Acting out of curiosity

In the past 40 years, from Joint Stock, through the Royal Court to his touring company, Out of Joint, Max Stafford-Clark has been a life force to theatre as a powerful stimulus to political curiosity and a provocateur of public debate about the way we live. He explained his philosophy, his method and his future plans to Cassandra Howard

Max Stafford-Clark is in the quirky and unassuming office of his theatre company, Out of Joint, in north London. With actors rehearsing on the floor below, the company’s unpretentious strength as an ensemble is apparent in the building’s communal feel. It is clearly a quiet and very personal space to Stafford-Clark, an appropriate place to hear reflections on the latest developments in theatre to-day, which clearly excite him.

‘My working life in this theatre, which comes to some 40-odd years, has coincided with a period of particular fruitfulness,’ he says. ‘There are a number of writers engaged in the public debate about how we are going to live our lives. Mark Ravenhill, for example, wrote 17 20-minute plays for the Edinburgh fringe festival this year. It is now quite an accepted norm that commentary on how we live and that plays should have a curiosity and an outward look towards the world rather than an inward look into themselves.’

An outward looking approach is typical of Out of Joint, which works mainly as a touring company producing new writing. The latest expression of the company’s – and Max’s – curiosity about the world is verbatim theatre.

‘If you do a verbatim play it is like going out in your under-clothes, you are dealing with research,’ he explains, and he’s now a master of the genre. Always one to deal with controversial subject matter, in 2003 he directed David Hare’s The Permanent Way, a play which used first hand accounts of those affected by the privatisation of Britain’s railways. Two years later, Out of Joint performed Talking to Terrorists by Robin Soans, a play composed entirely of interwoven testimonies of people affected in different ways by terrorism. With depictions of former IRA members, Palestinians and a child soldier in Uganda, the discretion in Stafford-Clark’s direction added a brutal poignancy to the delivery of those who played the victims.

‘I wouldn’t say that verbatim theatre is a new tool comparatively or a more recognised tool in the theatre-makers armoury,’ he says. ‘Certainly the authenticity that it gives to pieces like Talking to Terrorists makes for a very specific relationship between the actor and the audience and the audience and the work.’

Stafford-Clark’s acute awareness of these two crucial relationships in any performance is founded upon his close attention to detail in work on characters. ‘The first audience you have to please is yourself and then you spin it outwards from there.’ His approach is very much hands on. He encourages his actors to spend time researching the topic at hand as proactively as possible.

‘With something like The Overwhelming [a play by J T Rogers set on the eve of the Rwandan civil war produced last year], the text changed hardly at all and yet the research done by the actors reading the books was indispensable.’ Whether they’re playing a jihadist, Gordon Brown or a rent boy, Stafford-Clark will do his utmost to ensure that the actors investigate their roles in great detail, to embody those personal attributes to the highest emotional and physical level.

More recently he applied this method with LAMDA students on a new verbatim play by Robin Soans: ‘The play follows a theatre group breaking barriers in Burnley, a decrepit mill town whose economic purpose has disappeared. There is a large Bangladeshi community and a large white community, both of whom are equally out of work and both of whom are self segregating. We talked to the leader of the council, Sharon Wilkinson from the BNP, along with a lot of kids and the chairman of Burnley Football club.’

Doesn’t this amount to a kind of dramatised journalism? I ask. ‘Theatre can learn a great deal from journalism,’ he says but goes on to explain a process unique to theatre: ‘You could send a journalist to Burnley to do a piece on the different communities there but instead we sent actors and what we found will be represented in a theatrical form rather than in a newspaper. When we did A State Affair [an earlier Robin Soans play based on bleak estate life in West Yorkshire], we went to Bradford. I know for a fact that Melanie Phillips, who was writing a piece for the Sunday Times arrived on the 12.00 train and left on the 16.00 train on the same day. She investigated Bradford in a different context for four hours whereas we were there for two weeks with nine actors; so you can cover a lot of ground.’

But just as he believes in and often becomes involved in the literary evolvement of a play, by working so close at hand with the text, Staffored-Clark is committed to every member of his creative team. ‘It is a director’s responsibility to realise a play visually and obviously so you are very careful about the designer you work with. I am very conservative; once you do find a designer you work with you tend to keep that person for as long as you can.’

For actors, Stafford-Clark’s peerless commitment to them thrives in the rehearsal room. Watching him lead a rehearsal five years ago for Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, I saw him suddenly halt the scene between two actors and get them to re-run it in the style of ‘New York Queens’. Given the 18th-century classic English comedy context of the scene, a brilliantly funny improvisation took place without ever altering the actors’ intentions.

Stafford-Clark is famed for his theoretical approach and in particular that of ‘actioning’. By breaking up the text into sections, the actor has to find a transitive verb to accompany each individual action. He reassures me that both he and his actors find this technique very useful and that his ‘rehearsal process and the actioning has evolved to a consistency’.

Given the intimacy of his company, it comes as no surprise to learn that consistency is something he strives for. Out of Joint has been producing plays now for over 14 years and its inventive approach to political subject matter is undoubtedly one of its strong points. 2005 saw a deservedly successful run of a ‘site-specific’ revival of Macbeth set in a lawless African state.

‘I hope that Out of Joint is able to bring a political sensibility to everything it does. Macbeth is the story of a society that has produced an autocrat and a psychotic leader, so by relating that to Northern Africa one was able to see it in a slightly fresh way,’ he says.

Having seen the play in the disused Batley Red Brick Mill, West Yorkshire, I must expand on such a humble statement. Before the play had even begun, the audience – deprived of the familiar comfort of their creaky scarlet-upholstered chairs – were threatened by AK47-wielding youngsters (played by local kids), mobile phones were assertively confiscated and individuals intimidated before being lead through a series of increasingly dank and eerily lit rooms to the performance. Steering well clear of the ‘alarming regularity’ with which Stafford-Clark believes most popular classics to be performed, Macbeth received dazzling reviews.

‘A political curiosity is absolutely essential to any work that you do,’ he says. ‘That’s why I find it particularly hard to revive classics. You have to find a particular reason why you want to do them. But certainly site-specific theatre is a tool which helps to make the production theatrically fresh and vivid and aids with this curiosity.’

This year, in keeping with its support of new writing, Out of Joint’s new season sees the opening of the young David Watson’s Flight Path, directed by Naomi Jones.

‘Flight Path is about a London family which contains a young man who has Downs syndrome and that faces a particular challenge to the family themselves,’ says Stafford-Clark. ‘There is that great saying of Tolstoy’s that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It isn’t only first time writers who write family plays, but first time writers often do because it is something everybody has in common.’

Throughout his career Stafford-Clark has actively backed ‘first time’ writers and provided new and unfamiliar talent with an artistic outlet. The late Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob Too) was living in a battered wives’ home in Keighley when Max discovered her work and introduced her to a wider world. Mark Ravenhill’s career was launched after Out of Joint premiered his debut play Shopping and Fucking to great acclaim. A writer with a firm take on consumerist culture post-Thatcher and a recognisable way of not holding back, it comes as no surprise that his bold and political individuality struck Stafford-Clark as a valued creative asset.

‘The theatre is full of people who are determined and ambitious and to a more or lesser extent talented and there are always more of them than there is room for. In a way you have got to have a little bit more. I use the words “political curiosity”, some sensibility outside yourself about what you want to write about. If a young director writes to me and says they would love to have a talk about the alternatives that face them I will always reply to them but I am much more likely to see somebody who has a political sensibility. You see it in its most extreme form in America where I have just been casting The Overwhelming. There is a kind of desperation to work that fuels everybody. It isn’t necessarily positive because it just makes them more determined and more ambitious and more self centred.’

Ambition is an attribute exemplified by Stafford Clark, but self-interested ‘desperation’, as he so calls it, is far removed from his character. Last Summer he suffered from a stroke which has left him physically weakened, yet thankfully mentally unscathed.

‘I spent a large part of last July to last December lying on my back in a hospital so obviously I was able to do a lot of thinking,’ he says. ‘The production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera I am doing next year came out of that. It will be set on a convict ship going to Australia and will be a co-production with the Sydney Theatre Company. It’s also coming to England. It’s an idea I have had for a while.

‘I’m also doing a play with Laura Wade [writer of Breathing Corpses and Other Hands] based on an unfinished novel by Jane Austen called The Watsons. Laura has finished the novel herself, dramatised it and introduced a character called Jane Austen and a character called Laura Wade. There is an argument between the two about how the play should finish and a debate about what brings greater happiness in the 18th century versus the 21st century. For Austen, for example, the happy ending was a marriage because the idea that you could sleep with your prospective partner before marriage was totally impossible.’

It is reassuring to hear Stafford-Clark talk so boldly about his plans for the year ahead. Nautical productions on the other side of the world alongside Georgian fiction prove his ability to continually reinvent his company. Ever abreast of the political climate and highly pro-active in its artistic handling of indispensable topics, Out of Joint will continue to disseminate these themes across the country. Max Stafford Clarke will remain an integral part of British theatre in the years to come.

‘It is always very difficult to answer future questions because the theatre’s job is to extract the present. It’s not my job to predict what the theatre is going to be like,’ he says. ‘Why theatre continues to be vital in this country is that it does not simply respond to market forces, as in the West End or Broadway, but it continues to play a part in the debate about how we are to live our lives. It has learned that “education” is not a bad word in the theatre and that “entertainment” is not always a good one.’

Flight Path is showing at the Bush Theatre, London until 6 October before touring the UK. See www.outofjoint.co.uk for tour details. Max Stafford-Clark’s most recent book Taking Stock is published by Nick Hern Books.