Breaking new ground….

It’s not just Konstantin in The Seagull who is seeking “new forms” in the theatre, or claiming (as he did in Christopher Hampton’s recent Royal Court translation of the play), “the theatre’s on its last legs. Once upon a time there were mighty oaks, now all you see is tree stumps.”

Theatre practitioners are increasingly straining at the leash and pushing against the walls of the buildings that have been confining them to burst free towards new ways of creating work. The National Theatre of Scotland, for instance, pointedly doesn’t even have a building: it exists wherever the work does, whether that’s an airport terminal, a forest, an army drill hall, or a theatre. The NTOS are re-defining ways of working for themselves, and new trees, to continue Konstantin’s metaphor, are growing as a result.

So are site-specific, “immersive” companies like Punchdrunk, whose production of Faust in a vast warehouse building in Wapping is nearing the end of its run. Producer Colin Marsh and artistic director Felix Barrett came to talk to the Critics’ Circle last week, and it was fascinating to hear of the kind of process – and meticulous planning – that creates a work that seems to unfold so spontaneously, but in fact with utter rigorousness. While the audience each make their own individual journey through the event, choosing where to go and who to follow, the actors have every moment “scripted” to the soundtrack that plays out to tell them where to be and what to do.

While “conventional” theatre making sticks to the existing classical repertoire and seeks to add to the canon with new writing, there’s a whole world now beyond those confines. And two new brand-new festivals – one in London, the other in Manchester – are pointing the way to new ways of respectively showcasing and making that work.

A couple of weeks ago I had lunch with Robert Pacitti, an experimental theatre maker in his own right who is launching the first Spill Festival of Performance (http://www.spillfestival.com) with a season of 52 live performances, featuring artists from Australia, Brazil, Belgium, France, Germany and the UK, across five venues (the Barbican, Southbank Centre, Soho Theatre, Shunt Vaults and Toynbee Studios), from April 2-22. The work being showcased includes six world premieres, four installations, a number of “feasts”, and various symposiums. This is theatre that is thinking outside of the box – not to mention the proscenium arch. And conventional time frames, too: Forced Entertainment’s show, On the Thousandth Night, for instance, is described as a “six hour durational performance where the public are free to come and go as they wish throughout the performance” (at the Purcell Room on April 15). Pacitti’s own work in the festival includes a Grand Finale, in the Shunt Vaults on April 21 and 22, that combines “elements of installation, video and photographic work” to “further blur the boundaries between gallery and stage, activity and page,” in its abstract version of Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin. Meanwhile, Julia Bardsley – one-time co-artistic director of the Young Vic with Tim Supple – returns with a show, Trans-Acts, for audiences of just twelve, in which visual, theatrical and sound combine to forge what the programme calls “an intimate dialogue between the audience and the performer, the artist and the creative process, the live presence and the visual art object” (at Shunt Vaults from April 7-17). These are just three of the shows I want to see.

And yesterday, I went up to Manchester for the press launch of the first Manchester International Festival (http://www.manchesterinternationalfestival.com) that is billing itself as “the world’s first international festival of original, new work”, and runs from June 28 to July 15. Curated by festival director Alex Poots, it is offering a smorgasbord of some 25 major theatrical and musical commissions and an international music series that stretches from appearances by the Happy Monday and Lou Reed to The Fall and PJ Harvey. There is also a series of debates and discussions, a range of free activities to provide entry points for people who might not think that the festival is for them, and a massive club night for 20,000 people at Manchester Central (formerly the G-Mex centre) that combines VJ’s and DJ’s. Amidst much earnest talk of individual aspirations for the work being created, Johnny Vegas was on hand to talk about his contribution to the festival – a collaboration with Stewart Lee called Interiors, in which audiences will be shown around a home he is trying to sell – and he confessed, “I feel so out of my depth… I just desperately want to do a Neil Diamond song and get out of here!”

When I got out of there, I went to visit a part of the festival that’s already on view. In February, artist Steve McQueen created a project called Queen and Country under the festival’s auspices that commemorates some of the British soldiers who have been killed in the war in Iraq so far. At the start of the project, some 115 families of the deceased were asked to participate by contributing a photograph of their lost relative that has then been turned into a page of postage stamp sheets that can be viewed on a pull-out wooden panel. 98 families agreed, and these panels form the exhibition so far. Sadly, of course, it is a work-in-progress, since more soldiers have died since, and whose families will now be asked if they wish to partake.

The exhibition is currently at the Central Library, and I stopped by on the way back to the station. The most poignant panels of all, I felt, were the blank ones, awaiting filling. But I was moved to tears by the simplicity and eloquence of this public memorial to lost lives: no judgement is being made on the cause for which they died, just a memorial of their passing. The exhibition will move to London’s Imperial War Museum in July. Already, the festival has created a major work.