Practitioner Application: Physical Theatre and Ensemble Storytelling
Why Practitioners Matter for This Play
When a question asks you to apply a practitioner’s techniques to a set play, it is not asking for a biography. It is asking you to understand how a specific working method — a way of creating scenes, rehearsing the ensemble, constructing images or relating to the audience — could shape the choices a modern company makes when staging this text. For Around the World in 80 Days, three practitioner traditions are directly relevant and practically applicable: Frantic Assembly, Complicite, and the music-hall and circus tradition that the play’s comic form echoes.
The three most relevant practitioner traditions are: Frantic Assembly (ensemble physical theatre, contact work, collaborative image-making), Complicite (object transformation, storytelling ensemble, narrator-led staging) and the music-hall/circus tradition (direct audience address, comic precision, shared theatrical pleasure).
Frantic Assembly: Bodies as Storytelling Instruments
Frantic Assembly, founded in 1994 by Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton, built its reputation on a form of physical theatre in which the body is not decorative but dramaturgical — the body’s movement tells the story and creates the emotional world of the play. Their signature vocabulary includes round-by-through exercises, chair duets and contact choreography, and lifts that serve narrative rather than spectacle.
In Around the World in 80 Days, Frantic Assembly’s influence is most visible in the sequences where the company must become a single creature or vehicle. The elephant sequence, the train sequence, the ship — all require the same principle Frantic Assembly built their method on: the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the audience reads a collective physical decision as a single image. A director working from Frantic Assembly’s approach would develop these sequences in rehearsal through physical improvisation, allowing the company to find the movement together rather than having it choreographed from outside.
As a performer working in a Frantic Assembly-influenced rehearsal for the elephant sequence, you might begin the devising process with a round-by-through exercise in which two performers in physical contact with each other explore the rhythm and weight of a large, slow-moving creature. The goal is not to mime an elephant — it is to find the weight and rhythm in your own body so the physical choice becomes instinctive. Your vocal contribution in this scene is silence: the physical precision carries the full dramatic load.
As a lighting designer for a Frantic Assembly-influenced staging of this sequence, you would trust the physical storytelling and resist the temptation to overilluminate. A warm amber wash from a high angle (suggesting the Indian sun), perhaps a dim state with a gobo of leaf-shadow patterns projected onto the floor — giving the ensemble’s bodies maximum visual impact against a subtly textured background — would be the Frantic Assembly aesthetic: clean, powerful, serving the movement without competing with it.
Complicite: Object Transformation and the Narrator
Complicite (founded 1983, still directed by Simon McBurney) built a different but equally relevant tradition. Where Frantic Assembly’s strength is in the physical ensemble, Complicite’s signature is in object transformation and in the figure of the storytelling narrator. In Complicite’s productions, company members regularly step in and out of the fiction to address the audience directly, to handle and transform objects, and to remind the audience that they are watching a story being told, not a reality being reproduced.
This is exactly the theatrical mode Eason’s script requires. The Complicite-influenced director would pay close attention to the way objects change meaning during the play: a chair is never just a chair once the ensemble has trained itself to use it as a carriage; a rope is never just a rope once it has been ship rigging. The discipline is that the transformation must be total and committed — there is no half-way position where the audience is uncertain whether this is a chair or a carriage. Complicite’s training method emphasises that the object’s transformation is effected entirely by the performer’s physical relationship to it.
Complicite’s core principle: the object’s meaning is entirely created by the performer’s physical use of it. A chair becomes a train carriage the moment the performer sits in it as if in a moving carriage — not because the chair looks like a carriage, but because the body’s logic makes it one.
Brechtian Elements: The Narrator and the Episodic Frame
Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical principles also have limited but specific relevance here. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) — using narration, direct address and visible theatricality to remind the audience they are watching a construction — is built into Eason’s structure. Every time a company member steps forward to narrate the passage of days or comment on Fogg’s progress, they perform a Brechtian function: the story is held at arm’s length so the audience can observe it.
The episodic structure — short scenes in clearly labelled locations, no attempt at continuous realistic time — is also Brechtian in spirit. Brecht’s epic theatre avoided the seamless illusion of naturalism in favour of a structure that acknowledged each scene as a discrete unit. However, important to note: Around the World in 80 Days is not a Brechtian play in the full sense — it does not make political-didactic demands on its audience in the way The Caucasian Chalk Circle does. The Brechtian elements are structural tools within a comedy-of-adventure, not an ideological programme.
Victorian music hall — the variety entertainment tradition that was the dominant popular theatre form when Verne’s novel was published — operated on principles that resonate strongly with Eason’s play. Direct audience address was the norm; performers acknowledged the presence of the audience and played to them explicitly. Comic precision — the exact timing of a pratfall, the perfectly judged pause before a punchline — was a highly valued craft skill. Songs, physical spectacle, and an awareness that the audience’s pleasure was the goal rather than their passive observation were all central.
Some productions of this play interpolate live music — a piano onstage, a percussionist tracking the journey — that explicitly invokes this tradition. A director drawing on music-hall principles would coach Passepartout in particular on the shared, audience-aware quality of his comedy: the moment when he turns to the audience with an expression of disbelief, or when he makes an aside directly to the front row, is the music-hall gesture surviving into 21st-century ensemble theatre. In terms of performer-audience relationship, this play operates much closer to the music-hall end of the spectrum than to the fourth-wall naturalism of Stanislavski.