. This was a tit for tat fight. This is a much better solution, because it doesn’t pretend to be realistic. As soon as you get realistic about it, you have to ask psychological questions to find realistic characters, or social questions, or broader questions. Actually, it’s a series of actions taking place in a shop. You can understand that it’s a pattern, a set of conditions in which subjects don’t know where they’ll end up, but know the rules of the game.

DD: And the groups, did they struggle with the process then?

JMS: I tried to stop them to collage together nice ideas without real coherence. I think they found that quite stressful, because i found it stressful too. You always go through periods of thinking ‘is this actually going anywhere’. It’s easy to accrete something, add an interesting details, another, then slip them in the show. That’s not the way to make work- you need one thing which develops. One idea, if it’s a good idea, will proliferate, it will be focused. But you can’t chose that at the beginning of the process, so they had to sift through a lot of things, and there were a lot of nice things along the way- but I’m sure those will be useful somewhere down the line. That’s my experience, good ideas come back in the right place, you dig them out years later. Things are not lost if you chuck them out, but it’s important to throw ideas away that don’t fit. That’s the big problem with devising- you have half a dozen people, how do you keep everyone happy?

DD: Were there any interesting connections between film and theatre you discovered along the way?

JMS: Interestingly, the last group made a direct link with the film, albeit in a tradition which is utterly different- endurance performance. In the film, being a narrative, the process of their lives was an endurance test which ultimately they failed- here that was read in physical terms. What I found touching in all performances was not only their different takes on the film, but the connections with each other. What appears a narrative construction becomes tangibly real in the end. There’s a game you play where you read something representationally, narratively, which is a distancing effect between viewer and performer, and that distance is reduced in a film because of the magic of the screen- we’re less likely to project when there’s tangible human beings in the space, in front of you.

DD: In the film you’re allowed into a very private event, yet in the performances you were working with a very public space. So there was an audience relationship to negotiate?

JMS: How to treat the audience was central, especially since a lot of the groups started with that. In the end, it was a fairly traditional set up outside of the first group. I don’t know why three out of four decided to do it that way and of course there was always a practical issue. Making the four things join up was an issue that upset a lot of people- negotiation. That was just one of the things which happened.

DD: Did using media affect that?

JMS: That’s interesting, because they all fought with media in the beginning, when we experimented with media. The question of working with video remained. There were some interesting experiments, yet funnily enough most groups dropped it. I tried to get them to work in an integrated way, where all elements had a functional relation, which is of course really hard when there are so many variables. In the first group, there was a sort of sense of seeing something- that use of video was relevant to the opticians. There was also a sense of the video used illustratively, but use of video seemed to have become problematic. One of the groups wanted to play a video of the same thing backwards, which is an idea with a lot of possibilities, but they were wise to attempt it in the shop, because of the daylight, and practical issues- you’d need to change the space majorly.

Once we made the decision the audience is outside looking in, a lot of ideas got left out, but a lot materialized as well.