ABSTRACT
If teachers were honoured in the British theatre alongside directors, designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be as familiar a name as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert, Edward Bond and the other young talents who were drawn to the great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 195os. As head of the Court’s script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in the development of the ‘writers’ theatre’, but to the general public he was known only as the author of occasional and less than triumphant Court plays like Brixham Regatta and Performing Giant. As he recounts in this book, he started as a writer who lost the ability to write, and then ran into the same melancholy impasse again when he turned to directing.