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Publication: ​3rd June 2020
List Price: £22.00 
Available here for £18

Format: ~ Paperback - 280 pages
Size: 23.4 x 15.6 cm
ISBN: 978-1-911193-83-8  ​
Tags: theatre, new theatre, popular theatre, experimental theatre, Meyerhold, touring theatre

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pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-85-2​​
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Readership

TNT - The New Theatre​ is for anyone who has ever seen a TNT or ADG Europe production, for directors, playwrights, actors, dramaturgs and theatre designers anywhere and for theatre studies and drama students.

Read more:

About the authors
Phil Smith
Paul Stebbings

See some images from a recent production of 'Frankenstein'

Visit the TNT Theatre website

What is Acting?
Paul reads an extract:
TNT in Iran 2004 
Paul reads a second extract 
Listen to Phil Smith interviewed about the book on Yale Radio by Brainard Carey
TNT - The New Theatre

lessons, techniques and ideas for making new theatre for a changing world from the most widely travelled theatre that ever packed a bag
​Paul Stebbings & Phil Smith 
​
This long-awaited new book is an extraordinary, wide-ranging, funny, clever account of  40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company of all time. The authors dance between magical storytelling... offering a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre... considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents... and offering a eye-opening history of TNT.
"TNT started with nothing but three unemployed actors in my mum’s little car. Decades later TNT has become the most popular touring theatre in the world. How that came about, and maybe why, is the subject of this book. "

In 1980, ​The Guardian newspaper described TNT as “the most interesting development on the current theatrical scene”
40 years later it still is!

“the world’s most popular touring theatre company” (China National TV)
TNT gives more performances in more countries in a single year than any other theatre company in the world.
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TNT perform regularly in Australia, Cambodia, China, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Malta, Nicaragua, Panama, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK, Ukraine, Vietnam... and many more countries.

"Epic and ambitious work which stretches musicians and actors alike. TNT's  complex structures and multi-layered symbolism often make great demands on the audience too; for while  the company acknowledge the bland expectations of a  television saturated audience they make no intellectual or artistic allowances for it. They are always entertaining and, far from isolating themselves in obscure elitism, they connect with their audience in a most intimate and sensitive manner."
The Guardian on TNT's 'Cabaret Faust'

"The story of TNT is told in the uneven and sometimes tumultuous stories of its productions,  its ideas and the countries it has visited. It is told through blinding flashes of discovery, slogs and setbacks; wild seas in which we have swum and on occasions floundered only to reach the surface once again and strike out, not for the shore, but further into the endless ocean." From The Preface

"Just about every German adult under 45 will now, mostly at a young age, have seen a TNT production of some kind and it is tempting to speculate that we might have had some influence on that country’s generous response to the refugee crisis and the resistance of so many of its population to attempts to draw it into anti-immigrant sentiment."
Paul Stebbings

Some TNT productions you may have seen:
Cabaret Faust ~ The Ghost of Illiam Dhone ~ Dracula and the Eco-Warrior ~ Moby Dick
Wizard of Jazz  ~  Le Petit Prince ~ The Murder of Sherlock Holmes ~ Harlequin
Video & Julia  ~  Lord of the Flies ~ Don Quijote  ~  Frankenstein  ~ Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels  ~ 
 English Tea Party ~ A Streetcar Named Desire  ~  The Crucible
American Dreams and Nightmares: The Life and Death of Martin Luther King ~  My Sister Syria 
Free Mandela ~ Death of a Salesman  ~   Brave New World ~ A Christmas Carol

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“During my tenure at the Manoel I always endeavoured to include TNT Theatre in my annual programmes. As helmed by Paul Stebbings their productions always featured intelligent scripting coupled with honest performances that stimulated our audiences.
I also appreciated the enthusiastic manner in which cast and crew remained available after the shows to discuss the presentations with the interested members of the audience.”

Tony Cassar Darien, Former Artistic Director, The Manoel Theatre (the National Theatre), Malta
Current Artistic Director, The Mediterranean Conference Centre, Valletta, Malta

"Extraordinary"    "Glorious"     
"A love story... with theatre itself"
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"I've known TNT since 2003, and I took them to China for the first time in 2005 for performance. The first play was 'Macbeth' and it was very successful. Since then, Paul has been invited to Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center and other theatres in China to direct plays. We had a very happy cooperation with him. TNT is also very famous in China now, they have a large audience in China and are loved by them."   Nick Rongjun YU
Artistic Director, Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center


"Great read and fascinating stuff, and what an extraordinary and vast story the TNT one is. People often say our tours are long, but they don’t come anywhere near yours!  So many themes and issues I recognised if on a more local scale! As a director I particularly enjoyed Paul’s challenging comments re design and staging, and as a writer I enjoyed Phil’s understanding around practicalities and constant drafts. And it just shows how important the small scale touring ethic and practice is to theatre nowadays. This could be our way back out of lockdown!"  Ivan Cutting, Artistic Director
Eastern Angles, Sir John Mills Theatre, Ipswich

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"This extraordinary memoir of a theatre company is actually many stories. It is the story of the impact of a university lecturer, Edward Braun, on two young men in the 1970s. It is the story of their location in theatrical lineages and genealogies that include Vsevolod Meyerhold and Music Hall, Jerzy Grotowski and Jonathan Pryce. It is the story of one of the few small-scale British touring companies of the 1980s to survive into the 21st century through a combination of happenstance and pragmatic utopianism. It is the story of adaptation and assemblage resulting from open-ended journeys, encounters and the crossing of borders between what was once known as East and West. But perhaps more than anything, it is a love story – and the object of love is theatre itself."  Roberta Mock, Professor of Performance Studies, University of Plymouth


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"A glorious mix of fine, precise detail and broad sweep commentary and reflection on the last four decades.  A model of writing which allows for feeling and passion to co-exist alongside and become intertwined with ‘cold’ consideration and incisive scrutiny of how to position TNT within the cosmology of theatre and performance both within Europe and beyond. ... If categories matter this book is impossible to position: part travel writing, part (auto)biography, part political and cultural history, part philosophy, part theatre and performance studies, part poetry and always story-telling."  Read the full review
Simon Murray, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at Glasgow University; ​author of Physical Theatres (Routledge)

"...takes us on a rollicking journey through the first forty years of the world’s most extraordinary, imaginative, and successful touring company, a company that “started with nothing but three unemployed actors in my mum’s little car.”
...the story reads as if the Company were riding wild waves tossing them to and fro. And in so many ways, they were. For such is the history and evolution of TNT as the Company rides the crest between performances and discovery.
[The authors] explore the adventure, rather than merely lay out the adventure. What I didn’t expect was that [their] delightful writing style would draw me so deeply into the adventures and discoveries that flowed over the forty years. I laughed with and felt the anguish of both Paul and Phil, along with the Company. In an unexpected way I became part of TNT Theatre. "

                            Reviewed by Frank Mills - Photographer
"Some of the book’s most valuable content arises from the authors’ forty years of acquaintance with the theatre scene in so many parts of the world. Regular chapters use personal anecdote to examine how theatre works in places as different as China, Costa Rica, France, Iran, Israel and Russia, with particular emphasis on the audience.
The book is mercifully free from self-promotion or self-congratulation. One especially touching sub-chapter, entitled “Failure,” is an honest examination of productions or tours that did not work." Ian Herbert in Critical Stages, The IATC journal – December 2020: Issue 22

From a first-hand account of working with Jerzy Grotowski to an analysis of the art of writing for the stage; from the hazards of touring in the Emirates to the dramas of touring behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s; from an analysis of the role of the set and stage music to the story of taking Shakespeare to China... this is an extraordinary, wide-ranging, funny, clever account of  40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company of all time.

In 1990,  in the dying days of Gorbachev's Soviet Union, Paul Stebbings stood on the stage of the Leningrad State Comedy Theatre and performed to a packed audience in the role of Stalin. 

In ‘Wizard of Jazz’ and other plays TNT ripped into some of the darkest recesses of the ‘American Dream’. They explored racism, poverty and inequality, soulless commerce, witch hunts, and the seeds of fascism inside US culture. Across these productions TNT sounded a long warning about the dangers of having illusions in the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ coming from the USA: a country that locked up a staggering percentage of its black population, was dominated in large areas by leaders who believed that the world had been made in six days and that human and dinosaurs co-existed, and ran its fossil-fuel based economy with entire disregard for its great-grandchildren.

The greatest crime of all is an actor seated behind a table. What is there left except a floating head? TNT uses as little furniture as possible. Even in the banquet scene in ‘Macbeth’ we have no table. We performed the whole of ‘Julius Caesar’ without a single chair. But some seats are better than others; stools are good because they leave the body visible, thrones are powerful image-things that need to be occupied rather than sat upon. An upturned dustbin in ‘Pygmalion’ can create an image, informing Alfred Doolittle’s rough and ready character.

In Dresden, a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the authors found themselves in a march against the regime, at the time when its leader, Erich Honecker, was proposing a motion to his party’s Central Committee that protesters like us should be fired upon. Fortunately, his motion was defeated. 
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“....the actors.... must have open, dilated bodies and an emotional warmth as the audience’s very positive reflections.... from whatever tradition it does not matter.... as long as those trainings apply principles of movement springing from the lower trunk, that open the body, and are expressed in terms of oppositions within the body....”
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