"Devised Theatre on the British stage"
Résumé
The development of devised theatre in Great-Britain was stimulated in the 1960s and 1970s by experimental theatre collectives, formed by artists who wished to escape the usual hierarchy of companies. The “democratic” process of collective improvisation matched the political focus of groups such as Joint Stock, the feminist collective Monstrous Regiment, or the Red Ladder Theatre Company (originally called the Agitprop Street Players). In recent decades the range and variety of devised theatre has expanded and its focus is no longer exclusively political. The two shows presented in this section thus represent two different eras in devised British theatre: whereas the Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War! (1963) recycles agit-prop techniques from the 1920s and 1930s to indict the business of war, Complicite’s Mnemonic (1999) is an exploration of human memory, which uses a blend of dialogue, projection and physical theatre to examine universal processes of identity and history construction.