The Art of Writing Drama

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by Michelene Wandor




  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page i The Art of Writing Drama

  Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and musician. Her dramatisation of The Wandering Jew was produced at the National Theatre in 1987, the same year her adaptation of The Belle of Amherst won an International Emmy for Thames TV. Her prolific radio work includes original plays and dramatisations (novels by Dostoyevsky, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Kipling, Sara Paretsky, Margaret Drabble and D. H. Lawrence), many nominated for Sony and Prix Italia Awards. Her books on contemporary theatre include Carry On, Understudies and Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender. She has published a number of short-story collections. Musica Transalpina was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for 2006 and her dramatic poem, The Music of the Prophets (both Arc Publications), was supported by a grant from the European Association for Jewish Culture. Since 2004 she has held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship. Her history of creative writing in the UK, The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived, was published in 2008. Her new play, Tulips in Winter, about Spinoza, will be broadcast on Radio 3 in 2008.

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page ii by the same author

  drama

  The Wandering Jew

  non-fiction

  The Author is not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived

  Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender poetry

  Gardens of Eden Revisited

  Musica Transalpina

  Music of the Prophets

  short stories

  False Relations

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page iii THE

  ART OF WRITING

  DRAMA

  Michelene Wandor

  Methuen Drama

  Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  LON DON • NEW DELHI • NEW YORK • SY DN EY

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page iv Published by Methuen Drama

  Bloomsbury Methuen Drama

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama

  First published 2008

  Methuen Drama

  50 Bedford Square

  1385 Broadway

  A & C Black Publishers Limited

  London

  New York

  38 Soho Square

  WC1B 3DP

  NY 10018

  London W1D 3HB

  UK

  USA

  www.acblack.com

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Copyright © 2008 Michelene Wandor

  BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are Michelene Wandor has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work First published 2008

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  © 2008 Michelene Wandor

  ISBN 978 0 413 77586 3

  Michelene Wandor has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work.

  Typeset in 10pt Janson Text by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading, RG1 8EX

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission by any means – graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, in writing from the publishers.

  recording, taping or information storage and retrieval systems – without the written permission of A & C Black Publishers Limited.

  No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted This book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, by Bloomsbury or the author.

  sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data of origin.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: PB: 978-0-4137-7586-3

  ePDF: 978-1-4081-4132-8

  ePUB: 978-1-4081-4133-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Typeset in 10pt Janson Text by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page v Contents

  Introduction

  1

  Learning to write drama; creative writing and drama;

  backgrounds; after censorship; positioning dramatic

  writing; from imagination to page and stage; writing

  drama per se – the complete text; the Death of the Author

  and the birth of the dramatist; drama – the ‘complete’ text;

  received clichés

  Chapter One: Drama – the apparently incomplete text

  16

  Drama as collaborative art; writing drama as an

  imaginative mode of thought; drama as a visual medium;

  drama as the novel manqué; conclusions; the compleat

  dramatist

  Chapter Two: The emergence of the dramatist

  and drama in education

  29

  Drama and education; teaching drama after World War

  Two; after censorship, new dramatists and new drama

  Chapter Three: The performance text

  40

  Theory; anthropology; performance and meaning;

  audience as political and social entity; theatre and

  semiotics; competence and performance; the performance

  triumvirate; performance theory and the Death of the

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page vi vi

  Author; the Death of the Author and the fourth wall;

  audience as active; conclusions

  Chapter Four: The text from the other side: director

  and performer

  55

  The director; the performer, acting and the text; the

  fourth wall; after Stanislavsky – new objectivism;

  conclusions: performance and immediacy

  Chapter Five: The novel and the drama

  64

  Size matters; narrative voice, point of view, character and

  subjectivity; poly-vocality and the dialogic; narrative,

  structure and causality

  Chapter Six: Methods of teaching – the workshop

  71

  Early workshop history; the tutorial precedent; workshop

  pedagogy; authority; workshop practice and power-

  relations; criticism and value judgement; training

  professional writers versus self-expression; the workshop as

  a House of Correction; the workshop as therapy group;

  theatre workshops; conclusions

  Chapter Seven: The concepts in how-to books on

  dramatic writing

  87

  Action or character?; action, conflict and crisis (actions

  speak louder than words); character; premise, idea, vision,

  theme; scenario; dialogue; narrative and causality; drama

  and creative writing; conclusions – dialogue – the absent

  centre

  Chapter Eight: St
age directions

  101

  Main or subsidiary; from directions to performance; extra-

  dialogic stage directions; extra- and intra-dialogic stage

  directions; conclusions

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page vii vii

  Chapter Nine: The compleat dramatist – preparing to

  write

  117

  Copyright; the story so far; from prose to dialogue; narrative

  through dialogue; monologue and character; monologue and prose

  Chapter Ten: The text – dialogue and relationships

  126

  Dialogue, action and speech acts; dialogue and voicing;

  dialogue – turn-taking, exchange; reaction and interaction:

  dialogue and relationships; response as the condition of

  dialogue; relationships and character

  Chapter Eleven: Teaching and learning the art of writing

  drama

  137

  Aims and boundaries

  Chapter Twelve: The pedagogic process

  142

  Overheard conversations; languages and individual resources;

  words on the page, in the air and on the floor; scenes on the air

  and behind the fourth wall; analysis and possibility; plan, event,

  conflict and subtext; time and place; structural imperatives –

  beginning, middle and end; immediacy, pivot and exposition;

  example: narrative and causality; structure; pivot

  Chapter Thirteen: Subject matter, character and

  follow-up

  166

  Subject matter, theme and message; character; rewriting

  and further writing; after class

  Chapter Fourteen: Culture and representation

  173

  Gender as a case study; women dramatists

  Chapter Fifteen: Conclusions

  181

  Bibliography

  183

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  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page 1

  Introduction

  This book is about the art of writing drama. The statement sounds more straightforward than it actually is. The ‘art’ refers to the position of drama as one of the performance arts. ‘Writing’ refers to a skill and understanding of conventions which are distinctive to the dramatist, and which have symbiotic links with other imaginative literature – poetry and prose fiction, all covered by the now widely used phrase ‘creative writing’. The overarching term ‘drama’ is Janus-like: looking in two directions at once. It gestures towards the written and/or published text on the one hand, and to the complexity of performance and applied technical approaches to production on the other. These two interdependent artistic practices result in a combined product (the performance/artefact, live or recorded) and the discrete written product in the text on the page (sometimes, but not always, published in book form). The two are generally distinguished by the terms ‘dramatic text’ and

  ‘performance text’.

  Learning to write drama

  Drama comes to us via a number of technologically distinctive media: theatre, radio, television and film. It is read, seen, enjoyed and studied in many different contexts. Drama schools train

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  The Art of Writing Drama

  performers, technical staff and, more recently, have provided opportunities for students interested in becoming directors. Set and costume design can be studied at art schools, and film schools provide training courses for the technologically intensive forms of recorded drama. However, all these have addressed the skills of writing drama to a much more limited extent.

  In universities, Theatre Studies were invigorated in the last part of the twentieth century by the development of Performance Studies. Influenced by anthropology, cultural theory and semiology, this new subject illuminated the complex, intertwined ways in which meanings are created in performance. Performance Studies exist alongside, or have been incorporated into, more traditional university drama degrees, which study the histories of theatre and published plays. However, here too, the actual writing of drama has rarely been included as a distinct practice, with its own history and theory.

  This is not to say that writing drama is unpopular: quite the opposite. Theatres, radio, television and film companies are inundated with scripts from aspiring writers. The vast majority of these – an estimated 95 per cent – are rejected, but enthusiasm persists. The thriving amateur theatre movement in the UK not only devotes itself to staging productions of established plays, but also has a large appetite for drama specially written for amateur production. In adult education and community-based writing courses across the country, writing drama is a strong presence.

  Since the late 1960s there has been much more stress on the development of new writing, in particular for theatre. Occasional residencies for playwrights enable developing writers to work in theatres, and for dramaturgs/directors to support, and often produce, their writing. Some theatres run ‘workshops’ for new drama and organise staged readings for new work. Many theatres have educational outreach activities, including Theatre-in-Education, where there are opportunities for ‘devising’ new drama, with input from local communities, teachers and the company, to

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page 3

  Introduction

  3

  select subject matter and be more closely involved with the writing process. In recent years BBC radio, the largest drama-commissioning organisation in the world (some 1,000 dramas each year), has also set up new writers’ initiatives. Film schools include writing specifically for film as one of the skills students can acquire.

  There is thus some opportunity for those who want to write drama to learn within the industry, as it were. Of course, this can be very rewarding. Producers, directors and artistic directors may be sensitive readers and genuinely interested in developing ‘talent’, but inevitably the extent to which this can be done is relatively limited.

  Theatres and production companies are primarily there to produce work which will enable their survival, economic and artistic, even if publicly subsidised. Education is not their primary purpose. Most directors are not writers, and their expertise lies in the way they read and respond to already written drama. This responsiveness to text is vital; in a context where work is devised with companies, any would-be writer is bound to learn a great deal about what other theatre workers bring to their work. However, writing is a distinctive skill in its own right. Industrial apprenticeship of this kind can be helpful, and should continue. However, it is now timely to extend the way in which writing drama is thought about, understood and practised.

  This book is positioned in relation to all the various ways in which the art of writing drama may be developed and learned. It is not, in any way, a replacement for those who may devise work with companies or directors to develop their writing in relation to the practicalities and imperatives of theatre production and performance. This book augments those hands-on processes, by enabling students and writers to stand back from the immediate practical pressures, to become aware of the place of drama in the performance and literary worlds, and to think about what is involved in their own developing practice of writing drama. It is written out of the experience and thinking of a dramatist, and from a passionate conviction that writing drama is a writerly skill in its own right – its relationship to performance-in-production is what gives it a

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  The Art of Writing Drama

  different complexion from writing for publication as poetry and prose fiction are. In particular, this book has been spurred by the establishment of a new area of study in higher education – creative writing.

  Creative writing and drama

  The rapidly expanding field of creative writing (CW) degrees has, in princi
ple, provided a context within which dramatic writing could be fully addressed in higher education. However, at both under- and postgraduate level, prose fiction and poetry dominate. Drama, where it is present at all, is most often taught in the form of screen-or the rather more ambiguously titled ‘script-writing’ courses. The fact that the first MA in Playwriting in this country was set up in 1989 at the University of Birmingham contrasts with the first MA in Creative Writing (in the novel), set up in 1970 at the University of East Anglia. This captures the time and culture lag in addressing the art of writing drama in formal higher education.

  In recent years the advent of creative writing in universities, at both under- and postgraduate levels, has generated a considerable number of ‘how-to’ books, which aim to provide practical advice on different kinds of imaginative writing. These are not, strictly speaking, written as classroom textbooks. Most of them are addressed to individuals, to the self-help writing market, as it were.

  In keeping with the relatively minor place of drama in creative writing, there have been fewer books on writing drama.

  This book is part of that new development, but it sets out to do something rather different, provocatively complementary to what is already available. The new contexts for studying dramatic writing as a practice provide opportunities to explore the insights of performance theory, cultural and language studies, and to discuss how they might contribute to a new approach to dramatic pedagogy.

  At the same time the practical imperatives of production and

  Art of Writing Drama pages 9/6/08 07:49 Page 5

  Introduction

  5

  performance remain acutely relevant to approaches to teaching the art of writing drama in higher education. This makes the idea of teaching dramatic writing separate from performance conditions (i.e., away from access to theatres and other forms of production) complicated in ways which are different from the conditions which apply to teaching poetry and prose fiction. However, I would argue that it is possible to do so. I will also argue that the conventions of the academic ‘workshop’, in which creative writing is predominantly taught, are unsatisfactory and need to be reconceived.

  In other words the book offers a framework for the practice of writing drama, by historicising, theorising and critiquing its pedagogical context and procedures, and then by proposing alternative methodologies. I have set out to explore and deconstruct some commonly held assumptions which underlie most of the current approaches to writing drama, and which, as I shall argue, impede a real understanding of the dramatist’s working process as writer, and therefore affect pedagogic approaches to teaching dramatic writing. Based on a combination of this analysis and my own teaching experience over nearly three decades, I suggest some alternative approaches and methods.

 

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