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Bibliography

Yorke, J. 2014. Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them. Milton Keynes: Penguin.

Mitchell, K. 2009. The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. New York: Routledge

Greig, D. 2001. Introduction. In: Sarah Kane: Completed Plays. London: Methuen.

Marsh, C. 2015. “The Strange Case of the Goddess Peitho: Classical Antecedents of Public Relations’ Ambivalence Toward Persuasion.”  Journal of Public Relations Research. 27 (3): 229–243.

Crossley, M., & Yarker, J. 2017. Devising Theatre with Stan’s Cafe. London/New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Jeffreys, S. 2019. Playwriting: Structure, Character, How and What to Write. London: Methuen.

Di Benedetto, S. 2012. An Introduction to Theatre Design. London: Taylor & Francis Group.

Breton, A. 1924. Surrealist Manifesto. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. 1972. University of Michigan Press: Michigan.

Alessi, S. 2013. Rewriting Classical Myth: the Case of Penelope. MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities. p.44

Artaud, A. 1938. The Theatre and its Double. Translated by Victor Corti. 2010. Croydon: Alma Classics Limited.

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Rehearsal

To block our scenes with the script, we needed a set to work around. When writing the script, I imagined a rickety wooden walls with moonlight peeking through, a singular door upstage centre acting as an entrance, and a singular podium to present the bag.

“This is their first look at the production and can set its tone, reveal the time or locale, set up the basic style, establish mood and atmosphere, and introduce the production’s concept. It can suggest a lot about the kind of people who will inhabit this stage world before we meet them.” - Stephen Di Benedetto

Due to our close to shoe string budget, we had to get a lot more creative with our blocking. Our minimalist set still worked effectively, but the set I imagined never really came to be from outside my head.

“To extend the geographic metaphor, they rarely remain in one artistic ‘location’ for long and when they do reveal themselves they are often at the opposite end of the compass from where they last appeared and heavily camouflaged by the hybrid art forms intertwined within one piece.” - Mark Crossley and James Yarker

The set I imagined never really came to be from outside my head.

The lighting on the other hand I had full realised creativity for. I introduced a shadow sequence inspired by the work of Complicité, plus my own method in using changes in coloured lighting to distinguish between the real world and the dream.

In my own acting choices, I was inspired by the work of Berkoff. I tried to create large and sometimes cartoonish (when appropriate) positions and movements when onstage.

^ Setting word cloud

^ Performance of Shadow Sequence

^ Production of Complicité's Mnemonic that served as inspiration for the shadow sequence

^ Production of Steven Berkoff's The Trial that served as inspiration for the acting

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Writing

I was put in charge of writing the script for the piece.

“One of the secrets to adapting novels is that it is generally easier to adapt a flawed novel. If you find a mistake or anomaly in the narrative, for some reason it makes it much easier to write the play because you have to sort out that problem; it gives you a way in. So, conversely, Jane Austen is very hard to adapt for the stage because her books are so perfect.” - Stephen Jeffreys

While I had practised writing adaptations of works before, they never went very far. And I also didn't give myself as much creative freedom as I did with this piece. Here, I was given characters I could design myself without having to make a 1:1 translation of the source material.

Before I started writing, I made a planned out act structure, and eventually came up with a scene order to perform.

Discussing with the group, we agreed that the plot would start with sailors awake, then dreaming, then persuaded, then awake. This eventually led to the scene structure I made.

Specifically, I wanted each sailor to have their own scene with Peitho to eventually get persuaded, rather than have chaotic scenes with all 4 characters on stage talking over each other.

The part that struggled for me was my decision that in order to make good surrealist script, I had to write poetically. This was a particular challenge for because I am not a fan of poetry.

But I am a fan of the playwright Sarah Kane, who wrote in a very poetic style. So I read her plays and got used to reading poetic dialogue.

What emerged from this exercise was a repeated love of Kane's stage action. How it always seems impossible but so long as you're awake in rehearsal, you can make it happen.

“Kane believed passionately that if it was possible to imagine something, it was possible to represent it.” - David Greig

Because of this new found inspiration, I was put in stage directions that were intentionally difficult. So that in rehearsal we could come up with a creative way in making them happen.

Something interesting that emerged from the writing process was how Peitho became the protagonist of the piece.

“Ultimately, the Greeks determined that Peitho, at her best, was honest, respectful of others, and mindful of community wellbeing. The Greeks’ resolution of Peitho's nature ideally holds lessons for the troubled status of persuasion within modern public relations.” - Charles Marsh

The way I wrote the piece meant Peitho was in control of the dreams, and that by the end she would succeed in tricking the sailors. But I needed her to be motivated by something to make her actions make sense. In the original draft, she was motivated by revenge on Odysseus. However, through further rewrites, she became a lot more of a mischief maker archetype.

^ Sadie Hennessey as Peitho

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Character

Now that we had our story decided theme and style, our next course of action became deciding characters. We knew early on that we didn't want Odysseus or an Olympian to be a character in the piece. This is because we wanted to focus more on characters who don't get their story told as often, and so could be more creative in our character design. This is a decision apparently a lot of contemporary writers make.

“The twentieth century is perhaps the time during which the most interesting developments involving the Odyssey, its plot and its symbols, take place. Authors of rewrites are attracted by non-dominant characters, by what has not been said by the canon, by marginal stories and consequences taken for granted” - Serena Alessi

The obvious choice for characters was the sailors who opened the bag. Combining our exploration of theme, style and character, we began taking notes on the possible greedy desires that the sailors could have. We eventually settled on: power, fame and money. We chose these because they felt like they came from the id residing in the unconscious.

But there came a point where we wanted to add some sort of divinity to the piece. I felt like a wasted opportunity to add some surreal divine being to piece to ward of the naturalism, but also because we needed a reason to have the sailors dream, and maybe the power of God could suffice.

I looked at specifically the many minor gods of Greek Mythology and eventually stumbled upon Peitho, an ocean nymph and Goddess of persuasion and seduction.

This really hit it big with the group. The idea that the sailors were persuaded and seduced into opening the back gave us clear character motivation, and an interesting conflict to look into.

Through this, I created material, including word clouds and AI generated pictures as sources of inspiration for the piece and for the characters specifically.

^ Peitho's word cloud

^ Sailor's word cloud

^ Peitho's art

^ Sailor's art

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Theme and Style

At the beginning of the process, we had to choose a piece of the Odyssey that we found interesting, so that we could make a piece out of it.

To start, we watched a summary video that outlined the entire plot. We shared what parts stuck out to us as story-worthy and one part was the "bag of wind" part from Book 10.

After reading the actual section from the Odyssey that the bag of wind comes from, we agreed that this was the story we wanted to tell. Specifically, we wanted to look at themes of greed and desire. Through this theme emerged the key motif of the play: the bag itself. The idea that the sailors begin to believe that their desires were in the bag and so that's why they opened it, proved very popular amongst the group.

We also wanted to establish our performance style early on as well, so that we had a direction we could aim towards in rehearsals. After some research and landed on surrealism.

“Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.” - André Breton

This quote particularly stuck with me, as it I believed it was want I was meant to be going for in the module. Allowing myself to explode my imagination out onto the stage to create theatre of a certain quality not often seen. I also felt this was reflected in this quote:

“If our lives lack fire and fervour, that is to say continual magic, this is because we choose to observe our actions, losing ourselves in mediation on their imagined for, instead of being motivated by them.” - Antonin Artaud

With our research into surrealism and its focus on dream logic, we came up with the idea of the whole play being set in a dream. And that through the dream do the sailors access their deep, unconscious desires.

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Video Blog

If you read Homer's Odyssey and you go to Book 10, which is the part of the story that we based our piece on, you'll notice that there isn't that much content on the bag of wind, which is what we based our piece on. It goes on for about seventy lines while the rest of Book 10 goes on for hundreds and hundreds of lines.

And so when we did our treasure hunt for our piece, it was more about filling the gaps, the bits that were left blank or empty, and filling them with treasure, rather than finding treasure that was similar to the story.

So this meant that we had blank slates of character and desire that we could fill in and we could add things to. This lead to the theme of greed and the character of Peitho, who would tempt the desire of greed to the sailors who we also focused on a lot more.

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Questions

What was your key learning point?

I believe my key learning point came from writing the script for my piece. I had been practising script writing before I started the course, but a lot of my projects were full-length rather than shorter, approximately 15 minute time length I was designated.

I started with the exercise I use when plotting out my story, which is to work my story into a five act structure (as shown above). What this allowed me to do was figure out pacing out which scenes feature where in the narrative. 

"In every complete story there are two major turning points: one which should call the protagonist to action, while the second should show them the consequence of accepting that call. That consequence should present itself to them as an obstacle that invites their final choice." - John Yorke, Into the Woods

During the writing process, I tried to expand my style of writing. I usually write in a more naturalistic style, so I challenged myself to find an opposite style. Since we were aiming for surrealism, I made an attempt in using the theory of automatism in writing. My first attempt came from a rehearsal, where I came in tired, sat in a dark corner behind a corner for a few minutes, and wrote words that came to mind. I’d describe that process as sitting in a tornado of words I associated with the story, and reaching out to catch whatever words that didn’t slip my mind. I used this process in writing the rest of the script, eventually finishing a first draft used to fuel rehearsals.

Some time during rehearsals, we realised that the thirteen scene script was too long to memorise and eventually perform, so in the editing process, I cut it down to a nine scene play.

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What was your key learning block?

I think my key learning block came from my maximalist mindset. If I were to describe my daydreaming of what I want my ideal theatre to look like, a common trend that appears is a heavy use of set, lighting and other forms of theatre technology, mostly inspired by popular theatre directors like Marianne Elliott and Rupert Goold.

Obviously, this doesn’t work in the space given to us, and a big part of being a theatre maker is playing to your given space. So a lot of the big ideas I had had to be reworked to fit the space, which also included being cut entirely.

A key example of this would be the movement sequence intended for the opening prologue. As written in the script, the monologue was meant to be accompanied by a movement sequence performed as a piece of shadow theatre performed behind a sheet of fabric. However, the technicalities of distance between the casting light, the actors and the sheet, as well as the question of where the sheet would go next proved to be too complicated for the performance. In the end, we were eventually still able to perform the movement sequence, but instead the shadows performed in front pre-placed LEDs in the theatre, and with the absence of the sheet.

When we actually practised using this set-up, I actually thought it worked effectively even if it wasn’t used to the full extent that I imagined it.

"Think about how to make your visual ideas reach everyone in the audience. This is not just about sightlines, it is about acknowledging that everyone sits in a slightly different relationship to the performance and looks at the work from a slightly different angle. Of course, it is crucial that everyone sees key bits of the action such as main events. For the rest of the time, it is important that everyone looks at things that take them into the world and ideas of the play." - Katie Mitchell, The Director's Craft

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With respect to devised storytelling centred on renewal of classics, what do you need to do next?

I think my next task should be to familiarise myself with classic texts, and get myself used to reading them. The reading experience of the Odyssey can involve feeling it’s length is too long or that the shifting of perspectives in the early sections feels unnecessary compared to the Odysseus centred narrative for the rest of the book.

I've read novels that are considered "classics", most of which are pre-twentieth century and the experience is different compared to reading contemporary works. A recent comparison that comes to mind are my readings of Jane Austen's Emma and Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven. While obviously more than just the time period explains the differences in style between these two novels, it's still a major factor. Emma contains many features of "classic" literature (long descriptions, finely tuned vocabulary, core set key characters, etc) and some, but not all, of these features can make reading it difficult to readers. Compared to Station Eleven which is a very contemporary novel (non-linear narrative, pared down description, emphasis on dialogue, etc) I found to be a lot more of an easy read.

Going back to the Odyssey, its structure and language proves difficult and sometimes dragging to read. I feel like if I were to adapt classic texts to the stage, I'd have to practise reading stories that are difficult so that it gets to the point where it's no longer difficult.

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INTRODUCTION

The Gust is a short play created by Luc Jones, Henry Stratford, Sadie Hennessey and Fabian Butler (seen above, from left to right). It reimagines a section from Book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey.