The Cine Technician (1953-1956)

184 CINE TECHNICIAN December 1955 THE GENERAL MANAGER OF THEATRE WORKSHOP WRITES ON A Theatre for the People TT is very difficult for anyone ■*■ who comes from a workingclass family to get a job as an actor in the English Theatre unless he or she is prepared to lose all trace of their natural speech and to learn to speak always with a middle-class accent. This is because more than 99% of the plays presented in Great Britain deal with the lives of middle-class families and the only working-class people portrayed are the servants. A few of us set out nearly twenty years ago to create a different sort of theatre organisation: one in which the actors would be able to speak the real dialects of the British people on the stage, whether working or upper-class, also to encourage writers to write plays which were not limited to middle-class subjects. This was the birth of Theatre Workshop. It was the result of the meeting of two different sets of people — some who were dissatisfied with the commercial theatre on artistic grounds because they found it dull and unimaginative and lacking in movement, and others who were dissatisfied with the commercial theatre on social and political grounds because of its middleclass character and its anti-labour basis. The conflict and collaboration between these two groups has resulted in the creation of a theatre company that is unique in this country. WE INVEST IN ACTORS The training that is normally given to young actors is to fit them for the other theatre. When we get new actors we have to invest in them, train them almost completely anew and hope that under the intensive cultivation they get in Theatre Workshop they will in time flower as artists. Every actor in the company must train every day because his tools are his own body, voice and imagination and they easily become rusty and inflexible. Unlike an engineer, no actor can ever complete a job. It has to be done again every night, and if he tries simply to repeat tonight the things he did last night he will fail to achieve anything worthwhile. Moreover, he has to spend his free time during the day studying the character he is to portray that evening. The Company started in the North of England and worked BY GERALD RAFFLES until the war. In 1945 when some of us were demobilised we pooled our gratuities and started again. We started touring throughout Great Britain and Europe and it turned out to be rather a long tour. For 8', years we were never more than a few weeks in any one place, until in February 1953 we took over the derelict Theatre Royal, Stratford. Working without any financial backing or official support, all income was shared out equally among the Company, from the newest to the oldest. Even so, life was sometimes very hard and at one difficult period we lived on porridge and potatoes for over three weeks. We could only afford a rehearsal period in the summer time, because then we could camp out and earn enough in a couple of days' farming to keep us for the rest of the week rehearsing. But still the group held together. Occasionally, the girls would get married, and have babies and have to leave, and sometimes the men would get similar domestic responsibilities which meant they could no longer risk earning a reasonable wage one week and a starvation rate the next. Sometimes, too, actors who had been trained and developed in Theatre Workshop would begin to receive offers from commercial managements. For a time they would turn them down, but in the end they capitulated they can hardly be blamed for exchanging a £5 a week job with us for £50 a week in the West End or on Television. But always the nucleus of the group has held firm and always there have been new young actors and actresses keen to try and build a different sort of theatre. Our aim is to present only the best plays, whether new or old, and to produce them in a direct lively style which will not only interest but will excite the audience. If we do a classical play we refuse to treat the characters as abstract poetry but, instead, try to find out what they were really like as people, and to present them on the stage truthfully with all their vices and virtues brought out. When we produced Shakespeare's " Richard II " this year the theatre critics were up in arms! How dare we read Shakespeare differently from them! It is this attitude which gave Theatre Workshop its tremendous success at the Paris International Theatre Festival this year. In the face of competition from the leading theatre companies of twenty different countries we were acclaimed everywhere and hailed as the " Pride of the modern English Theatre." Why not come along and see a show? Live actors have more vitality and punch than you can ever get from a cinema or television screen. We play in a beautiful old theatre which although not as plush as a supercinema is clean, comfortable and above all exciting. Why not give us a trial ? NEW IDEAS. " Don't lose the opportunity to experiment; the prestige of the documentary film has been acquired solely by experimentation. Without experimentation, the documentary loses its value; without experimentation, the documentary ceases to exist." Cavalcanti's advice to young documentary producers, The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television, California.