Total Theatre: Newsons Deviation Towards Total Theatre?

Chapter 3

Newsons deviation towards Total Theatre?

Total Theatre is a genre which believes all areas of performance bear equal importance to a shows success. From the pieces physicality and text to the stages; set, lighting and sound, no element is an afterthought of the creative process. A concept originally established by director and Composer Richard Wagner in the mid-19th century as Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), it is a concept that has influenced many practitioners including pioneering practitioner Antonin Artaud.

Artaud played a huge role in forwarding this concept of a Total Theatre within his own genre of performance, described as “one of the great, daring mapmakers” (Artaud, 1976, p.Ivii), he like Newson saw faults with the theatre of his time and realised his own genre of performance, the Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud was disgusted by the bourgeois culture of western theatre, a theatre which showed plays he believed skimmed the surface of reality making no effort to realise a deeper psychology. Artaud is quoted as saying “I have a body which experiences the world and spews out reality” (Esslin cites Artaud, 1976, p.48), “I no longer want to be deceived by illusions” (Esslin cites Artaud, 1976, p.48). He believed that the theatre along with media and publications were deceiving society “we are born, we live, we die in an environment of lies” (cites Artaud, 1976, p.xxvi). Much like Newson he was not afraid of controversial content and believed that to show an audience real emotion, you had to show it physically as well as verbally. His realisation brought theatre to reality, he saw that the body had the power to give the audience a reflection of their innermost human mental and emotional condition; it could uncov...

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...n, 2011) and for this production it was much the same. Newson describes that it is "through lots of rehearsal, we find different physical tasks and styles" (Edelstein cites Newson, 2011), Newson work with the set designers also began long before the performers were cast so again the creative process had begun before ay physicality had been introduced. When asked if she believed

Not necessarily, I think as his shows now are all middle-large scale, this is a move that often happens when a company gets big- the technology within the performances has to (or is perceived to have to) keep getting better and bigger in order to justify the scale or fill the venue- the larger levels of funding also allow him to do this. I think he's always been concerned with aesthetic from the beginning, and the developments coincide with the company getting bigger and technology developing