Creativity and structure

These days I work at Falmouth University. My official title is Head of Subject, Theatre Arts. In practice that means I am responsible for the running of a department of five courses. I teach acting.

I trained as an actor in the late 1980s at East 15 Acting School. Back then, East 15 was one of the more out there schools. It was rebellious and non-conformist. We were banned from calling ourselves students – we were actors. East 15 was “not an institution”. We did not have teachers and classes (not in acting, anyway) – we had directors and rehearsals. The work was the most important thing. More important than making friends, more important than relationships, more important than money. If it all sounds a bit cult like, in some ways it probably was. It could also be fabulous. But it could get dark. At its best it was wildly creative. What it did not have was formality and structure.

Today we have formality and structure to burn – including the East 15 Acting School of today, which is now part of the University of Essex with all the governance that brings. It is sometimes tempting to see this in a very binary way. Back in the 1980s we had craziness and that feels like we were perhaps more creative. Today the craziness has been tamed and that can seem like we have lost the creative. As with most binaries the reality is more complex.

The original East 15 Acting School was an off-shoot of Joan Littlewood’s ground-breaking company – Theatre Workshop. That company had its origins in the politically charged landscape of 1920s and 1930s Manchester and was born out of the chaos of post-second world war Britain. Originally a touring company, they trained themselves based on research they did at Manchester Library. They had a van that they had to push as often as they were able to drive and seem to have slogged around the country playing village halls and other non-traditional venues for audiences who would otherwise have had little to no access to theatre. In 1953 they landed at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London E15. They are an extraordinary moment in British Theatre and their influence is hard to over-estimate. But they were definitely chaotic.

Two members of Theatre Workshop – Margaret Bury and Jean Newlove – founded the school when Theatre Workshop disbanded (that happened a lot) for what turned out to be only a year. At the time it was thought to be for good and Maggie and Jean needed a new project. The school was founded to try and give structure to the improvisational brilliance of the company. The question the school asked was how can we have the wild creativity with a sense of consistency? Structure and freedom needed to be balanced, they felt.

I think about that a lot. The acting I really admire is when I can’t quite tell how the actor is doing it. It looks completely real, but it isn’t. It looks like that is the first time the actor has thought that thought or said that sentence or picked up that object. But it isn’t. If it really is the first time, then it’s not acting (although there can be exceptions to that – there are always exceptions in acting). If it doesn’t look believably like it’s the first time that happened, then it might be acting but it’s probably bad acting. And that quality of the appearance of reality is what Joan Littlewood wanted too. Maggie and Jean wanted to find ways to do that consistently.

The greater level of governance, scrutiny and structure that we work within today is not, of itself, a bad thing. It keeps everyone much safer. We just need to make sure we make space for the creativity whilst we pay more attention to that safety than maybe used to be the way.