Collective Creation and the “Creative Industries”

Abstract

This chapter aims to discover the presence and forms of collective creation employed in devised performance produced at Britain’s Royal National Theatre, a three-stage complex on London’s South Bank. The increased presence of devised performance in the National’s programming reflects the shift that devising has undergone in Britain from a “fairly marginal position in the 1970s to one of significant disciplinary and institutional orthodoxy by the first decade of the twenty-first century.”¹ The box office success of productions such as War Horse (2008; which sold out two runs at the National, is currently playing on London’s West End, Broadway, and beyond, and inspired a Stephen Spielberg film released in 2011) within a theatre culture that is “hierarchical and fundamentally resistant to the practices of devising and/or collaboration”² calls for a reevaluation of devising’s characterization as “alternative, oppositional and democratic” (author’s emphasis).³ The brief survey of the National’s devised productions since 2003 provided within this chapter demonstrates that devising’s emphasis on physical and visual spectacle does offer an aesthetic alternative to the entrenched “antitheatrical prejudice” of British theatre.⁴ What this study seeks to discover is the extent to which employing a “mode of work in which no script … exists prior to the work’s creation by the company”⁵ within mainstream theatre continues to constitute a form of “democratic” creativity and an opposition to the hegemony of the individual author.