ESSAY

An Introduction to Frantic Assembly

Aleks Sierz
Rose Bruford College

INTRODUCTION
Frantic Assembly is an innovative British theatre company that has spent
more than two decades telling stories by using physical theatre
techniques, and whose style is a viscerally exciting fusion of text, music
and movement. Frantic Assembly developed its unique style by coming to
theatre from leftfield, and its early work enjoyed a cult following. Having
matured into a mainstream company, Frantic Assembly’s unique style
marks it out as one of the best touring groups in Britain. The company
attracts new and young audiences, both internationally and in the UK, with
work that reflects contemporary culture, and also has a thriving education
programme. As well as their own shows, such as Othello and more recently
Things I Know To Be True, company members have contributed ideas
about movement for other plays, notably including the West End mega hit
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The most crucial thing to understand about Frantic Assembly’s style is that
the movement or dance moves do not merely illustrate the words spoken
by the performers, but rather show what is left unsaid. So, to use a simple
example from Things I Know To Be True, the way the Price family lift and
support each other between scenes is a physical expression of what they
fail to say. While they drive each other away with words, they hold onto
one another with their bodies.

Also distinguishing Frantic Assembly from other physical-theatre groups is

the company’s desire to work with playwrights in order to collaboratively
produce excellent texts for their shows. The text is not just an add-on, but
an essential part of the finished work. During the company’s history, this
has led to tensions with some of the playwrights — collaboration is always

a difficult process — and with some critics. Many reviewers fall foul of
seeing Frantic Assembly shows as examples of text-based theatre, and
subsequently review text over staging.

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CRITICAL CONTEXT
The advancing digital age has strongly affected theatre reviewing in the
UK. The decline in the sales of daily newspapers, and resultant loss of
income for their owners, has resulted in widespread cuts to their specialist
subjects – culture in general, and theatre in particular, is vulnerable to
these kinds of reductions. But, while some mainstream print critics have
lost their jobs, the internet has conversely expanded the range of writing
about theatre, due to the rapid increase in websites and blogs. A new
generation of critics — such as Andrew Haydon, Catherine Love and
Megan Vaughan — has surfaced, and it works mainly online. New websites
including Whatsonstage, Exeunt and West End Whingers have sprung up;
and now mainstream newspapers, from The Guardian to The Daily
Telegraph, have expansive web-presences of their own, that promote their
coverage and their critics.

Many of these new digital critics have been enthusiastic admirers of Frantic
Assembly’s work, but, in the past, reviewers have not been uniformly
supportive – mainstream theatre criticism in the UK print medium has
traditionally been more comfortable with seeing theatre as a branch of
English Literature, than as an art form in its own right. English Literature has
a long history of vocabulary, concepts and judgements about what is good
or bad playwriting to draw upon. Finding a new lexicon to describe
movement, contemporary dance and the fusion of words, music and action
has been, and arguably still is, much more of a challenge.

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PROCESS
As the history of the company (see below) makes clear, Frantic Assembly
began as a small group of director-performers who devised their shows
through mutual collaboration with a playwright and choreographer. Soon,
however, they began to work in a more structured way with a different
playwright for every show. Now the company, led by director Scott Graham
(from 1994–2014 with co-director Steven Hoggett), commissions a variety
of playwrights on the basis of their distinctive individual authorial voices,
and their job is to create characters and to script a narrative. As Hoggett
says in an interview: “I think we’re much happier looking at text as a starting
point for physicality, rather than the other way around” (Sigal, 2017, pp.59–
60).

Although the process varies from production to production, a pattern has

emerged. Each show takes about two years to develop (although Things I
Know To Be True took longer as it was an international collaboration). First
there are two periods of research and development (about one-to-two
weeks over the course of roughly two months) with writer, director(s) and
performers. This is when the characters and overall story are first discussed
and brainstormed. Then, six-to-twelve months for the playwright to write
the text on their own. Next come six months of dramaturgy in which
playwright and director(s) edit, add to and refine the text into a working
draft. Then a further four-to-five weeks of rehearsal when the playwright,
director(s) and performers refine the text and integrate the physical
movement into the piece (Sigal, 2017, p.60).

The following scene synopses are summaries from The Frantic Assembly
Book of Devising Theatre (Routledge, 2014) and give examples of some of
the company’s typical creative techniques.

THE SUNBATHERS SCENE FROM TINY DYNAMITE

The aim of Tiny Dynamite was to explore imaginatively the relationships
between three young people, Anthony, Lucien and Madeleine, who
constitute a love triangle. Most of the action happened on one set, which
was an expanse of wooden garden decking, similar to that featured in
Channel 4’s reality television show, Big Brother. In the story, the play’s
three characters, Anthony, Lucien and Madeleine, have spent long summer

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days together sunbathing. They are totally relaxed and totally in tune with
one another. The Sunbathers scene showed how they were in this
peaceful state, attuned to each other.

The three performers began by creating short and simple sequences of

movement based on the idea of sunbathing, bodies lying down to absorb
the rays of the sun. This took place on the floor and the main rule was to
avoid beach clichés such as applying suntan oil, mopping your brow or
mimed sleepiness. Instead they looked at the kind of behavior that you are
only conscious of when you have spent hours and hours literally doing
nothing. This included being suddenly interested in the cracked skin
between two toes, or the sensation of sweat in the crook of your arm. Once
this material was discovered, it was developed into a sequence, with
suitable linking movements, which all three performers learnt.

Using a video camera to record this sequence, the performers then played
it backwards at a slower speed, noting those moments when the image
suddenly came to arrest (stopped cleanly when a sequence came to an
end). They then learnt the sunbathing scene in reverse, noting especially
the rhythm of the sequence and its arrest points. The performers then
practised doing the whole sequence in unison, later adding moments when
they would stop, look at each other and note the fact that their lives were
in perfect harmony, and that they were perfectly at ease with one another.
Lastly, they added a moment at the end when, to illustrate the idea that
time was going in reverse, all three would pull out a strawberry from their
mouths in unison (in real time, as opposed to reverse time, the eating of
the strawberry would be the moment that this sequence started). Keeping
the strawberries in their mouths for the sequence without damaging them
was a challenge. In general, this sequence aimed to convey not only the
long summers spent sunbathing, but also the relaxed emotional harmony
of the characters, and their consciousness of this in the shared glances
between them. The absence of dialogue emphasised the unspoken
complicity, a sense of love, between them (Graham and Hoggett, 2014,
pp.67-69).

THE SELECT DELETE SCENE FROM POOL (NO WATER)

The aim of pool (no water) was to show how friendships between young
people might crack under the strain of celebrity culture in the art world. In
the story, four would-be artists destroy the work of their talented friend,

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who has been much more successful than them, while she is in hospital
fighting for her life after accidentally diving into an empty pool. At this point,
the text, by playwright Mark Ravenhill, reads ‘select delete’ 47 times as the
characters delete their rival’s art work from her computer, thus destroying
her life’s achievement. After several different read-throughs, the company
introduced the Imogen Heap track ‘Mic Check’ to play during the scene.

This music enabled the cast to find a certain appealing joy in their wanton
destructiveness, which was less heavy than trying to act out maliciousness.
Each of the four actors created a simple eight-count gestural sequence,
using only their hands, consisting of four imitations of the action select
delete. At the beginning, these actions were fairly realistic, showing
buttons pressed and screens wiped, and then all performers learnt all of
these sequences of eight. This lesson in muscle memory took some time
to learn. Once all the cast had learnt all the sequences, the directors set
them the task of creating foot patterns for their gestures. These were
relatively simple and in tune with the music. One of the cast was asked to
create a further sequence of sixteen select deletes, which were to start off
quite mundanely and then develop into flamboyant hand gestures.

Finally, the rehearsal took shape by matching the movement sequences to

‘Mic Check’. The finished scene starts with one character beginning the
sixteen select deletes, then, as the movements become more and more
extravagant, the other cast members begin to join in. As the music
develops the cast fell into a unison of movement, then (taking a cue from
the music) had a brief rest, and finally all joined together again, this time at
double speed, as the music climaxed and the cast began to fling
themselves joyously into the air. In this way, the choreography followed the
music chosen for the scene (Graham and Hoggett, 2014, pp.72-75).

THE SLABSLAMMERS SCENE FROM HYMNS

The aim of Hymns was to show the devastating effects of suicide on a
group of four young men, after one of their number kills himself. The social
and political context was the release of government statistics showing that
there had been a rise in suicide among young men. The directors watched
a BBC Panorama documentary about suicide rates among 18- to 35-year-
old men being higher than for women and they’d been to a couple of
funerals of young people that year so this provided them with a personal
motivation to explore the subject of the crisis in masculinity and

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depression. Because the company’s target audience was young people,
this was also relevant to their concerns. Following discussions about the
finality of death, and how it turns humans into inert ‘bodies of meat’, the
company created a scene in which the four friends struggle to come to
terms with this reality. The set was five chairs and a strong metal table. The
idea was that the four occupy four of the chairs but that their dead friend
is still in the room with them, despite his absence from life. The four male
performers practiced running and flying into the air and then landing as
lifelessly, flat like meat, as possible. Director Liam Steel wanted a strong
contrast between the vitality of the jump and the lifelessness of the fall. In
this way, each character would be making a split-second comment about
death that was so difficult to verbalise.

During the rehearsal, each performer had to land on the table very soon
after another, and their approach to landing had to look exciting, as they
avoided colliding with each other, but still crossed paths. The performers
explored more and more intensely the physical quality of the idea of being
meat on a slab. Once the choreography was ready, the scene was set to
music, which was quite a short piece, challenging the performers to speed
up the routine. By the time the show opened, the slightest mistake would
mean that they would not be able to complete the moves in time with the
music, which effectively raised the stakes. All through the scene the empty
chair was a soundless memorial of the person who died (Graham and
Hoggett, 2014, pp.65-67).

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TECHNIQUES
Frantic Assembly’s practice makes use of a whole series of techniques.
Here are some of them:

THE PRE-SHOW
From the very start of the company’s history, the performers wanted to
create an intense and exciting atmosphere in the auditorium as the
audience wandered in. They wanted to claim the space, to tell the
audience that this was a Frantic Assembly show, and to compensate for
the fact that, during a long tour, each venue and each space was radically
different in size and facilities. By using loud atmospheric music, the
company claimed the space, made it their own and imposed a uniformity
on the different venues they had to perform in. The idea behind the pre-
show was to give the audience the impression that, before they even
arrived, the show had already started. Sometimes, this also involved a short
burst of furious dance moves at the point when about half the auditorium
was filled, thus creating a ‘blink and you miss it’ scene, a treat for anyone
who was there and watching the stage (Graham and Hoggett, 2014, pp.21-
23).

NAMES OF CHARACTERS
While devising the show Klub in 1995 the company members had a
discussion about the names of their stage characters. The idea that all
performers should use their own names instead of made-up ones seemed
to stall because two performers, Korina Biggs and Karina Sarmiento, had
phonetically similar names. But Spencer Hazel, the writer, started using
their names anyway in his scripts. As early as the initial read-throughs this
created an emotional reflex, and added energy to the exchanges. An
immense power was unleashed in using their real names. It felt honest, in
the moment and full of emotional depth. But there were also some
problems: the overuse of names started to make rehearsals feel like a
therapy session, and, during direct address to the audience in a live show
it was difficult to avoid using real names to announce other characters
rather than just indicate that they were being spoken to. But for the early
shows, the company did adopt their real names as a convention and
developed rules for it. If the characters have the same name as the
performers it follows that they should be using their natural voices, and

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ensuring that this is maintained. So any deviation into actorly speech had
to be picked up and eliminated. The company also used a downstage
spotlit microphone for direct address to the audience, making sure to
speak to them as naturally as possible (Graham and Hoggett, 2014, pp.24-
26).

USE OF VIDEO

When the company members were rehearsing Heavenly in 2002, they had
the idea of video taping the rehearsals because they felt stuck and unable
to move forward. So they filmed the improvisations and the moves, and
then rewound the film and watched the results. The performers were
shocked to find that most of the good bits were accidental and that many
of the moves that felt great actually looked bad. This external eye enabled
the performers to cut out some moves, and isolate and develop other ones.
On subsequent productions, it enabled the directors to show, rather than
tell, the performers what was working in rehearsal and what wasn’t. So the
video camera is used not just to show you what you know but to suggest
things the performers don’t yet know, the little accidents that might be
developed into new moves. This is extremely useful, especially when
improvisations are very physically and mentally draining, so that the
performers struggle for a sense of what works and what doesn’t. The use
of video in rehearsal can save time and focus attention on small moments
that matter, rather than endlessly repeating movements that doesn’t quite
work (Graham and Hoggett, 2014, pp.33-35).

SOUNDTRACKING

Music has always been central to Frantic Assembly’s work. As early as Klub,
the company worked with a local DJ, Andy Cleeton, who taught them about
the structure of a dance club set. Across a three-hour set, Cleeton would
start with tracks that had a tempo of about 120 beats per minute (bpm):
relatively slow and the tempo that most pop and dance songs from the past
50 years use. Over the next 45 minutes he would then increase the tempo
to around 140 bpm, drop it down to 120 bpm for the next 15 minutes, then
build up to a high of maybe 145 bpm over the next 30 minutes. He would
then repeat this pattern. This shape of peaks and troughs inspired the
company to visualise their shows in a similar way, gradually varying the
intensity of the scenes, and building towards a climax, then levelling off.
Dance music was used in the pre-show and the show to create excitement,

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to convey a mood and to differentiate character. It was also used in
rehearsal to structure improvisations and suggest avenues for exploration.
The company describes the kind of music they find inspiring as “bedroom
cinematic”, with a nod to the idea of film music or soundtracks (Graham
and Hoggett, 20124, pp.44-50).

Specifically, they have used tracks such as:

• ‘Gabriel’ by Lamb
• ‘Unbreakable: Main Theme’ by James Newton Howard
• ‘Felt Mountain’ by Goldfrapp
• ‘Just for Today’ by Hybrid
• ‘That What Everbody Wants?’ by Cliff Martinez.

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COMPANY HISTORY
[NOTE: In this section, all quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from
interviews by Aleks Sierz with artistic directors Scott Graham and Steven
Hoggett on 19 and 26 February 2004]

Theatrical inventiveness is the key to the history of Frantic Assembly, the

company having graduated from a cult following in the mid-1990s —
attracting such critical plaudits as ‘young, thrusting and certifiably hip’ and
‘the collective pulse of a generation’ — to being one of Britain’s most
established touring companies.

EARLY YEARS | GENERATION TRILOGY (1995-97)

The three founder members — directors and performers Scott Graham and
Steven Hoggett, and producer and administrator Vicki Middleton (née
Coles) — met at Swansea University, Wales, in 1991. None of them studied
drama, but, as a hobby, they joined the university drama society, first of all
contributing to an uninspiring production of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita.
Then, in 1992, came what Graham and Hoggett call “the life-changing
moment” (Graham and Hoggett, 1). Volcano Theatre Company (formed by
a psychology graduate and a politics graduate from Swansea) ran a
residency and as a result Graham and Hoggett (both Eng Lit students)
performed Christopher Hampton’s Savages and William M Hoffman’s As Is
at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1992–3. In interview, Graham and
Hoggett say that at the time:

“We did not want to call ourselves Swansea University

Drama Society because that seemed too dull. We wanted
our name to reflect our chaotic preparations, so we chose
Chaos. Then we found out that Kaos Theatre Company
already existed so we came up with ‘frantic’.”

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The pair emphasises the role of chance in the early years:

“Without Volcano coming in, we probably would have just

pottered about in the drama society for three years and then
left. So we got lucky. They passed on their inspiration to us.
Volcano were perfect role models, being alternative and
sexy, intelligent and fierce” (Graham and Hoggett, 1).

After success at Edinburgh, Graham, Hoggett and Coles decided to turn

their hobby into a career. They wrote a business plan, joined a government
scheme (Enterprise Allowance) and raised £5,000 in set-up loans. Formed
in 1994, Frantic Theatre Company renamed itself Frantic Assembly two
years later to emphasize their collaborative nature. For each project, the
three core members put together a different team of choreographer,
performers and technicians. And the company quickly learned to turn
weakness into strength:

“Because we weren’t trained, we were original. At first, we

didn’t know what we were doing, but we were constantly
being told it was right. So we felt liberated.”

Realising that, to attract audiences, the new company had to perform a

well-known play, they chose John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger for their
first professional show, which they toured mainly around Wales in 1994:

“Our intention was to find the guts of the play. We wanted to

invent a physical language that had some of Osborne’s
passion — we wanted our audience to feel his rage.”

Spencer Hazel, a friend and collaborator, edited the text, developing the
parallels between the two women characters, and between 1950s Britain
and 1990s Generation X. The budget was only about £200 so the set was
just some ironing boards and the cast wore pyjamas. The music was a mix
of Elvis Presley, Sergei Prokofiev and Sinead O’Connor:

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“We started to work physically on the text with

choreographer Juan M Carascoso, and that’s where the
company’s signature style — rough, ready, fast and furious,
with banging tunes for the MTV generation — came from.
We played Look Back in Anger as if it was set in a bear-pit.”

Inspired by Volcano and avant-garde dance groups such as DV8, Frantic

Assembly used choreographers for both dance and direction:

“For our early tours to be cost-effective, we both [Graham

and Hoggett] had to act, so the choreographer was an extra
outside eye to help direct the show. Because we knew so
little, we didn’t try to dictate what to do: all company
members had an input. An ethic developed which meant that
everyone participated. We realised that we weren’t dancers
but instead of dance skills we had energy. We loved trashing
ourselves physically. We liked to feel audiences wincing as
we careered around the stage. We were also proud of
reclaiming an audience of teenagers and young people for
theatre. Our work was popular with kids because it was
accessible.”

Frantic Assembly created shows not by spending months devising work,

but by having an idea and booking the tour (including dates overseas).
Then six or seven weeks before the opening, they’d start rehearsals.

The Generation Trilogy – Klub, Flesh and Zero (1995–97) – attracted a cult
following and critical applause. For Klub and Zero, the choreographer was
Steve Kirkham, and for Flesh it was Christine Devaney. Text, by Hazel, was
the essential starting point for the physical work:

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“Our style was to take hold of a text and batter it until it

became a Frantic text: honest, witty, brash and brief. We
believed that the words should be conversational in tone.
We were also trying to rediscover what makes theatre
exciting: at one extreme is the moment when a performer
looks you in the eye and speaks directly to you — so we
exploited that.”

Klub (1995) had 20 short scenes — each lasting about three minutes — and
was a response to nationwide media hysteria about Ecstasy and the ‘evils’
of club culture. With minimal props and costumes, just basic lighting effects
and music, it felt like a gig, “As soon as you entered the space, there was
this banging intro music — no curtains, no set.” The play started quite
frivolously, then it moved:

“to a menacing climax with six actors crashing our bodies all
over the stage. We hit the walls as fast and as hard as we
could. At the time, we were young and didn’t think about
things like the state of our knees ten years later. But it was
exciting to perform — the last scene was called Exhaustion.
We never really thought of it as a play but as an event. For
example, we kept our real names for our characters.”

For music, they approached DJ Andy Cleeton, who’d worked at the

legendary Hacienda club in Manchester:

“He told us about how he constructed a three-hour set,

about the shape of the evening, how many beats per minute,
and also about responding to the club audience. This
encouraged us to respond to audience mood.”

Flesh (1996) was about the body as commodity. Hazel and the company
spoke to pimps, prostitutes and rent boys, while choreographer Devaney
was fascinated by photographer Robert Longo, whose 1980s pictures of
writhing sharply dressed people have “an explosive quality”. The music
was dark and brooding, with bursts of attack. A key scene used Iggy Pop’s

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‘Lust for Life’ (1977). In part a political response to the work ethic of 17 years
of Conservative government, the play used prostitution as a metaphor for
wage slavery:

“We also wanted to explore ideas about the body as meat

and about lust. We used a simple metal bed as a prop and
then started taking our tops off in every show. But when the
show might have got sexy, we deliberately made it a bit ugly.
Cait [Davis], one of the performers, for example, recalled
how she worked in a Cardiff guesthouse when a resident
offered her £30 for her knickers: ‘I just remember being so
embarrassed, ’cause I’d been wearing them for two days.’ It
was very in-yer-face, confessional, but the text was also
sometimes poetic. Often, Spencer finished a scene on the
day we were rehearsing. That generated its own energy. We
did very little for the first three weeks of rehearsal and then
worked our arses off for the last three.”

With Zero (1997), the company changed the tempo and became more
reflective. The piece used the idea of a photograph of friends at a New
Year’s Eve party to explore the theme of friendship and the hopes of the
new millennium. Once again, there were about 20 scenes, and lots of
direct address to the audience in a conversational style. On the first day of
rehearsals the company found a Wendy House in the rehearsal room and
that gave them the idea for the set:

“We were very low-tech, pumping a box full of smoke and

having a lit bicycle torch inside so that when you opened the
box, the light hit your face as the smoke rose up. It was
simple but it worked.”

But if the early Frantic Assembly style was a fusion of collective writing,
anti-acting, physical recklessness and hip dance music, their next show
was a turning point.

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ENTER THE WRITER | SELL OUT (1998), HYMNS (1999),
UNDERWORLD (2001) + TINY DYNAMITE (2001)
Written by 26-year-old playwright Michael Wynne, Sell Out (1998) is about
friendship, love and betrayal, and the end of an affair. It starts with an
innocent-seeming birthday party, which is then replayed at the end of the
show, after all the revelations, with a mixture of irony and agony. Having
parted company with Hazel during Zero, the company realised that they
needed to take more responsibility and tell the writer exactly what they
wanted:

“The most important thing we told Michael was not to write

a physical theatre show but to concentrate on the integrity
of the text: give us four characters and write a story. At the
start, he gave us questionnaires about our friendships and
what kind of arguments we had, and so on. He then
delivered a rehearsal text, which included the device of us
having conversations with the audience, and we developed
it.”

The company also discovered new ways of integrating text and movement.
As the friendships between the characters fell apart, so the dance moves
became more and more bruising. The choreographer was T C Howard,
whose approach was gymnastic and athletic, and the soundtrack advisor
was Andy Cleeton. Because the show now had a proper story, Graham and
Hoggett had to develop their acting abilities. The set was bare, and the
main props were a set of steel steps, a metal box and some white plastic
seats. The advantage of a simple set was that no rehearsal time was
wasted in waiting for its arrival. Sell Out toured for almost a year, ending
up at the New Ambassadors theatre in the West End:

“By the end of the tour we had an office at BAC [Battersea

Arts Centre] in London, and had moved to the capital. So we
went from the fringe to the mainstream in one leap.
Internationally, Sell Out was our most successful show. It was
when we grew up.”

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The next show, Hymns (1999, reworked 2005) was a co-production with
the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in west London and this allowed the
company to have a more elaborate and stylish set: tall ladders, with floating
seats plus a metal table and chairs in the foreground. Written by playwright
Chris O’Connell, Hymns is an all-male play about how men communicate.
During an early discussion meeting:

“someone said that men were killing themselves by not

talking, and then we saw a BBC Panorama documentary
about suicide rates among 18- to 35-year old men being
three times higher than for women. Finally, we’d been to a
couple of funerals and we wanted to explore the experience
of people dying young.”

The story, with no direct address to the audience, was about four men who
are reunited at a funeral after one of their friends commits suicide. It was
choreographed and directed by DV8’s Liam Steel, who gave it a similar feel
to DV8’s Enter Achilles, with its balletic use of bottles for example. The cast
was dressed in black and explored the idea of what non-communication
does to male bodies. When one of the characters starts talking about his
feelings, the emotional gulf he opens up is shown as he walks precariously
across a ladder suspended above the stage. The music — from Craig
Armstrong’s ‘Ball’ to Laurent Petitgand’s religious compositions — was a
blend of celestial classical with dark, brooding techno:

“There was a seminal moment when we were trying out a

track for a piece of movement, then someone left the tape
on, and it went on to the next track, which was so obviously
the one to use for the show. That taught us a great lesson: if
we’d stuck to our preconceived idea we would never have
found that ideal track.”

After the all-male Hymns, Frantic Assembly followed up with an all-female

cast in Underworld (2000), written by playwright Nicola McCartney. The
play is about four women who stay in an empty cottage where a murder

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had been committed years before. They hold a séance and end up
frightening themselves:

“We wanted to create on stage those kind of stories — such

as Don’t Look Now, The Sixth Sense or The Blair Witch
Project — which frighten you because of what you don’t see.
Our inspirations have always been films, video, adverts
rather than theatre.”

The name of the show suggests a hidden malevolent power. McCartney’s

text explored the idea of female hysteria and included horror movie
clichés:

“We wanted the audience to recognize them, but we also

wanted to scare them, and to see whether we could do that
in the theatre. We wanted to make something that felt like a
film because people seem to identify with film a lot easier
than with theatre.”

T C Howard did the choreography — which featured some reptilian-style

moves — and the atmospheric music included Goldfrapp and Michael
Nyman, but avoided classic horror music:

“We wanted to convey a sense of what might happen when

the breath is held rather than describing the slice of the knife
or the blow of the hammer. And, inspired by The Shining, we
also wanted to create a tasteless 1970s-style room so we
went to some crappy wallpaper shops, but ended up having
to source that from a website specializing in retro decor.’”

Next came the company’s best show to date, Tiny Dynamite (2001), written
by playwright Abi Morgan, and performed by Graham, Hoggett and
Jasmine Hyde. The playtext says “An impossible love story is given a
second chance and three scorched characters are about to learn that
lightening does strike twice.” Two childhood friends, Lucien and Anthony,

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meet Madeleine on holiday, and a love triangle develops that echoes a
previous tangled affair, which ended in the woman’s suicide. The play asks
whether Lucien and Anthony can break the cycle of repetition — and
whether Madeleine can survive meeting these emotional lightning
conductors. The text is full of stories about risk, freakish accidents and is
shot through with evocative metaphors about lightning strikes, electricity
and repetition: “We were more and more interested in the writing element,
even if most people still saw us as a ‘physical theatre’ company.”

This was Frantic Assembly’s first co-production with Paines Plough, which
specialises in new writing, having staged shows such as Sarah Kane’s
Crave. The production’s blend of movement, music and acting not only
made sense of a rather obscure and allusive text, often generating
meanings and connections which were essentially wordless, but it also
pushed at the boundaries of theatrical genre: “While we may be a ‘physical’
theatre company we have absolutely no intention of existing only within
the confines of any such definition.”

Morgan had been inspired by the on-stage relationship between Graham

and Hoggett and her text explored her perception of that. Together, they
discussed films such as Magnolia, with its opening sequence’s incredible
coincidences, and the playtext quotes artist Cornelia Parker describing
how, during the Darwin hurricane, normally benign things, such as straw,
became lethal because they were being blown so fast. Another story is
about cracking a paving stone by dropping a sandwich from the Empire
State Building. Designer Julian Crouch’s set was simple and clean: a large
square playing area with light bulbs above. And the play’s lake was just a
panel with a children’s paddling pool underneath, “Nobody realised that
we only had an inch of water but that’s all we needed to get wet and re-
emerge as if we’d been swimming”. At the start:

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“We played a piece of music by Zero 7 that had the right feel
to composer Nick Powell and he said, “Do you mean like
this?” and put his own track on — and it was absolutely
perfect. That was typical of the rehearsal, which felt really
blessed. We also added some gentle visual jokes to
enhance the mood: for example, a metal fork floats down on
a parachute to illustrate a joke about forked lightning; or the
characters produce a strawberry from their mouths.”

CRISIS WITH WRITERS | HEAVENLY + PEEPSHOW (2002)

The company’s relationship with playwrights has not been unproblematic.
Heavenly (2002), written by playwright Gary Owen:

“was a chocolate box Frantic show, with all the favourite

elements in it. So if it was somebody’s first Frantic show, it
was an absolute beauty. For people who’d seen all our work,
however, the feeling was that it was not going anywhere.”

Despite a stressful six-week rehearsal characterised by injuries, and much

text work after the company and Owen went their separate ways, the
audience response to the show’s comedy was very positive. Frantic
Assembly then immediately created their next show, Peepshow (2002),
which was written by Isabel Wright after things did not work out with
company’s original choice, Nicola McCartney:

“Peepshow, by definition, is a thing which never fully

satisfies you so the challenge of the piece is that in each
scene we wanted to miss the beginning and the end. So the
whole structure was about just missing the beginnings and
ends of things.”

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Set in a cross-section of a block of flats, the show offered fragments of the
life stories of the inhabitants and, for the first time, the actors also sang:

“We wanted to put a music video on stage. It was meant to

be a series of glimpses at people’s lives seen through
images and described through music. We were less
interested in narrative than in stage pictures.”

Music was by Lamb, supervised by Nicholas Skilbeck, who created a fragile

and intimate feel. Dan O’Neill was the choreographer. Although Frantic
Assembly was proud of Peepshow, which did have moments, such as the
flowing of bodies through the ceilings and floors of the block of flats, which
were as memorable as any of their best work, hostile reviews limited its
life:

“It broke records in terms of box office (97%) when it was at

the Lyric Hammersmith for three weeks, and the tour was the
best attended that the company ever had (16,000 people
over an 8-week tour), but the reviews meant that we couldn’t
get another tour.”

A great piece of live art was reviewed as if it was a piece of text-based

theatre — and found wanting.

This experience precipitated a crisis. Exhausted by the process of devising

work in close collaboration with writers, the company spent three months
looking for a completed script. But, after reading some 60 scripts and
finding nothing suitable, the situation became critical as Christmas 2002
loomed and the next year’s tour had to be booked. Over the holiday,
Hoggett visited a friend in Sydney, Australia, and saw a poster for Brendan
Cowell’s Rabbit at the Griffin Theatre:

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“But, even though we found a completed script rather

devising one ourselves, it was fascinating that it was a story
about a family falling apart and, for each of us in the
company, it came at a time when our own notions of family
were coming apart, in different ways. Even when we weren’t
looking for ourselves, we were finding ourselves in other
people’s work.”

The plot is about a young woman, Madeline, who plans to drop out of law
school to become a rap artist. But when she brings her junkie boyfriend,
MC Spin, home to meet her parents — Paul and Kate — the comedy turns
dark as her father reveals that he is dying from cancer:

“We felt that at its heart, this was a story about a father and
a daughter who can’t talk to each other, despite the fact that
they both use words to make a living, the father who is a
radio shock jock and the daughter wanting to be a rapper.
Towards the end, we wanted to find the kernel of the story,
which was that the characters could communicate through
silence.”

It was the first time that Frantic Assembly worked with older actors, David
Sibley and Susan Kyd:

“One review condemned the on-stage rapping as ‘shit’

without realising that this was a posh girl trying to rap but
failing. She needed to be shown up for what she was. In fact,
our sympathies were very much with the older couple.”

Still, most of the reviews gave Graham and Hoggett good notices for
directing the show, in which neither performed.

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BROADENING THE EXPERIMENT | ON BLINDNESS (2004), POOL (NO
WATER) (2006), STOCKHOLM (2007), LOVESONG (2011), THE
BELIEVERS (2014) + OTHELLO (2014)
In the next phase of the company’s work, there was a renewed emphasis
on broadening the range of their experimentation in order to avoid
becoming stale. After the crisis of trying to find a good text, On Blindness
(2004) was an attempt to recover the pleasures of creating Tiny Dynamite.
Vicky Featherstone, head of Paines Plough, introduced them to Glyn
Cannon’s play On Blindness, which was written as part of a project
exploring the possibilities of physical communication, signing and voice in
a co-production with Graeae, a company that works with deaf and disabled
actors:

“The rehearsal period was only four weeks, which is a

mistake we’ll never make again, because it was too short.
The last thing that was challenged was Glyn’s text because
we didn’t have time. If we’d had longer, we might have
worked a bit more on the form of the play. It works, but it
could’ve worked better.”

The show not only featured performers with disabilities such as Karina
Jones, who is blind, David Sands, who is deaf, and Matt Fraser, who has
very short arms. Sands and other cast members were always on stage,
taking turns to sign, sometimes creating a delightful complicity between
the character and signer. The result was an extra layer of language.
Although some reviewers had doubts about the text, most were
enthusiastic about the way the mixture of signing, projected captions and
voice-overs made audiences watch and listen in different ways. Simple
words and actions became loaded with added meaning as we were forced
to imagine what it’s like to be deprived of one or other of our senses.

The company then worked with three of the most important contemporary
British playwrights: pool (no water) by Mark Ravenhill (2006), Stockholm
by Bryony Lavery and Lovesong by Abi Morgan.

• Pool (no water) is a story about artistic jealousy in a small group of

friends and was inspired by the photographs of Nan Goldin, its text

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has unascribed lines of dialogue that can be distributed among
various characters in different combinations.

• Stockholm (2007–10) was based on a fascination with the complex

relationship of a mutually abusive couple and how they reacted to
outsiders, with the central metaphor being the Stockholm Syndrome
(complex feelings of affection felt in some cases of kidnapping by the
victim towards the abductor).

• Lovesong (2011), about an old couple who are coming to terms with
illness and whose memories of their youthful selves are still vivid,
gave the company a chance to work with older actors, including Sian
Phillips, who proved inspirational.

• With The Believers (2014), written by Bryony Lavery, Graham was the
sole director of a story about belief and tragedy.

• Finally, the company tackled a Shakespeare play, Othello (2008–15),

in an edited version of the text and a contemporary pub setting. The
show explored the themes of racism and class, and presented a
compelling picture of broken Britain.

• The latest show, Things I Know To Be True (2016), is a unique

international collaboration for the company.

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CITATIONS & FURTHER READING
Curious Incident. (2018). Physical Theatre | Frantic Assembly | Curious
Incident . [online] Available at: [Link]
theatre/ [Accessed 28 Feb. 2018].

[Link]. (2018). Things I Know To Be True Resource Pack

[online] Available at: [Link]
guides/things-i-know-to-be-true-a-comprehensive-guide [Accessed 28
Feb. 2018].

Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2014). The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising

theatre. Abingdon: Routledge.
Mark, E. (2012). Interview with Frantic Assembly: Beautiful Burnout and
training the performer. Theatre, Dance, and Performance Training , vol. 3
(pp 256-268).

Sierz, A. (2005). Frantic Assembly. Theatre Forum, 26. (pp.3-9).

Sigal, S. (2017). Writing in Collaborative Theatre-Making. London: Palgrave.

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