John Tiffany’s Evolving Theater

Today, Radcliffe Institute Fellow John Tiffany will speak of theater that breaks fascinatingly from the traditional form. Tiffany, Associate Director of the National Theatre of Scotland, is the guest speaker in the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture in Art and the Humanities. His talk, entitled “Can We Keep Up? Theater’s Incredible Ability to Evolve,” will take place at 4 p.m. in the Radcliffe Gymnasium.

The National Theatre of Scotland is Tiffany’s case study in the evolution of theater and its potential for the future. “The lecture is going to be looking at the way theater ... evolve[s] out of buildings and stages and traditional theater forms, and how the National Theatre of Scotland has been doing in terms of this evolution. It is a new national theater company that’s been set up without a building—and that means a different take on the process,” said Tiffany.

Tiffany incorporates a deep love for Scotland into the more unstructured, less classical style of theater in his productions. His acclaimed production of “Black Watch,” a play about Scotland’s esteemed eponymous military regiment in the Iraq War that first opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006, is just one example of this modern Scottish flavor. 

“There’s something about Scottish theater that I especially love. It’s very musical and connected with vaudeville and a very working-class country—that shows in the art form. There’s a lot of movement, there’s a lot of heart. It’s very different from the more—how would you say it?—refined English theater,” Tiffany continued. 

Tiffany has worked to incorporate his contemporary Scottish style into more traditional works. One such effort was his adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” “‘Peter Pan’ is the most famous Scottish play every written, but it’s not set in Scotland—it’s set in London. So the first thing I did was move it back to Edinburgh, and then I focused on Peter himself. I pulled him out of the Disney version and made him a lot darker, based on the god Pan, much more connected to the lands,” said Tiffany.

Tiffany believes that theater must not only evolve at the level of script writing, but also evoke a change in societal attitudes. “I get really down when I tell someone that I’m a theater director and [people] say, ‘I should go to the theater more often.’ I tell them, ‘no, you shouldn’t.’ No one ever says that they should play more ‘Grand Theft Auto.’ Rather than say society is terrible for not appreciating the theater enough, we should make the theater more interesting,” he said. 

Tiffany is currently investigating the use of the human voice in theater as a Radcliffe Fellow. In a project with the American Repertory Theater, Tiffany deals with dialects, voices, and how they affect people’s perceptions. His interest in the topic comes from an experience of his own.

“I was doing a project in London 10 years ago on the development of the English language. They brought in voice experts and one of them, Stanley Eveling ... told me within three minutes of speaking to me that my mom was from Lancashire and my dad was from Yorkshire.” Though Tiffany has devoted most of his adult life to the theater—an art heavily reliant on vocal mutability—his history was easily discerned. “For me, as someone who necessarily moved away from [my native] accent [to work] in the arts and then at university in Scotland ... it was incredibly emotional to discover that my accent was still there like vocal DNA,” he said. 

As far as his experience in Cambridge, Tiffany decided to take a sabbatical from the usual three to four trips to the theater he takes each week in Scotland. Instead, he has taken to seeing films every Sunday. “It seems to be a law that films have to be set in Boston: ‘The Social Network,’ ‘The Town,’ ‘The Company Men,’ ‘The Fighter.’ I feel like a Bostonian now,” he said.

There are some things, however, that make Tiffany miss home. “The thing I miss is [British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)] radio. I’m a huge [National Public Radio] fan—but the fundraisers!”

However receptive to modern American culture he may be, it seems Tiffany remains faithful to his work with the National Theatre of Scotland and his efforts to convey both Scottish tradition and modern life to audiences with flair.