Writing

This essay, written for the Routledge Companion to Twentieth-Century British Theatre, Vol. 2, 1950-1999, proposes that work should be more widely used as an analytical framework within theatre studies, with attention paid both to its historically specific and material social conditions, and its crucial function as a site of political contestation.

I argue that the second half of the twentieth century saw the processes of British theatre production subsumed to capital accumulation in numerous ways. Firstly, the post-war period saw the creation (partly through state subsidy) of a co-ordinated theatre sector, whose managerialist tendencies were accelerated by the shift, in the late 1970s, to neoliberal capitalism. Secondly, the turn to neoliberalism expanded the significance of rentierism for the sector.

The essay charts various consequences of these modes of subsumption for British theatre and its workers, including the gendering of work and the proletarianization of theatre workers (their subjection to regimes of waged labour) with the consequence that their work was widely deskilled and their labour devalued. It also argues that the organisation of work functioned as a means of racializing theatre production and thereby maintaining white supremacy in cultural production, initially by excluding racially minoritized workers, and later by offering them forms of conditional inclusion in a theatre that remained structurally racialized.

The essay will be published later this year, but you can read the final submitted version here.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Directors (ed. Maria Delgado and Simon Williams) has the broadest range of entries of any reference book on the subject, and is the most thoroughly international. I wrote the entries for Harley Granville Barker, Peter Cheeseman, Michael Chekhov, George Devine, William Gaskill, Buzz Goodbody, Tyrone Guthrie, Stephen Joseph and Jatinder Verma. Lightly edited versions of the entries can be found in my blog, published on their birthdays in 2022/23.

This short article about/long review of Matthew Xia’s 2023 production of Dave Harris’ play Tambo and Bones at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East was originally written for my substack. It was then published in the Back Pages of Contemporary Theatre Review. You can read a pre-publication version here.

I am the lead author of the report Producing Producers: Enhancing Career Development and Training Opportunities for British Theatre Producers from the Global Majority alongside Rafia Hussain (Independent Producer), Jessica Bowles (Principal Lecturer in Creative Producing, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama), and Helen Jeffreys (Executive Director and Joint CEO, Tara Theatre). Our report makes recommendations for improving training and career development opportunities for racially minoritised theatre producers based on a survey of 187 producers, follow-up interviews and a focus group of 25 producers from 23 theatre companies.

You can read the report here.

I contributed a chapter to Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato’s Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945. ‘Directors: Organisation, Authorship, and Social Production’ focuses on three intertwined traditions of theatre directing in Britain in the post-war period. First, it explores the managerial and administrative position of the Artistic Director (key examples discussed are Michael Buffong, Stephen Daldry, Peter Hall, David Lan and Paulette Randall). Secondly, it analyses the work of ‘auteur’ directors whose focus is primarily on the creation of theatrical ‘performance texts’ (Joan Littlewood, Simon McBurney, Katie Mitchell, Emma Rice are my examples here). Finally, the essay considers three directors (Geraldine Connor, Jenny Sealey and Lois Weaver) whose artistry is to be found, I argue, in ‘social production’: the shaping of relations between people in public space. By tracking this wide range of directorial practices, the chapter aims to expose the material conditions and social relations that have shaped creative practices in the theatre, and thus to analyse the social forces and political interests that have governed the sector and its output since 1945.

You can read the submitted version of my essay here.

I’ve changed my name to Tom Six, so anything that was published or in press before the end of 2022 will be under Tom Cornford, and after that, Tom Six.

Theatre Studios is the first comprehensive history of the theatre studio in 20th century Britain, considered as a coherent movement with a shared (albeit differentiated) historical and discursive formation. The main case studies are studios led by Michel Saint-Denis and George Devine, Michael Chekhov, and Joan Littlewood, but the book takes organisations and collectivities, rather than individual artists, as its primary object of study. This enables a materialist analysis that derives theorised models of practice from the studios’ distinctive forms of collective operation. It concludes with an extended consideration of the possibilities and limits of the studio as a model of collective creative practice today.

‘a rigorously compelling examination of a long-neglected area of British theatrical history […] sharp, provocative and always surprising.’ – Sean Holmes, Associate Artistic Director, Shakespeare’s Globe

‘comprehensively researched, elegantly written, robustly argued and emphatically current.’ – Jonathan Pitches, Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Leeds

I co-edited this special issue of the academic journal Contemporary Theatre Review on the director Katie Mitchell with Caridad Svich. You can read our introduction to the issue or download it as a pdf.

The issue contains research essays by Benjamin Fowler, anna harpin, Mario Frendo, and Catherine Love, and interviews and shorter pieces by Paul Allain, Duška Radosavljević and Struan Leslie, Bryce Lease and Katie Mitchell, Adam J. Ledger, Donato Wharton and me, and Erin Lee.

This article explores the work of European theatre director Katie Mitchell (1964-) by examining her approach to managing the technologies of the realist theatre. It concludes that the technological apparatus of the realist stage is systemically resistant to both critical political analysis and radical political action, and that a director such as Mitchell can therefore only work against wider political systems of domination and exploitation by working within just such a system. The productions analysed here demonstrate that any politically critical theatrical endeavour must begin from this understanding: that the theatre’s technologies are – in themselves – conduits of hegemonic power, and that it can therefore only take hold if the technological configuration of theatrical realism is radically dismantled.

Download a pre-publication pdf of ‘Katie Mitchell and the Technologies of the Realist Theatre’.

I co-edited this collection with Cass Fleming as the principal output from a practice research project with lots of practitioners working in different disciplines. Michael Chekhov in the Twenty-First Century: New Pathways draws on historical writings and archival materials to investigate how Chekhov's technique can be used across the disciplines of contemporary performance and applied practice. It contains essays by Cass and me, Caoimhe McAvinchey, Roanna Mitchell, Daron Oram, and Sinéad Rushe.

This book chapter builds upon an analysis of the close connections between Michael Chekhov’s practices and those of collaborative play-writing that were developed later in the twentieth-century, as well as the ‘new dramaturgy’ that has emerged in the early twenty-first. It proposes, in brief, a new pathway for Chekhov’s technique in the training, study and practice of dramaturgs and collaborative playwrights and the theorising of dramaturgy that underpins their work.

In brief, the chapter argues that the excision of dramaturgy from accounts of Chekhov’s technique has crucially limited our understanding of its potential and that, by bringing the two together, some crucial limitations of Chekhov’s approach can be overcome. Furthermore, the discipline of dramaturgy stands to gain a great deal from both practical interventions and theoretical insights grounded in a re-appropriation of Chekhov’s technique for a form of dramaturgy that reflects not only the shifts in aesthetic tastes in the sixty-five years since his death, but the political and cultural specificities of twenty-first century performance.

Download a pre-publication pdf of ‘Actor-Dramaturgs and Atmospheric Dramaturgies’.

I was asked to imagine a ‘postcard’ from Theatre Workshop about their approach to training for a special issue of the journal Theatre Dance and Performance Training.

I drew on an interview with Harry Greene to imagine the company describing being ‘tactically trained’. This wasn’t a case of ‘make do and mend’, but beg, borrow or steal, with Joan Littlewood plundering Stanislavsky’s books and Laban and Lisa Ullmann’s classes, which the company made their own. I borrowed from De Certeau to have them argue that strategizing is for the powerful, and that they were content to find a place on the margins and improvise towards their vision of a new theatre bit by bit.

This chapter, co-written with Roberta Barker for Bloomsbury’s Great European Stage Directors series, explores the life, work and legacy of the Anglo-Irish theatre director Tyrone Guthrie, with a particular focus on the UK and North America. It argues that Guthrie originated the model of the hybrid artistic, entrepreneurial and bureaucratic figure of the Artistic Director, which came to dominate the Anglophone theatre in the second half of the twentieth century, and that he also exemplifies crucial paradoxes and contradictions to be found in the settler colonial cultures of North America in this period and their relations with their former metropole.

I wrote these two essays (from 2012 and 2019) in an attempt to condense some of the findings of my research into Michael Chekhov’s studio into guides to using his technique for directing.

The first of them focuses on Shakespeare, critiquing the dominant Anglophone approaches of American realism and British textual analysis, and offering instead a range of techniques derived from Chekhov’s work.

The second is in this collection edited by Amy Skinner. It’s more comprehensive, arguing that Chekhov's work is incompletely understood unless we consider him as both an actor and a director, and as a theorist not only of acting but of performance more widely. It offers an overview of his directorial work and analyses his directorial process, from which it derives some exercises for use in the rehearsal room. You can read it here.

Taken together, I hope these essays will fill something of a gap in scholarship on Chekhov’s technique (which is also addressed by Cass Fleming’s and my collection above), and offer theatre directors valuable tools for creating performances of all kinds.

This short article was written as a quick response to a notorious incidence of racism in a British theatre review from 2018 to argue that diversity initiatives in the British theatre have failed to challenge the assumptions of white supremacy at the level of narrative and discourse and have thereby not only acted as a fig-leaf for systemic racism, but have actively sustained it.

You can read the article here.

This lecture/essay uses Sara Ahmed's conception of 'willfulness' to consider the repeated accusations, levelled by critics against director Katie Mitchell, of 'auteurism' and productions whose effect is 'distracting'. It argues, via a close analysis of Mitchell's productions of three canonical works for the stage - Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and Strindberg's Miss Julie, that Mitchell's project is deliberately and productively to distract from the political agenda that underpins these works' canonical status. In these stagings, Mitchell distracts - that is, draws attention away, both literally and figuratively - from narratives that sustain patriarchal and class oppression, in order to expose and counteract their interlocking functions. The essay concludes with a consideration, by contrast, of Mitchell's tacit acceptance of the hegemonic position of whiteness in the contemporary European theatre, and argues for a similar project to distract from its political agenda.

You can watch the lecture on DT+, read the essay or download a pre-publication pdf.

This essay takes as its starting-point the post-2016 Refugee Crisis, which it considers to have been caused not so much by unmanageable migration as by excessive border control. It then uses Julia Kristeva’s figures of the ‘abject’ and ‘deject’ and Tim Ingold’s related conceptions of ‘containment’ and ‘exposure’ to explore some ways in which borders shape conceptions of nationhood and of identity. It goes on to explore Vicky Featherstone’s production of Zinnie Harris’ How to Hold Your Breath (Royal Court, 2015) and the Isango Ensemble’s A Man of Good Hope (Young Vic, 2016) as examples of representations of migrants and migration from a position of settled, white privilege. It then takes up the challenge of the chorus in A Man of Good Hope to ‘tell the other stories’ of the nationless, which it does partly by tracing the trajectories of easily-overlooked characters in A Man of Good Hope and then in dialogue with Zodwa Nyoni’s play Nine Lives (Leeds Studio, 2014). It finds in Nyoni’s play ways in which bounded conceptions of identity can be productively troubled by the figure of the migrant and identity thereby reframed not as the experience of containment within borders, but as a consequence of movement across them.

This short article was written as a quick response to the announcement of Emma Rice’s departure from the Globe in 2016. It analyses the politics of this controversial incident, with a particular focus on what it tells us about the ways in which theatre-makers can be made accountable to what may be unaccountable groups, and therefore vulnerable to half-hidden agendas and private interests in the shaping of their creative output.

You can read the article here.

This book chapter analyses the École International de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris as an example of a theatre studio. It charts the development of the Studio movement in Moscow and Paris in the early twentieth century through the work of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold and Copeau, and frames Lecoq's practice in the context of the legacy of their work. Ultimately, it argues that, by combining explorations of occluded theatre histories with ideas from contemporary culture, and by focusing on the psychophysical space of the body, the pedagogic space between training and experimental practice, and the creative space between freedom and discipline, Lecoq' s school was the most influential and significant twentieth-century incarnation of the ideals of the Studio tradition.

This book chapter analyses the artistic technique of the Russian actor, director and teacher Michael Chekhov (1891–1955), the essence of artistry in acting, as in any discipline, was transformation. He wrote extensively about ‘the hallmark of talent and the divine spark within the actor’ — the ‘ability to transform oneself totally’ — and explored this transformation in unusual depth in his teaching. Chekhov was an Anthroposophist, a follower of the teachings of the spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner, and his association of artistry with divinity was not merely a turn of phrase, but a reflection of that belief system. Steiner posited intimate connections between the human and the divine, or between ‘the sense-perceptible world’ and ‘the spiritual realm,’ and he taught a process of ‘clairvoyant perception’ by which he claimed that his followers would be able ‘to perceive the world we enter after death’ and thereby see beyond physical appearances and ‘move from the figure we perceive to the actual being.’ For Steiner, however, ‘clairvoyance’ was not only spiritual but artistic: he defined the artist by the capacity to ‘create in beauty a piece of the world, so that the image on canvas or in marble lets us see more of the world than we do on our own’.

Dartington Hall, which was the home of the Chekhov Theatre Studio between 1936 and 1938, also accommodated other performing artists including the Ballets Jooss and Hans Oppenheim's music school, as well as artist-craftsmen such as the painter Mark Tobey, the potter Bernard Leach and the sculptor Willi Soukop. This essay examines the training undertaken in Chekhov's studio in dialogue with the practice of these artists (who also worked with his students) and theories of practice articulated by the wider constructive movement in the arts in the 1930s. It goes on to propose that Chekhov's technique be considered as a means of achieving theatre-artistry through craftsmanship, and as an artistic technique whose reach extends far beyond the confines of actor training.

I feel a bit sentimental about this article from 2010 because it was my first bit of academic writing, produced while I was doing my PhD and teaching acting and directing at the Globe. It also generated a brief and unedifying email correspondence with its eponymous anti-hero.

The main focus of the article is the policy, pursued by Artistic Director Dominic Dromgoole from 2006, of extending and adapting the permanent stage of Shakespeare's Globe for each new production. I begin by responding to John Russell Brown's equation (in NTQ 102) of ‘intimate’ acting with ‘small theatres’. I resist this conflation of acting and building, seeing in it a tendency to obscure two things: 1) the capacity of reconstructed theatres to challenge contemporary notions of the ‘rightness’ of theatre spaces, and 2) the capacity of directors and actors to convert the apparent problems of these spaces into opportunities. I use the evidence of interviews given by Dromgoole and directors working at the Globe, as well as their productions, to critique their ‘permanently temporary’ alterations to the theatre and use of its (extended) stage. Finally, the article proposes some staging solutions to the apparent ‘problems’ identified by Dromgoole and his team, and derives from these an alternative model of ‘reconstructing’ theatre: not rebuilding auditoria, but constantly reviewing and renewing theatre practice.

You can read it here.