Derek Paget

Acts of Commitment: Activist Arts, the Rehearsed Reading, and Documentary Theatre

The past two decades have seen a remarkable resurgence in documentary theatre in Britain and America, with a growing emphasis on verbatim material. In this article, Derek Paget examines a distinctively twenty-first-century contribution to the tradition of activist theatre grounded in the last century. Using verbatim material, supporting a specific current cause, and often produced in association with an NGO or charitable organization, the ‘rehearsed reading’ apparently offers little in terms of theatricality even if it is clearly worthy and a valuable resource for activists. Documentary theatre has always been heavily context-based, and so tends to come to the fore in troubled times. In the present conjuncture, work like that of the ‘Actors for Human Rights’ group, analyzed here, seeks to be a force for social change through a focus on single issues and a reliance on verbatim speech. Derek Pagets interest in documentary theatre has featured several times in NTQ and his early intervention on Verbatim Theatre featured in NTQ 12 (November 1987). Research for the article was conducted as part of University of Readings 2007–2010 ‘Acting with Facts’ project (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council). Derek Paget is Principal Investigator of the project, and Reader in Theatre and Television in the Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, University of Reading. The second edition of No Other Way To Tell It , his book on screen docudrama, is due for publication this year.

‘Acting with Facts’: Actors performing the real in British theatre and television since 1990. A preliminary report on a new research project

Abstract This article outlines a funded UK research project, ‘Acting with Facts’, about to begin an investigation of the work of the actor in British stage and television docudrama. The preliminary position of the project is defined in terms of the current centrality of documentary modes in cultural production and the relative lack of research into the contribution of the actor to the docudrama. The reasons for an emphasis on British stage and television practices are discussed. The project is located in terms of current scholarship on docudrama, with special reference to the place of this mode within theories of the documentary. The usefulness of Benjamins notion of ‘porosity’ (in contradistinction to the idea of ‘blurred boundaries’) is proposed. An initial account of the questions to be used by researchers is set out, along with ultimate objectives.

The ‘Broken Tradition’ of Documentary Theatre and Its Continued Powers of Endurance

In 1986 Richard Stourac and Kathleen McCreery drew attention to a ‘broken tradition’ of theatre practice (p. xiii). They were referring to those forms of theatre favoured by working-class groups between the two World Wars, forms that included documentary theatre as a ‘weapon’ in the revolutionaries’ theatrical arsenal. Their eloquently paradoxical phrase encapsulates the history of documentary theatre wherever and whenever it manifests itself. Practitioners almost always have to learn again techniques that seldom get passed on directly. The resultant discontinuity contrasts sharply with the continuity of the tradition of stage naturalism that typifies mainstream Western thea-tre. Modifying itself seemingly effortlessly, naturalism sails on through crisis after crisis. Emphasising the individual against the collective, as mainstream theatre does at primary levels of composition, production and reception, it has a built-in advantage over other forms. However, the rhizomic nature of alternative forms allows for different kinds of flowerings — recoverable, like the past itself, by effort of will and in cir-cumstances of necessity.

‘Movie‐of‐the‐Week’ docudrama, ‘historical‐event’ television, and the Steven Spielberg series Band of Brothers

In this paper we consider the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks series Band of Brothers from several perspectives: the theory and history of the docudrama; its sub‐generic war film manifestation (contrasted to cinema); the current cultural significance of testimony in television documentary and docudrama representation; and the emergence of ‘historical‐event’ television in post‐cold war Europe. We identify new codes and conventions in the series that respond to cultural and political change in the post‐9/11 conjuncture. Two episodes of Band of Brothers are analysed in relation to American responses to the events of 9/11, and the series is compared and contrasted to the European ‘historical‐event’ docudrama of the post‐cold war period.

‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Accuracy’ in British Television Drama

When, back in 1971, the original Theatre Quarterly devoted one of its earliest issues (TQ6, 1972) to television drama, the strongest reactions were to remarks by Tony Garnett concerning the recently developed form already being dubbed documentary drama. Subsequent issues featured both an attack on the form from Paul Ableman, and a vigorous defence from its leading practitioner, Jeremy Sandford, author of the seminal Cathy Come Home (1966). As this article bears witness, the debate still rages, and here its leading historian, Derek Paget – author of True Stories: Documentary Drama on Radio, Stage, and Television (Manchester University Press, 1990) – explores some of the ways in which myth has contributed as much as analysis to the argument. He goes back to contemporary documentation to explore the nature of the BBCs own sometimes timorous attitude to the creature it had spawned, its context within the developing aesthetics and technology of television drama, the reactions of politicians and local government agencies – and the way in which repeat transmissions were (and were not) hedged about with paranoia.

New Documentarism on Stage: Documentary Theatre in New Times

Abstract In this essay I outline the historical provenance and recent development of Documentary Theatre produced in Britain during the millennial period (1990-2007). Specifically, the essay takes account of “Verbatim” and “Tribunal” Theatre productions at the National and Royal Court and Tricycle Theatres. I define both forms and describe some of the distinctive theatrical characteristics of each. The essay traces the evolution of these documentary forms from British and German pre-and post-war practices involving non-naturalistic modes of theatre. I argue that the new forms have developed in order to represent, and to oppose, a new, privatised, political culture in which collectives have been sidelined and individuals placed centre stage. The rhetorics of courts and confessionals have become central to theatrical representation of crucial current social and political issues such as racism and international conflict. I argue that individual “bearing witness” (in the first person singular) has overtaken political analysis (conducted in the third person plural) in the new theatrical conjuncture, and that audiences too are implicated in acts of witness

Theatre Workshop, Moussinac, and the European Connection

This article investigates the influence of a French communist writer on Joan Littlewoods Theatre Workshop. Joan Littlewood celebrated her eightieth birthday in 1994 – a year which also saw an ‘Arena’ programme about her life and the publication of her memoir Joans Book . Critics and commentators are agreed that Littlewood was a charismatic director, her Theatre Workshop a ground-breaking company which in the late 1950s and early 1960s acquired an international reputation only matched later by the RSC. However, the companys distinctive style drew as much from a European as from a native English theatre tradition, and in this article Derek Paget examines the contribution to that style of a seminal work on design – Leon Moussinacs The New Movement in the Theatre of 1931. Although he was also important as a theorist of the emerging cinema, Moussinacs chief influence was as a transmitter of ideas in the theatre, and in the following article Derek Paget argues that his book offered the Manchester-based group insights into European radical left theatre unavailable to them in any other way. Moussinac thus helped Theatre Workshop to become a ‘Trojan horse’ for radical theatricality in the post-war years, while his design ideas were to sustain the Workshop throughout its period of major creativity and influence. Derek Paget worked in the early 1970s on Joan Littlewoods last productions at Stratford East, and he wrote on Oh What a Lovely War in NTQ 23 (1990). He is now Reader in Drama at Worcester College of Higher Education.

‘Oh What a Lovely War’: the Texts and Their Context

This year marks no less than the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first performance, on 19 March 1963, of Oh What a Lovely War by the Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East – a production which has been alternatively mythologized as the apogee of the companys achievement under Joan Littlewood, and, by fewer but influential critics (notably the late Ewan MacColl), as its nadir. Even those who saw the show after its transfer to Wyndhams Theatre on 20 June 1963 may, as Derek Paget here illustrates, have seen a production which differed significantly from the original: while those who did not see either version (even if they can be persuaded that the subsequent film bears little relation to either) have to rely on the text as published by Methuen. But this, as Paget demonstrates, provides only one. albeit the most accessible, of the several sources of textual documentation: and in this article, derived from the authors doctoral thesis for Manchester University, he draws on the recollections of actors and other theatre workers as well as on printed, manuscript, and source materials, to illuminate the creation and, arguably, the subsequent dilution of this collectively created indictment of war.

Introduction: A New Europe, the Post-Documentary Turn and Docudrama

This book is predicated on the idea that the screen genre docudrama became ubiquitous during the latter part of the twentieth century. It argues in general that the genre was made for new times. Fact-based art in general burgeoned during this period, part of a millennial zeitgeist. It is tempting to relate this to Francis Fukuyama’s controversial 1992 concept of the ‘End of History’, which posited a new world order at the close of a century in which the capitalist system seemed triumphant. While the coming of this order seems less likely in the second decade of the new century, it is clear enough that Greater Europe has been radically reconfigured in the past quarter-century, and that more change must come. Initially, the new era was heralded by striking workers in Poland, by Gorbachev’s glasnost policy in the USSR, and, crucially, by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even before the fall of the Wall, the forests of aerials pointing westwards in East Germany, remarked by many visitors from the West during the long Cold War period, were testament to many things, including the desire for a ‘free’ media in the East that would open up proscribed subjects. The extent to which any medium can actually be free will, of course, always be debatable. But the Wall and its collapse became a powerful symbol of contrasting desires arising from opposed political systems. If keeping some things out was uppermost on one side of the Wall, letting some things in was surely the aim of those aerials. On both sides was a consciousness of a Europe still troubled by its twentieth-century past and becoming confused by the looming twenty-first-century future. The ramifications of the break-up of an uneasy Pan-European postwar settlement that had seemed for two generations to be set in stone, the emergence of a new, and unsettled, Europe, triggered many things—as the subsequent two-and-a-half decades have shown.

Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People edited by Tom Cantrell and Mary Luckhurst

unforeseen processes. Theatre never simply illustrates the political; it can also announce, read backwards or contest public feelings of memory and mourning. Werth’s work is undoubtedly strongly informed by Diana Taylor’s important work on the Argentine situation. However, she also manages to establish her own path. Her book suggests an implicit response to Taylor’s idea of ‘DNA performance’, which famously addresses the public presentation of the victims through a repetitive paradigm based on blood. In contrast, Werth explores the extent to which the aftermath of violence also gave space to alternative family settings and intragenerational forms of memory. Thus, Werth’s book benefits not only from the fresh perspective of a scholar welltrained in sophisticated theories of performance, but also from extensive research supported by both fieldwork and the critical disposition needed to understand the nuances of the post dictatorial scene on its own terms. In recent years, Argentina’s strong and vital theatrical community, full of promising young practitioners and directors, has attracted the attention of performance studies scholars at a global level. However, this process has not been accompanied by systematic academic work in the local field. In this regard, Theatre, Performance, and Memory Politics in Argentina fully merits translation into Spanish in order to start narrowing this gap.