# Introduction

If teachers were honoured in the British theatre alongside directors,
designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name
as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and the other
young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court
Theatre in the late 1950s. As head of the Court's script
department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the
'writers' theatre', but to the general public he was known only as the
author of occasional and less than triumphant Court plays like
_Brixham
Regatta_ and
_Performing
Giant._ As he recounts in this book, he
started as a writer who lost the ability to write, and then ran into the
same melancholy impasse again when he turned to
directing.

What follows is the story of his
escape.

I first met Johnstone shortly after he had joined the Court as a
10s-a-script play-reader, and he struck me then as a revolutionary
idealist looking around for a guillotine.
He saw corruption everywhere.
John Arden, a fellow play-reader
at that time, recalls him as 'George Devine's subsidised extremist, or
Keeper of the King's Conscience'. The Court then set up
its Writers' Group and Actors' Studio, run by Johnstone and William
Gaskill, and attended by Arden, Ann Jellicoe and other writers of the
Court's first wave. This was the turning point.
'Keith', Gaskill says, 'started to
teach his own particular style of improvisation, much of it based on
fairy stories, word associations, free associations, intuitive
responses, and later he taught mask work as well.
All his work has been to encourage
the rediscovery of the imaginative response in the adult; the refinding
of the power of the child's creativity.
Blake is his prophet and Edward
Bond his pupil.'

Johnstone's all-important first move was to banish aimless discussion
and transform the meetings to enactment sessions; it was what happened
that mattered, not what anybody said about it.
'It is hard now to remember how
fresh this idea was in 1958,' Ann Jellicoe says, 'but it chimed in with
my own way of thinking.' Other members were Arnold Wesker,
Wole Soyinka, and David Cregan as well as
[Bond
who now acknowledges Johnstone as a 'catalyst who made our experience
malleable by ourselves'. As an example, he cites an
exercise in blindness which he later incorporated in his play
]_Lear_; and one can pile up
examples from Arden, Jellicoe, and Wesker of episodes or whole plays
deriving from the group's work. For Cregan, Johnstone
'knew how to unlock Dionysus': which came to the same thing as learning
how to unlock himself.

From such examples one can form some idea of the special place that
teaching occupied in Devine's Royal Court; and how, in Johnstone's case,
it was the means by which he liberated himself in the act of liberating
others. He now hands over his hard-won
bunch of keys to the general reader. This book is the fruit
of twenty years' patient and original work; a wise, practical, and
hilariously funny guide to imaginative survival.
For anyone of the 'artist type'
who has shared the author's experience of seeing his gift apparently
curl up and die, it is essential
reading.

One of Johnstone's plays is about an impotent old recluse, the master
of a desolate castle, who has had the foresight to stock his deep-freeze
with sperm. There is a power-cut and one of
the sperm escapes into a goldfish bowl and then into the moat where it
grows to giant size and proceeds to a whale of a life on the high
seas.

That, in a nut-shell, is the Johnstone doctrine.
You are not imaginatively impotent
until you are dead; you are only frozen up.
Switch off the no-saying intellect
and welcome the unconscious as a friend: it will lead you to places you
never dreamed of, and produce results more 'original' than anything you
could achieve by aiming at
originality.

Open the book at any of the exercises and you will see how the
unconscious delivers the goods. Here are a group of
hippopotamuses knitting pullovers from barbed wire, and a patient
suffering from woodworm who infects the doctor's furniture.
There are poems transcribed from
thin air, masked actors magicked back to childhood, Victorian melodrama
played in extempore verse. At the point where rational
narrative would come to a stop, Johnstone's stories carry on cheerfully
into the unknown. If a desperate schoolmaster kills
himself he will find a plenary session of the school governors awaiting
him at the pearly gates. Or if our hero is swallowed by a
monster, he will change into a heroic turd and soldier on to fresh
adventures.

I have seen none of this material in performance, either by students or
by Johnstone's Theatre Machine company; and one of the book's
achievements is its success in making improvisations re-live on the
[page.
Like all great advocates of the unconscious, Johnstone is a sturdy
rationalist. He brings a keen intellect,
nourished on anthropology and psychology, to the task of demolishing
intellectualism in the theatre. And where no technical
vocabulary exists, he develops his own down-to-earth shorthand to give a
simple name to the indescribable. In rediscovering the
imaginative world of childhood, he has re-examined the structural
elements that bind that world together.
What is a story?
What makes people laugh?
What relationships hold an
audience's interest, and why? How does an improviser
think up what comes next? Is conflict dramatically
necessary? (The answer is
No.)]

To these and other fundamental questions the book returns unexpected
and invariably useful answers. Answers that extend
theatre into the transactions of everyday life.
One's first impulse on reading
about these actors' games is to go and try them out on the kids, or to
have a go yourself. Like
this.

From anthills in the north

I come with wand in hand

to slay all people there

that I could understand.

At last one heap was left

Untamed by all my foes

until I caught the bees

and dealt them mighty blows.

That was a nonstop poem written in fifty seconds flat.
It may not be much, but it is more
than I have ever got from any other text-book on the imagination.
The difference is that Johnstone's
analysis is not concerned with results, but with showing you how to do
it; and his work ranks as a pioneer contribution to the exceedingly
sparse literature of comic theory from which comic practitioners really
have something to learn. It certainly has more to offer
than Meredith, Bergson, or Freud, to whom the suicidal hero of Heathcote
Williams's _Hancock's Last Half
Hour_ turns in his time of need;
dipping hopefully into _Jokes and their Connection with
the Unconscious,_ and then dropping the book with
the despairing cry, 'How would he do second house at the Glasgow
Empire?' If Hancock had picked up this
book, there might have been a happy
ending.

IRVING WARDLE

_[[Notes
on Myself]](#06_Contents.xhtml_not1)_

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull.
I could still remember the amazing
intensity of the world I'd lived in as a child, but I thought the
dulling perception was an inevitable consequence of age---just as the
lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim.
I didn't understand that clarity
is in the mind.

I've since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about
fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours.
For example, if I have a group of
students who are feeling fairly safe and comfortable with each other, I
get them to pace about the room shouting out the wrong name for
everything that their eyes light on.
Maybe there's time to shout out
ten wrong names before I stop them. Then I ask whether other
people look larger or smaller---almost everyone sees people as different
sizes, mostly as smaller. 'Do the outlines look sharper or
more blurred?' I ask, and everyone agrees that
the outlines are many times sharper.
'What about the colours?'
Everyone agrees there's far more
colour, and that the colours are more intense.
Often the size and shape of the
room will seem to have changed, too.
The students are amazed that such
a strong transformation can be effected by such primitive means---and
especially that the effects last so long.
I tell them that they only have to
think about the exercise for the effects to appear
again.

My own rediscovery of the visionary world took longer.
At a time when I seemed to have
lost all my talents as a creative artist I was driven to investigate my
mental images. I started with the hypnagogic
ones--- the pictures that appear to many people at the threshold of
sleep. They interest me because they
didn't appear in any predictable sequence; I was interested in their
_spontaneity_.

It's not easy to observe hypnagogic images, because once you see one
and think 'There!' you wake up a little and the image
disappears. You have to
_attend_ to the images without
verbalising about them, so I learned to 'hold the mind still' like a
hunter waiting in a forest.

One afternoon I was lying on my bed and investigating the effects of
anxiety on the musculature (how do you spend your afternoons?).
I was relaxing myself and
conjuring up horrific images. I had recalled an
[eye
operation I'd had under local anaesthetic, when suddenly I thought of
]_attending_ to my mental images
just as I had to the hypnagogic ones.
The effect was astounding.
They had all sorts of detail that
I hadn't known about, and that I certainly hadn't
_chosen_ to be there.
The surgeons' faces were
distorted, their masks were thrusting out as if there were snouts
beneath them! The effect was so interesting that
I persisted. I thought of a house, and
_attended_ to the image and saw
the doors and windows bricked in, but the chimney still smoking (a
symbol for my inhibited state at the time?).
I thought of another house and saw
a terrifying figure in the doorway.
I looked in the windows and saw
strange rooms in amazing detail.

When you ask people to think of an image, their eyes often move in a
particular direction, often up and to the side.
I was placing my mental images
upwards and to the right---that's the space in which I 'thought' of
them. When I
_attended_ to them they moved
into the 'front' of my mind. Obviously, at some time
in my childhood my mental images had frightened me, and I'd displaced
them, I'd trained myself not to look at them.
When I had an image I knew what
was there, so I didn't need to look at it---that's how I deluded myself
that my creativity was under my own
control.

After a lot of practice at _attending_ to the images I
conjured up, I belatedly thought of
_attending_ to the reality around
me. Then the deadness and greyness
immediately sloughed off---yet I'd thought I'd never move through a
visionary world again, that I'd lost it.
In my case it was largely my
interest in art that had destroyed any life in the world around me.
I'd learned perspective, and about
balance, and composition. It was as if I'd learned
to redesign everything, to reshape it so that I saw what
_ought_ to be there, which of
course is much inferior to what _is_ there.
The dullness was not an inevitable
consequence of age, but of
education.^1(#10_SPONTANEITY.xhtml_id_28)^

**Contrariness**

At about the age of nine I decided never to believe anything because it
was _convenient_.
I began reversing every statement
to see if the opposite was also true.
This is so much a habit with me
that I hardly notice I'm doing it any more.
As soon as you put a 'not' into an
assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out--- especially
in drama, where everything is supposition anyway.
When I began teaching, it was very
natural for me to reverse everything my own teachers had done.
I got my actors to make faces,
insult each other, always leap before they looked, to scream and shout
and [misbehave
in all sorts of ingenious ways. It was like having a
whole tradition of improvisation teaching behind me.
In a normal education everything
is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop
it.]

**Cripples**

I made a two-minute film for a TV programme.
It was all in one shot, no cuts.
Everyone who saw it roared with
laughter. There were people rolling on the
cutting-room floor, holding their sides.
Once they'd recovered, they'd say
'No, no, it's very funny but we can't show
_that_!'

The film showed three misshapen but gleeful cripples who were leaping
about and hugging each other. The camera panned
slightly to reveal that they were hiding around a corner and waiting for
a normal person who was approaching.
When he drew level, the cripples
leaped on him, and bashed him to pulp with long balloons.
Then they helped him up, as
battered and twisted as they were, and they shook hands with him, and
the four of them waited for the next
person.

**A Psychotic Girl**

I once had a close rapport with a teenager who seemed 'mad' when she
was with other people, but relatively normal when she was with me.
I treated her rather as I would a
Mask (see Masks, page [143](#12_MASKS_AND_TRANCE.xhtml_page_143))---that
is to say, I was gentle, and I didn't try to impose my reality on her.
One thing that amazed me was her
perceptiveness about other people---it was as if she was a body-language
expert. She described things about them
which she read from their movement and postures that I later found to be
true, although this was at the beginning of a summer school and none of
us had ever met before.

I'm remembering her now because of an interaction she had with a very
gentle, motherly schoolteacher. I had to leave for a few
minutes, so I gave the teenager my watch and said she could use it to
see I was away only a very short time, and that the schoolteacher would
look after her. We were in a beautiful garden
(where the teenager had just seen God) and the teacher picked a flower
and said: 'Look at the pretty flower,
Betty.'

Betty, filled with spiritual radiance, said, 'All the flowers are
beautiful.'

'Ah,' said the teacher, blocking her, 'but this flower is especially
beautiful.'

[Betty
rolled on the ground screaming, and it took a while to calm her.
Nobody seemed to notice that she
was screaming 'Can't you see? Can't you
see!']

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent.
She was insisting on categorising,
and on selecting. Actually it is crazy to insist
that one flower is especially beautiful in a whole garden of flowers,
but the teacher is allowed to do this, and is not perceived by sane
people as violent. Grown-ups are expected to distort
the perceptions of the child in this way.
Since then I've noticed such
behaviour constantly, but it took the mad girl to open my eyes to
it.

**'Education' as a Substance**

People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity,
as if education was a _substance_, and that bad teachers
supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot.
This makes it difficult to
understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad
teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged
in opposite activities. (I saw a teacher relax his
students on the floor, and then test for relaxation by lifting their
feet eighteen inches into the air and dropping their heels on the
concrete.)

**Growing Up**

As I grew up I began to feel uncomfortable.
I had to use conscious effort to
'stand up straight'. I thought that adults were
superior to children, and that the problems that worried me would
gradually correct themselves. It was very upsetting to
realise that if I was going to change for the better then I'd have to do
it myself.

I found I had some severe speech defects, worse than other people's (I
was eventually treated at a speech hospital).
I began to understand that there
really was something wrong with my body, I began to see myself as
_crippled in the use of
myself_ (just as a great violinist would
play better on a cheap violin than I would on a Strad).
My breathing was inhibited, my
voice and posture were wrecked, something was seriously wrong with my
imagination---it was becoming difficult actually to get ideas.
How could this have happened when
the state had spent so much money educating
me?

Other people seemed to have no insight into my problems.
All my teachers cared about was
whether I was a _winner_.
I wanted to stand like Gary
Cooper, and to be confident, and to know how to send the soup back when
it was cold without making the waiter feel obliged to spit in
[it.
I'd left school with worse posture, and a worse voice, with worse
movement and far less spontaneity than when I'd entered it.
Could teaching have had a negative
effect?]

**Emotion**

One day, when I was eighteen, I was reading a book and I began to weep.
I was astounded.
I'd had no idea that literature
could affect me in such a way. If I'd wept over a poem
in class the teacher would have been appalled.
I realised that my school had been
teaching me _not_ to
respond.

(In some universities students unconsciously learn to copy the physical
attitudes of their professors, leaning back away from the play or film
they're watching, and crossing their arms tightly, and tilting their
heads back. Such postures help them to feel
less 'involved', less 'subjective'.
The response of untutored people
is infinitely superior.)

**Intelligence**

I tried to resist my schooling, but I accepted the idea that my
intelligence was the most important part of me.
I tried to be
_clever_ in everything I did.
The damage was greatest in areas
where my interests and the school's seemed to coincide: in writing, for
example (I wrote and rewrote, and lost all my fluency).
I forgot that inspiration isn't
intellectual, that you don't have to be perfect.
In the end I was reluctant to
attempt anything for fear of failure, and my first thoughts never seemed
good enough. Everything had to be corrected and
brought into line.

The spell broke when I was in my early twenties.
I saw a performance of Dovzhenko's
_Earth_, a film which is a
closed book for many people, but which threw me into a state of
exaltation and confusion. There is a sequence in
which the hero, Vassily, walks alone in the twilight.
We know he's in danger, and we
have just seen him comforting his wife, who rolled her eyes like a
frightened animal. There are shots of mist moving
eerily on water, and silent horses stretching their necks, and
corn-stooks against the dusky sky. Then, amazingly,
peasants lying side by side, the men with their hands inside the women's
blouses and motionless, with idiotic smiles on their faces as they stare
at the twilight. Vassily, dressed in black, walks
through the Chagall village, and the dust curls up in little clouds
around his feet and he is dark against the moonlit road, and he is
filled with the same ecstasy as the peasants.
He walks and walks and the film
cuts and cuts until he walks out of frame.
Then the camera moves back, and we
see [him
stop. The fact that he walks for so
long, and that the image is so beautiful, linked up with my own
experience of being alone in the twilight---the gap between the worlds.
Then Vassily walks again, but
after a short time he begins to dance, and the dance is skilled, and
like an act of thanksgiving. The dust swirls around
his feet, so that he's like an Indian god, like Siva---and with the man
dancing alone in the clouds of dust something unlocked in me.
In one moment I knew that the
valuing of men by their intelligence is crazy, that the peasants
watching the night sky might feel more than I feel, that the man who
dances might be superior to myself---word-bound and unable to dance.
From then on I noticed how warped
many people of great intelligence are, and I began to value people for
their actions, rather than their
thoughts.]

**Anthony Stirling**

I felt crippled, and 'unfit' for life, so I decided to become a
teacher. I wanted more time to sort myself
out, and I was convinced that the training college would teach me to
speak clearly, and to stand naturally, and to be confident, and how to
improve my teaching skills. Common sense assured me
of this, but I was quite wrong. It was only by luck that
I had a brilliant art teacher called Anthony Stirling, and then all my
work stemmed from his example. It wasn't so much what
he taught, as what he _did_.
For the first time in my life I
was in the hands of a great
teacher.

I'll describe the first lesson he gave us, which was unforgettable and
completely disorientating.

He treated us like a class of eight-year-olds, which I didn't like, but
which I thought I understood---'He's letting us know what it feels like
to be on the receiving end,' I
thought.

He made us mix up a thick 'jammy' black paint and asked us to imagine a
clown on a one-wheeled bicycle who pedals through the paint, and on to
our sheets of paper. 'Don't paint the clown,' he said,
'paint the mark he leaves on your
paper!'

I was wanting to demonstrate my skill, because I'd always been 'good at
art', and I wanted him to know that I was a worthy student.
This exercise annoyed me because
how could I demonstrate my skill? I could paint the clown,
but who cared about the tyre-marks?

'He cycles on and off your paper,' said Stirling, 'and he does all
sorts of tricks, so the lines he leaves on your paper are very
interesting . .
.'

Everyone's paper was covered with a mess of black lines---except mine,
since I'd tried to be original by mixing up a blue.
Stirling was
[scathing
about my inability to mix up a black, which irritated
me.]

Then he asked us to put colours in all the shapes the clown had
made.

'What kind of colours?'

'Any colours.'

'Yeah . .
.
but .
.
.
er .
.
.
we don't know what colours to
choose.'

'Nice colours, nasty colours, whatever you
like.'

We decided to humour him. When my paper was
coloured I found that the blue had disappeared, so I repainted the
outlines black.

'Johnstone's found the value of a strong outline,' said Stirling, which
really annoyed me. I could see that everyone's paper
was getting into a soggy mess, and that mine was no worse than anybody
else's---but no better.

'Put patterns on all the colours,' said Stirling.
The man seemed to be an idiot.
Was he teasing
us?

'What sort of patterns?'

'Any patterns.'

We couldn't seem to start. There were about ten of
us, all strangers to each other, and in the hands of this
madman.

'We don't know what to do.'

'Surely it's easy to think of
patterns.'

We wanted to get it _right_.
'What sort of patterns do you
want?'

'It's up to you.' He had to explain patiently to us
that it really was our choice. I remember him asking us
to think of our shapes as fields seen from the air if that helped, which
it didn't. Somehow we finished the exercises,
and wandered around looking at our daubs rather glumly, but Stirling
seemed quite unperturbed. He went to a cupboard
and took out armfuls of paintings and spread them around the floor, and
it was the same exercise done by other students.
The colours were so beautiful, and
the patterns were so inventive---clearly they had been done by some
advanced class. 'What a great idea,' I thought,
'making us screw up in this way, and then letting us realise that there
was something that we could learn, since the advanced students were so
much better!' Maybe I exaggerate when I remember
how beautiful the paintings were, but I was seeing them immediately
after my failure. Then I noticed that these little
masterpieces were signed in very scrawly writing.
'Wait a minute,' I said, 'these
are by young children!' They were all by
eight-year-olds! It was just an exercise to
encourage them to use the whole area of the paper, but they'd done it
with such love and taste and care and sensitivity.
I was speechless.
Something happened to me in that
moment from which I have never recovered.
It was the final
[confirmation
that my education had been a destructive
process.]

Stirling believed that the art was 'in' the child, and that it wasn't
something to be imposed by an adult.
The teacher was
_not_ superior to the child,
and should never demonstrate, and should not impose values: 'This is
good, this is bad . .
.'

'But supposing a child wants to learn how to draw a
tree?'

'Send him out to look at one. Let him climb one.
Let him touch
it.'

'But if he still can't draw one?'

'Let him model it in clay.'

The implication of Stirling's attitude was that the student should
never experience failure. The teacher's skill lay
in presenting experiences in such a way that the student was bound to
succeed. Stirling recommended that we read
the _Tao te
Ching_.
It seems to me now that he was
practically using it as his teaching manual.
Here are some extracts: '.
.
.
The sage keeps to the deed that
consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no
words . .
.
When his task is accomplished and
his work done the people all say, "It happened to us naturally" .
.
.
I take no action and the people
are transformed of themselves; I prefer stillness and the people are
rectified of themselves; I am not meddlesome and the people prosper of
themselves. I am free from desire and the
people of themselves become simple like the uncarved block .
.
.
One who excels in employing others
humbles himself before them. This is unknown as the
virtue of non-contention; this is known as making use of the efforts of
others . .
.
To know yet to think that one does
not know is best . .
.
The sage does not hoard.
Having bestowed all he has on
others, he has yet more; having given all he has to others, he is richer
still. The way of heaven benefits and
does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.'
(Translated by C.D.
Lau, Penguin,
1969.)

**Being a Teacher**

I chose to teach in Battersea, a working-class area that most new
teachers avoided---but I'd been a postman there, and I loved the
place.

My new colleagues bewildered me. 'Never tell people
you're a teacher!' they said.
'If they find you're a teacher in
the pub, they'll all move away!' It was true!
I'd believed that teachers were
respected figures, but in Battersea they were likely to be feared or
hated. I liked my colleagues, but they
had a colonist's attitude to the children; they referred to them as
'poor stock', and they disliked exactly those children I found most
inventive. If a child is creative he's likely
to be [more
difficult to control, but that isn't the reason for disliking him.
My colleagues had a poor view of
themselves: again and again I heard them say, 'Man among boys; boy among
men' when describing their condition.
I came to see that their
unhappiness, and lack of acceptance in the community, came from a
feeling that they were irrelevant, or rather that the school was
something middle class being forcibly imposed on to the working-class
culture. Everyone seemed to accept that if
you ]_could_ educate one of these
children you'd remove him away from his parents (which is what my
education had done for me). Educated people were
snobs, and many parents didn't want their children alienated from
them.

Like most new teachers, I was given the class no one else wanted.
Mine was a mix of twenty-six
'average' eight-year-olds, and twenty 'backward' ten-year-olds whom the
school had written off as _ineducable_.
Some of the ten-year-olds couldn't
write their names after five years of schooling.
I'm sure Professor Skinner could
teach even pigeons to type out their names in a couple of weeks, so I
couldn't believe that these children were really dull: it was more
likely that they were putting up a resistance.
One astounding thing was the way
cowed and dead-looking children would suddenly brighten up and look
intelligent when they weren't being asked to
_learn_.
When they were cleaning out the
fish tank, they looked fine. When writing a sentence,
they looked numb and defeated.

Almost all teachers, even if they weren't very bright, got along
reasonably well as schoolchildren, so presumably it's difficult for them
to identify with the children who fail.
My case was peculiar in that I'd
apparently been exceptionally intelligent up to the age of eleven,
winning all the prizes (which embarrassed me, since I thought they
should be given to the dull children as compensation) and being
teacher's pet, and so on. Then, spectacularly, I'd
suddenly come bottom of the class---'down among the dregs', as my
headmaster described it. He never forgave me.
I was puzzled too, but gradually I
realised that I wouldn't work for people I didn't like.
Over the years my work gradually
improved, but I never fulfilled my promise.
When I liked a particular teacher
and won a prize, the head would say: 'Johnstone is taking this prize
away from the boys who deserve it!'
If you've been bottom of the class
for years it gives you a different perspective: I was friends with boys
who were failures, and nothing would induce me to write them off as
'useless' or 'ineducable'. My 'failure' was a
survival tactic, and without it I would probably never have worked my
way out of the trap that my education had set for me.
[I
would have ended up with a lot more of my consciousness blocked off from
me than ]_now_.

I was determined that my classes shouldn't be dull, so I used to jump
about and wave my arms, and generally stir things up---which is
exciting, but bad for discipline. If you shove an
inexperienced teacher into the toughest class, he either sinks or swims.
However idealistic he is, he tends
to clutch at traditional ways of enforcing discipline.
My problem was to resist the
pressures that would turn me into a conventional teacher.
I had to establish a quite
different relationship before I could hope to release the creativity
that was so apparent in the children when they weren't thinking of
themselves as 'being educated'.

I didn't see why Stirling's ideas shouldn't apply to all areas, and in
particular to writing: literacy was clearly of great importance, and
anyway writing interested me, and I wanted to infect the children with
enthusiasm. I tried getting them to send
secret notes to each other, and write rude comments about me, and so on,
but the results were nil. One day I took my
typewriter and my art books into the class, and said I'd type out
anything they wanted to write about the pictures.
As an afterthought, I said I'd
also type out their dreams---and suddenly they were actually wanting to
write. I typed out everything exactly as
they wrote it, including the spelling mistakes, until they caught me.
Typing out spelling mistakes was a
weird idea in the early fifties (and probably now)---but it worked.
The pressure to get things right
was coming from the children, not the teacher.
I was amazed at the intensity of
feeling and outrage the children expressed, and their determination to
be _correct_, because no one would
have dreamt that they cared. Even the illiterates
were getting their friends to spell out every word for them.
I scrapped the time-table, and for
a month they wrote for hours every day.
I had to force them out of the
classroom to take breaks. When I hear that
children only have an attention span of ten minutes, or whatever, I'm
amazed. Ten minutes is the attention span
of _bored_ children, which is
what they usually are in school---hence the
misbehaviour.

I was even more astounded by the quality of the things the children
wrote. I'd never seen any examples of
children's writing during my training; I thought it was a hoax (one of
my colleagues must have smuggled a book of modern verse in!).
By far the best work came from the
'ineducable' ten-year-olds. At the end of my first
year the Divisional Officer refused to end my probation.
He'd found my class doing
arithmetic with masks over their faces---they'd made them in art class
[and
I didn't see why they shouldn't wear them.
There was a cardboard tunnel he
was supposed to crawl through (because the classroom was doubling as an
igloo), and an imaginary hole in the floor that he refused to walk
around. I'd stuck all the art paper
together and pinned it along the back wall, and when a child got bored
he'd leave what he was doing and stick some more leaves on the burning
forest.]

My headmaster had discouraged my ambition to become a teacher: 'You're
not the right type,' he said, 'not the right type at all.'
Now it looked as if I was going to
be rejected officially. Fortunately the school was
inspected, and Her Majesty's Inspector thought that my class were doing
the most interesting work. I remember one incident
that struck him as amazing: the children screaming out that there were
only three chickens drawn on the blackboard, while I was insisting that
there were five (two were still inside the hen-house).
Then the children started
scribbling furiously away, writing stories about chickens, and shouting
out any words they wanted spelt on the blackboard.
I shouldn't think half of them had
even seen a chicken, but it delighted the Inspector.
'You realise that they're trying
to throw me out,' I said, and he fixed it so that I wasn't bothered
again.

Stirling's 'non-interference' worked in every area where I applied it:
piano teaching for example. I worked with Marc
Wilkinson, the composer (he became director of music at the National
Theatre), and his tape recorder played the same sort of role that my
typewriter had. He soon had a collection of tapes
as surprising as the children's poems had been.
I assembled a group of children by
asking each teacher for the children he couldn't stand; and although
everyone was amazed at such a selection method, the group proved to be
very talented, and they learned with amazing speed.
After twenty minutes a boy
hammered out a discordant march and the rest shouted, 'It's the Japanese
soldiers from the film on Saturday!'
Which it was.
We invented many games--- like one
child making sounds for water and another putting the 'fish' in it.
Sometimes we got them to feel
objects with their eyes shut, and got them to play what it felt like so
that the others could guess. Other teachers were
amazed by the enthusiasm and talent shown by these 'dull'
children.

**The Royal Court Theatre**

In 1956 the Royal Court Theatre was commissioning plays from
established novelists (Nigel Dennis, Angus Wilson), and Lindsay Anderson
suggested that they should stop playing safe and commission an
unknown---_me_.

[I'd
had very bad experiences in the theatre, but there was one play I'd
liked: Beckett's ]_Waiting for
Godot_, which seemed entirely lucid and
pertinent to my own problems. I was trying to be a
painter at the time, and my artist friends all agreed that Beckett must
be a very young man, one of our contemporaries, since he understood our
feelings so well. Because I didn't like the
theatre---it seemed so much feebler than, say, the films of Kurosawa, or
Keaton---I didn't at first accept the Royal Court's commission, but then
I ran out of money, so I wrote a play strongly influenced by Beckett
(who once wrote to me, saying that 'a stage is an area of maximum verbal
presence, and maximum corporeal presence'---the word 'corporeal' really
delighting me).

My play was called _Brixham
Regatta_, and I remember Devine thumbing
through the notices and saying that it was sex that had been intolerable
to the Victorians, and that 'whatever it is now, Keith is writing about
it'. I was amazed that most critics
were so hostile. I'd been illustrating a theme of
Blake's: 'Alas! The time will come when a man's
worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family .
.
.'
But in 1958 such a view was
unacceptable. Ten years later, when I directed
the play at the Mermaid, it didn't seem at all shocking: its ideas had
become commonplace.

I've been often told how weird and silent I seemed to many people, but
Devine was amused by my ideas (many of which came from Stirling).
I'd argue that a director should
never demonstrate anything to an actor, that a director should allow the
actor to make his own discoveries, that the actor should think he'd done
all the work himself. I objected to the idea that the
director should work out the moves before the production started.
I said that if an actor forgot a
move that had been decided on, then the move was probably wrong.
Later I argued that moves weren't
important, with that only a couple of actors on a stage, why did it
matter where they moved anyway? I explained that
_Hamlet_ in Russian can be just
as impressive, so were the words really of first importance?
I said that the set was no more
important than the apparatus in the circus.
I wasn't saying much that was new,
but I didn't know that, and certainly such thoughts weren't fashionable
at the time. I remember Devine going round the
theatre chuckling that 'Keith thinks
_King
Lear_ should have a happy
ending!'

They were surprised that someone so inexperienced as myself should have
become their best play-reader. Tony Richardson, then
Devine's Associate Director, once thanked me because I was taking such a
load off them. I was successful precisely because
I didn't exercise my taste. I would first read plays
as quickly as possible, and [categorise
them as pseudo-Pinter, fake-Osborne, phoney-Beckett, and so on.
Any play that seemed to come from
the author's own experience I'd then read attentively, and either leave
it in Devine's office or, if I didn't like it, give it to someone else
to read. As ninety-nine per cent of the
plays submitted were just cribs from other people, the job was easy.
I had expected that there'd be a
very gentle graduation from awful to excellent, and that I'd be involved
in a lot of heart-searching. Almost all were total
failures---they couldn't have been put on in the village hall for the
author's friends. It wasn't a matter of lack of
]_talent_, but of miseducation.
The authors of the pseudo-plays
assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.
My play had been influenced by
Beckett, but at least the content had been
_mine_.

Sometimes I'd read a play I liked, but that no one else would think
worth directing. Devine said that if I was really
convinced they were good I should direct them myself on a Sunday night.
I directed Edward Bond's first
play in this way, but the very first play I directed was Kon Fraser's
_Eleven
Plus_ (which I still have a fondness
for, although it hasn't prospered much).
I was given advice by Ann
Jellicoe---already an accomplished director---and I was successful.
It really seemed that even if I
couldn't write any more---and writing had become extremely laborious and
unpleasant for me---at least I could earn a living as a director.
Obviously, I felt I ought to study
my craft, but the more I understood how things ought to be done, the
more boring my productions were. Then as now, when I'm
inspired, everything is fine, but when I try to get things right it's a
disaster. In a way I was successful---I
ended up as an Associate Director of the theatre---but once again my
talent had left me.

When I considered the difference between myself and other people, I
thought of myself as a late developer.
Most people lose their talent at
puberty. I lost mine in my early twenties.
I began to think of children not
as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children.
But when I said this to
educationalists, they became
angry.

**Writers' Group**

George Devine had announced that the Royal Court was to be a 'writers'
theatre', but the writers weren't having much say in the policies of the
theatre. George thought a discussion group
would correct this, and he chaired three meetings, which were so tedious
that he handed the job over to William Gaskill, one of his young
directors. Bill had directed my play
_Brixham
Regatta_, and he asked me how I
[would
run the group. I said that if it continued as a
talking-shop, then everyone would abandon it, and that we should agree
to discuss nothing that could be acted out.
Bill agreed, and the group
immediately began to function as an improvisation group.
We learned that things invented on
the spur of the moment could be as good or better than the texts we
laboured over. We developed very practical
attitudes to the theatre. As Edward Bond said,
'The writers' group taught me that drama was about relationships, not
about characters.' I've since found that my
no-discussion idea wasn't original.
Carl Weber, writing about Brecht,
says: '. .
.
the actors would suggest a way of
doing something, and if they started to explain, Brecht would say he
wanted no discussion in rehearsal---it would have to be tried .
.
.
.'
(A pity all Brechtians don't have
the master's attitude.)]

My bias against discussion is something I've learned to see as very
English. I've known political theatre
groups in Europe which would readily cancel a rehearsal, but never a
discussion. My feeling is that the best
argument may be a testimony to the skill of the presenter, rather than
to the excellence of the solution advocated.
Also the bulk of discussion time
is visibly taken up with transactions of status which have nothing to do
with the problem to be solved. My attitude is like
Edison's, who found a solvent for rubber by putting bits of rubber in
every solution he could think of, and beat all those scientists who were
approaching the problem
theoretically.

**The Royal Court Theatre Studio**

Devine had been a student of Michel Saint-Denis, who was a nephew of
the great director Jacques Copeau.
Copeau had been an advocate of
studio work, and George also wanted a studio.
He started it with hardly any
budget, and as I was on the staff, and full of theories, he asked me if
I would teach there. Actually William Gaskill was the
director, and _they_ agreed that I should
teach there. I'd been advocating setting a
studio up so I could hardly refuse; but I was embarrassed, and worried.
I didn't know anything about
training actors, and I was sure that the professionals---many from the
Royal Shakespeare, and some who shortly afterwards went into the
National Theatre Company---would know far more than I did.
I decided to give classes in
'Narrative Skills' (see page [109](#11_NARRATIVE_SKILLS.xhtml_page_109)),
hoping I'd be one jump ahead in this area.
Because of my dislike of
discussion I insisted that everything should be acted out---as at the
Writers' Group---and the work became very funny.
It was also very different,
because I was consciously reacting
_against_ Stanislavsky.
I thought, wrongly, that
[Stanislavsky's
methods implied a naturalistic theatre---which they don't, as you can
see from the qualifications he introduces as to what sorts of objectives
are permissible, and so on. I thought his insistence
on the 'given circumstances' was seriously limiting, and I didn't like
the 'who, what, where' approach which my actors urged on me, and which I
suppose was American in origin (it's described, in Viola Spolin's
]_Improvisation for the
Theatre_, Northwestern University Press,
1963; fortunately I didn't know about this book until 1966, when a
member of an audience lent it to me), Lacking solutions, I had to find
my own. What I did was to concentrate on
relationships between strangers, and on ways of combining the
imagination of two people which would be additive, rather than
subtractive. I developed status transactions,
and word-at-a-time games, and almost all of the work described in this
book. I hope this still seems fresh to
some people, but actually it dates back to the early sixties and late
fifties.

My classes were hysterically funny, but I remembered Stirling's
contempt for artists who form 'self-admiration groups' and wondered if
we were deluding ourselves. Could the work really be
so funny? Wasn't it just that we all knew
each other? Even considering the fact that I
had some very talented and experienced actors, weren't we just
entertaining each other? Was it right that every
class should be like a party?

I decided we'd have to perform in front of real audiences, and see if
we _were_ funny.
I took about sixteen actors along
to my contemporary theatre class at Morley College, and said we'd like
to demonstrate some of the exercises we were developing.
I'd thought that I'd be the
nervous one, but the actors huddled in the corner and looked terrified.
Once I started giving the
exercises, they relaxed; and to our amazement we found that when the
work was good, the audience laughed far more than we would have done!
It wasn't so easy to do work of a
high standard in public, but we were delighted at the enthusiasm of the
spectators. I wrote to six London colleges and
offered them free demonstration classes, and afterwards we received many
invitations to perform elsewhere. I cut the number of
performers down to four or five and, with strong support from the
Ministry of Education, we started touring around schools and colleges.
There, we often found ourselves on
a _stage_, and we automatically
drifted into giving shows rather than demonstrations.
We called ourselves 'The Theatre
Machine', and the British Council sent us around Europe.
Soon we were a very influential
group, and the only pure improvisation group I knew, in that we prepared
nothing, and everything was like a jazzed-up drama
class.

[It's
weird to wake up knowing you'll be onstage in twelve hours, and that
there's absolutely nothing you can do to ensure success.
All day you can feel some part of
your mind gathering power, and with luck there'll be no interruption to
the flow, actors and audience will completely understand each other, and
the high feeling lasts for days. At other times you feel
a coldness in everyone's eyes, and deserts of time seem to lie ahead of
you. The actors don't seem to be able
to see or hear properly any more---they feel so wretched that scene
after scene is about vomiting. Even if the audience are
pleased by the novelty, you feel you're swindling them.
After a while a pattern is
established in which each performance gets better and better until the
audience is like a great beast rolling over to let you tickle it.
Then hubris gets you, you lose
your humility, you ]_expect_ to be loved, and you
turn into Sisyphus. All comedians know these
feelings.

As I came to understand the techniques that release creativity in the
improviser, so I began to apply them to my own work.
What really got me started again
was an advert for a play of mine in the paper, a play called the
_The
Martian_.
I had never written such a play,
so I phoned up Bryan King, who directed the theatre.
'We've been trying to find you,'
he said. 'We need a play for next week,
does the title _The
Martian_ suit you?'
I wrote the play, and it was well
received. Since then I've deliberately put
myself in this position. I get myself engaged by
a company and write the plays as I'm rehearsing the actors.
For example, in eight weeks I did
two street theatre plays lasting twenty minutes, plus a three-hour
improvised play called _Der
Fisch_, plus a children's play lasting
an hour---this was for Salvatore Poddine's Tubingen theatre.
I don't see that the plays created
in this way are inferior to those I struggle over, sometimes for
years.

I didn't learn how to direct again until I left the Royal Court Theatre
and was invited to Victoria (on Vancouver Island).
I directed the Wakefield Mystery
Cycle there, and I was so far away from anyone whose criticism I cared
about that I felt free to do exactly what I felt like.
Suddenly I was spontaneous again;
and since then, I've always directed plays as if I was totally ignorant
about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common
sense and try to find the most obvious solutions
possible.

Nowadays everything is very easy to me (except writing didactic things
like this book). If we need a cartoon for the
programme, I'll draw one. If we need a play I'll
write it. I cut knots instead of laboriously
trying to untie them---that's how people see me; but they have no idea
of the turgid state I used to be in, or the morass from which I'm still
freeing myself.

**[Getting
the Right Relationship]**

If you want to apply the methods I'm describing in this book, you may
have to teach the way that I teach.
When I give workshops, I see
people frantically scribbling down the exercises, but not noticing what
it is I actually do as a teacher. My feeling is that a
good teacher can get results using any method, and that a bad teacher
can wreck any method.

There seems no doubt that a group can make or break its members, and
that it's more powerful than the individuals in it.
A great group can propel its
members forward so that they achieve amazing things.
Many teachers don't seen to think
that manipulating a group is their responsibility at all.
If they're working with a
destructive, bored group, they just blame the students for being 'dull',
or uninterested. It's essential for the teacher to
blame himself if the group aren't in a good
state.

Normal schooling is intensely competitive, and the students are
supposed to try and outdo each other.
If I explain to a group that
they're to work for the other members, that each individual is to be
interested in the progress of the other members, they're amazed, yet
obviously if a group supports its own members strongly, it'll be a
better group to work in.

The first thing I do when I meet a group of new students is (probably)
to sit on the floor. I play low status, and I'll
explain that if the students fail they're to blame
_me_.
Then they laugh, and relax, and I
explain that really it's _obvious_ that they should blame
me, since I'm supposed to be the expert; and if I give them the wrong
material, they'll fail; and if I give them the right material, then
they'll succeed. I play low status physically but
my actual status is going up, since only a very confident and
experienced person would put the blame for failure on himself.
At this point they almost
certainly start sliding off their chairs, because they don't want to be
higher than me. I have already changed the group
profoundly, because failure is suddenly not so frightening any more.
They'll want to test me, of
course; but I really will apologise to them when they fail, and ask them
to be patient with me, and explain that I'm not perfect.
My methods are very effective, and
other things being equal, most students will succeed, but they won't try
to win any more. The normal teacher-student
relationship is dissolved.

When I was teaching young children, I trained myself to share my eye
contacts out among the group. I find this crucial in
establishing a [' fair'
relationship with them. I've seen many teachers who
concentrate their eye contacts on only a few students, and this does
affect the ]_feeling_ in a group.
Certain students are disciples,
but others feel separated, or experience themselves as less interesting,
or as 'failures'.

I've also trained myself to make positive comments, and to be as direct
as possible. I say 'Good' instead of 'That's
enough'. I've actually heard teachers say
'Well, let's see who fails at this one', when introducing an exercise.
Some teachers get reassurance when
their students fail. We must have all encountered the
teacher who gives a self-satisfied smile when a student makes a mistake.
Such an attitude is not conducive
to a good, warm feeling in the
group.

When (in 1964) I read of Wolpe's work in curing phobias, I saw a clear
relationship with the ideas I'd got from Stirling, and with the way I
was developing them. Wolpe relaxed his phobic patients
and then presented them with a very dilute form of the thing that scared
them. Someone terrified of birds might
be asked to imagine a bird, but one in Australia.
At the same time that the image
was presented, the patient was relaxed, and the relaxation was
maintained (if it wasn't maintained, if the patient started to tremble,
or sweat or whatever, then something even less alarming would be
presented). Relaxation is incompatible with
anxiety; and by maintaining the relaxed state, and presenting images
that gradually neared the centre of the phobia, the state of alarm was
soon dissipated---in most cases. Wolpe taught his
patients to relax, but soon other psychologists were using pentathol to
assist the relaxation. However, there has to be an
_intention_ to relax
(muscle-relaxant drugs can be used as a
torture!).

If we were _all_ terrified of open
spaces, then we would hardly recognise this as a phobia to be cured; but
it could be cured. My view is that we have a
universal phobia of being looked at on a stage, and that this responds
very well to 'progressive desensitisation' of the type that Wolpe
advocates. Many teachers seem to me to be
trying to get their students to conceal fear, which always leaves some
traces---a heaviness, an extra tension, a lack of spontaneity.
I try to dissipate the fear by a
method analogous to Wolpe's, but which I really got from Anthony
Stirling. The one finding of Wolpe which I
immediately incorporated into my work was the discovery that if the
healing process is interrupted by a recurrence of the total fear---maybe
a patient being treated for a phobia of birds suddenly finds himself
surrounded by fluttering pigeons---then the treatment has to be started
again at the bottom of the hierarchy.
I therefore constantly return to
the very first stages of the work to try to pull in those students who
remain in a terrified state, and [who
therefore make hardly any progress.
Instead of seeing people as
]_untalented_, we can see them as
_phobic_, and this completely
changes the teacher's relationship with
them.

Students will arrive with many techniques for avoiding the pain of
failure. John Holt's
_How Children
Fail_ (Penguin, 1969; Pitman, 1970)
gives examples of children learning to get round problems, rather than
learning to find solutions to problems.
If you screw your face up and bite
on your pencil to show you're 'trying', the teacher may write out the
answer for you. (In my school, if you sat relaxed
and _thought_, you were likely to
get swiped on the back of the head.) I explain to the students the
devices they're using to avoid tackling the problems--- however easy the
problems are---and the release of tension is often amazing.
University students may roll about
in hysterical laughter. I take it that the relief comes
from understanding that other people use the same manoeuvres as they
do.

For example, many students will begin an improvisation, or a scene, in
a rather feeble way. It's as if they're ill, and
lacking in vitality. They've learned to play for
sympathy. However
_easy_ the problem, they'll
use the same old trick of looking inadequate.
This ploy is supposed to make the
onlookers have sympathy with them if they 'fail' and it's expected to
bring greater rewards if they 'win'.
Actually this down-in-the-mouth
attitude almost guarantees failure, and makes everyone fed up with them.
No one has sympathy with an adult
who takes such as attitude, but when they are children it probably
worked. As adults they're
_still_ doing it.
Once they've laughed at themselves
and understood how unproductive such an attitude is, students who look
'ill' suddenly look 'healthy'. The attitude of the
group may instantly change.

Another common ploy is to anticipate the problem, and to try and
prepare solutions in advance. (Almost all students do
this---probably it started when they were learning to read.
You anticipate which paragraph
will be yours, and start trying to decipher it.
This has two great disadvantages:
it stops you learning from the attempts of your classmates; and very
likely you'll have calculated wrongly, and will be asked to read one of
the adjacent paragraphs throwing you into total
panic.)

Most students haven't realised---till I show them---how inefficient
such techniques are. The idea that a teacher should be
interested in such things is, unfortunately, novel to them.
I also explain strategies like
sitting on the _end_ of the row, and how it
isolates you from the group, and body positions that prevent absorption
(like the 'lit-crit' postures which keep the user 'detached' and
'objective').

[In
exchange for accepting the blame for failure, I ask the students to set
themselves up in such a way that they'll learn as quickly as possible.
I'm teaching spontaneity, and
therefore I tell them that they mustn't try to control the future, or to
'win'; and that they're to have an empty head and just watch.
When it's their turn to take part
they're to come out and just do what they're asked to, and
]_see what
happens_.
It's this decision not to try and
control the future which allows the students to be
spontaneous.

If I'm playing with my three-year-old son and I smack him, he looks at
me for signals that will turn the sensation into either warmth or pain.
A very gentle smack that he
perceives as 'serious' will have him howling in agony.
A hard 'play' slap may make him
laugh. When I want to work and he wants
me to continue playing he will give very strong 'I am playing' signals
in an attempt to pull me back into his game.
All people relate to each other in
this way but most teachers are afraid to give 'I am playing' signals to
their students. If they would, their work would
become a constant pleasure.

NOTE

**1.** If you have trouble
understanding this section, it may be because you're a conceptualiser,
rather than a visualiser. William Grey Walter, in
_The Living
Brain_ (Penguin, 1963) calculated that
one in six of us are conceptualisers (actually in my view there is a far
smaller proportion of conceptualisers among drama
students).

I have a simple way to telling if people are visualisers.
I ask them to describe the
furniture in a room they're familiar with.
Visualisers move their eyes as if
'seeing' each object as they name it.
Conceptualisers look in one
direction as if reading off a
list.

Galton investigated mental imagery at the beginning of the century, and
found that the more educated the person, the more likely he was to say
that mental imagery was unimportant, or even that it didn't
exist.

_An exercise_: fix your eyes on some object,
and attend to something at the periphery of your vision.
You can
_see_ what you're attending
to, but actually your mind is assembling the object from relatively
little information. Now look directly, and observe the
difference. This is one way of tricking the
mind out of its habitual dulling of the
world.