The Documentary Body: Theatre Workshop to Banner Theatre

Abstract

The George Luscombe Theatre, University of Guelph, 5 May 2005: I am watching the reformation of British documentary theatre in a performance that dissolves theatricality, erases its national frames and refutes the disciplinarity of theatre craft. The performance is almost lacking in affect. Banner Theatre consists of (tonight) three musicians who play a song cycle in dialogue with digital projections of actuality: testimonial interviews and filmscapes. They call their performances ‘video ballads’, gesturing directly to Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker’s BBC Radio Ballads from which they derive (see Watt, 2003). Dave Rogers, Banner’s director and preeminent songwriter, began his career with Parker and MacColl, and his long history with Banner refutes Raphael Samuel’s conclusion that the workers’ theatre tradition had lost its historical continuity in Britain.¹ The theatre they are performing in is another manifestation of that living, embodied and material continuity. It commemorates a Canadian director who had joined Joan Littlewood and Ewan MacColl’s Theatre Workshop just before it moved to Stratford East, and who subsequently returned to Toronto to spend his life building on the theatrical techniques that Littlewood and MacColl had developed for 20 years. Tonight, two vectors of continuity from Theatre Workshop converge in this space.

Ewan went to the factory floor to write his songs and plays He took his pen to the wastelands, where traveling people stay To the people with no property, the people with no choice He used his craft and learning to give them a louder voice He left us with a thousand songs.

’Ewan’s Song’ (Rogers, 2005, p. 84)