Physical Theatre: Frantic Assembly and Beyond

What Is Physical Theatre?

Physical theatre is a broad term for performance in which the body is the dominant instrument of communication. It does not mean theatre without words — most physical theatre companies use spoken text — but the physical vocabulary of the performers carries equal or greater meaning than the language they speak. Physical theatre draws on dance, acrobatics, mime, martial arts, Lecoq technique, contact improvisation and a range of other movement traditions to create a distinctive grammar of the body.

Physical theatre companies have shaped contemporary British and international theatre profoundly. Four useful examples are the companies Frantic Assembly, Complicite and DV8, plus the practitioner Steven Berkoff.

Key Fact

Frantic Assembly are known for their “round-by-through” methodology of exploring physical contact and for chair duets as a signature technique. Complicite are known for object transformation and ensemble storytelling. DV8 make physical theatre that addresses social and political issues through extreme physicality. Berkoff uses highly stylised, exaggerated movement as a form of social satire.

Frantic Assembly: Round-by-Through-Under and Ensemble

Frantic Assembly was founded in 1994 by Scott Graham, Steven Hoggett and Vicki Middleton. Their signature is a devising methodology that begins with physical exploration rather than textual analysis — performers explore the physical relationship between bodies before the meaning of the scene is fixed. The central physical framework they use is round-by-through: performers explore every possible way their bodies can move in relation to another performer — over, under, around, through — generating a range of physical possibilities before selecting the most expressive for the final sequence.

Their most recognisable technique is the chair duet. Two performers use chairs as props and obstacles, their physical relationship to each other and to the furniture communicating the emotional state of the scene — desire, conflict, distance, dependence — without a single word. The chair duet has become a GCSE Drama shorthand for Frantic Assembly because it is both technically distinctive and a perfect demonstration of physical theatre’s ability to communicate without language.

Frantic Assembly co-developed Things I Know to Be True with playwright Andrew Bovell in 2016 — one of the nine AQA set plays. In that production, physical sequences were embedded within a naturalistic family drama, with moments of heightened physical theatre marking emotional revelations that ordinary speech could not carry.

Frantic Assembly use lifts and physical support work to communicate relationships that are otherwise invisible. When one performer lifts another, the audience reads: this person holds this person up; this person trusts this person completely; this person’s weight is carried by another. A lift in a scene of reconciliation communicates something different from a lift in a scene of control or coercion — but both are immediate, legible and viscerally felt by the audience in a way that dialogue rarely achieves. The physical vocabulary of weight, support, resistance and release is a direct language of human relationship.

Ensemble: Multi-Roling and Collective Voice

Physical theatre is fundamentally an ensemble art form. The ensemble does not simply mean “the cast.” In physical theatre, the ensemble is a finely tuned collective body — performers who have developed a shared physical language, a precise awareness of each other’s timing, weight and spatial positioning. The ensemble can represent a crowd, a community, a family or a social force through synchronised or deliberately fragmented movement.

Multi-roling is common in physical theatre because the emphasis on the performer’s body as a malleable instrument makes transformation between roles legible and immediate. A performer might shift from playing a child to an authority figure to a memory from the past in a single sequence, signalled not by a costume change but by a postural shift, a change in vocal pitch and pace, and a change in levels in the space.

Complicite, DV8 and Berkoff

Complicite (founded in 1983 by Annabel Arden, Fiona Gordon, Marcello Magni and Simon McBurney) are known for object transformation and an ensemble storytelling style that blends visual theatre, physical comedy and emotional intensity. A single crate might become a bed, a car, a coffin, and a judge’s bench within a single production, with the audience accepting each transformation because the performers’ physical commitment to the fiction is absolute.

DV8 Physical Theatre (founded by Lloyd Newson in 1986) make work that uses extreme physicality to address social and political questions — masculinity, sexuality, violence, and the limits of the body. Their work is often uncomfortable, physically demanding and deliberately confrontational.

Steven Berkoff developed a highly stylised physical theatre language influenced by Brecht, mime and Artaud: exaggerated gesture, stylised movement, heightened vocal delivery, and a theatrical artifice that is never disguised. Like Brecht, Berkoff uses the performer’s posture and movement to reveal social type and class position.

As a performer: Imagine you are staging the moment of a family argument in which unspoken resentments finally surface. Rather than having the performers simply shout at each other, you build a Frantic Assembly-influenced sequence: the two central performers begin with a round-by-through exploration of physical space, each movement growing more restricted and angular until one performer — positioned downstage centre — executes a chair duet sequence with the other circling them. The ensemble of family members behind them mirror the central relationship in a reduced, stylised echo — the same physical tension played out collectively across the group. The scene ends with a tableau: all performers frozen in a configuration that places the two central figures back-to-back, hands touching but faces turned away. The audience reads the emotional state through bodies, not words.

As a designer: For a physical theatre sequence depicting emotional fracture within a group, you might design a gobo pattern that fragments the light on the floor — broken lines suggesting division — while a soundscape of overlapping voices (each speaking a different fragment of a shared text) builds under the movement. As the tableau is reached, the lighting narrows to a single tight lighting special on the two central performers, the surrounding space falling into shadow, making the family’s isolation physical and visible.