The room where it happens: Jaz Woodcock-Stewart and The Attempts
On a project where the process, not the outcome, was the main goal.
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This week I’m back in London, catching up with friends, theatre and attending The Stage awards (full shortlist here), for which I’m on the judging panel. My interview with Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski is also in this week’s issue of The Stage. We talked about his form-straddling work, how it is informed by his deep love of rave culture, and how the rehearsals for his show Respublika were like a “kind of social experiment,” in which the actors ended up living together for weeks as a commune in the woods.
Which ties in nicely with this week’s edition, which is about The Attempts, a unique project in the UK in that it focusses on process rather than outcome.
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Jaz Woodcock-Stewart is a director who thinks a lot about process. Currently in the middle of rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie which opens at the end of the month at Theater Basel, the UK director has a long-standing interest in collaborative practices which recently manifested in The Attempts, an unusual project in that it was focussed more on the creative journey of its participants than the outcome.
Over a series of weekends in September and October last year, nine actors - Catherine Ashdown, Leah Brotherhead, Jonathan Case, Francesca Henry, Kayla Meikle, Mae Munuo, Irfan Shamji, Fode Simbo and Sophie Steer - gathered in a rehearsal room with Woodcock-Stewart. They came with no previously prepared material. They went in sans plan. “I really challenged myself not to plan too much. And I challenged the actors to not come with anything prepared,” she says. The idea was to respond organically to what happened in the room, to build something together without having to rush, and without all the pressures that come with having to produce something by a set date.
The Attempts grew out of Woodcock-Stewart’s interest in exploring alternative models for making work. She wanted to see what was possible when actors were given this freedom, to experiment, to play, to fail. “It was also about carving out the space for myself to be able to take the risks that I wanted to take,” she says.
Trust-building was fundamental to this process. Bonds can develop over time between actors in a permanent company, and you can reach a place “where you’re arriving on day one having trust already embedded in the process,” she says. In the UK, however, you have six weeks rehearsal, if you're lucky, but often closer to three weeks, in which you “need to basically spend 50% of that process building trust with your company in order to make some interesting discoveries,” Woodcock-Stewart explains.
Her aim with The Attempts was to turn a group of skilled actors into a temporary ensemble where the goal wasn’t to make something, rather to build a foundation from which something could be made in the future.
As she described in this thoughtful interview with Fergus Morgan’s The Crush Bar (which I’d highly recommend if you’re not already a subscriber), Woodcock-Stewart has an interestingly mixed CV. She’s a director of new writing, who has worked as an assistant and associate with directors including Thomas Ostermeier, Ivo van Hove, Joe Hill-Gibbins and Jeff James, but also has a reputation as a co-creator of nuanced devised work, much of which was made with Antler, the experimental theatre company she co-founded in 2012 with members of East 15's Contemporary Theatre course.
I first encountered Antler’s work at the Edinburgh fringe in 2015 with If I Were Me, a show exploring ideas of self-branding by way of a “surreal universe in which everyone is performing their identity in one way or another,” as Catherine Love wrote in her review for Exeunt.
Their 2017 show Lands (which I reviewed here for The Stage) saw them develop their formally adventurous mode of performance further. Lands is a two-hander in which one performer – Sophie Steer – spent the whole performance bouncing on a trampoline, while the other – Leah Brotherhead – attempted to complete a 1000-piece jigsaw. Steer’s bouncing was continual and compulsive. She couldn’t seem to stop, while Brotherhead grew increasingly distracted. It was a show with multiple metaphorical layers that could be read in any number of ways, a show that was at once satisfyingly committed to its central device – Steer bounces for the best part of an hour, even drinking a glass of water while on the trampoline - and gratifyingly resistant to spelling out what it all meant.
It was their next show, 2019’s Civilisation, an experimental fusion of theatre and dance devised with choreographer Morgann Runacre-Temple, that really opened doors. In the largely wordless piece about grief, Steer plays a woman returning from her partner’s funeral, her actions reflected by three dancers. During the show, Woodcock-Stewart has Steer frying an egg and playing Bop It! (though not on a trampoline this time), with everything coalescing into what the Guardian described as “an intimate, alien portrait of loss and isolation.”
Civilisation was devised without a writer – a mode of making work that Woodcock-Stewart enjoys but for which there remains limited scope for in the UK, with its still largely text-centric theatre culture.
At the same time Woodcock-Stewart also regularly directs new writing by some of the UK’s most interesting young playwrights - including Tim Foley’s Electric Rosary at Manchester Royal Exchange, a play with an incredible premise about a robot nun, and Margaret Perry’s Paradise Now! at London’s Bush Theatre, which the Guardian described as a satire of “hear-me-roar girlboss culture, the #selfcare luxury industry and social media’s curation and commodification of artful authenticity and vulnerability.”
Last year she directed Sami Ibrahim’s Multiple Casualty Incident at the Yard Theatre in London, a piece about a group of doctors at a medical aid NGO being trained to go into war zones. Time Out was impressed by both the revelations contained in the play and Woodcock Stewart’s use of video.
In 2021, Civilisation was programmed at Dresden’s Fast Forward festival, an international festival which showcases work by new and emerging directing talent. (Here’s my piece on the 2023 edition). Civilisation won the jury prize, which led to Woodcock-Stewart being given the opportunity to direct at Dresden’s Staatsschauspiel. Jason Medea Medley, a devised piece inspired by Medea, premiered there in 2023 - “Woodcock-Stewart dissects modern life with a cool but playful eye,” said Theater Heute - paving the way for her to direct Tennessee Williams’ classic play at Theater Basel.
The Attempts came about, in part, from what Woodcock-Stewart describes as “a jealousy around wanting to build long term collaboration with actors in a way that is available in repertory companies.”
“When actors work in a clearly-guided devising or improvising context,” she says, it can result in magic. Directors like Mike Leigh are famous for working this way, but he’s something of an exception in the UK. And this magic can only happen “when artists trust themselves, and when actors trust themselves, and when they are put in an environment where they are encouraged to trust themselves.”
It’s hard to argue with this. I’ve very often found myself watching work in the UK, and wishing they’d just had that little bit more time to go deeper, to really dig into the material. So often things feel rushed or not quite in the place they need to be, a symptom of the conditions under which they were made.
The Attempts was clearly revelatory for the actors involved. “We were building scenes organically and finding characters with lots of depth. We were always searching for the most truthful way to tell stories,” says Fode Simbo. “I found it so insightful. If we failed, we discussed why a scene might not have worked and dug deeper into the scene and the character.” The Attempts afforded them the time and space to do this kind of detailed, responsive work. “I think a whole process like this would result in something special,” says Simbo.
“There’s not many rehearsal rooms where actors truly feel they have the space and time to fail, to investigate something and not feel you have to solve it,” says Brotherhead. “When you take those pressures away, it’s so freeing and exciting.”
Steer also describes the process as liberating. “To be in a room with no endpoint in mind was the perfect environment to discover what might be exciting,” she says.
“It was sometimes absolutely jaw-dropping what was revealing itself,” she says. With “the lightest touch or provocation something unmissable began happening – all these new possible stories had the space to bubble up.”
In the UK, however, it can sometimes feel like there's an absence of trust, says Woodcock-Stewart, “from directors not trusting actors, actors not trusting themselves, organizations not trusting audiences.” This stems from a number of factors, with financial instability chief among them. People are worried about money, they’re worried about their careers, they’re worried about trying to create profitable work. This creates a system in which people are afraid to take risks. “It’s hard to really focus on what is possible with theatre and art when everyone’s scared,” she says. “The Attempts is an attempt to free ourselves from these parameters.”
The Attempts could only have happened with funding from the New Diorama’s Intervention 01. The tiny fringe theatre has a reputation for innovation – The Stage gave them its Innovation Award in 2019 for its programming model. (I wrote a piece for the New York Times article on how this small London studio theatre became an incubator for talent, nurturing artists whose work has ended up in the West End and, now, on Broadway too, with musical Operation Mincemeat, which debuted in the space in 2019, due to open at the Golden Theatre in February).
Intervention 01 was a scheme originated by then artistic and executive directors David Byrne and Will Young, both now at the Royal Court, after the theatre’s post-Covid reopening. Instead of struggling to get back to things as they were, they decided to produce no new work for a year and instead invest in artists to make, what they described as, ‘big swings.’ “No one else would fund this kind of work,” says Woodcock-Stewart.
Everyone involved clearly found the process hugely rewarding. In that interview with The Crush Bar, Woodcock-Stewart described how “a lot of the best music comes from people jamming around in a room and seeing what happens.” With The Attempts she created that space. “What's bittersweet about it is that I feel like we did discover some fascinating things,” she says. The process produced material that could form the basis of more than one piece of work, she tells me. But the money ran out. “So for now, it’s back to the drawing board. Plans are in the works though, and we are actively looking for partners to support us in the next stage of development for The Attempts. It will live again. I think it has to.”
The Attempts is fascinating anomaly at a time when artists often have to wear multiple hats and expend energy in multiple directions to the extent that the process of creation sometimes gets side-lined. “When everyone’s worried about money and, politically, everything feels unstable, there have to be ways of making these radical offers,” she says. “Because if we give up on those small radical gestures, there’s no point.”
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days
Revenge: After the Levoyah - Nick Cassenbaum’s madcap two-hander was one of the highpoints of last year’s Edinburgh fringe. Set within the Jewish communities of Essex and the East End, it’s an outrageous crime caper, complete with exploding helicopters and kidnapping plots, that’s also a smart exploration of the different forms antisemitism can take and the impact that it has. It’s a premise that really shouldn’t work, and yet it does. It’s at London’s Yard Theatre until 25th January and you can read Fergus Morgan’s interview with Cassenbaum about the show here.
Mime London – The successor to the long-running London International Mime Festival offers a curated programme of physical theatre, dance theatre, object theatre, puppetry, and other stuff that’s not easy to put into any one box. This year’s highlights include Plexus Polaire’s puppet Moby Dick and Italian dance company Dewey Dell’s take on The Rite of Spring. Mime London takes place at venues around London until 1st February and you can read my piece from last year on the rich history of the London International Mime Festival and why it was necessary for it to evolve, here.
Ajax and the Swan of Shame - Renowned German director Christopher Rüping returns to Thalia Theater with a contemporary interpretation of Sophocles’ Ajax, reframed as a meditation on shame and failure. It has its world premiere in Hamburg on 15th January.
Giovanni’s Room – While London audiences can catch Eline Arbo’s production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years in the West End from the end of January, her latest production for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, where she is artistic director, is a new version of James Baldwin's classic novel, a sensual account of desire, sexuality and identity. Performed by the renowned ITA ensemble, it opens in Amsterdam on 19th January
Thank you for reading. If you have any recommendations, tips, or thoughts about this newsletter, you can reach me on natasha.tripney@gmail.com