The Art of Writing Drama
Page 3
During the decades in which I’ve taught playwriting much has changed. The Creative Writing landscape has been transformed, with under- and postgraduate degree courses proliferating. Along with developing my own method of teaching the art of writing drama, I have also gained extensive experience in teaching poetry and prose fiction writing at university level and in adult education.
As a result of this, I am certain that one of the most important elements in understanding the practice of the art of writing drama is to know what makes it distinctive from other imaginative forms, particularly prose fiction.
This book will, I hope, be of interest and use to many different groups of people. Drama-writing courses in adult education can be augmented by encouraging students to think about what they are doing, while they develop their drama-writing skills. Those involved in devising, in dramaturgy, directors and producers interested in generating dramatic writing will, I hope, understand more about the
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Introduction 15
difficult and discrete practices in which the dramatist (student and professional) engages. In higher education the imperative to think about, theorise, as well as engage in the practice of learning by doing is powerful.
The book will be of use to teachers of creative writing, enabling them to expand courses they already teach, or are developing. It will also be useful to students who are interested in the relationship between writing drama as practice, and the excitements of conceptualisation involved in reading and understanding cultural theory. The book will help to bring a practical application into Theatre and Performance Studies, and perhaps contribute to bridging the gap across increasing specialisation at academic and professional levels. Above all, it will contribute to the understanding of anyone who is interested in what is involved in the art of writing drama.
This book makes an unabashed call for the rehabilitation of the dramatist as writer and of the dramatic text as a distinctive form of writing. I believe that by so doing, a space is created to bridge the pedagogic and vocational, and to help clarify the relationship between writing and performance, from the perspective of the dramatist.
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1 Drama – the apparently incomplete
text
There is, wrote Raymond Williams, a ‘confusion, both theoretical and practical, in our contemporary understanding of the relation between a dramatic text and a dramatic performance . . .’1 This
‘confusion’, or question, is at the heart of writing drama.
There are a number of terms used for the dramatic (written) text:
‘blueprint’ is perhaps the most common, but there are others.
Playwright Ronald Hayman described it as ‘more like a code or a musical score, as a scenario for a series of theatrical impacts which can be achieved only in a public performance’.2 Director David Jones commented that: ‘a play is a stepping stone to the theatrical event which is the play in performance.’3 Sam Smily defined further:
‘A written play, by itself, isn’t a completed work of art, but an important ingredient for the creation of drama.’4 Jean-Claude van Italie advised: ‘Don’t think of a script as an end in itself, but as a musical score for actors’ voices and a blueprint for theatrical action.’5 Playwright and director Alan Ayckbourn wrote that for him, ‘writing . . . is in a sense only the preparatory notes for the 1 Drama in Performance (Penguin, 1972), p. 4. First published in 1968.
2 How to Read a Play (Grove Press, 1977), p. 9.
3 Making Plays, Richard Nelson and David Jones, ed. Colin Chambers (Faber, 1995), p. 58.
4 Playwriting, by Sam Smily (with Norman A. Bert), (Yale University Press, 2005), p.
10. First published by Prentice Hall, 1971
5 The Playwright’s Workbook (Applause, 1997), p. 17.
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Drama – the apparently incomplete text 17
directing process; directing is the continuation and completion of the writing.’6
Some of these pronouncements derive from the work of academics, distinguishing between different parts of the theatrical process, some from teachers and writers of drama, attempting to formulate an aesthetics of dramatic writing. Ayckbourn, of course, wrote as both writer and director, with the above quote coming from the point of view of the director in him. Similar comments are often made about writing for film. Robert McKee, in his lucid and influential book on writing for the silver screen, commented, ‘A literary work is finished and complete within itself. A screenplay waits for the camera.’7
Clearly, there are both theoretical and practical reasons for this assertion of the putative ‘incompleteness’ of the drama-writing process. But whatever the reasons, historical, academic or industrial, the idea that a dramatic script is ‘incomplete’ amounts to a deeply problematic cliché. I am deliberately calling it a cliché because it has become an unthinking way to undermine the importance of the dramatic text and therefore of the dramatist’s work. By virtue of constant assertion, the cliché is elevated to quasi-theoretical status, or to a ‘universal’ truth.
From the notion that the written dramatic text is ‘incomplete’
follow a number of assumptions. Especially significant is the implication that the text does not exist adequately as an object for scrutiny until it has been lifted off the page and embodied in performance. It must, therefore, be difficult to read and understand:
‘It is because the playtext is such a strange – incomplete – object –
that it seems useful to have a guide as to how someone might get the most out of dealing with this object.’8
The idea that the dramatist produces an incomplete text puts him/her into a strange situation. She/he supposedly produces 6 The Crafty Art of Playmaking (Faber, 2003), p. ix.
7 Story (Methuen, 1999), p. 394.
8 Studying Plays by S. Shepherd and M. Wallis (Edward Arnold, 1998), p. 1.
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something inherently secondary, always lesser and offering only a starting point, a signpost for the ‘real thing’, for which the director and the rest of the team are responsible, because (a) performance is considered more important than text-on-the page, because (b) it is only in performance that ‘real’ meaning is created. This is a profoundly ironic state of affairs, given that Theatre Studies still direct considerable serious attention to playwrights and plays, and that (word-free theatre apart) there can be no performance and therefore no theatre without written texts. One might at this point legitimately wonder why any writer should ever bother to sit down and write something which is inherently incomplete. Because they’re star struck, plain masochistic, or humbly grateful that they are being allowed to experience some of the glamour and excitement attached to performance?
Drama as collaborative art
The second, and related, cliché, is that theatre/film etc. are
‘collaborative’ arts. This, too, demands further examination. In all dramatic forms of production there are clearly demarcated skills – a division of labour: who does what and the ways in which different skills and functions link and combine in the finished performance.
This product appears seamless, but is clearly the result of a long list of skills which contribute to the finished artefact. The person with whom the dramatist has his/her main working relationship is the director. In this relationship there is a clear division of labour: the writer writes, the director directs. Sounds simple. The writer has the skill to do one thing well, the director has the skill to do another thing well. Each refines his/her expertise during the course of his/her cultural practice as part of the production of the dramatic event in performance.
However, director and writer occupy different positions of temporal authority, or power, within the production process. These
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Drama – the apparently incomplete text 19
are not just straightforward distinctions of artistic skill. Whereas the writer’s job begins and ends with the act of producing the written text (writers may be consulted on casting, set etc., but even when consultation is enshrined in a contract, it doesn’t guarantee full consultation, participation or agreement), the director’s responsibility extends over a far wider field.
The director is the person responsible for co-ordinating all the artistic and technical skills, including the contribution of the writer.
Ultimately, the director is accountable to the management/
producer. This gives the director overarching responsibility and an inevitable degree of power, and this is the predominant working model which operates in all the performance industries.
Put bluntly, the dramatist is completely dependent on his/her director. A dramatic text will stand or fall on its first showing/
production, depending on the director’s achievement. Good direction and performance (begging the detailed question of what that is!) can cover weaknesses in the writing. Bad direction (ditto) can destroy a brilliant text. Inadequate or uneven direction might blur or leave under-realised aspects of the written text.
Directors, particularly artistic directors of theatres and companies, have the commissioning power upon which all dramatists depend for professional survival, publication of their texts and the ability to make a living. Dramatists survive, and enjoy the opportunity to develop their work, if their plays continue to be produced and, for this to happen, the plays must also be published.
Only a relatively small number of new plays reach publication and these tend to come from the larger, more prestigious theatres, and only if the first production is successful.
When a dramatic text in any medium goes into production, however welcome the writer may be, whatever changes might be made to the text during the process, the writer’s job is essentially done. The writer becomes an informed spectator, but nevertheless no more than that: a spectator with special interests, but not a central participant. The director is in a position to influence the
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script, but the dramatist is, very largely indeed, very unlikely ever to be in a position to exert much influence over a production. At best, his/her responses and comments all filter through to the director, who is (must be) the final decision maker.
Production can as easily (some might say more easily) take place without the writer as with him/her present. During the 1970s the Writers’ Guild and the Theatre Writers’ Union spent a great deal of time putting in place a contract, which asserted and protected theatre writers’ rights. The right to presence in rehearsal was a hard-won principle – and one for which the writer is paid only a very small token amount. BBC radio drama contracts have a participation clause with a pitifully tiny payment for a day’s attendance. In film, the writer has an even tougher time. This is not likely to encourage any writer to believe his/her presence in rehearsal (or, indeed, their work perhaps) is really taken seriously or fully acknowledged.
Writing drama as an imaginative mode of
thought
These comments do not derive from a conviction that the dramatist is a hermetic, arrogant creature, superior to all other interaction with fellow dramatic workers. Nor is it to suggest that the dramatist
‘should’, as of right, be a full participant during the rehearsal process. Many aspiring dramatists gain an enormous amount from working with directors on rehearsed readings, or the first productions of their plays. It is often the case that new plays are subject to some form of rewriting during rehearsal. This is not a bad thing, as long as the director is not peremptory. Often the revelations that follow from the excitement and insights of rehearsal contribute to producing more finished writing, and enable the dramatist to continue writing in the future with greater understanding and skill.
The point I want to make here is that, in general, if the fundamental, conceptual work has not been done by the dramatist before a written
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Drama – the apparently incomplete text 21
text seriously enters the production process (i.e., the director’s first reading and then rehearsal), no amount of tinkering stands much significant chance of transforming the work. Writing takes a long time; it entails thinking, imagining, thinking, writing and thinking and rewriting. A great deal – if not all – of this takes place away from the rehearsal floor. All dramatists know this.
Dramatic writing, as such, is therefore not intrinsically a collaborative art form, any more than writing novels or poetry is collaborative. Clearly, there is teamwork involved later in the process and because part of the team (in the form of the cast) is visible onstage and their names are listed in the programme (or film credits), it may appear as though in some way they have all consciously worked as a collaborative team.
In the performance arts, many people with different skills work together on the same production, but they do not all have the same decision-making power, or the same creative options. Indeed, none of these people can begin work properly until they have something to start work on and with. The dramatist’s resources and raw materials come from different sources or origins, closer to those of writers of other imaginative literary forms.
Writing drama is a matter of entering a particular mode of imaginative thought, which is then realised in terms of a particular set of writerly (literary, if you like) conventions. For this reason there is no automatic cause-and-effect relationship between writing and performance: a drama is not written ‘for’ performance, even though performance is one of its possible forms (and, in many cases, the only one) of publication.
Real teamwork, democratic or otherwise, only fully happens when it is structured in such a way that everyone both contributes her/his own skill, while acknowledging the other skills within the relevant existing power structure. This can be very strictly hierarchical, or with different kinds of inbuilt egalitarianism. The experiences can be productive and, equally, they may be frustrating and oppressive. It all depends, in the end, on the
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working ethos and, in the most conventional working structures, on the relationship between writer and director. The cosy idea that it is just all, in some way, ‘collaborative’, serves to mask the authority structure, keep the writer in a constrained place and conceal the extraordinary and distinctive imaginative process with which a dramatist works.
Drama as a visual medium
As an extension of the notion of the written text as only one component of a collaborative art comes the concomitant cliché that writing drama is a ‘visual’ art. This, too, needs to be unpacked. Of course, all dramatic texts have a very powerful relationship to the
‘visual’, insofar as performance is seen and heard, and is literally visualised by its other participants. In terms of the text itself, the concept of the ‘visual’ is considered to be contained within the device of ‘stage directions’, or information which relates mostly to what is ‘seen’ in performance, rather than what is heard – i.e., the dialogue. However, at best, stage directions are ambiguous and unstable elements in drama, and need discussion in their own right (see chapter 8).
Misunderstandings about stage directions come about because of an inadequate grasp of how a dramatist works and what she/he does, and also because of a fundamental theoretical confusion about the written text itself and the ways in which it relates to, and is distinct from, prose fiction. The particular dominance of dialogue, or the utterance, or speech acts in dramatic fiction demand attention, and will be discussed in more detail later in this book (see chapter 9). But dialogue is primarily aural rather than visual, even though in performance it is an element in what is ‘seen’. Dialogue is emb
odied (voiced) by the performer, not made visual. If that were so, radio drama would be an impossibility. In radio, everything is heard and not seen.
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Drama as the novel manqué
The final cliché, that the dramatic text is either hard to read or unreadable, has two related implications. First is the more obvious assumption that, because it is ‘incomplete’, subject to completion in production/performance, it can only be partially read by the lay person (and then only with difficulty), or read by the expert (i.e., the director/producer), who will then become the Svengali to bring together all the component parts in performance. Second is a more profound, hermeneutical implication: if the dramatic text cannot be properly ‘read’ on the page, this suggests that its meanings, or any meanings it may have, or convey, or contain, or yield, are either inaccessible or only partially accessible on the page, and (to complete the familiar circular argument) only finally ‘meaningful’ in and via performance. This is particularly ironic in view of how much time is still spent studying, analysing and writing about the dramatic text on the page, and how many academic books and articles address drama on the page as a distinctive kind of literary text (which, of course, it is).
If the dramatic text is unreadable, or only readable with difficulty, the implication is that it can only be ‘read’ with special training –
something beyond the ability of most readers. While this expressed
‘difficulty’ must be taken seriously, it must also be seen in its proper context. The notion owes far less to any supposed ‘difficulty’ of reading the dramatic text than to the fact that in our culture the novel is still the dominant fictional form, providing a reading
‘norm’. This means that anyone deciding to read a dramatic text comes to it with conscious, or unconscious, expectations of what she/he may find, by implicitly comparing it to the experience of reading prose fiction.