Cover of the published script of Tim Crouch’s ‘My Arm’, published 2009 by Faber & Faber.

Audience enters into space. A table. Handed a piece of paper with the following printed upon it:

My Arm is partly about giving ordinary things extraordinary significance. What it needs is a supply of everyday objects from you: the stuff in your pockets, in your bags, your wallets; stuff you carry around; photographs (drivers licences, IDs, travel cards etc.), lucky charms, key rings, badges, toys. Useful things; useless things. Things no bigger than a shoe.

Anything you supply will be treated with care and respect. It will be in view at all times. No conventional magic will be attempted with it – no hammers and handkerchiefs. You will get it back at the end. But the stuff you supply will create a major part of My Arm. Please be ready with possible things when they’re requested.   ¹

^{1 Crouch, Tim (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.}

Collect audience objects – I need:

• Doll
• 7 objects of any kind

Perform from My Arm, script-in-hand: Plays One, 25-27. Using objects provided by audience.

My Arm, performed by Tim Crouch in Lisbon, 2005

Presentation segment:

• What I have just performed is from Tim Crouch’s play My Arm, first published in 2003
• Tim Crouch’s theatre is acknowledged by a range of academics to problematises the distinction between the traditionally dramatic and postdramatic theatre.
• The postdramatic is a theory which “denotes a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre” (Lehmann, H., Postdramatic Theatre, 2009, 27).
• For many scholars, the postdramatic is in binary opposition to dramatic theatre, driven not by the “dictatorship of the dramatic text” (Boenish, P. M. Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience, 2010, 162) as drama is, but instead
• However, Lehmann identifies in Postdramatic Theatre that postdramatism “does not mean is an abstract negation and mere looking away from the tradition of drama” (Lehmann, 2009, 27) but that the written or verbal text has a space as a material element of a performance, wherein “the written and/or verbal text transferred onto theatre, as well as the ‘text’ of the standing understood in the widest sense […] are all cast into a new light through a changed conception of the performance text.” (Lehmann, 2009, 85)
• Tim Crouch’s work problematises the neat categorisation of theatre into ‘dramatic’ and ‘postdramatic’, led as they are by the traditionally-dramatic ‘story’ – born out of Tim Crouch’s history as an actor and his interest in storytelling as a subsequent result – but in which the materiality of the text is highlighted, and constitutes “a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text” (Lehmann, 2009, 85)
• This problematisation, I believe, can have powerful effects in critically analysing Crouch’s work in a way which both illuminates his artistic techniques, and challenges the falsety that his work can be confidently labelled dramatic, or conveniently excluded from the realm of the postdramatic. This is a valuable liminality between forms which, by exploiting, can yield new understanding
• Crouch’s works are an example of what Lehmann calls an ‘almost still dramatic’ theatre (Lehmann, 2009, 69), or what Liz Tomlin calls in her article And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’ (2009) the “no-longer-dramatic text” (title), in which the narrative thrust of his theatre-making means the “written texts often predicate all other elements of the production process, thus aligning them, under Lehmann’s terms, with the dramatic” (Tomlin, 2009, 59) but his other theatrical techniques “simultaneously deconstructing the teleological implications of the dramatic, thus aligning them, one would surely argue, with the postdramatic.” (Tomlin, 2009, 59)
• For instance, in the performance I just gave of the first few minutes of My Arm, the casting of the objects I took from you as performers in the piece – playing the brother, father and mother amongst others – and their non-concurrence with those people and things they are intended to represent, clearly establishes that while driven by narrative, there is no illusion of a coherent “fictive and simulated text-cosmos” (Boenisch, P. M. (2010) Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience, 163) – and thusly draws attention to the materiality of the text as merely a constituent element of the overall performance event
• Crouch’s sceneography also creates a conflict between dramatic and postdramatic. My Arm’s sparse stage, open and uncluttered and set strikingly against a white curtain, reminds the audience of the lack of illusion of a three-dimensional fictive cosmos with its own rules of logic, and in a postdramatic sense “considers the new theatre aesthetics of space, time and the body, as well as the use of text” (Lehmann, 2009, 4). In Crouch’s theatre, these aesthetic choices are as striking and as important in contextualising a non-concurrence between narrative discourse and aesthetic presentation as the text is. These scenographic choices challenge the primacy of the dramatic text and highlight the text as a single material element of a range of phenomenological and recorded elements making up the performance event.
• This role played by the sceneography of the performance is nodded to in the play: “We worked under a bright naked light bulb. There was no refuge or pretence. She hid nothing of what she was doing from me” (Crouch, 2003, 43). Just like the artist this refers to, Crouch hides nothing of what he is doing from us, performing under bare lights on a bare stage.
• His use of the objects from the audience also illustrates that “postdramatic theatre is a theatre of the present” (Lehmann, 2009, 143). The objects taken from the audience situate the performance event in the moment of its live communication, the presence of the audience “reformulated as present” (Lehmann, 2009, 143) as the objects they offer reflexively reference their being at the point in space and time in which the performance itself occurs, the audience’s presence in the “absolute present tense” as Lehmann calls it. Similarly, the use of the items renders the performance as “a process, as a verb” through which the audience is made present and their objects are incorporated into the mise-en-scene in plain sight.
• I will now play a video of Crouch performing My Arm in Lisbon in 2005. I’ll play the video sound through headphones, and perform it back to you, in an attempt to navigate the tension between its intention as a live event, and its lack of liveness through its recorded form. This will also emphasise the discord between its narrative and aesthetic qualities, and in doing so will draw out the tension between dramatic and postdramatic within the performance. This will hopefully give context to the points I have made and illustrate what I mean by them.

Play video on tablet – hold close to audience. Script on stand or in hand. Objects close by – use as Crouch does. Read words into video.

THE END.

Citations

Boenisch, P. M. (2010) Towards a Theatre of Encounter and Experience: Reflexive Dramaturgies and Classic Texts. Contemporary Theatre Review, 20(2) 162-172.

Crouch, Tim (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.

Lehmann, H. (2009) Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York: Routledge.

Tomlin, L. (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’: Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text. Performance Research, 14(1) 57-64.

Tomlin, L. (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’: Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text. Performance Research, 14(1) 57-64.

Dr Liz Tomlin, Senior Lecturer and Head of Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham

• “it appears to be the function of the written text, as predicating the other elements of the production process, that categorizes the work within the logocentric binds of the dramatic. To understand the binary through these terms, however, fails to offer any coherent categorization for writers such as Beckett and Müller, or indeed Crimp and Kane, as identified by Jurs-Munby, whose written texts often predicate all other elements of the production process, thus aligning them, under Lehmann’s terms, with the dramatic, while simultaneously deconstructing the teleological implications of the dramatic, thus aligning them, one would surely argue, with the postdramatic.” (59)
• “Academics and arts development agencies consequently need to reject the easy and misleading binaries that divide new work into text-based/dramatic/ teleological and non-text-based/postdramatic/ deconstructive in order to more precisely define where the logos might lie, be that in the written text, the mise-en-scène of the auteur-director or the virtuosity of the performer. This will enable a more sophisticated ideological and philosophical analysis of new work and safeguard the diverse range and fusion of models and forms being developed in British contemporary theatre and performance today.” (64)

My notes:

• “no-longer-dramatic text”: Is this the middle-ground between ‘dramatic’ and ‘post-dramatic’?
• CONFLICT BETWEEN THE DRAMATIC AND POSTDRAMATIC – and the argument for Am I Dead Yet and An Oak Tree, both of which have texts but both of which also place other elements at the fore consistent with a postdramatic reading.

Lehmann, H. (2009) Postdramatic Theatre. London and New York: Routledge.

Cover of ‘Postdramatic Theatre’ (2009), by Hans-Theis Lehmann, translated by Karen-Jurs Munby from the original German.

• “he also, somewhat paradoxically, talked about the ‘postdramatic drama’, in which no longer the ‘story’ but what Schechner calls the ‘game’ becomes the ‘generative matrix’ – albeit within the frame of what, according to our use of terms, is a ‘dramatic’ structure of stage fiction and situation.” (Schechner, in Lehmann, 2009, 26)
• “The adjective ‘postdramatic’ denotes a theatre that feels bound to operate beyond drama, at a time ‘after’ the authority of the dramatic paradigm in theatre. What it does not mean is an abstract negation and mere looking away from the tradition of drama.” (27)
• “This describes post-dramatic theatre: the limbs or branches of a dramatic organism, even if they are withered material, are still present and form the space of a memory that is ‘bursting open’.” (27)
• “The prefix ‘post’ indicates that a culture or artistic practice has stepped out of the previously unquestioned horizon” (27)
• “ranging from an ‘almost still dramatic’ theatre to a form where not even the rudiments of fictive processes can be found any more.” (69)
• “for postdramatic theatre it holds true that the written and/or verbal text transferred onto theatre, as well as the ‘text’ of the standing understood in the widest sense […] are all cast into a new light through a changed conception of the performance text.” (85)
• “postdramatic theatre is not simply a new kind of text of staging – and even less a new type of theatre text, but rather a type of sign usage in the theatre that turns both of these levels of theatre upside down through the structurally changed quality of the performance text: it becomes more presence that representation, more shared that communicated experience, more process than product, more manifestation than signification, more energetic impulse than information” (85)
• “The principle of narration is an essential trait of postdramatic theatre […] one often feels as though one is witnessing not a scenic representation but a narration of the play presented.” (109)
• “Postdramatic theatre is a theatre of the present. Reformulating presence as present, in allusion to Bohrer’s concept of the ‘absolute present tense’ […] means, above all, to conceive of it as a process, as a verb.” (143)

My notes:

• “in which no longer the ‘story’ but what Schechner calls the ‘game’ becomes the ‘generative matrix’”: Is this what happens in AOT/AIDY?
• “the limbs or branches of a dramatic organism, even if they are withered material, are still present “: So still has some link to the traditionally dramatic – a reason for AIDY and AOT to be read through the postdramatic?
• “almost still dramatic’ theatre”: this is the in-between
• “not a scenic representation but a narration of the play presented”: both plays definitely do this

Lehmann, H. and Primavesi, P. (2009) Dramaturgy on Shifting Grounds. Performance Research, 14(3) 3-6.

• “The current development of theatre and performance takes place in changing cultural landscapes, defined by new media technologies and new perceptional habits.” (3)
• “contemporary dramaturgy is facing a challenge: to develop creative ideas in the cooperation with authors and directors; to ensure the quality of theatrical work based on a fruitful communication process within the production team; to invent helpful concepts for season schedules and for cultural institutions in general; to enhance unconventional modes of exchange and discourse; to build up European networks and to use them effectively” (3)
• “distinctions between theatre and performance are increasingly blurred” (3)
• “the practice of postdramatic theatre demands new styles and competences of dramaturgy” (3)
• “a constant dynamics of crossover and interdisciplinary art, of physical and choreographical theatre takes place that no longer necessarily needs dramatic texts to which a dramaturgy in the traditional sense could be applied” (3)
• “the traditional hierarchy of theatrical elements has almost vanished: as the text is no longer the central and superior factor, all the other elements like space, light, sound, music, movement and gesture tend to have an equal weight in the performance process.” (3)
• “new dramaturgical forms and skills are needed, in terms of a practice that no longer reinforces the subordination of all elements under one (usually the word, the symbolic order of language), but rather a dynamic balance to be obtained anew in each performance.” (3)
• “The changing realities of a global media culture […] have to be regarded as an important context for performing arts in general and in particular for the new emphasis on physical theatre, dance, body, music.” (3-4)
• “theatre […] will have to develop various strategies of playing with the difference and tension between live and recorded’ (4)
• “the dramaturg should no longer be defined as the controlling power of the theatre […]the dramaturg may instead become a negotiator for the freedom of theatrical experimentation and risk” (4)
• “dramaturgy needs to reflect upon and respond to altered ways of perception and participation, to rethink the position and the possible functions of the spectator” (4)
• “What is essential may rather be a new way of thinking media, techné, technology as new possibilities to conceptualize spectating, viewing, witnessing, participating beyond the simple dichotomy of subject and object” (4)
• “how the theatrical situation (the co-presence of performer and audience) and the role of the spectator (as voyeur, witness and participant) are changed by the use of media technologies” (4)
• “Dramaturgy in dance and performance art is therefore not confined to the narration of stories through elaborated movement. It may also work on structures of physical and spatial relations, among the performers and between them and the spectators.” (5)
• “More important than the dramaturg is the dramaturgy, collective whenever possible.” (6)
• “the dramaturg of the twenty-first century will need to be open-minded, ready to accept the job as a position on shifting grounds and to question the categories that used to define the art of theatre.” (6)
• “it is a quality of contemporary theatrical work often to transgress our traditional definitions” (6)
• “Successful dramaturgical practice within the theatre institutions of today demands a productive flexibility, a capacity to shift grounds oneself and to switch from an argument based in literary knowledge to an argument based in visual arts or in music, from choreography to document, from the strategy of presenting something in front of an audience to a strategy of communication.” (6)
• “Dramaturgy needs the development of a number of skills and competences – but among these skills is the capacity to renounce skills altogether, to be open and sensible to unexpected changes in the process of rehearsal and production” (6)
• Heideggerian Gelassenheit: “the calmness to let things happen without imposing one’s own ready-made concepts on a word in progress” (6)

My notes:

• The dynamic balance obtained anew each performance is apparent in An Oak Tree, where the introduction of a new actor each time changes the dynamic balance which needs to be found. Crouch refers to this in the text (sometimes they clap etc.)
• Difference in tension between live and recorded: In An Oak Tree this might be seen as happening in the tension between the liveness of the interaction between Crouch, the new second actor and the audience, and the ‘record’ that is the script. In Am I Dead Yet the incorporation of material written by that night’s audience into the piece as part of song might similarly represent.
• “rethink the position and the possible functions of the spectator” – both perfect/useful examples
• “changed by the use of media technologies”: AIDY – Use of mics as barrier between spectator and performer? Crouch does this too as the hypnotist with slightly mechanical speech into mic.
• Dramaturgy “collective wherever possible”: AIDY does this sort of collective dramaturgy with its use of a bit of the real (the local paramedic or first-aider coming to demonstrate CPR), the use of the notes etc.
• “transgress traditional definitions”: Both do this. An Oak Tree obviously – has contention around the second-actor conceit etc. etc. – see writing on Crouch and controversy is apparent. In AIDY critics had a hard time defining it – is it theatre? Is it music? Is it a sort of cabaret? Some didn’t like it for this.

Bozic, A. (2009) On Dramturgy. Performance Research, 14(3) 1-2.

• “A dramaturg in my process is a kind of a ‘Turk’, someone who is somewhat alien, who maintains his or her otherness and distance from the process in order to be able to ask questions about it.” (1)
• “And it is also someone who makes a lot of drama, someone who asks questions about things that might otherwise slip by unnoticed or be taken for granted.” (1)
• “dramaturgy of space, which renders both the content and the manners in which that content is produced visible at the same time.” (1) – Dramaturgy renders the thing and the process by which the thing was produced visible at once
• “Once this generator is clear to all of us, we use it as an anchor to hold the rest of the elements together, a red thread that runs through the process and the performance and to which everyone can relate. A good dramaturg for my process is someone who manages never to lose sight of this red thread.” (1)
• “attitudes that can help make dramaturgies of real-life events transparent” (2)
• “They may include: a dramaturgy of one’s of life (how I fictionalize my own life to give it a grand narrative); a dramaturgy of community life (that makes visible the strategies of staging, fictionalizing and performing day-to-day life); a dramaturgy of virtual life (that makes visible the strategies of fictionalizing, staging and performing political and other events through the mass media of TV, film and the Internet).” (2)
• “this kind of dramaturgy would be capable of underlining the network-like relationship between these three threads and could incorporate them into the art-making process, where not only life is a generator of art but art is a generator of life in a transparent way.” (2)

My notes:

• Both plays make dramaturgies of real-life events transparent.
• Am I Dead Yet? makes dramaturgies esp. narratives of death apparent through traditional storytelling, the CPR demonstration and (most interestingly) the writing in of how audience members think they’ll die for the ‘I think I’ll die / I know I’ll die’ song at the end.
• In An Oak Tree this is made apparent using a narrative of a mourning father and a life event, giving it to a new performer who lives it anew on stage each time – even though it’s based in a fictional text or narrative it identifies dramaturgies of real-life events and the new actor lives the text in as real a way as possible each night.
• Both tackle the life event that is death.

Lane, D. (2010) A Dramaturg’s perspective: Looking to the future of script development. Journal of Media Practice, 30(1) 127-142.

• “‘dramaturgy’ is not only a word applied to the composition of work, but is also ‘a word applied to the discussion of that composition’QTD” (128, quotation from Turner and Behrndt, 2008, 4, emphasis theirs) – Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2008) Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• “‘the rules of meaning-making within a script or production’” (Haring-Smith, 2003, 46) – Haring-Smith, T. (2006) Dramaturging non-realism: creating a new vocabulary. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 45-54.
• “With Crouch, the dynamic of conversation between stage and audience must be recognized as an active element of the play’s dramaturgy, and to ignore the anticipated presence of the live encounter during script development is reductive, creating a limiting approach that serves only to ‘collapse dialogue into monologue and to ignore the art form’s place in a complex web of cultural connection’ (Meyrick 2006: 280).” (128) – Meyrick, J. (2006) Cut and paste: the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre. Theatre Research International, 31(3) 270-282.
• “The common terminology on offer when developing a play text takes its lead from the realm of psychological realism, where phrases such as character, narrative, language, location and plot carry particular associations. They are part of a broader understanding of theatre where stories are linear, characters are three-dimensional; dramatic action, and therefore plot structure, has a basis in causality; spoken text takes the form of conversations between characters; and locations are identifiable as part of the material world we recognize in everyday life. This extends also into associations regarding the style of performance: acting embedded in naturalism; a compliant audience that receives rather than constructs meanings; a performance space within a theatre building, carrying with it the conventions of that particular arena; a design that attempts to replicate rather than suggest; a text that has been rehearsed rather than one that is improvised; and a theatre experience that is live only because it occurs in a shared space and time, rather than one that fully exploits, within its composition, the risks and tensions of live performance. These characteristics belong to what Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006: 21–22) refers to as the persistent ‘theatre of dramas’: a near-inescapable bind to ‘dramatic theatre’ that defines the human through speech, represents a totality and oscillates around action, plot and mimesis – the key tenets of a European, Aristotelian conception of theatre, which he arguably goes on to present as limiting criteria in creating new work.” (128-9)
• “whilst Lehmann (2006: 24) emphasizes the primacy of the text in his argument, he also acknowledges playwrights who fit a ‘postdramatic’ model, citing Heiner Müller and Peter Handke as examples” (129)
• “Perhaps in a bid to form a coherent and flexible approach to the development of play texts, Meyrick identifies three critical categories put forward by Aristotle – plot, character and language – that under his definition can extend the boundaries for play composition, thus echoing Lehmann’s acknowledgement. Plot can be ‘anything which maintains tension in time’; character, ‘anything which allows an understanding of what is taking place to thicken and deepen as the drama progresses’; and language, ‘anything that can perform the function of bringing order to the onstage world’ (Meyrick 2006: 278). By reducing the base elements of a play text to a simple paradigm – a play is a sequence of events that unfolds in time, allows accumulation of feeling or thought and arises from a coherent stage language – common ideas of what might constitute a play can be greatly extended. Meyrick’s adjusted definitions create a space of exploration and innovation. The first task of the dramaturg is, then, to look at how a writer might be challenging or deconstructing the more limited understanding of Aristotle’s terms as Meyrick has done, and to what ends.” (129)
• “this notion of presence and absence, and a demand upon the audience to interpret meaning by comparing the two, is a cornerstone of much of Crouch’s dramaturgy.” (130)
• “In script development this signals a clear task for the dramaturg: to explore the rules the writer has set and to assess whether they are effective in achieving his or her intentions, rather than dictating from the outset that the work should fit an existing dramaturgical model – the model is a tool rather than a mould.” (130)
• “When applied as a mould, this one-size-fits-all approach becomes a barrier to the discovery of new theatrical forms, an attempt to ‘dramaturgically “terraform” the work without lending credence to the rules of this new world the writer is attempting to create’ (Bly 2006 20). This delicate or ‘listening’ analytical approach may be one we are more used to applying to ‘performance writing’ rather than ‘playwriting’, treating them as separate entities – which is an unhelpful division in the case of Crouch.” (130)
• “He is certainly writing plays, but his play texts demand these approaches.” (130)
• “John Freeman (2007: 10) uses the term ‘performance writing’ rather loosely, suggesting that its role is to ‘challenge mainstream sensibilities in ways that are both provocative and original’. Although this definition may characterize performance writing unhelpfully as simply a novelty reply that takes its lead from the mainstream, it does bring us neatly to the focus of the article: Crouch’s work and how it uses familiar characteristics of drama to provoke, challenge and ask us to rethink our assumptions.” (130)
• “‘the visual arts have stolen a march on theatre in their ability to handle progressive forms’” (Crouch, 2003, 9) – Crouch, T. (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.
• “This statement is both a subtle lament for the theatre’s dependency on familiar dramaturgies and, as the play itself demonstrates, a nod towards the bafflingly infinite boundaries of what constitutes visual art.” (130)
• “The difference in Crouch’s work, and what is exciting from a dramaturgical perspective, is that it is actively asking questions about the authorship of art and theatre through its form and content, resulting in scripted performances that present us with unexpected transformations and interpretative challenges.” (131)
• “Crouch transposes the messiness of the real world he is exploring into the play’s dramaturgy, expressing reality not by rearranging it into a clinical and fixed dramatic model, but by re-framing it to maintain its confusion and chaos.” (131)
• “It is an escape from a habit of theatre that American playwright Mac Wellman (2002: 229) apocalyptically refers to as a ‘tyrannical domination of meanings so fixed, so absolute, as to render the means of meaning, which is to say the heart and soul of meaning, a mere phantom’.” (131)
• “false coherence of representational mimesis” (Freeman, 2007, 20)
• “An Oak Tree explores a different sort of projection. A father responds to the loss of his daughter Claire in a road accident by spending all of his time by an oak tree. He believes he has ‘scooped up the properties of Claire and changed the physical substance of the tree into that of my daughter’.” (Crouch 2015: 52)
• “This paradoxical relationship between the unpredictability of live performance and the relative security of a script’s structural framework manifests itself with greater force in Crouch’s second play An Oak Tree […]each night the Father is played by a new performer who has never seen the script before. The live and unpredictable collision of image and object in My Arm is developed into something much more risky: the live response of a performer to a script, in a story about which he knows as much as the watching audience does.” (133-4)
• “An Oak Tree also disrupts the linear narrative of the Father’s story and instead creates an impressionistic structure that moves backwards and forwards in time and simulates various locations. Crouch and the performer also take on numerous roles beyond that of Father and Hypnotist. Crouch plays the Hypnotist and the Father’s wife, and the performer plays seven different contestants during the Hypnotist’s faltering stage show, and over time the worlds of the real, the simulated and the hypnotic begin to bleed and blur into one another until it is almost impossible to decipher what is real and what is not – a clear parallel to the Father’s problematic belief that he has somehow transformed his daughter into an oak tree.” (134)
• “First, there is the narrative Crouch has created in the fictional future ‘in a pub a year from now’ (Crouch 2005: 18), of a meeting between the Father and the Hypnotist who ran over his daughter. Second, there is the narrative in the fictional past, of the death of the daughter and how the Father and his family have responded. Third, there is the present ‘real’ narrative of the relationship between Crouch and his invited performer on the particular night – though it is a simulation of the real, because all of their conversations about the play they are performing in are scripted. Finally, there is the only real present-tense narrative, one that sits outside the fictions Crouch has constructed: this is the story of the performer as he or she encounters and navigates an unknown text. The dialogue may be prescribed, but the choices the performer makes in the delivery are unrehearsed and occurring in real time.We watch this as closely as we watch the other three constructed narratives within the play.”(135)
• “An Oak Tree requires us to experience the Father’s confusion by disrupting our own assumptions about the play’s logic. The logic is deliberately problematized: the form expresses the content, but it simultaneously requests that we relinquish our desire for a neat resolution.” (135-6)
• “For a dramaturg, the revisions in developing writing for performance start to present themselves: the honouring of problems rather than solutions; the pursuit of a question of meaning rather than meaning itself; the elevation of the experiential above the passive; the construction of theatrical conceits such as anticipated narratives that demand a live performance to be fully realized; the use of the stage as an arena of imagination and playfulness presenting multiple frames of fiction, simulated reality and the risk of the real itself.” (136)
• “whilst Crouch employs these elements effectively, he always anchors the audience with the drama of a single protagonist facing a problem in the world, and by placing this character at the centre we are given a clear point of reference to which we can relate the expressiveness of the form. The protagonist’s emotional journey informs our understanding, and this is a vital foothold when the play asks more questions than it seeks to answer.” (136)
• “This is a dramaturgy that ‘makes us aware of the mechanisms of communication and the artificial construction of imaginary (real) worlds, even while we are moved and engaged by them’ (Turner and Behrndt 2008: 193).”
• “swapping of roles half way through the act emphasizes our naïve dependency on the English language to communicate identity and intention” (137)
• “An Oak Tree operates within fluid but identifiable frames of fiction and reality” (138)
• “For the dramaturg working in script development, what is left in the wake of Crouch’s body of work is a world of playwriting that expects the audience to invest in an act of creative construction, rather than creative response. All audiences respond: Crouch’s audiences are expected to work. The boundary between ‘performance text’, referring to the dramaturgy of the whole event, and the play text, the written document upon which that performance is based, is not removed by Crouch but nudged gently aside to create what Freeman (2007:139) gamely refers to as a ‘textual playground’ where the possibilities begin to extend infinitely” (137)
• “The level of demand upon the audience to construct their own meaning, or coherent thematic or narrative conclusions increases with each of Crouch’s projects and, in turn, the dramaturgy of the scripts increasingly resembles that of an open performance score, rather than plays that are concerned with answering all of our creative questions. Dramaturgs solve them at their peril. To do so would corrupt the complexity of the craft, by eradicating the potent unease of possibility that is intentionally created through risk, and the absence of clear answers: Crouch’s work calls for an ‘open, fluid and plural’ reading that stays mindful of the potential of play texts to be in flux, and not finite or resolved (Turner and Behrndt 2008:
  “The effectiveness of Crouch’s compositional choices suggests two important areas of focus for the dramaturg in the development of future creative relationships. First, the dramaturg should be prepared for the terminology he or she uses in play analysis and the writing process to invite, necessarily, innovative responses from playwrights, and these in turn can suggest innovative solutions and suggestions regarding form and its purpose. If each element of playwriting is considered as a site of exploration, rather than as a fixed entity with a fixed function, the writers’ options extend, as does the dramaturg’s capacity to engage with unfamiliar compositional choices with an open mind. Second, a vocabulary including the words silence, discord, lack (of answers), collision (of time and space) and evasion (of absolute clarity) can operate within the structural paradigm of playwriting suggested by Meyrick, where plot, character and narrative are the core components. Michael Pinchbeck might describe these additions as intentionally problematic: they problematize traditional narrative structures, but also create a narrative out of problem. When the heart donor’s mother ‘speaks’ in England the silence creates a problem for the audience – we never hear first-hand what is actually said – but this also expresses vividly the same problems the characters are facing, which in turn is the narrative of the play’s second act. Such ‘problems’ indicate a mindfulness of the live nature of theatre and operate beyond provocative theatrical gimmickry to enhance and illuminate an audience’s understanding of the work. Taking the elements of playwriting as sites for exploration and introducing a technical vocabulary that includes ‘problems’ as dramaturgical choices may indicate a desire to place greater responsibility upon the audience than on the playwright: it might indicate a shift towards a looser, less disciplined, dramaturgy that shirks the need for the writer to have a detailed understanding of the craft. Traditionally, problems in the text are to be solved before it reaches production. However, these developments should be viewed as an extension of the writer’s and dramaturg’s choices, not an outright replacement. For the time being, they complement existing practice, as evidenced in Crouch’s work. A clear understanding of the relationships among form, content and intention should still be one of the first responsibilities of the playwright. There is no overarching system that will solve all play texts, and we are warned that dramaturgy remains a double-edged sword: ‘a search for an unyielding truth that the nature of the theatrical process precludes from the start’ (Meyrick 2006: 271). However, even though theatre thrives on ambiguity, chance, risk and the phenomenology of performance, Crouch’s work provides the dramaturg working in script development with models that draw together the act of playwriting with the possibilities of live performance: their relationship is symbiotic, rather than accidental. The ‘lack’ or ‘problem’ in the structure, as expressed above, can push the writer to unlock the unique qualities of their craft, and in turn transform the work, rather than slavishly moderating it to fit an inflexible and preconceived dramaturgical model. A flexible approach to terminology from both the dramaturg and the playwright is the means through which a shared language can evolve in the long-term development of the work. Vocabulary is only the beginning (Haring-Smith 2003: 53).” (139-40)

My notes:

• “the rules of meaning-making within a script or production”: Ultimately what dramaturgy is concerned with – meaning-making within the production process, the artwork itself, and the discussion around it.
• “acknowledges playwrights who fit a ‘postdramatic’ model”: There is precedent for including Crouch’s work even though it is based upon the play text
•  “false coherence of representational mimesis”: AN OAK TREE AND AIDY REMOVE THIS FALSE COHERENCE – An Oak Tree does this, for example, by replacing real-life objects with completely different objects.
• “asks more questions than it seeks to answer”: Crouch’s use of traditionally dramatic methods is a way of supporting its postdramatic methodologies so that it doesn’t become impossible – dramatic anchors used to support and underpin the postdramatic
• “The boundary between ‘performance text’, referring to the dramaturgy of the whole event, and the play text”: Crouch’s method of using text

Works cited

Freeman, J. (2007) New Performance / New Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Crouch, T. (2015) An Oak Tree (10^th anniversary edition). London: Oberon.

Crouch, T. (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.

Wellman, M. (2002) The theatre of good intentions. In: M. Delgado and C. Suich (eds.) Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 229-40.

Bly, M. (2006) Pressing an Ear Against a Hive or New Play Explorations in the Twenty-First Century. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 19-22.

Meyrick, J. (2006) Cut and paste: the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre. Theatre Research International, 31(3) 270-282.

Haring-Smith, T. (2006) Dramaturging non-realism: creating a new vocabulary. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 45-54.

Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2008) Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.