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
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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
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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.
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ISBN: PB: 978-0-4137-7586-3
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
The Art of Writing Drama Page 1