Interview with Rachel Barnett – Tuesday , July 5 2011 - London
Playwright, producer, dramaturg with children's theatre company Peut Etre
Interviewed by Charisse Baxter
It is Tuesday, it’s the fifth of July, and I’m here at Wagamama with the lovely and talented Rachel Barnett, and we’ve been having a wonderful conversation about kissing stories – which, of course, we know I can never help talking about kissing stories… So that was an inspired question on her part.
She’s allowing me to use her as my guinea pig – it’s going to be my first official interview, maybe slightly awkward, but that’s because of me, not her. So. Here we go.
OK. Rachel is a dramaturg and playwright, and works with a company called Peut Etre and does some wonderful children’s theatre. So – Rachel, when you’re talking about dramaturgy, how do you describe your role in the production?
Well, it differs for every production. It might be worth just talking about the last one as a case in point. Um, I start the process before we get into the rehearsal room working quite closely with the director and together we sketch out a story that we’re both happy with; me putting in the structure, the beginning, middle and end, (I tend to do everything on a spreadsheet ‘cause I’m a geek) and drawing kind of the dramatic arc, finding the crisis points, finding the dramatic points, very very vaguely. I mean, literally just sketching out something like ‘we know something dramatic needs to happen here’, ‘we know the stakes need to be raised here’, but also putting in things like ‘I feel it should snow here’. So it’s a mixture of things I know and things I feel. And that’s very much in tandem with the director, that we come up with this together. Uh, and that’s before we go into the rehearsal room. With the kind of material that we want to be fleshed out by the dancers that we work with. In the rehearsal room, we allow for lots of material to be created, the director runs lots of devising and creation, um, exercises, and together we edit – with her keeping an eye on what works theatrically, me keeping an eye on what works ‘story’. And sometimes those things don’t connect: she likes to put a lot of prologue in before the story starts. My main task quite often is to find what those moments are, find a place for them later in the structure. I try very hard not to lose anything, but just to find a better place for it so that it works to push the story on.., with a little tweak, maybe, rather than just being something pretty to look at. Uh, we try and avoid just having something pretty to look at, which is hard for dance (it’s our big problem) because everything looks pretty! Our dancers are amazing, and we could just watch them for an hour just standing on each other’s shoulders, ‘cause it’s cool. But actually the challenge for me is to find the story. And I try in the rehearsal room to keep really positive and never say ‘no’, because that would – although sometimes I do, actually, because my role is sometimes dramaturg, sometimes co-director. But, um, more often, it’s just about going ‘I love it, this is where I can see it fitting in the story’, which is why (for me) having that structure in place before – although, I’d say the last show, we restructured about ten times during the four-week rehearsal period. We just kept on tweaking it, kept on restructuring it. And that’s cool, because once you’ve got something you can keep changing it, but you can’t change something unless you’ve got it. So, I’m really keen on that. So that’s kind of my main function, and then as it settles into place my role becomes more about looking at the pace and the rhythm, which the director is amazing at. That’s really one of her absolute strengths, is the energy flow through a piece. But there’s details and things ‘cause I’ve been around theatre for so long that I can just add and that’s when I stop being so much dramaturg and start being more a second Eye. Um, and just keep an eye on everything that’s going on. And that’s when my role as producer takes over a bit as well, ‘cause that’s often when I’m needed outside the room as well. So I’m much more a dramaturg before rehearsals and in the first half of the rehearsal process, and then I stop being a dramaturg in quite the same way. But there’s obviously also all the research-y stuff, which I enjoy doing – I’m not sure how much of it is actually used or useful. But I still make sure that I sound like I know what I’m talking about. Which I’m fairly good at doing, as I’ve just demonstrated by describing my role!
(Laughs) Absolutely! Now, it sounds like your role as dramaturg works very closely with your role as a playwright. Do you think that’s the same for most dramaturgs, or other dramaturgs, or are they generally separate kinds of roles?
I have absolutely no idea, like, not a clue. I have heard of another dramaturg working with the same director that I work with a lot, and his role was much more antagonistic: it was much more pushing, much more questioning, much more… attacking, actually. That’s a really different approach. I understand where it’s coming from, theoretically; I don’t agree with it. I think it preys on people’s weaknesses, rather than their strengths, and I think that’s demoralizing and utterly counterproductive. But those won’t be playwrights. Those will be people who are dramaturgs, maybe that have come from a directing route, or a literary managing route, that are much more in the role of editor, much less in the role of creator. Um, I didn’t set out to be a dramaturg – it’s just kind of happened to me. Nick Wood made me a playwright. I thought I was going to be a dramaturg, I applied to be a dramaturg, and he looked at me and went (deepens voice) ‘No, you are a playwright.’
(Laughs)
So I became a playwright. But I love adaptation, I love translation, I like the nitty-gritty of getting into other people’s stories, and finding a way of making them current, or bringing them to the stage if it’s a short story or something. So, from the beginning of my playwrighting career, one of my first jobs was adapting from Dickens’ short stories, which is actually my first paid commission? No, my third or fourth paid commission, and that was much more of a dramaturgical role in the research I had to do. Although the end product was a script, I think my process was probably much more dramaturgical (as much as I understand it to be). Does that make sense?
Yes! No, that’s great. Interesting nuances, and those areas of definition. It’s good. You might have to really work on expressing your opinions a little more clearly, though, you seem to be fairly reticent about those kinds of things. (Laughs) You’ve actually covered a lot of my other questions, so… awesome. Have you worked in what would be considered a ‘traditional dramaturgy’ kind of situation?
No. I haven’t. I’ve only really dramaturged my own work as I’m creating it. Let me have a think – hold on, thinking – thinking – thinking some more – no, I’ve done pretty much everything you can do in theatre, but other than dramaturging for Peut Etre, which is the closest I’ve come to being a ‘true’ dramaturg, I’ve more been in the role as playwright or director.
What do you mean when you say ‘true dramaturg’?
Well, when there’s a script, and there’s a director, and a dramaturg works with the director to facilitate their understanding of the script (I presume).
OK, all right. Completely valid. So when did you first, or how did you first identify yourself as a dramaturg?
Um, it was working with Peut Etre, and actually it was much more working with ‘The Bug and the Butterfly’, our second show, when we were working from a number of different sources, all [Frederico Garcia] Lorca- based, a load of poems, and the storyline of his first play. And that’s really when I was a ‘weaver’ – I was taking elements and making sure that they all fitted together. And that’s when I considered myself to be a dramaturg, more than a writer. Because all of the creation, uh, -ish, most of the creation had already happened before I got to material. So my role was, yeah, I was kind of knitting the play rather than shearing the sheep.
OK.
It’s an extended metaphor – it kind of works!
I love the imagery. I love that picture! I think that’s great. How would you – how do I phrase this? – what would you suggest to anyone that was, say, interested in looking at dramaturgy, what would you tell them to try or to play around with if they wanted to experience the work of a dramaturg?
It’s a good question, and I’m not necessarily the right person to ask it to. But… I think the key is to never be precious about text. I think it’s too easy to think the text is perfect. The text is what’s written, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right or infallible, and I think being a person who is the catalyst for change and the catalyst for experimentation, who can when the director’s hit a slump and the actors don’t know where to go can be the person to go ‘Ah, yes, did you know about the symbolism of eggs?’ and you bring a whole new level to it. So, find the Penguin Symbols Dictionary (which I really should get a commission on because I do recommend it to everybody) – I find that reading that, and having that information to hand, and being the one who can be playful because the stakes are lowest for the dramaturg – or making everybody else feel like the stakes are lowest for you as the dramaturg - I think that’s a really powerful position to be in and it can just facilitate everybody to have fun (which is ultimately I think what it has to be about). If you’re not having fun, and if you can’t make people understand how anything can be playful, then you’re not going to make good theatre. Essentially, the dramaturg can inject that playfulness – from a text base, if it’s a text-based project, or just from, say, ‘OK, we came up with a structure two weeks ago and we’ve been working with it, but what happens if we cut everything up and we put everything in a different order, and we try it that way?’ And you shift everything around and you show how, yeah, two weeks ago you drew them a diagram and it all fitted beautifully, but if you draw the diagram again then it still all fits – and you’re making it up, because it’s a play, and it’s not that important. Then, y’know, I think that’s the key: when you’re learning how to dramaturg, whatever that means, you find your way through – but I think being prepared to be the one who’s prepared to be playful is probably the key strength a dramaturg brings.
And I think we’re going to stop there on that note. I love that idea, that that is part of a dramaturg’s job description and so, we’ll finish there. Thank you very much Rachel, that’s brilliant!
- CKB
- CKB
