ON ALBERT HUNT'S PARALLEL EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION

Albert Hunt is an old and valued friend of mine. Throughout the early sixties we were in touch with
each other. To some extent we tested our ideas out on each other as well. I have enormous respect
for Albert's work and it was something that was both new and a very positive step forward, and even
though it has been left behind, it remains there for someone else to pick up. What links us together is
that our method of working is student-centred and not teacher-centred and also that the student
learns from experience and not from pedagogical diktat. That is where we both overlap to some
extent. Also the fact that he started in the same period when people were saying that education has
to change and develop new methods. Albert was given his chance to start his experiment and he was
shut down at about the same time as me. In that sense we have always had a mutual respect for
each other. However, he let go of a lot of the baggage that I carry. I still am a traditionalist at heart; I
am still a theatre-man and therefore a dramatic - as opposed to a literary - theatre man: that's what I
am after. Whereas Albert departed from that and threw out many of the core props of dramatic
theatre. He threw out character, and various structural forms, and he threw out dialogue in favour of
people addressing the audience. To a certain extent he threw out dialogue and replaced it with very
large and strong images. Albert's The Destruction of Dresden was a very powerful piece that was
central for both him and for me. I was instrumental in taking Albert to the GDR (Eastern Germany)
where he toured with a group. In this group there was a Pakistani man and they wouldn't let him
travel overland through Holland and he had to be flown in to Berlin - because of his colour. Each night
that they played The Destruction of Dresden there was somebody in the audience who had been in
Dresden that night when the firestorm was unleashed by the British bombers. That was very moving -
particularly for the actors, meeting those people's stories that they had just been acting out. They did
a performance in the Director's school in Berlin, after which we all sat round, and the head of the
school said, 'Thank you for showing us a new way of using history and theatre', and Albert replied 'But
we learned all this from you, from Bertolt Brecht'. They all looked blankly at him and it became clear
that Brecht had developed along two totally different lines when Germany was divided. The East
German Brecht was not the British Brecht. It was a most educational trip.