Frantic Assembly

This article discusses three performances that took place in Devon in the South West of the UK in 2006:
• Wrights & Sites, Launch of A Mis-Guide to Anywhere (Exeter Phoenix, May 2006).
• Frantic Assembly, pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill (Drum Theatre Plymouth, September 2006).
• The Ninagawa Company, Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare (Theatre Royal Plymouth, June 2006).

Boxing is one of the very few sports in which the aim is to inflict injury on your opponent to the extent that they are unable to continue with the contest. It is a sport of violence, danger, and endurance. In 2010, the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, in collaboration with the National Theatre of Scotland, began a training process to prepare for the creation and rehearsal of their production of Beautiful Burnout by Bryony Lavery, a play about a group of young people training in a boxing gym in Scotland. In an interview in June 2011, the co-founders of Frantic Assembly and co-directors of the production, Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, talked about what drew them to this project; about what they learned about physical training, combat and performance within the boxing world; and about how the experience has changed and developed their own approach to training and performance. This article presents key extracts from the interview alongside a critical reflection on the issues that are raised.

If performance techniques can adapt a text, but cannot be accurately recorded in print, how can we determine to what extent a script has been adapted? This paper examines how performative adaptations are used to alter Shakespeare's stories in Red Shift's 'Much Ado About Nothing', Frantic Assembly's 'Othello', and Filter Theatre's 'Twelfth Night'.

Changing Languages of Performance: Adapting Shakespeare for the Modern Day Stage
In seeking to justify Filter’s adaptation of Twelfth Night, Co-Artistic Director Tim Phillips observed:
If you truly have passion for this writer you need to logically recognise that his sentiment was infinite; his medium transient. [. . .] Filter’s aim with this production was to rip down these barriers and show that one of the greatest artists of all time is accessible in a modern artistic context.
(2008)
Here Phillips invokes fidelity to Shakespeare’s sentiment rather than his text, whilst highlighting the necessity of adapting to changing performance conditions.  Fidelity, whether to text or sentiment, remains a problematic notion, particularly where multiple versions of a text exist.  Despite this, Phillips’s use of it in this context to extend authorial authorisation to converting the text into other performance mediums raises interesting questions.  To what extent is it possible to translate text into movement, music or design within a dramatic production?  What values inform what is translated and what is not?  How does the working context of the company affect these choices?
In this paper, I consider how two recent touring productions, Filter’s Twelfth Night and Frantic Assembly’s Othello, use music, movement and design within their adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays for the modern stage.  Both these company’s have strongly developed aesthetics which they achieve through radically different rehearsal processes.  Drawing on interviews and analysis of the productions, I examine how these aesthetics and processes affected their approach to adapting these texts.


Phillips, T. (2008) ‘Comment on Twelfth Night is pared down to worthlessness’, London Evening Standard, 3 September [Online].  Available at: http://www.standard.co.uk/arts/theatre/twelfth-night-is-pared-down-to-worthlessness-7409389.html (Accessed: 3 February, 2010).