What Is Devised Theatre? How Companies Make Plays Without a Script

Most plays begin with a writer alone at a desk. Devised theatre begins with a room full of people and a question. If you are asking what is devised theatre, here is the plain answer, the companies that shaped it, and a Bay Area case in which the audience helped make the show.

Devised theatre, defined

Santa Clara University’s library guide gives the clearest definition: “In devised theatre all the ensemble members, from actors to designers, participate in all or most stages of the creative process, from conception to presentation.” It adds that devising “often involves collective creation, in which every member of the group works on an equal footing with the rest.”

The same guide stresses that the word describes a method, not a look. There are dance pieces and documentaries made this way, and “the term “devised” denotes a process more than a product.” So devised theater (the American spelling) can be silent in one company and talky in the next.

How a devised show is made

Every devising process needs somewhere to begin. The Santa Clara guide calls it the “departure point,” which “is sometimes a question (such as “What do you call home?”) or an organizing image.”

The Sheffield company Forced Entertainment describes the middle stage in detail on its page on how Forced Entertainment works in rehearsal. “Combining discussion, improvisation and writing, our rehearsal process is a creative laboratory,” it says. Shows usually start with the company in a room “improvising a scene until something starts to stick.”

The group will “experiment with it, debate it, videotape it, watch it, adapt and edit it before trying it on an audience.” Improvisation finds the show; it is not the show itself.

Where devised theatre came from

Nobody invented devising. Deirdre Heddon and Jane Milling’s history, Devising Performance: A Critical History, asks “Why have theatre-makers, since the 1950s, chosen to devise performances?” and follows the practice through Britain, America and Australia.

Year	Company or work	Where	What it added
1963	The Open Theater (Joseph Chaikin)	New York	An actors’ collective making work through exercises and improvisation
1970	San Francisco Mime Troupe becomes collectively run	San Francisco	No single artistic director; collaborative playmaking
1974	Joint Stock Theatre Group	London	The workshop: actors, writer and director improvise, then the writer writes
1978	Somewhere in the Pacific (Snake Theater)	Fort Cronkhite beach, Marin	Four co-directors; the Chronicle called it devised by the team
1978-1979	Cloud Nine (Caryl Churchill with Joint Stock)	Dartington, then the Royal Court	A play born from a workshop on sexual politics
1983 / 1984	Complicite / Forced Entertainment	London / Sheffield	Long-running devising ensembles
2002	High School Project (Antenna with Tamalpais High)	Tamalpais High School, Marin	Devising as a school residency, with students scripting the walk-through

1960s collectives: the Open Theater and the Mime Troupe

Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theater ran from 1963 to 1973 on his principle, “Working together, we teach ourselves.” In San Francisco, the Mime Troupe became collectively run when its founder R.G. Davis left in 1970, and it still teaches “its unique method of collaborative playmaking.”

Joint Stock’s workshop and Cloud Nine

Joint Stock Theatre Group was “founded in 1974 by Max Stafford-Clark, David Hare, and David Aukin.” Its method was “to bring in a playwright, actors, and a director to improvise on a subject.” After the workshop, “the playwright would have a period of time to write the script before rehearsal began.”

Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine “was born out of Joint Stock in 1978-1979 in a workshop on sexual politics.” Even the title came from the room: the rehearsal hall’s caretaker told the company, “Now we have sex sometimes as much as twice a week and I’m on Cloud 9.”

Complicite, Forced Entertainment and Frantic Assembly

These are the devised theatre companies students meet first. Complicite was founded in 1983 and is led by its co-founder Simon McBurney. Forced Entertainment’s six artists have been “collaborating to make original theatre and performances together since 1984.”

Frantic Assembly began, in its own words, as “a reckless leap into the unknown.” Its Frantic Method treats devising “as a series of tasks, each broken down into building blocks.”

Three ways to devise

The models differ on one question: who writes the words the audience finally hears? Verbatim theatre, which builds scripts from interview recordings, is a close cousin of the third model below.

Model	Who writes the final text	Starting point	Example
Ensemble devising	The company together, edited in rehearsal	A question, image or object, improvised until something sticks	Forced Entertainment
Workshop, then writer	A playwright, after a research and improvisation workshop	A subject explored by the actors	Joint Stock, Cloud Nine
Devising with the audience	The director, from material the public supplied	Questionnaires and taped interviews collected around town	Antenna’s Vacuum (1981); students in the High School Project (2002)

Devised theatre examples from the Bay Area

The word was used about a Bay Area company in the 1970s. Antenna Theater and its predecessor, Snake Theater, offer two less familiar devised theatre examples.

“Devised by” four directors on a Marin beach, 1978

“SNAKE was an experimental performing arts company which produced only original work,” the archive says. After 1977, all its productions were a collaboration of four artistic directors: Laura Farabough, Chris Hardman, Lary Graber and Evie Lewis. See Snake Theater’s productions from the 1970s.

Reviewing Somewhere in the Pacific in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 29, 1978, Bernard Weiner wrote that the piece “was devised by Laura Farabough and Chris Hardman, who wrote the script,” with “Larry Graber (music director) and Evie Lewis (choreographer).” It was “performed by the 21-member Snake ensemble with superb precision.”

Devising with the audience: Vacuum’s questionnaires

Hardman explained the name of his next company as a method: “To Receive input, To Transform it, and then To Transmit it back.” Esquire wrote in 1986 that Vacuum, the 1981 play its audience helped write, had “an audience that not only wrote the script but delivered all the lines.”

The taped voices came from “questionnaires from the community and interviews conducted around town.” Hardman’s question, as Esquire quoted it, was how much of the audience Antenna could entangle in the preproduction. In his own account, the salesmen and housewives he interviewed “became co-collaborators.”

The High School Project’s student workshops

In 2002 the idea became teaching. Hardman planned “a series of workshop residencies and performances at a variety of high schools,” and “much of the pre-production work and performances will be created and enacted by the students themselves.” Students recorded each other and helped script the walk-through.

Backstage West reviewed the result as “Antenna’s High School, produced in collaboration with Tamalpais High School’s Conservatory Theatre Ensemble.” It grew from High School, the 1981 walk-through made with students.

Frequently asked questions

Devising has neighbours with their own histories: read what street theatre is and where it came from and what a happening in art was in the 1950s and 60s. For the company’s own approach, see Walkmanology and Antenna’s other new theater forms.