BARKER’S OBSERVATIONS ON THEATRE GAMES

1996 and 2001

The background to Theatre Games

The basis for the games lies in the 27th Middlesbrough Baptist Boy Scouts and the Baptist Church
Youth Club. During the war we couldn't get any scout masters because they were all in the army and
so we had a somewhat elderly man, who looked after us, but basically we did what we wanted to do
and what we wanted to do was play games. A lot of the games I picked up, I picked up then. I keep
pointing out to those of my fellow boy scouts with whom I'm still in contact, that there's a living to be
made out of these games! Mark Evans has pointed out an important feature of my work, which is that
it is related to a physical working class society. It is not related to a middle-class literary society. It is
one that functions on the same level that peasants have been developing over centuries, the
vernacular is still there, buried in working class speech and action.
The next layer of this is when John Russell Brown took me to the department of Drama and Theatre
Arts in Birmingham to teach. At the end of the first year I said to him that I couldn't teach when I was
working one hour with this group and one hour with that one, sometimes they'd turn up and
sometimes not. The first production I did with them I got four hours' rehearsal in two weeks because
they didn't turn up. I couldn't work that way. I had found that there was a small group of five or six
who were interested in working with me. It was a very curious time when Universities were all trying
to change, to broaden their syllabuses and there were huge meetings about whether we could include
theology or Marxism within our curriculum. It all came to nothing. But certain things were possible in
1965/66, such as some interesting appointments. One was that of Jane Winearls who was appointed
one year before me to teach dance - mostly fox-trots and two-steps - and then my appointment which
was at the behest of the Dean of Arts. Suddenly there was a collision between trying to find a new
way of teaching and what I was doing. I was asked by the Dean what structure I wanted, what would I
do? I drew a chalk line on the floor and said that anyone who decides to cross that line will work with
me, and if they don't want to, they should remain on the other side. To my surprise a lot of first years
came across, as did some members of staff. So I had the opportunity to test out ideas that I had had
over the years - on the use of improvisation, of breaking down the text - with some quite sensational
results. I published a paper on the theatre in the east end of London and the research had all been
done by first year students. Nobody would have assumed that first-years were capable of producing
research that could be published - all I did was write it up.

And so we played games at this time. And that is the basis of what I do. Then came a peculiar period
because next year they said that they wouldn't give me any help. So I was left with the alternative of
doubling my class or letting the whole thing drop. I ended teaching 68 hours a week. That couldn't
continue. Then I was asked to take what I had learned from my one year's experiment and apply it to
my teaching within a more conventional university structure. At a certain point I got called up for Jury
Service, and when they saw that I was taking notes they asked whether I was a journalist - I said, 'No,
I'm jotting down ideas for a book'. They threw me out. So I went home and didn't tell anybody that I
had skipped Jury Service, and with these notes I sat down and wrote what became "Theatre Games".
I wrote it in three weeks. It was also an intensive period of study as well because I had looked at
Feldenkrais and got stuff on F.M. Alexander from Jane Winearls, and we also had discussions about
Laban, Kurt Jooss and Sigurd Leeder, [two of Laban's most celebrated pupils]. I had done some
Laban with Littlewood and Theatre Workshop, and taken some classes with them. But I had also
done a lot of observation of people moving in the street - that is the basis of much of my approach to
acting: how people stand, how they move, how they relate to each other in various situations.

So, I sat down and wrote the book. In that time I also had a library that I had gathered and worked
through all these books: Feldenkrais' "The Body and Mature Behaviour" being one in particular. I
went back to Laban again. Jane Winearls introduced me to a lot of new movements in modern dance
as can be seen from her book. She also gave me some Alexander lessons, not enough, but as many
as she could. She was a genius but left little behind apart from that book.

I haven't been able to develop much beyond "Theatre Games" because people always ask me for this
work. What I have been able to do is gradually condense the work. These final exercises are part of
the later stages of this condensation. The response to my more recent article in NTQ has prompted
some interesting responses from people who have thanked me for putting into words what has been
in their minds for some years. I don't know whether I can go much further with this work. I hope so.
But I am certainly not tired of games. I love games.

I don't have anything more to say really, except that I may ask you at several point to do things that
make you think, 'what's this got to do with theatre, what's this got to do with performance?' There is a
method to the madness. There is something underneath where I've a big idea of where I'm going, but
I've no predetermined plan about where I'm going. I will promise you, I will give you a categorical
guarantee that anything I ask you to do will relate to [what] the most conventional actor in the most
conventional theatre is doing on the most conventional stage. So what I ask you is to trust me.

For these reasons, I have never had a broad framework to extend the work. Since the book came out
[in 1977], people say 'Come here and do the work', so I've gone on doing the same work, but I think it
has become deeper and more refined, and more interested in what is the core of acting. What is, I
would say, the stance?

Reflections on his teaching method

There is no order to the stuff I'm doing with you. I have a fixed thing in my head that I only ever do the
same thing with every group I work with. And so, in order to give myself security, I look through my
work-book and find out what it is that I do every time, and instant reaction every time is: 'Why did I do
that?' Because no two circumstances are ever the same. I feel we shouldn't start with where we
finished last night, because it was cold. We shouldn't go back to it. This morning we'll do something
different. What makes workshops work is if you change the order of things around. You come to an
exercise or a game in a different position and it brings out different things in different groups. I never
get the same results. Groups are different, they work out differently. I think what has grown this week
has not only been a lot of trust and respect, but also a lot of affection. It has been a very warm week
in that respect and I have enjoyed it.

On Working with the Body

They told me there was no cure for arthritis and I've cured it. There's a little bit in my hands, that's all.
And I did that by my own methods of how the brain and the body work. I think movement, I work out
movement, I develop ideas. The body has improved until the arthritis is not a problem for me any
more.

Basically, what I am doing is coordinating the spine to take tension stops out. It is the biggest problem
of the actor. In life, I see something, I respond to it, I react, I make a decision, I do something, and
then I verbalise. As actor we start by verbalising. We start with the words and we have to get all the
other processes back. So what I would say is that acting and performance is a manifestly artificial
activity, but it should be carried on by natural and not artificial means. Actors who sit down without
breathing are doing something that is perfectly natural, artificially; and we shouldn't do this. By putting
you on my back [in his exercise The Raft], when we got you to relax like that, then two things happen:
firstly, your diaphragm was freed up, which meant that your whole body began to participate in what
you were saying. Secondly, the exercise took the pressure off your neck. At the bottom of your spine
is the cerebrosarcophical neuromuscular centre, which is like the telephone exchange for the body. It
is why balance is so important. The great majority of information arriving at and coming out of the
brain stem is concerned with balance. It also has contact with the memory; it is the root of the
subconscious.

The first time you play a game it is fun; afterwards you can begin to work out what you want to do with
it. You can explore certain features of a relationship: the weight you would give to it or the tactics you
would use in it, the movement characteristics - you can explore a whole range of things which can
motor the performance when we get to it. Hopefully when we get there we don't have people talking
about, 'I love you and I don't love her' standing statically, like traffic cones but with bodies that are a
constant reflection of that relationship pattern. What I wanted to show you now was that games have
a great deal to do with sophisticated theatre performances; they are not facile by any means. They
give us energy and a path through. You play the game and then you learn through playing the game.
The problem which will keep coming up and which actors always have is that they work things out in
their heads and then the body rather than trying to get it into the body without the head getting in the
way.

Body and Mind

If you put the body in a certain position, the mind begins to work in a certain way. If you make the
mind work, it sometimes interferes with the body. There is a constant interaction and there is an
optimum feeling in the body that, for me, is the stance and core of acting. The relationship exercise is
the core of acting. In everyday life we constantly ask ourselves questions. The mind functions not on
the give but on the response. This is the problem of acting: we start with the end result, which is the
verbalisation. We don't even start with the physical action. So if you do anything on the stage start
with a question.

Are Barker's Games all about Competition?

It doesn't have to be. That's me. It doesn't have to be. That's my way of working. What one finds, in
the early to mid-seventies, is people who started to bring out a whole pile of non-competitive games.
But they died the death very quickly. What is the purpose of the competition? It is never to put the
other person down, and it is in a cooperative framework. Therefore, I could take competition. I
wouldn't want competition that was destructive of the other person at all.

And what of competition and cooperation on stage?

One of the things we have to guard against in the theatre, is that in acting companies people make
agreements. 'I don't like you, but nevertheless, we'll stick together and be chummy while this is going
on.' So what happens is agreements get made not to bring conflicts into the open. Very often, when
theatre companies like each other, they get very chummy. When they're on stage, instead of playing
the conflict that's in the play they begin to feed each other lines like 'I don't like you - just as a cue.
The whole thing begins to get very chummy, very cozy. What happens is that the pattern of
relationships within the company begins to take over in relationship to the play. Take the example of
how Joan Littlewood treated Jimmy Booth and Richard Harris - who were both drinking pals - when
they were working at Stratford East. Before a show, Littlewood would strategically speak to Harris
and Booth separately and seek to set them off against one another. 'He's not giving you enough is
he?' and then to the other: 'He's complaining you're not giving him enough.' When they next meet on
stage the tension between them was palpable - it was like Michael Angelo's God! You could see it
crackling from finger to finger.

Influences and Connections

Stanislavsky

Stanislavsky said, 'Sometimes on stage I feel right and sometimes I feel wrong'. He started by look at
the question psychologically: that's not where he finished, but that's where he started. I started from
the point of view that this 'I feel right', 'I feel wrong' was a physical sensation. And therefore I start to
explore the possible explanations for why an actor feels wrong and why an actor feels right. And I see
that [it is] rooted in the kinaesthetic coordination of the back brain, the subconscious brain and the
muscles - the physical coordination of the body - the head, the neck, the spine and the pelvis.
Those are the terms with which I've gone on working. Looking at ways of inducing a feeling in the
actor which corresponds as far as I can see to what Stanislavsky meant when he said, 'Sometimes on
stage I feel right and sometimes I feel wrong'. Along the way we look at the mental processes that get
in the way of the body, we look at freeing the actor up so that the imagination, which is rooted in the
subconscious, can be utilised and people can relate expressively to each other.

On Stanislavsky's practice of Affective Memory and Barker's practice of Game Memory

Stanislavsky asks us when we approach a situation or approach a character in a play, that we go back
into our past and look at experiences we've had, try and recall the feelings we then had, and the
emotion memories that we bring back can help us make that scene come alive.

In my way, if we play a game, we create our own emotion memory and we create it absolutely within
the situation of the play. The amount of transference is minimal, absolutely minimal. We are
remembering now, or we should do when we get to the play. We have built in a physically-stored
memory, so that I can instinctively react to you on the stage - there is a memory within me that I can
draw upon. Similarly, by changing the rules or exploring different ways of playing the game, or playing
over a period of time, it becomes different. You become much more interested in exploring it as you
go on playing it.

Game Theory: Roger Callois

The French sociologist, Roger Callois, divided games into four categories. He took games very
seriously. He said, 'If you look at the games that predominate in any society, they will give you as
much information about the nature of that society as religion, politics or other fields of human
enterprise. He divided games into four classifications: games of competition, games of chance,
games of simulation, and games of vertigo. In games of simulation he included theatre: that there are
games where people pretend something is happening or they disguise themselves.

Our society is riddled with and built on games of competition and games of chance. Take, for
example, games of vertigo. The purpose of 'vertigo games' is to go as near as possible to the
boundary of losing control, to lose control. There is a whole range of activity in human society where
we are interested in how far we can go to the edge of control without going over.

Roger Callois is interesting. I went back and read him two or three years ago and discovered
something that I hadn't seen before. He says theatre is simulation. He goes so far as to say it is a
combination of simulation and vertigo and is socially and politically subversive. It is something you
get in things like voodoo, where you get possession, simulation and you get also the loss of control,
vertigo - either drug induced or whatever. Then he starts putting theatre as mimicry, as though what
actors do is simply imitate what someone else does without any internal commitment of themselves.
It's the old strange prostitution image of theatre, that what we do is pretend, but it doesn't touch us
personally as actors. This is usually an image which has a double implication because it degrades us
in order to imitate something else, which is never how I've seen my craft. We have to find the security
either in ourselves or the security we can find in the group in order to be able to go beyond the limit of
our own personality, in a world that is constantly, I think, hedging us in. When the theatre becomes
ordinary it is not worth watching. You might as well stay at home and watch the paint dry.

Erving Goffmann

Was an American sociologist who had a big influence on the way we looked at theatre in the late
sixties and seventies and who began to look at the whole range of life in theatrical terms, such as
'forestage' and 'back-stage'. He wrote his doctoral thesis in a small hotel in the Hebrides 1 and when
observing the waiters and waitresses noted that the kitchen could be understood as backstage and
the restaurant as main stage with the kitchen door marking the boundary between the two. When
they came to the door you could see them take on another persona. They developed a game
whereby when they came through from the kitchen they would goose each other, in order to make
them come out with a startled expression.
1
It was actually Shetland
Is there a connection with the Alexander Technique?

It runs parallel with most of what I'll do this week because most of what I'm dealing with is the ability to
coordinate mind and body, but, in this instance to work at it unselfconsciously through playing games.
We go back to the way in which a child learns and employ that to remove blocks in our adult
development. That is one way we've got of doing what I call 'taking the pressure of the actors'.

Joan Littlewood on Creativity and Play

Littlewood's point of view on this would always be, 'Don't go out on stage to win, go out to lose, go on
stage to die. That way you'll be creative. If you go out to hold and to work the audience, then you will
fail. But if you go out and let it all go and start from there, then you will be creative; then you're able to
play with the audience and the other actors. 'Efficiency', she would say, 'is death. Don't do things, let
things happen to you. Chuck it all away when you go on stage. There were times in rehearsals with
her when she would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse and rehearse ... Until, in the end you would
say, 'Bugger this. I don't know what on earth she wants. That's it.

The Raft of the Medusa

This painting has a place in my mythology. Many, many years ago when I was working with Theatre
Workshop, working with Littlewood, we were mounting a production of Buchner's Danton's Death,
which takes place in the French Revolution. As we started rehearsing Joan drew a square on the
floor and said 'OK, everyone in the square', and we all pushed and played it for half and hour or
something. There was a lot of horse-play as people kept throwing each other off the raft. We played
this for a few days. Then she came in and said, 'OK, five days on the equator'. So we began to move
and throw people out with more slow, heavy movements. After a while it was ten days on the equator,
then fifteen, and the pushing became slower and heavier.

Then Joan brought in a reproduction of the painting The Raft of the Medusa in which everyone's
gesture has an exaggerated romantic style. Then she says, 'Now play the game after fifteen days on
the equator in the style of this painting. The pushing was now transformed. Then she said, 'We'll take
the raft away' and we started rehearsing the street scenes. The street scenes were written by a
playwright whose play was never performed in his own lifetime. It's streets are full of people and it
can be a terrible mess. But now she found a way of doing the street scenes in a romantic style with
physical actions and with the weight taken out of us: there was no confusion and everything was clear.
When we opened The Evening Standard we found out another company was opening Danton's Death
ten day's before we were planning to - so we never did the show.

That's why it exists in my mythology as something that was never realised but was a wonderful piece
of work. To take what was basically a horse-play game, take it through various stages and so create
the style of a production. To find a way of creating that style which bypasses intellectual activity. The
physical actions are already going on in the raft scene before the intellectual work, the painting is
brought in. If the painting is brought in first you start posing from the exterior.

Littlewood's concept of Heading for Home

Joan Littlewood used to 'Head for home' late in the day. What I could perceive with Littlewood was
the point at which she headed for home - that point in a production where you suddenly think, 'there
are going to be bums on those seats next week'. If the actors haven't got it by that time you have to
put it there. You can't open a show that is under-rehearsed. The mark of a good director is how late
that point comes. The nervous director is the one who comes in with the book and says, 'I want you
to sit here; you do this, you do that, you the other'. A good director can leave it to the end. Littlewood
would head for home three days before the opening night which was petrifying. If it was difficult we
didn't get a dress rehearsal.

Theatre Games and Keith Johnstone

Keith Johnstone would have had a field day with that game. He would have spent three weeks
analysing what you were doing. The number of times that you put 'activity' in place of 'action'. That
is, you put something in front of, as Keith would say, your own creativity; in front of a spontaneous
'give and take' relationship, you determined that relationship by doing something. You lost
concentration. You don't know where you are, you don't know what your status is, in Keith's terms. It
is interesting that nearly everybody is playing low status and not high status in this group. It's ok. I
don't want to tell you how to play it. You play it and then think, 'Maybe I'll play it some other way,
maybe I'll do this.' Maybe you all want to play low status. An awful lot of Keith Johnstone's work is
concerned with the number of things actors do to stop themselves being creative. He's got
catalogues of techniques that actors have to stop themselves being creative.

I think that a large part of Keith Johnstone's work is the dangerous moment when the actor is
exposed. A lot of his early work was concerned with everything an actor does not to be exposed.
How you put on a disguise, activity or fiddling, or a mask over activity in order not to be exposed, in
order not to be creative. I think to be creative must be to be flexible, to be open, to be in relationship
with. I think in Keith's terms, and mine as well, to actually do something between you, to put
something between you and the other people is not to be. It may be functional and technical but it is
not creative.

On Grotowski

In an interview a pupil of Grotowski was asked whether he ever talked about theory. 'Never', he said,
'he worked through the Via Negativa. He worked all the way through ... "That's inauthentic, no no,
no". Until he created a space within the actor, and felt that space was authentic.’ It was only what
that actor or that dancer could produce - absolutely authentic and specific to that person. When you
get that coming together, then that's where we get real creativity. We're talking about ideals. We're
human beings. We have our failings, we have our insecurities. But that is what we should be trying to
work towards: that openness to contact; that openness to be able to discard all the things that worked
in the past that we carry as baggage: 'It worked once therefore it might work this time'. Chuck the
baggage away and see what happens.

Laban Efforts

I said throughout the week that certain games would have a specific movement quality attached to
them. With the Scottish Play we got that heavy, indirect, rapid movement - the slash. The people
provoking him used a flick - light, quick and indirect. When we did Grandmother's Footsteps we got
light, quick and direct -dabbing. Then, when we did Pirate's Treasure we got light, direct, sustained -
gliding. That's already four. When we did the Rescue out of the Pit we did heavy, indirect, sustained -
wringing. When I picked someone on my back I did a press - heavy, direct, sustained.

Yesterday I talked about the different movement efforts and we did the game [Grandmother’s
Footsteps] with quick, light and direct - dabbing - and direct, light and sustained – gliding [Pirate’s
Treasure]. We now come to one of the most important ones: what is called a 'wringing' action - heavy,
sustained and indirect. It is very important because, certainly in the English language, there are so
many metaphors that connect wringing or twisting with emotion: 'it wrung a cry out of him' or 'his guts
knotted up'. All that action is associated with deep emotion. Deep emotion is not a direct physical
sensation, it's an indirect, heavy and sustained sensation in the body. Very often actors, again
because of the situation in which we work, express emotion directly, instead of feeling it inside the
body, instead of physicalising the sensations of grief, anger, pain.
Anton Chekhov and Textual Devices

Something happens at least two times in Chekhov who is normally when we see him performed, the
ultimate fourth wall playwright. Toward the end of the outdoor performance in The Seagull, the doctor
is left onstage virtually on his own and Masha runs in and says, 'O, I am so miserable, so unhappy';
and he says something of the order of: 'How disturbed , how mixed up they all are'. It can't be to her -
it can only be to the audience. You make your choice there, whether you suddenly say, 'do you want
to come in or do you want to stay out?' And then, of course, there is the other occasion in which
Chekhov has to deal with the fact that that form of theatre, that realist theatre, is breaking down at the
turn of the century. He finds it very difficult to let us know what is happening to a character through
dialogue, because in The Three Sisters there are all sorts situations where nobody says what is inside
them. So he has a deaf character come on. The other character on stage says everything he's got
inside him, all his feeling and all his thoughts, knowing that the deaf character can't hear. But again,
you have a choice there, of disturbing - and I think very creatively - of disturbing Chekhov to let Andre
speak to the audience and let the audience internally into his mind and his feeling in that way. It
would be very interesting to do it in that way, because it would mean, whereas the viewpoint is
normally the viewpoint of the three women, his viewpoint would also be expressed as well.

Thoughts on Theatre in General

On Montage

In this post-modern form of improvisation we are dealing with the personal construction of meaning.
As Eugenio Barba would say: 'There are two things which are terribly boring in the theatre: one is
when the stage tells you everything, and the other is when the stage tells you nothing.' In between
there has to be some anchor, there has to be something happening. In this activity it is the shifting
patterns of the relationships, the personalities of the people, or what the people are finding out about
their personalities.

Improvising physically and Improvising with text

We have a freedom here which we don't have elsewhere. But we have other things here. We have
an ability to sustain a pattern of actions which are very difficult on a stage. Actors tend to get stuck
repeating an action over and over again, or they get stuck in disconnected action. They make things
happen and do things. Both of those exercises were well over twenty minutes. It would have been
easy for us just to sit back and let you do maybe an hour of that stuff. It certainly wasn't running out of
ideas and inspiration. At the beginning of the week when I saw this group, I thought, 'This is a very
interesting group to work with because of the mixtures in it. At the end of the first day, I thought I may
have a problem getting the group to sustain, within the disparate nature. But you're sustaining things.
I think in the theatre you can use this exercise as the motor-action. The biggest single problem we
have is to do an action and forget what you have done before; we are always tempted to repeat what
we have done before. Repetition is the worst thing - it has to be done afresh. Over the years I've
been working this has become the most important part of anything I do because you put people in
positions of freedom to make discoveries or to create. It is creative, and produces images of great
beauty and power and eloquence, in such a way that you can read them. It is not literary, it is not
intellectual, in the sense that you have to use your mind to work out what it is about. I feel what it is
about, it is a subconscious, physical sensation to me. And it is emotional. It moves me to watch, but I
couldn't pin it down and say, 'The significance is ...', or 'What this is about is ...'. We could hazard
guesses, but who wants to? The days of art when you could put a frame around it and put a title
under it have gone I hope.

When directing I try and bring in what I have learned from the games in other ways; that is, I try not to
set up a big game that will evolve, but use little bits in corners here, when there are problems. I try
and take something that I have learned from the games and put the actors to work that way. For
example we were working on a dramatisation of some of the interludes by Cervantes. He also wrote
seven short plays which were never performed because they tend to be wordy. But inside of them is
a lot of action if you release it. There is one situation where the wife is waiting for the sacristan who is
her lover. The husband is going away on a business trip and so his partner calls out to him, 'the
horses are ready, let's go'. The man is caught in a particular situation, because he's never touched
his wife in three weeks. This is his one chance, but on the other hand, he's got to go for business.
On the other hand the wife wants to appear all loving and careful. That is what provokes the action.
The wife says goodbye and is very loving to him in case he gets suspicious that she is waiting for a
lover. So she eggs him on, and thus he is caught between the two. We played a game where you
appear to be saying goodbye affectionately to me, but stop me putting my hands on you. You want
me to go, but you don't want it to look like you're trying to get rid of me.

On active and passive audiences

In the sixties and seventies we broke with the consistent framework, we got away from the natural
realist drama with a passive audience. A lot of work was done in this country, some of it
extraordinarily vulgar and violent, to involve the audience in the action. Many companies found that
the thing to do with this was to go out and sit on someone's lap in the audience. There was one
moment with Pip Simmon's group that I thought, 'If that bloke contacts me again, I'm going to stick
one on him.' You would turn around and there'd be people copulating in the audience behind you.
This was all bringing the audience in, breaking down the conventions of bourgeois naturalist theatre.
But now we've gone back to passive audiences watching shows. It seems to me that one way
forward at the moment would be the structure of drama in which the viewpoint changes, in which the
audience would see the action through different perspectives. It would disturb the audience.

How to keep a play fresh over a long run

You keep it fresh by the play that's in it. That's the best way. You certainly don't keep it fresh by doing
what you're told: that may be the framework in which you work, but it has no motor-energy in it. What
keeps it fresh is the ability to look for those contacts, to keep the feeling of the relational exercises that
we've done so that you are playing at the centre of space, you're playing on balance, you're playing
with flexibility and you can cope with what's given to you. If it isn't given to you, at least you may have
some way of imaginatively creating the response to the stimulus that doesn't come.