A lot of contemporary plays cannot be experienced unless you’ve attended them and many of those performances are hard to transcribe on paper, because of their visual and physical nature. Of course, it’s always possible to make a video recording, but watching that is a diminished experience. Although Ontroerend Goed embrace the ‘nowness’ of theatre and its visual and physical possibilities, the group wanted to take an extra step to share its work.
In this book, Ontroerend Goed explore different forms to convey a theatrical experience on paper. Each performance has its own way of approaching the audience, so each text has its own way to address the reader. This book is not made to turn the page and document the performances as a past experience, but for people to use it as a tool. A tool to play, adapt, oppose, relive, challenge and inspire.
You can buy the book online here
All Work and No Plays contains 9 blueprints of shows by Ontroerend Goed. Amongst them are The Smile Off Your Face, Internal, A Game of You, Once and For All, Teenage Riot, All That Is Wrong, Audience, A History of Everything and Fight Night
Authors: Joeri Smet, Alexander Devriendt & Mieke Versyp
Press
Breath-taking arrogance and arresting humility, monolithic certainties that stop dead at a surprising moment of fragility, callousness blossoming into soul-swelling generosity – all the teeth-clenching, enslaving contradictions of Ontroerend Goed, they’re all here… These blueprints have been reverse engineered. They are a retrospective. They are a greatest hits.
Exeunt Magazine - Steward Pringle
‘All Work and No Plays’ is important reading for anyone interested in the potential of performance to escape traditional format and challenge audiences, or indeed the recent history of European devised theatre… In some sense, this mimics the experience of an Ontroerend Goed event: technically brilliant, disturbing and intelligent, shifting between ideas and emotions relentlessly. Alongside the hints for other makers to recreate these performances, this could be the most powerful part of the book. Combined with its idiosyncratic yet coherent design, it allows the texts to stand out against mere publication of scripts… through the complexity, it offers an insight into the most consistently challenging theatre-makers of the past decade.
Scottish Journal of Performance - Gareth K. Vile
