Theatre studies: why study drama?

Pod Academy's Daniel Marc Janes speaks to playwright and academic Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway and one of Britain’s leading theatrical commentators. Daniel Marc Janes: I’m in the Calder Theatre Bookshop in London. It couldn’t be better located to evoke Britain’s theatrical heritage, situated as it is on The Cut alongside the Old Vic and the Young Vic. Looking at the bookshop’s selection, I can see plays from some of the most distinguished British playwrights of recent years. Here’s David Greig... Sarah Kane... Dennis Kelly... Mark Ravenhill. What all these writers have in common is that they all studied drama at the university level. But drama at the university is a recent innovation. Many of Britain’s most brilliant playwrights have been autodidacts: Tom Stoppard, George Bernard Shaw, William Shakespeare. So why study drama? I’m in the downstairs rehearsal space of the Calder Theatre Bookshop. This is a place where writers and performers go to make plays come alive. But how far can the inscrutable, mysterious act of playwriting be taught in an academic environment? What is the role of drama in the university? To talk about these topics, I’m joined by Dan Rebellato, Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway, author of numerous stage and radio plays and of several books, most notably 1956 And All That: The Making of Modern British Theatre. Professor Rebellato, thank you for joining us. Dan Rebellato: Thanks very much. DMJ: So before we start to unpack the broader questions, I’m wondering whether you could outline for us a kind of potted history of drama as an academic discipline in the British university. DR: There are lots of examples, of course, of theatre being made in universities and that goes back centuries, but drama as an academic discipline really starts in the late 1940s at the University of Bristol. Oxford University, during the war, set up a commission to see if drama was a suitable subject for the universities and it was a very ramshackle affair. They booked the wrong flights and they lost their luggage and they ended up with half the amount of time they were supposed to have. And they recommended that you shouldn’t do drama at the university. But the University of Bristol decided that it was a good subject and that was the first degree – I think that started in about 1947, 1948, something like that – and the big waves of expansion followed from there. Manchester, Hull was quite early, but the 1970s had a lot of expansion and the 1990s saw another big wave of expansion as well. DMJ: But what’s interesting is that drama, as an academic course outside of English, took some time to be accepted. Even at Bristol it took them 21 years for drama to be a full honours degree. You mentioned the committee at Oxford; Oxford and Cambridge stopped short of having full honours drama courses. Where do you think that this lack of acceptance comes from? DR: A lot of things that I think are interesting about the theatre are the reasons why it can sometimes be a difficult subject in the academy. Because it’s neither purely literary, nor is it purely a live experience. It’s a kind of mixture of the two. I think that in academic terms – of course there are certain kinds of theatre that are, in a sense, purely live and also purely literary – but also I think there’s a sense in which theatre is clearly a collection of different crafts and skills, because you have scenic designers and you have actors and you have directors and you have writers and composers and so on and so on. That maps on in the academy into the fact that it’s a very interdisciplinary subject. So in order to fully – if you could ever fully understand theatre – you’d have to be a bit of a linguist, a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a psychologist, a bit of an archaeologist and so on and so on and so on. And the question is left: if you took those things away,