Simon Stephens emerged as a dramatist in the late 1990s. His play Bluebird was staged by Gordon Anderson at the most important venue for new writing in London, the Royal Court Theatre, on 1 December 1998. Over the years, his stature has grown and his plays have been regularly performed in the United Kingdom and further afield. He has been most successful in the German-speaking nations where his plays have been premiered and revived on multiple occasions. In the period from 2003 to 2015, for example, 20 plays were produced 96 times.Footnote1 He has also enjoyed productions in Spain, France, Hungary, Scandinavia, and a host of other European countries. In addition to a series of translations and adaptations, he mostly writes plays based in concrete situations with realistic characters, as in Motortown,Footnote2 or texts that externalise inner monologues that are more slippery in the way they treat time and place, such as Pornography.Footnote3 His language is not, however, a flatly naturalistic slice of life: the use of repeated motifs and more lyrical, reflective moments mark his writing as reaching beyond the everyday while keeping its feet firmly on the ground. Such a rough sketch could describe several contemporary British playwrights, yet Stephens has developed his reputation not only for the quality of his writing, but also for the modes of working he has sought to promote. His epiphany in the theatre appears to have come on the evening he spent watching the German premiere of his play Herons in 2003 (an encounter Benjamin Fowler elucidates later in this Special Issue). The production, which diverged from Stephens’s own imaginings of the play on stage, opened his eyes to a more collaborative and mutually informative relationship between playwright, director, and creative team. Consequently, he redefined his understanding of their interaction and ascribed the insight to the differences between the British and German theatre systems.
In the light of this, Stephens has become a prominent reforming figure in contemporary British theatre for a couple of reasons. He has written deliberately open texts, such as Pornography, which signal their own provisional status as a point of departure for a production. This play attributes no character names to the speeches and exhorts the creative team to cut the play up and populate it with as many actors as desired. While such an approach to dramaturgy may not be all that novel in the European context, it nonetheless puts down a marker in British theatre-writing and places itself in a tradition associated with Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Martin Crimp. Stephens has also sought to work more collaboratively over time, rejecting the role of the inviolable poet. This can be seen in his long-term creative partnership with German director Sebastian Nübling as well as in the Secret Theatre project at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith with the director Sean Holmes, that has attempted to promote and explore new ways of working. These have included a move away from the more standard British model of assembling a cast and a crew for a single production before they head off to new projects elsewhere. As a result, the creative team and the ensemble were able to experiment over time and build on discoveries made in previous productions.
Stephens’s drive to instil different working relations in Britain begs the question as to what prevented theatres from adopting more collaborative ways of working until only recently. At times in the recent history of European theatre, it has seemed as if the English Channel presented a more effective barrier to cultural exchange than the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War. Innovations and developments in theatre-making that have, for decades, exerted significant influence in continental Europe have hardly permeated British theatre. More stylized or abstract approaches to production and performance that have become mainstream on the stages of France, Germany, or Poland have rarely gained much traction in major British theatres, even those in cosmopolitan London, except in the last few years. This is not to say that British theatreFootnote4 has not been a lively or exciting place to be – the explosive force of John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney, among many others, in the 1950s has re-echoed down the decades in a variety of tones. Yet the mode of presentation, a broad stylistic ‘realism’, has been fairly constant, and there was little evidence of influence from mainland Europe. The reasons for this may not so much be geographical isolation as institutional narrowness, and a brief examination of the two theatre cultures that seem the most polarized, the German and the British, may provide a way of understanding the difficulties the British theatre system has had in importing new practices.
One Playwright, Two Theatres
The two systems are funded in fundamentally different ways. British theatres are mostly commercial venturesFootnote5 while their German counterparts are mostly subsidized. The latter were nationalized in the wake of World War I when the Kaiser abdicated and the Weimar Republic was declared to fill the power vacuum. By freeing theatres from a direct cash nexus, the government of the day effectively granted theatre-makers a greater opportunity to experiment and to challenge orthodoxies. The results of this are evident in the blossoming of innovative theatre, and not just playwriting, in the 1920s. Even in the era of post-Wall cuts and, indeed, theatre closures, it is worth remembering a speech given by Péter Fábri, the head of the Hungarian branch of the International Theatre Institute, in 2003 to his German colleagues, entitled ‘Ihre Sorgen Möcht’ ich Haben!’ (‘I’d Like to Have Such Troubles!’).Footnote6 Over a decade later, Arts Council England received £449.4 million from government in the year 2014–15 (down from £460.7 million in 2013–14),Footnote7 while the city of Berlin spent €397.4 million (roughly £331.2 million) in 2015 (up from €379.4 in 2014) on its cultural budget.Footnote8 The differential between subsidies provided by a nation and a capital city are quite astounding and reflect, at least at the level of public expenditure, the relative importance of culture to those holding the purse-strings.
These divergent constellations have, in turn, had an effect on the way theatre is made. With a strong financial safety net in place, German theatres have greater resources that allow for a more fundamental engagement with productions. The employment of a permanent ensemble allows actors to learn collectively, production after production. Rehearsal time is longer and theatres have dramaturgy departments that support productions not only with research into the play in question, but also into past productions, their methods and their aesthetics. What has emerged over the decades is that German theatre has tended to favour the creative input of the director as an artist over the playwright. This is a response to generous subsidy and the creative freedom it affords, and it has led to both innovation and self-indulgence. The relationship is one that more conventional dramatists, like David Edgar, have found to be an unacceptable and wilful state of affairs.Footnote9 However, it is clear that such a position entails its own set of assumptions regarding the function of a playwright’s text in the theatrical process. It presupposes that the playwright has a vision of the play’s production; that that vision is encoded in the text and is readable; and that it is the director’s job to translate the vision into performance. Experimental playwriting of the last century and shifts in playwrights’ own self-understanding have called many of these conditions into question. Yet while Edgar’s more conservative views tend to be associated with British playwrights, similar sentiments can also be found in Germany, and they have something of a history themselves. Since the late nineteenth century, dramatists, critics, and audiences have employed a term, ‘Werktreue’ (‘faithfulness to the text’ in its theatrical interpretation), to insist on the defining role of the playwright.Footnote10 This example of how simple oppositions between the German and the British systems may prove to be more nuanced is symptomatic of a more visible breakdown of apparently fundamental differences that is taking place today.
Assumptions regarding the roles of the playwright and the director are being undercut and remodelled. This has much to do with changes in the modes of and opportunities for both virtual and physical exchange over the past decades. The Internet, especially in its ability to present the moving image cheaply and accessibly, has opened up European theatre practice to greater audiences than festivals in Avignon or Edinburgh ever could. The almost instantaneous transmission of information has, of course, also revolutionized communication and the transfer of ideas. In addition, the rise of budget airlines has allowed theatre-makers to collaborate and work together in ways that are now eminently more affordable than ever before. In the British context, most notable exemplars of trans-European theatre artists are director Katie Mitchell, who has worked extensively in Germany, and in other countries, in the past decade, and Simon Stephens. It should not be forgotten, however, that many British playwrights find themselves played and revived in Germany far more often than they do in Britain.
A renewed interest in English-language drama began to develop in the mid-1990s when the so-called In-Yer-Face playwrights were firmly embraced by the German theatre as a welcome new impulse. Indeed, director Thomas Ostermeier, who transformed Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre after taking it over in 1999, is a well-known champion of British and Irish playwrights, understanding them as a counterpoint to the more stylized and, to his mind, socially unengaged texts associated with postdramatic theatre.Footnote11 Here one can see that theatrical influence does not exclusively flow in one direction: British playwriting had both an enlivening effect on German repertoires and generated a more general interest in new writing. The never terribly successful invention of the 1970s, the Stückemarkt (market for plays), has been revitalized in Germany in the last decade. At such events, rehearsed readings present new material and open up opportunities for aspiring and more established playwrights in front of real audiences and members of the expansive theatrical establishment seeking to produce new work. Stipends and commissions for new writing are also a staple of the contemporary theatre landscape and have played their part in breathing new life into old repertoires. As a result, British playwright Nick Wood contends: ‘the rest of Europe comes to Germany for new work’.Footnote12 Such exposure to different ways of working opens the door for playwrights to rethink their own position on returning home. And this was the case with Simon Stephens.
Yet Stephens, a self-confessed proselytizer of German theatre, has come to recognize that the British system can also harbour space for innovation and more liberating ways of working, as set out in the interview that opens this Special Issue. He says that he was profoundly affected by the world premiere of Carmen Disruption in Hamburg, March 2015, and notes that the German system, rather than supporting his fragmented text, actually worked to undermine it. After the actors took against the play, they used their own permanence in the theatre’s ensemble as a way of frustrating a successful production, safe in the knowledge that they would outlive the show. The bountiful, subsidized system finally revealed its darker side to the playwright. The irony of this experience, however, is that the same play, that opened at the Almeida in April 2015, was a success with critics and audiences alike. The production, directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Lizzie Clachan, took the script as a starting point for an imaginative examination of five insecure lives. The audience was led in across a stage dominated by a fallen animatronic bull, and the five actors, who never speak to each other, functioned nonetheless as a tight ensemble. This brief example points to the ways in which theatre-making in Britain may already be starting to change and modify some of the structures that seemed to be keeping it out of step with its continental cousins.
In an age of increased exchange, the two systems have received new impetus from each other. British writing has led to a broader interest in new writing across the German system, while a more collaborative relationship between playwright and director has started to make inroads in Britain. With respect to these shifts, Stephens has been a beneficiary twice over, and this Special Issue considers how and what the effects have been.
In her article, Catherine Love discusses how the playwright has rethought the concept and function of authorship. She notes that even a dramaturgically conventional play, Three Kingdoms, acted as an invitation to director Nübling and the cast to take risks and move beyond its apparent realism in order to create their own theatrical language. Benjamin Fowler widens the lens to consider the institutional ramifications of a director/playwright relationship built on mutual respect with reference to three significant keynote speeches, including one by Stephens, subtitled ‘Five Things I Learned from Sebastian Nübling’. Jacqueline Bolton then examines Stephens’s other long-term collaboration with director Sean Holmes through the Secret Theatre initiative at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in London. Here the pair attempted to introduce a more European model to production by assembling a permanent ensemble of actors who would work together, make discoveries, and build on past experiences in a process of exploration, experimentation, and development.
The following three essays focus on individual plays, their production, and reception. Adam Ledger considers Stephens’s work with Katie Mitchell on The Trial of Ubu and refracts it back through the world premiere, directed by Nübling. The discussion shows Stephens’s openness as a writer to Mitchell’s directorial idea of turning a stage direction into the departure point for her production. He also shows how Stephens, rather than blithely letting Mitchell ‘get on with it’, actively contributed to reshaping the material during rehearsal. Marilena Zaroulia returns to Three Kingdoms, not so much as an experiment in multi-lingual theatre than as an attempt to re-frame Europe and the way that it treats women sex workers. She analyses a ‘politics of invisibility’ that is suffused by a tendentiously ambivalent relationship to the women that appear, but hardly speak in the play. Finally, Seda Ilter moves the discussion to Turkey, a country torn between the contradictory ambitions of joining the European Union and turning its back on the secularism instituted by Atatürk in the 1920s. Here she considers the first production of Pornography in Istanbul as a way of gauging the intercultural challenges involved in staging a play set in London at the time of the 7 July bombings. The non-literal responses in the production reflect the potential of the open text for a relatively young theatre culture.
Taken together, the essays reflect on a moment in British theatre-making, one that moves away from the roles and hierarchies that have previously defined much of the mainstream, and perhaps some of the fringe. This Special Issue, which focuses on Simon Stephens, is not trying to suggest that he is the only figure involved in what appears to be an important shift in the practices of British theatre. Instead, it points to the ways that a vociferous supporter of a more collaborative theatre may use his position to propagate and engage with practices that could have a far wider effect. In the interview that follows this introduction, Stephens speculates that Britain could be the next site of great theatrical innovation, given the constellation of well-trained actors, playwrights, and directors who are starting to rethink their relationships to each other, and writers who are not afraid to tell stories. He adds, however, that the centre of this renaissance may not be London, due to its increasing unaffordability, but other cities. Whether he is right or not, he seems to have understood that new possibilities for theatre-making no longer stop at the English Channel.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. European figures kindly provided by Luke Holbrook, who works for Stephens’s agent, Casarotto Ramsey & Associates. This figure excludes the 30 productions of his adaptation of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
2. Premiere 21 April 2006 at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Ramin Gray. The play follows Danny, a British soldier who returns from Iraq to Dagenham, the home of a major Ford car works that informs the play’s title.
3. Premiere 15 June 2007 at the Schauspielhaus, Hanover, directed by Sebastian Nübling. The play is made up of a series of monologues and duologues, each separate from each other, but centred around the week of the London bombings of 7 July 2005.
4. Here I am talking about the play-based theatre tradition. It is obvious that one of the most innovative sectors in British theatre has been the one developed by performance groups such as Forced Entertainment, Frantic Assembly, or Lone Twin. They occupy a very different space in Britain’s theatre ecology for a number of structural reasons that include funding and the development of a ‘circuit’ of venues beyond the producing and receiving houses of play-based theatre.
5. The list of theatres where Theatre Tokens may be used shows the regional extent of commercial, play-based theatre. See ‘Theatre Tokens: Participating Venues’, <http://www.theatretokens.com/where-to-use> [accessed 29 July 2015]. While the list includes some subsidized or part-subsidized theatres, the vast majority are not funded by Arts Council England. However, it is worth noting that Stephens tends to work in the subsidized rather than the commercial sector.
6. Péter Fábri, ‘Ihre Sorgen möcht’ ich haben!’, 2003 <http://www.iti-germany.de/pdf/z_fabri.pdf> [URL no longer active].
7. Arts Council England, ‘Grant in Aid and Lottery Distribution Annual Report and Accounts’, 2015 <http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/ACE-Annual-Report-201415.pdf> [accessed 15 July 2015], p. 55.
8. PIA, ‘Kulturhaushalt 2014/15: Berlin nimmt seine Verantwortung als Kulturmetropole ernst’, 29 December 2013 <https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/politik-aktuell/2013/meldung.59499.php> [accessed 15 July 2015].
9. See, for example, Janelle Reinelt, ‘Politics, Playwriting, Postmodernism: An Interview with David Edgar’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14.4 (2004), 42–53 (p. 46).
10. For an introduction to and discussion of this controversial term in English, see David Barnett, ‘Offending the Playwright. Directors’ Theatre and the Werktreue Debate’, German Monitor, 77 (2013), 75–97.
11. See, for example, Thomas Ostermeier, ‘Die Zukunft des Theaters’, Schaubuehne, 2013 <http://www.schaubuehne.de/uploads/Ostermeier_Die-Zukunft-des-Theaters_2013.pdf> [accessed 29 July 2015].
12. Nick Wood quoted in ‘Opportunities for UK Playwrights Overseas’, UK Writer, Autumn 2007 <http://www.writersguild.org.uk/public/008_Featurearticl/195_WGGBFeatures.html> [URL no longer active].