The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  Backgrounds

  I first taught a playwriting course in the early 1980s, at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. I was already a professional writer, earning my living from plays, poetry and journalism. I began writing for the theatre in the early 1970s, expanding into short stories, radio drama and some television by the end of the decade.

  My first plays were produced in the early 1970s in the fringe theatre, which burgeoned after official censorship was abolished in 1968. I also worked as poetry editor and theatre reviewer on the (then) new Time Out magazine.

  I have always written in all three core fictional genres – drama,

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  poetry and prose fiction. I have also always reviewed all three genres and written non-fiction studies of contemporary theatre. My passion for writing drama was matched in the 1970s by my sense of urgency about the importance of documenting this new writing. As a woman dramatist I was, along with other women working in the theatre, concerned about the relatively small number of women in executive and artistic positions, particularly as writers. This will be discussed further in chapter 14. Things may have improved a little on the gender-balance front, but only a little. We are still a long way from parity between male and female playwrights.

  The ‘political’ or ‘alternative’ socialist, art school derived, gay and feminist theatres of the 1970s put onstage new content, new experiences, new ideas, from all sides challenging twentieth-century performance traditions. It was exciting and controversial in its writing, performance, venues and audiences. It continued a tradition of radicalism already there in the theatre of the 1950s, with the work of (among many others) Joan Littlewood, at the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East. Commercial theatres benefited too, not only in transferring successful productions, but in adopting some of the innovations in fluid, non-naturalistic staging. Some writers and performers who began in fringe theatre later developed careers in radio, TV and film. The new venues and audiences enabled great variety and vitality in new writing.1

  1 Disrupting the Spectacle by Peter Ansorge (Pitman, 1975); The Arts Britain Ignores by Naseem Khan (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1976); Dreams and Deconstructions edited by Sandy Craig (Amber Lane Press, 1980); Stages in the Revolution by Catherine Itzin (Eyre Methuen, 1980); Understudies: theatre and sexual politics by Michelene Wandor (Methuen, 1981), expanded and revised as Carry on, Understudies (Routledge, 1986); Look Back in Gender: sexuality and the family in post-war British Drama by Michelene Wandor (Methuen, 1987), revised and expanded as Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender (Routledge, 2001).

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  Introduction

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  After censorship

  After the repeal of official theatre censorship in Britain in 1968, plays no longer had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, before they could be rehearsed and staged. Even after a script had been approved, representatives from the Lord Chamberlain’s office might well visit the theatre incognito, to make sure no untoward ad libs or other changes had crept into the production. Theatre censorship has had a long history.

  Performance, as a particular kind of group activity, gives theatre a high-profile public presence, rather different from the relatively individuated worlds of book reading.

  Until the late 1960s, therefore, there were strict controls applied to representations of royalty onstage, important historical figures, explicit references to sexuality, nudity, potentially blasphemous content and the censorship of ‘bad’ language. These strictures could be bypassed if theatres were set up as clubs, with membership, and it was in these circumstances that much radical work was staged while censorship was still in force.2

  It is extraordinary (and salutary) to realise that writing for the theatre has only had the same freedoms accorded to the novel and poetry for about half a century. The post-censorship theatrical landscape not only helped transform who wrote and performed what, where it was performed and to whom, but tacitly now made it possible to teach dramatic writing with more flexible expectations of what a play should or could be.

  During the 1970s a whole range of new dramatic phenomena came into being: writing, venues, studio spaces, styles of performance, touring companies who performed plays in community halls, in schools, pubs, basements – anywhere with a space and an audience. Called ‘fringe’, ‘alternative’, ‘underground’, ‘political’, it was closely influenced by, and linked with, the cultural and political 2 See ‘The Royal Smut-Hound’ by Kenneth Tynan, in Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender, pp. 98–111.

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  movements of the time: socialism, feminism, the gay movement, avant-garde artistic experiments in poetry, performance art and theatre, often incorporating moves to democratise theatre-making and theatre-going. The performance-art wing of this movement focused on work which privileged a theatrical mis-en-scène in which improvisation and physical theatre put the written text, or verbal language itself, into the background.

  Paradoxically, the 1970s and 1980s were decades in which a tension, sometimes creative, sometimes not, affected opportunities for, and attitudes to, writing drama. On the one hand post-censorship theatre provided new opportunities. Politics and art, the changing demography of the UK, all introduced new voices, new imaginative worlds to the theatre, TV and film. At the same time sections of the political theatre movement privileged democratised working practices, challenging what was seen as the traditional, putatively tyrannical, authority of the individual dramatist and director.

  Cinema theory (in particular the development of auteur theory), as well as Performance Studies, focused on the ‘visual’ media of film and TV, as well as on stage performance, analysing the way meanings were created and conveyed through non-verbal means.

  Somewhere within all these the dramatist was being moved around, re-placed or replaced, displaced, challenged and sometimes just dismissed.

  Positioning dramatic writing

  Writing drama is suspended between the ideological frameworks which conceptualise the writer and writing, and the needs, skills and aptitudes which belong to those who realise their work in performance. Institutionally, it is sometimes encouraged by dramaturgs attached to theatres specialising in new writing; it is sometimes taught as part of creative writing courses; it is often a popular

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  element in adult education. The actual teaching is not necessarily linked to the practicalities and skills of production. The art of writing drama raises some very distinctive pedagogical questions about the relationship between the dramatic text and the performance text.

  The relationship between writing and reviewing drama works differently, by comparison with the novel and poetry. While it is common for novelists and poets to review each others’ books and write critical studies, in drama matters are not so straightforward. A playwright reviewing productions is assessing the work of other applied skills, as well as those of fellow playwrights. Drama critics rarely venture into the world of writing and greasepaint – and so, expert and knowledgeable as they aim to be in responding to what goes on onstage or on the screen, they rarely have any working experience or involvement on the other side of the footlights. In his still provocative book The Empty Space (first published in 1968), director Peter Brook pointed out that some of the most vibrant playwrights of that decade – John Arden, John Osborne, Arnold Wesker – had been performers and directors before they became writers. A wide range of drama-related experiences can be a great advantage for a dramatist.

  This is not to say, of course, that everyone who writes drama must also be a fully-fledged professional in another part of the process.

  Nor, it should
be stressed, does it mean that a consummate performer, director or designer, however subtly aware of the nuances of text and staging, can automatically write drama – well or at all. Like all other applied skills, writing is its own skill. It takes time to learn and develop.

  However, there is no doubt that anyone studying the art and practice of writing drama – for whatever medium – should, over time, acquire an understanding and practical experience of the nature of rehearsal, preparation for performance and the potentials of appropriate technologies. Even though a dramatist may never perform or direct, the demands and imperatives of these skills need

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  to be internalised in a way which enhances and stimulates the imagination in relation to the conventions of the dramatic form.

  Like all other CW students, those who study the practical art of writing drama need an acquired understanding of the written conventions available to them. This should ideally involve the study of written texts, history and theory, as well as the development of a variety of analytical responses to performance – all these feed back into the imagination to enable the dramatist to know more sharply and clearly what it is to write multi-voiced texts, which have an extra dimension in performance. The novelist or poet can be involved in publication, in terms of cover design, and/or the layout on the page, but that is, generally, as far as it goes. ‘Publication’ for the dramatist means not only the appearance of the text in printed form, but the third dimension of public distribution through performance, in the presence of live audiences.

  From imagination to page and stage

  This makes the pedagogy of writing drama (teaching and learning) particularly complex, since classroom-based writing is inevitably divorced from the technologies of stage, TV, radio and film. However, this very partiality can have a great advantage, highlighting one of the most important arguments of this book. I maintain that in order to apply drama-writing skills to any of the performance media, students must acquire understanding and experience in two discrete and related processes. First, writing drama must be approached as a literary, practice-based form – from imagination to page. Second, students need to acquire direct experience of the nature of performance in space and time, in relation to their own writing –

  from page to stage. The combination of these two, gradually, cumulatively, enables students to begin to understand and put into practice what is involved in the journey from imagination to page to stage. It entails a training in understanding what happens in their

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  Introduction 11

  own imaginations, as well as an understanding of the range of dramatic conventions available to them, and the potentialities of performance.

  In this context the drama-writing classroom can be transformed.

  To borrow from Peter Brook, I can take any empty classroom and make it into a stage. Moving between writing and performance in the classroom provides an opportunity to re-create many of the conditions of performance without the pressures. Alongside the writing process, students can begin to gain a sense of what happens when the words come off the page and into the air. In the classroom drama is voiced, embodied, performed, seen and heard, then returned to the page, where it moves back into the imagination and the whole process starts again. The writing moves in time and space in genre-specific ways, only available in a pedagogic experience, in a group, in the immediacy of the classroom, where the imperatives of time and space establish their distinctive relationship to the writing on the page.

  Writing drama per se – the complete text

  This book argues that a course in drama writing per se provides a foundation from which students can go on and apply their writing specifically to the stage, film/TV/radio drama-making processes. It posits writing drama as a text-centred process, while also taking fully into account other contingent and necessary processes. The ephemeral and infinitely analysable immediacy of live performance in the ‘present’ moment of the classroom can interrogate the interface between writing, production and reception, and, with enough time, can investigate ways in which each dramatic medium can have an impact on the imagination, as well as on the writing. A course in ‘writing drama’ as such is, therefore, a foundation course in the most important sense: without a secure foundation, all the tips, exercises and writing to formula risk being symptomatic rather than

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  fundamental to the pedagogic process. Going back to basic principles and stating the very obvious, the dramatist writes. That is all the dramatist does. That is everything the dramatist does. He/she does nothing else. Teaching dramatic writing cannot be done from the point of view or perspective of performance or production, and cannot adequately be taught, I would argue, by directors, however invaluable their own particular responses to text may be.

  The Death of the Author and the birth of the

  dramatist

  The argument that writing drama is a skill in its own right and not secondary to, or subsumed within, performance, resonates against what has become one of the most powerful conceits of our cultural time. In 1967 French theorist, Roland Barthes, pronounced the Death of the Author.3 The tension between the actual responsibility of the dramatist, the practicalities of performance, the notion of the death of the author along with the insights of semiology into the meaning-creating processes of drama must all be addressed for anyone interested in the art of writing drama. The conceit of the

  ‘death of the author’ fits neatly into the foregrounding of Performance Studies and the insistence of the drama industries that writing is only one of a number of elements in the process of production. Barthes’s theory (along with his other writings) has remained an implicit and explicit rubric, which still hovers behind much contemporary critical analysis and this is at odds with the newly stressed focus on authorship, which emerges from Creative Writing courses. Steering a path through all this, what follows presents a newly radicalised argument for the discrete nature of writing drama as an individual authorial practice (intertextuality and social context notwithstanding).

  3 ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes, in Image, Music, Text (Fontana Press, 1977).

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  Drama – the ‘complete’ text

  This leads to something all professional dramatists know. In the vast majority of cases, even where there is discussion with the director, some rewriting during rehearsal processes, the writer of drama for any medium fundamentally completes her/his work before the work of other people (i.e., the production process) has begun; conceptually, formally, imaginatively and on the page. An entire working process, which might take years, has been completed before the written text exists and those who work on its production come into contact with it. The generally inadequate understanding of this derives from a number of factors and conditions, all of which will be discussed in due course in this book. Even in devised drama, where one person is in charge of the writing, there is still crucial conceptual and imaginative work which is ‘authored’, to a lesser or greater extent, by the individual concerned.

  Imaginative writing, in all genres, is a specific mode of thought.

  Thinking and imagining are invisible individuated processes, although they derive from, depend on and feed back into historically and socially constructed and shared conventions. Through the deployment of these, words are written and organised, subject to an understanding of the conventions of the chosen form. In relation to writing drama these conventions involve a relationship with staging/

  production, but these are separate (and separated in practice) parts of the process. Even where drama is co-devised and/or co-written, the moments where writing is done still engage with the individual realisation (in the mind and on the page) of a cul
tural convention.

  The dramatist’s active and ultimately executive relationship and responsibility remain towards the written text. This will be discussed in relation to concepts of authorship and copyright. It will also take into account aspects of performance theory and the division of labour in the industrial process of producing drama. It is a complicated argument, but without a degree of clarity the work of

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  the dramatist (and thus the pedagogic process) remains hedged round with clichés and unexamined assumptions.

  Received clichés

  Four of these clichés will be addressed at the beginning of the book.

  The first is that the written text is a ‘blueprint’ for performance and therefore ‘incomplete’ until so realised. The second is that theatre/drama is a ‘collaborative’ art. The third is that writing drama is a ‘visual’ art. Fourth, the dramatic text is commonly characterised as either difficult to read, or simply unreadable in its so-called incomplete written form. Only through performance, goes the argument, can it be really understood and, in that hermeneutic sense, ‘read’. At the level of common sense, each of these has its resonances; but I think it is vital to begin by deconstructing them all, in order to clear a space for proper attention to the art of writing drama.