The Burning Stage

Human sized theatre for the 21st century

Imagine, if you will, that you find yourself in the middle of a dark forest.  The trees gather round you and their branches sweep overhead, closing you in.  What you can see of the sky is darker still and you can see no stars in the blackness.  You are alone and cold.  But in the distance, you see a faint glow of reddish light.  As you stumble forward you find yourself in a clearing in the centre of which a fire burns brightly. People are gathered round, enjoying the warmth and companionship.  You sit yourself in the circle and watch the fire burning.  You notice how, at the heart it shines with brilliant intensity, the filmy blue fire consuming the resiny vapours given off by the logs.  Further from the centre of the blaze, red and orange flames dance, giving out the warmth and the glow that reflects in the faces of those watching. And, at the margins, hot coals give a comforting warmth that exists long after the fire itself has died away.  Behind us, the shadows watch from the trees.

Now imagine a theatre performance.  At its centre, the actors are alive with intense energy, projecting their interactions with each other outwards to engage an audience who are drawn forward by the humanity of what they are seeing.  We are together in one space. All are Experiencing the real warmth of human contact, actor to audience and audience to actor.  Our combined imaginations produce one drama.

What I am trying to describe here is a human experience, stripped of anything but the actor and the audience.

When I work with actors, I like to work in small, human scale places with the audience as close to the actors as possible. I try to do away with anything that does not belong to this experience.  That includes lighting, music, complicated sets and effects.

This stripped back, unplugged, intense form of performance I call The Burning Stage.

This is not a prescription or a set of rules.  It does not denigrate any other performance or style of performance.  Every performance and style is valid and will work for some but not others. I merely offer this as a collection of thoughts for anyone who may find themselves bogged down in the minutiae of theatre making or who find some current work unsatisfying and distant.  And, of course, thousands of theatre companies, large and small, are working in this way already. I love all forms of theatre and performance and admire everyone who plunges into this world but this is how I’ve worked over the last fifty or so years and is, in the end, how I like to work with actors and audiences.  That’s all.

This is how others have described The Burning Stage:

The Burning Stage is a unique and experimental approach to theatre developed by Peter John Cooper. It is influenced by Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and Grotowski’s Poor Theatre. Here are some key aspects of Burning Theatre:

Immersive Experience: Burning Theatre aims to create a truly immersive experience for both the audience and the actors. It challenges the actors to fully commit to the limited space they share with the audience, fostering a deeper connection.  Here the experience is focused and committed.  Both bring their concentration and attention to this moment. The stage becomes a holy place and is treated with respect by both participant groups.

Triangle of Responsibility: In Burning Theatre, the responsibility for the performance is shared equally among the writer, actor, and audience. This creates a social ritual where each performance is a unique and collaborative event.

Raw and Unfiltered: The style emphasizes raw, unfiltered performances that strip away traditional theatrical conventions, focusing on the raw energy and emotion of the actors.

To sum it up in another way, Burning Theatre is an Attitude or a mindset.  It does not require special training or experience. Beware anyone who tries to teach it to you.  It will be something you can work out for yourself.  It does, however, require commitment from all parties involved.  And these suggestions are ways in which I try to generate these attitudes with the actors and draw in audiences many of whom will be excluded by the weird formality that we love to generate in the theatre.  This might provide us with warmth and security but tends to alienate others.  Perhaps, more fundamentally, theatre is expensive these days.  Productions cost huge amounts to stage and ticket prices are, accordingly, out of reach of many audience members and prevent a theatre going habit forming.  Theatre becomes an occasional treat. Part of the reason for this, I guess, is because traditional theatres see themselves in competition with films and video games.  They are creating extravagant spectacles and star vehicles. But, maybe, our unplugged approach will enable more people to get involved either as theatre makers or audiences.  By doing away with the need to pursue bigger and better special effects we can concentrate on the golden USP of theatre – imagination.

The unplugged approach also releases us from the movie conventions that force the attention of the audience to experience pre-set emotions by the use of music or mood lighting.  Movies insist that the audience looks at this thing or follows that scene through the lens of a camera. At the Burning Stage, audiences are freed of the constraints imposed by the film editor or director. Their emotional response is directly related to the emotional intensity of the Drama.  It is not emotionally manufactured or imposed.  And if the audience finds the tragedy funny or the humour sad, that is a genuine, unforced response.  So be it.

And here is another thought.  There is a tendency for the arts to deliberately distance themselves from an audience.  “Look at us.  We are clever and brightly lit.  With music and effects to make us even grander.  And you are not.”  This is the Theatre as Spectacle. This is what’s known in the trade as a power gradient.  I don’t like power gradients.

Cooper's approach is designed to challenge both performers and audiences, pushing the boundaries of traditional theatre to create a more engaging and dynamic experience.

Let’s start with the stage.

For me, the crucial thing is that actors are seen and heard as human beings.  This means that stages are best when small and intimate.  This is only one step away from street theatre and stand-up comedy and is only different in that we are portraying drama, be it comedy, tragedy or farce.  And we are allowing time for the audience to focus on the interactions.  For this approach, I prefer to work in the round or in traverse.  Here the audiences are aware of both the actor and the audience members sitting opposite.  At the same time actors are conscious of their audience.  They feel a personal responsibility for them.  On a small, enclosed stage the actor is not constrained to perform facing in one direction.  They face the natural direction of the action.  Importantly, they can address the other actors they are interacting with.  The magic then arises because the audience call the shots.  They are not compelled to look in one direction.  They are free to experience every detail of what is going on.  There are no filmic close ups. Actor and audience are conscious of being in the same space together. And they are free to follow the fortunes of whichever character they choose to.  In this way, understanding and emotions derive truthfully from the performance and is not imposed by the director.

In my direction, I always insist that the stage is treated with respect.  There is a clearly delineated stage area.  Maybe the size of a carpet or a drugget.  Nobody walks here unless they are committed to their character.  I describe the feeling they should experience when crossing the threshold like being struck by a lightning bolt.  The performer should transform from actor to character in a split second. For this reason, the stage is kept clear except the very times when the characters are present.

One other advantage of small, intimate acting areas that I can do away with sound reinforcement. Actors’ voices should be able to reach any audience member. There is no need for microphones and associated sound gear except for hearing loops. Sound reinforcement produces another power gradient and we know what I think of them.

For more ideas about these sorts of stages click back to have a look at my blog where I talk about writing for the stage. “Choose Life. Choose the Drama of Life. part 3 about writing for the Drama”

The Classical Unities

Although the so-called Classical Unities of Time, Space and Action are artificial notions dreamed up by Renaissance intellectuals, I find them a useful starting place in thinking about dramas on the Burning Stage. Gian Trissino claimed that they originated with Aristotle but nowadays we know that is a bit of self-dramatizing.  However, the Unities do perform a useful focusing notion for dramatists that enables their work to coincide with the Burning Stage idea. Through the unity of time, we can experience the events of the stage as they happen before us.  It removes scene breaks and time jumps.  We are aware of the reality of the actor and the fact that it takes this amount of time to get from here to here or consider this or that course of action.  Of course, the writer will condense and compress but we do gain a sense that this could have happened to a living and breathing human being in the setting of the piece.  Unity of Action means we follow one thread or intellectual idea.  Not so useful if you want to demonstrate a complex set of relationships but it’s still useful focus for a playwright to bear in mind.  Unity of Place is an almost sine qua non on the Burning Stage, “We are here and we will unravel the magic here and now.”  Of course, all of these are artificial constraints but they are useful place to start to develop the attitude of The Burning Stage.

The Triangle of Responsibility

I have written about this elsewhere at length so I won’t go into it in too great detail. In short I suggest that the experience of Drama is divided in three equal parts. The writer, the actor and the audience share an equal responsibility for the eventual outcome of the production. The writer devises and orders the ideas, the actor communicates to the audience and the audience contributes the attention and makes the decisions about how they will watch the piece. There is no power gradient here.

A New Audience

So, how do we cope with the disappointment of an audience who come expecting a cast of thousands, glitter balls and extravagant special effects?  The answer is, by the intensity of the performance and the demands on the imagination of the participants and watchers.  And don’t forget, just because it’s intense it doesn’t mean it can’t have a grandeur and scope.  We can still tackle the great dramas of the Greek Classical canon.  Shakespeare, Comedies, farces all can be performed with this approach just as well as Becket or Genet.  The main strength, though, is that The Burning Stage can be a local phenomenon.  It works just as well in the upstairs room in a pub as in a studio theatre.  A small space can provide the seed bed to grow a new audience.  Of course, the limiting factor is, as always, money. But it can be done. And is being done.  And, if we really believe in this approach, it is up to us to persuade funding bodies that this is a worthwhile way to distribute public funding.