Convener(s): Stephen Hodge

Participants: Mark Conway, Dan Rebellato, Carl Miller, Michael Dempsey, David McGroarty

Summary of discussion, conclusions and/or recommendations:

Starting points:
- Theatre is a minority artform (a minority of the public go to the theatre each year). To some extent, we’re in a TV/multimedia-dominated age. That’s okay. But, in order to survive, perhaps theatre-makers should concentrate on what makes theatre special/different. This is not necessarily anything to do with a verbal text, which originate in a different medium – that of literature (as David Cole said in the 1970s, word-based scripts are only a model for turning what is not theatre into what is theatre, and there are others, e.g. the visual script).
- Julian’s visual record of the event.
- Phelim said to us all this morning: “I’ll draw you a picture. That’ll be better.”
- Huizinga wrote something like: “Play is of a higher order than seriousness. Seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include elements of seriousness.”
- Lots of talk about people drawing of gaming structures in their works in yesterday’s sessions, comments like “we play a lot with the audience”…

Record of the sessions:
- no verbal notes taken, see the 7 visual records (1 made by each member of the group)