London, December 2009: Over the years I have had the privilege to work with Bryony Lavery on several occasions. We were ‘lab-directors’ for Performing Arts Labs at Bore Place near Sevenoaks, near London. Artistic director Susan Benn, who orchestrates Performing Arts Labs, had the foresight to understand what good collaborators we would be. Working with Bryony is a delight: hard and committed work is matched with wit and laughing, deep conversations about life and the universe casually happen while taking a stroll and surprise is part of it all the way. Being a foreigner while working in a British context, Lavery’s cultural translations have been indispensible for me. Doing the interview was a strange experience. Before we would work on understanding and now I kept on asking questions and kept my distance to her answers in order to challenge her to formulate more. Her profound and long experience in the theatre contributes original insights to this research into witnessing.
Lavery’s first association with the word ‘witnessing’ is a witness in trial. Witnessing is not a word she uses to describe what happens in theatre. Being a writer of theatre plays, for Lavery the definition of a play is where one group of people comes to present a story to another group of people.
Lavery’s first association with the word ‘witnessing’ is a witness in trial. Witnessing is not a word she uses to describe what happens in theatre. Being a writer of theatre plays, for Lavery the definition of a play is where one group of people comes to present a story to another group of people.
The first group is the people who’ve made the play and the second group is the audience, but they have to breath the same air. They have to be alchemically changed, so simply observing is not possible. They alter the performance and the performance alters them, physically and mentally.
It is a construction of artistic deeds that makes up a presentation of a truth. It involves actors trying to seem like believable human beings in a story, which reveals their character or their lack of character. What they have to do is to convince the audience that it could happen or they have to delight the audience that a fantasy could occur. It has to seem like the truth, but of course it isn’t the truth because the characters are played by people who are not them. It is the opposite from real life, suggests Lavery, because theatre tries to represent a reality that’s unreal. By telling stories, theatre conveys truth in the end, Lavery explains.
An actor is believable when he inhabits his role, according to Lavery. In the rehearsal process actors do a lot of thinking both with their bodies and their brains to find the believable moves and to have a realistic and believable relationship to the other people on stage.
An actor is believable when he inhabits his role, according to Lavery. In the rehearsal process actors do a lot of thinking both with their bodies and their brains to find the believable moves and to have a realistic and believable relationship to the other people on stage.
The audience has to believe them. Finding one’s character usually happens physically in Lavery’s experience. It is like a dance; suddenly the character exists in the body of the actor. The entire body and voice and movement distill into a behavior that is the character. To find this moment is what the rehearsal process is about; finding the moment when the air thickens and the character on stage appears to be alive. To find their character actors try different things, do scene’s in different ways: furious, exaggerated, very calm etc.. You never know what it is that is going to unlock this moment, but it’s always something, Lavery finds.
It is the job of an actor to notice how for example a nurse moves and what typifies her so the audience will think: “oh, she’s a nurse”. Moves differ in different styles; in a comedy a nurse moves different to a nurse in a tragedy. The size of the theatre and the distance between actors and audience also influences the way actors have to move in order to convey their character. Body moves of an actor have to be precise, according to Lavery.
When rehearsing her play Stockholm, which is about the relationship of two people who are very much in love with each other but very destructive of one another, an anthropologist was observing how it was made, Lavery recalls. The anthropologist noticed that there are certain things that theatre people do to make the place safe.
When rehearsing her play Stockholm, which is about the relationship of two people who are very much in love with each other but very destructive of one another, an anthropologist was observing how it was made, Lavery recalls. The anthropologist noticed that there are certain things that theatre people do to make the place safe.
Because we are making something that does not exist, Lavery explains, we have to trust one another. We are making characters that do not exist, we are making places that don’t exist with just lighting and people and chairs and props. To be able to surprise one self as well as others, we have to trust each other, Lavery argues.
To create trust among the group of people that is involved in the rehearsal process, the anthropologist noticed that firstly theatre people share a lot of stories, share jokes and immediately make like a functioning family because they know they will be very close for the eight weeks of the rehearsal process. “Immediately it starts right from coffee onwards. People try to find common people they know, films, things that they’ve seen and jokes. If you can joke with each other, you make a room where you feel comfortable and safe. Jokes are often the valve where you can let off steam.” Lavery explains.
The second thing the anthropologist noticed is that theatre people agree that to all have equal status, while maintaining a clear division of labor. The director runs the room, makes sure the actors are challenged and safe at the same time. As a writer Lavery have the power to change the script etc. But in discussions, all have an equal say as to what they think should be done. In such discussions different truth’s come together.
Thirdly the anthropologist noticed that what is made is constantly tested by asking whether it is real or not. In theatre one is convinced something is real, when there is something unexpected in there. Lavery explains: “For example I was watching one scene where the girl was talking about her attic room and her voice was doing one thing, but because it was a physical theatre, she was doing something with her hand as well. I was watching it with the anthropologist and suddenly said “she broke bits of her body when she was a baby”. And I hadn’t thought of that and I’m sure the actor didn’t know, but that’s what I saw. And that was somehow proof to me that we were making something that we could believe was real.”
Last, it is important to realize that this trust only has to function for a limited amount of time, Lavery argues. Theatre people pretend they like to experiment and play forever, but actually the eight weeks or ten weeks is always good. “ You have to launch your trust into the eight or ten week group. And even if you’re in a stinker, everybody collaborates in a fiction that it’s going to be OK. And they keep it going until the last night party, when they will say “it was absolute crap, wasn’t it?” But you don’t say it before, because otherwise, the kind of the ball you’re trying to, you know, the reality you’re trying to keep going, can’t work.”
When confronted with the definition of a play as a system of time, place, relations and actions, Lavery emphasizes that theatre is a collaborative thing. It is a synthesis of actors, lighting, movement and nothing should happen twice. As a playwright Lavery tries to underwrite what needs to be necessary there. Lavery prefers to describe a play as a system of words and silences and movement and light.
When confronted with the definition of a play as a system of time, place, relations and actions, Lavery emphasizes that theatre is a collaborative thing. It is a synthesis of actors, lighting, movement and nothing should happen twice. As a playwright Lavery tries to underwrite what needs to be necessary there. Lavery prefers to describe a play as a system of words and silences and movement and light.
Fundamental to theatre are actions that change characters and relations are built through these actions in theatre. Plays are about characters, who are changed by what they do. Plays have speech, actions and activities. Actions have to be there, because they change people. Activities, like having a cup of tea, are not necessary because they do not reveal the actor’s story. A character getting up to make a cup of tea is inherently uninteresting and that’s an activity, Lavery explains. A character getting up to make a cup of tea because they don’t want to talk about what’s happening or that they want to get away from this person here that they loathe, or this person who they’re secretly in love with. Then, you know, if you know that’s happening, then that’s interesting. And that’s theatre and that’s hard to do.
Scenes have objectives. For example in this scene Hamlet discovers his mother is lying to him. It can happen in words or it can happen in actions. There have to be guide rules of character and actions. In a play nothing should be there, that does not have to be in there.
In the writing process and eventually in the play, Lavery leaves spaces in how people are talking. Her characters don’t talk in sentences, they have different sizes of space, or long gaps of silence, in which a change of thought can be felt. It implies that something specifically is happening, something mentally or physically is happening between the end of one word and the beginning of the next. Lavery argues that there has to be an in-between space for something physically to happen.
For Lavery the body is the instrument that records it all and is affected by it all. Whatever we see or whatever we witness has an effect on our brains, our bodies, our heat, our everything. That’s the relationship between being witness and the body. Even in today’s context, in which we have so much communication without body embodiment, the body still is the instrument that records it all.
As playwright Lavery suggests a rhythm, using her sense of where people’s behavior needs silence, focusing on the eloquence of movement rather than on the eloquence of words. While writing the page is a template, like the score is musically.
As playwright Lavery suggests a rhythm, using her sense of where people’s behavior needs silence, focusing on the eloquence of movement rather than on the eloquence of words. While writing the page is a template, like the score is musically.
In rehearsal the rhythm is tried. To whether it works Lavery comments: “I’m very intuitive rather than analytical. There is the moment where suddenly like the air gets still and thicker and more granular or viscous. And you know that that is convincing. But it’s trial and error, combined with artistic taste.”
To get the ‘magic in the air’ a robust structure is necessary, argues Lavery.
Such a robust structure consists of a strong story, quite complicated characters and then good actors. Also good word of mouth, good publicity, materials, the right space to perform it in, and the right design and the right director. It’s completely collaborative.
“Fundamentally it starts with strong characters. One believes the characters because of the actions they do, which are believable. And that the actions of one character impacts on the other character and then that action impinges on the next character. And so the story builds. And so I and everybody who’s in it and everybody who’s watching it, believes the path of the story. And at the end, it’s like with kids when you tell them a story and you stop and they say ‘is that the end?’. And they know it’s the end and that’s why they ask it, because they know it.”
In good stories, finds Lavery, you feel a story and every secene is about slightly more than it seems to be about. It has the notion of a myth or a story we’ve known from the dawn of time or you know it has the elements of the very first stories we were told.
In good stories, finds Lavery, you feel a story and every secene is about slightly more than it seems to be about. It has the notion of a myth or a story we’ve known from the dawn of time or you know it has the elements of the very first stories we were told.
It is not about making reference to such myths. As we are all sitting in the theatre we all have to feel that that’s there, Lavery states.
All stories need to have different great emotions: grief, joy, pain, loss, terror, fury. They are very useful and there are hundreds. Emotions are the fuel of the story, of the structure. The story is about characters experiencing, controlling or suppressing these feelings. Sometimes the emotion surprises, because you know the wrong emotion is in seemingly the wrong place. You suddenly think “that character is feeling murderous rage for this person they’re pretending to love and isn’t that interesting.” But always, you know, it is happening over there. Theatre is the place where you can kill people and get away with it, Lavery says. Personally she likes to explore things that terrify her or make her angry because those are great fires for making things.
Emotions relate to the actions. They are as twins, as Lavery formulates it. An emotion can make an action or an action can call forth an emotion. On stage Lavery cannot think of any example where actions are performed without triggering emotions. You cannot get up on stage just because you feel like it.
Creating the sense of place in theatre is mostly a collaborative effort of many. As a playwright Lavery is mostly concerned with creating an emotional sense of place. It’s a mixture of research and working hard to get it right.
Creating the sense of place in theatre is mostly a collaborative effort of many. As a playwright Lavery is mostly concerned with creating an emotional sense of place. It’s a mixture of research and working hard to get it right.
When breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly to the audience it has to make the audience feel safe. Strong structurer provide this safety, so people know what is expected o them. “So that you know that they’re not gonna come and make you come into their frightening world, into their magic space”.
Light is very important for the sense of place in theatre, as in poetry for example. In a tragedy, you start in a blaze of apparently good light and then it goes darker, and actually light goes darker. And then all good plays should take you out into the light again. Very often poets, novelists or filmmakers set certain scenes in the rain or in sunlight. Because pathetic fallacy is that the space you are in, replicates what is in your heart. Your heart is a green meadow with sun on it or your heart is in a dark cave. Light is one of the most important things in story or life anyway, Lavery states.
Lighting designers are the most unsung heroes in theatre, because you’re not always aware of what’s happening. Light deeply influences how people witness. It affects moods and how people witness as well as that it helps to tell the story.
Caroline Nevejan