Impro - Improvisation and The Theatre [antikvár]

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 los-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