THE WEEK began with a day spent in Warwick, preparing for what seems increasingly like an exercise in futility: preparatory meetings for a teaching quality assessment visit the following week that looks unlikely to take place. The meetings are thorough and informative. Generally, the support given by the university's administration and senior officers in respect of TQA visits is exemplary. Everyone is understandably anxious that departments should do well in what is clearly seen as a competitive exercise. But for those caught up in it, the whole process seems like an oppressive, eternally recurring absurdity.
Nietzsche once asked: "Who is strong enough to view without flinching the prospect of the iron band of an eternal recurrence?" The answer he arrived at suggests that we need to become blond beasts to do so!
Meanwhile, we see the last vestiges of academic freedom threatened as we are measured in the jargon and against the criteria of "quality", imposed by an external agency. Blond beasts or passive collaborators? Both seem thoroughly unappetising choices.
In my case the sense of absurdity is heightened by the knowledge that the 200 hours or so I have spent in preparing the documentation for our TQA visit are in reality wasted time. The Association of University Teachers has balloted its members, and an overwhelming majority has declared its support for action short of a strike. We are formally instructed by the AUT to withdraw from the TQA visit due to start next week. Talk about a sense of anti-climax.
WednesdayAfter an early class exploring the ambiguities of Ibsen's and Strindberg's late plays, I meet my colleagues in emergency session to decide an unambiguous response to the AUT's call for action. It takes very little time to decide that we should follow the AUT's instruction. The staff at AUT headquarters are audibly relieved that we, as one of the first departments due to go over the top, have decided to follow the AUT directive and stay firmly in the trenches.
For our part, we are rather less pleased to discover that we are one of the few theatre departments in the country that has actually received the AUT's instruction. Muttering quietly about friends who would find it difficult to organise a binge for alcoholics in a brewery, we ask them to make sure that the remainder of our colleagues are at least contacted and told what is going on. Advisors in Warwick's central administration are very jumpy about this decision. What if no one else follows the AUT's directive?
ThursdayA day of tedious administrative chores was enlivened in the evening by a visit to the Other Place in Stratford to see the RSC's splendid production of Everyman. This was a challenging reading of a medieval play, where individual scenes and props looked like the objets trouves of a post-modern installation. Stunning visual images and verse-speaking of exceptional clarity were a delight for both eye and ear. Our first-year students were suitably impressed by a very fine piece of live theatre.
FridayA morning's work with final-year students on the different strategies for transcending absurdity adopted by 20th-century playwrights and theatre practitioners, which seems a particularly appropriate topic this week. We have already examined the theoretical base supplied by Nietzsche and explored how this is extended in the work of Artaud and Genet. Today, we looked at comic strategies adopted by Beckett and Ionesco where the meaning of their plays is communicated in performance rather than in the text. We also looked at the ethical strategies outlined by Sartre in Existentialism and Humanism and then fleshed out in his play The Flies. Interestingly, Sartre seemed to find a more positive response than Beckett: I suspect because there are fewer layers of complex ambiguity in his work.
The afternoon was spent writing various administrative responses and bids, as well as sifting through the applications for a British Academy fellowship we have been awarded. And then the perfect end to a perfect week at Warwick: an awkward puncture that needed the assistance of the AA.
SaturdayOne of my colleagues attended a meeting of our subject association in London. As luck would have it, it was a normally programmed committee meeting, but it gave us the opportunity to elicit and obtain the support of our subject association for those departments who feel obliged to follow the AUT's instruction in respect of the TQA exercise. The result was a great relief. It means, if words mean what they say, that we are not likely to stand alone. With that assurance in the bag, I thoroughly enjoyed a game of golf on my local course overlooking the Bristol channel, with splendid views to the Welsh hills. It had not been the easiest of weeks, but it could have been a lot worse. Even so, I still lost my game on the last putt.
Lecturer at the school of theatre studies, University of Warwick.