The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  In 1921 the Board of Education set up an Adult Education 13 Ibid., p. 77.

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  Committee and commissioned a report on The Drama in Adult Education (1926). The committee, which included a number of enthusiastic amateur theatre practitioners, as well as Harley Granville-Barker, identified drama as ‘an instrument of education’.14

  This was also an important element in the early twentieth-century Progressive School movement, in both the US and the UK.

  Indeed, Myers has argued that creative writing as such was first taught in American schools in the 1920s, before it joined Composition as a university subject. In the UK there were a small number of progressive schools, such as Bedales, Dartington and Summerhill, based on radical, co-educational, child-centred approaches to education. They were concerned to send their pupils into the world as independent and responsible citizens. As part of this philosophy, all the arts were seen as important and included in the curriculum. There was a particularly prominent role for music, speech and drama. Pupils wrote the plays, made costumes and sets, and performed. While the writing component was, of course, important, it was only one element in encouraging group- and teamwork, and diverse forms of co-operation and collaboration.

  More explicitly writing-centred approaches were fostered by two figures. H. Caldwell Cook, teacher at the boys’ Perse School in Cambridge (where the influential critics F. R. Leavis and E. M. W.

  Tillyard went to school) published a book called The Play-Way in 1917,15 where he encouraged his boy pupils to write poetry and stories, as well as drama. Some decades later Marjorie Hourd published The Education of the Poetic Spirit 16 in 1949. Her work, with girls from eight or nine upwards, involved using The Iliad, the legends of King Arthur and Shakespeare’s plays as a basis for the children’s own dramatic writing. This was partly to develop the 14 Drama/Theatre/Performance by Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis (Routledge, 2004), p. 12.

  15 Heinemann.

  16 Heinemann, 1962

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  children’s original creativity, but also, very consciously, as a way to foster and encourage a greater understanding of the literature they were reading by doing, by exploring the forms through their own writing.

  Using drama in this way, as a means to an educational end, has now become pretty well taken for granted. The most recent professional manifestation of this is Theatre in Education (TIE), developed in the 1960s, with groups attached to professional theatres as a form of educational outreach. Often the presentations are group devised, sometimes by professionals who take productions into schools, sometimes creating productions together with pupils.

  Clearly, with such specific target audiences and a focused educational purpose, the subject matter and treatment are tailored to fit, as it were. Here writing and performance are at the service of the context and the desired issue-based aims, with benefits for teachers and pupils.

  The idea that ‘doing’ drama can also function as a ‘learning medium’17 expands the horizons of the ‘collaborative’ idea discussed in the previous chapter. In this context the processes of making drama, dictated by the imperatives of performance and working in and with groups, rather than the individually centred process of writing as such, are foregrounded. The notion that this kind of teamwork can be socially beneficial to individuals, groups and ultimately the wider society is powerful. Drama has also become an important element in therapeutic processes; in social rehabilitation and, interestingly, in corporate management training – where role-play exercises provide an imaginative insight into certain kinds of formal interactive relationships at work.

  In their potential for uses in a wide variety of contexts, with very different groups of people, the aims of these ‘dramas’ and the organisation, structure and control of the processes are likely to 17

  Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium by Betty Jane Wagner (Hutchinson, 1985). First published in the US in 1976.

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  vary. In such applied uses of drama the interaction, or interface, between the ‘art’ – the invention of relevant situations, role play (‘pretending’ to be someone else) – are tightly tailored to the particular constituency and situation.

  Teaching drama after World War Two

  In the UK the next pioneering educational stage for drama was the establishment of discrete drama departments, separate from English. The first was set up after the Second World War at Bristol University in 1947, to study the history of theatre and drama.

  Initially, the approach was still strongly shaped by a focus similar to that on the literary text in English departments. The importance of performance was acknowledged but at that point drama as a university subject ‘was in tension both with the textual analysis that was then fashionable in English departments and with the training done in acting schools’.18

  This led to a rather interesting division of labour. While university drama courses focused largely on the play-on-the-page, and on the history of performance, undergraduates often took charge of performance and production. At Oxford and Cambridge, university-wide and college-based drama groups produced plays throughout the academic year. At Cambridge, for example, where I was a student in the early 1960s, plays staged by the undergraduates were far more up to date and avant-garde than any of the drama texts on the syllabus.

  Although I was not particularly conscious of it at the time, some of my fellow undergraduates were already aware of contemporary drama hot from its first professional production. Some of the new playwrights visited these university productions and in this way many students who later became professional performers and 18 Shepherd and Wallis, op. cit., p. 40.

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  directors created their own autodidactic environment for exploring contemporary drama. Many graduates went into theatre, BBC radio drama, TV and film, becoming producers, directors and performers.

  There was thus a direct line into the professional theatre from these universities. Very few of them wrote plays as students. It was not until the later 1960s, influenced by the turbulent political and cultural climate, that undergraduate generations began writing plays, continuing to do so in the rapidly expanding alternative theatre world after the end of censorship in 1968.

  After censorship, new dramatists and new

  drama

  At the Royal Court Theatre, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) symbolised the arrival of a new generation of playwrights, initiating what has become our canon of contemporary drama.

  Even under official censorship the British theatre of the 1950s had begun to introduce different content and experiences onto the stage, drawing on popular forms of theatre, as well as the legacy of the well-made naturalistic play, which dated from earlier in the twentieth century. Joan Littlewood at the Theatre Royal in London’s Stratford East, for example, along with directors in regional theatres, began to stage plays about ordinary people, in contrast to the middle- and upper-class drawing-room theatre of London’s commercial West End. Theatre historian John Elsom observed, ‘Within ten years suave actors had been replaced by rough ones as heroes, metropolitan accents by regional ones, stylish decadents by frustrated “working-class” heroes.’19

  As the 1960s progressed, this theatre generated increasing pressure on the government to repeal the censorship laws. Socialism, feminism, the gay movement, avant-garde artistic experiments in 19 Post-War British Theatre (Routledge, 1979), p. 34.

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  poetry, performance art and theatre, all infused the theatre with ways of democratising theatre-making
and theatre-going. As Susan Bennett commented, ‘Since the 1960s many theatres have emerged which speak for dominated and generally marginalised peoples . . .’20

  Influenced by a politics which began to contest social, gender and racial cultural biases, this theatre drew new attention to the numbers of women and members of minority ethnic groups who were or were not contributing to the variety and richness of the theatre world.

  The heightened political awareness of the time helped to draw attention to the maverick and freelance insecurity of dramatists themselves. In 1977 a group of playwrights (of whom I was one) founded the Theatre Writers’ Union (TWU) which, for the first time, negotiated standard agreements between dramatists and West End, repertory and small theatres. These agreements are still in place, supported by the two main unions which represent writers: the Writers’ Guild and the Society of Authors. Walter Besant’s warnings about the need to protect theatre writers finally found fulfilment, nearly a century later.

  The dramatists who emerged from the alternative theatre movement joined those who were being actively encouraged by directors of theatres devoted to producing new plays. Theatre history, studied through the lasting reputations of produced and published playwrights, sometimes gives the impression that the dramatists ‘lead’ the production process. In fact, it has always been the case that new writing in the theatre comes about because of the insights and adventurous decisions made by the artistic directors of theatres. Of course, these people are responding to what dramatists are writing, or want to write, but such drama is only staged if those who run theatres are willing to take the risks. Writers – with the honourable and probably unique exception of Alan Ayckbourn – are very rarely in such executive decision-making positions. The pioneers of our vital modern theatre were artistic directors such as 20 Theatre Audiences, p. 1.

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  George Devine and Joan Littlewood who, at the Royal Court theatre and at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East respectively, were highly influential in encouraging new writing. After censorship ended many theatres made sure they had a smaller studio theatre attached to the main house, with the express purpose of putting on new writing.

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  3 The performance text

  The academic counterpart to the radical theatres of the 1970s was the development of Performance Studies. Influenced by revived intellectual interest in continental theory and post-Marxist writing, Performance Studies expanded the sources and possibilities for conceptualising the way meaning was/is created in theatre. Drawing on developments in semiology, this was a valuable addition to the established academic convention of only studying plays-on-the-page.1

  Theory

  One of the most vital, if sometimes intractable, questions about what theatre ‘is’ was formulated by Raymond Williams as the

  ‘relation between a dramatic text and a dramatic performance’.2 The concept of performance rightly directs attention to the ‘realised’

  dramatic event and thus, by implication, also to the audience/

  spectators. However, in the theorised attempts to understand the role of the audience as creators of ‘meaning’, a three-way tension is created between the written text, the realised performance and the 1 See, for example, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama by Keir Elam (Routledge, 1997). Originally published in 1980.

  2 Drank in Performance by Raymond Williams (Penguin, 1972), p. 2.

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  audience. This can easily become a contested way of trying to determine in an absolute way exactly where ‘meaning’ is significantly created, as well as how.

  If this is seen as a singular, monolithic question – i.e., the idea that meaning is created either in the written text, or in performance, or by the audience – we are in danger of reducing serious conceptual and practical discussion to a matter of competition, with the remaining two elements somehow seen as secondary, or neutral, or as creating not-meaning. If that is what we do, then we must add other meaning-creating figures to those jostling for interpretive supremacy: the critic, who reviews performance, and, later, the academic, who may study any or all of these, or any permutation of them, as well as those who study the play on the page as a literary text. The truth is that meanings are inevitably created at every stage along the way of writing/producing/performing/publishing drama.

  Drama theory becomes particularly difficult, because its real task should be to clarify the relationship between these different moments of meaning-creation.

  In the sometimes abstruse field of literary and cultural theory, Valentine Cunningham has cut to the chase, returning us usefully to some basic principles. In one of the most eruditely sceptical and exhilarating books produced in the wake of literary theory, Reading After Theory, he commented:

  Certainly everything that Theory comprises, operates on one zone or another, or in some combination, of what have proved the main continuing focuses of literary theory since poetics and discussion of aesthetics began with the Greeks and Romans.

  There’s only ever been up for grabs, for theory, a simple trio of knowable, thinkable, zones, corresponding to the three components of the basic model of linguistic communication.

  There is always, and only ever, a sender, a message, and a received – a writer, a text, a reader – the act of writing, the thing written, the reading of the written thing – the literary input, the

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  literary object found to be ‘there’, reader(s) attending to this thereness. Or, if you like, cause, consequence, effect. Only three: but a mighty three for all that. And the whole history of criticism, of theorising, is merely a history of the varying, shifting preoccupation across the ages with these three zones, and with these three alone.’3

  Of course, when we take this triumvirate and relate it to performance, each category is compounded. The ‘sender’ consists of the written text plus all those working on the production. The ‘message’

  is divided between performance, production and published written text (or filmed/recorded event). The ‘reader’ also becomes multiple; not just because of the pluralist presence of the audience(s) at the moment of the consumption of performance, but also because any written text has already been subject to various kinds of ‘reading’ via those who have applied their transformative labour to create the performance/production. There is a parallel with reader-response theory, which argues that it is the reader of fiction who is the real creator of meaning and thus, like the audience, ‘productive’ of meaning. However, the vast majority of audiences for drama cannot be easily identified as individuals, or as coherent groups, for the purpose of attributing clear sources for the ‘creation’ of particular meanings. The use of audience questionnaires can only catch a response at one particular moment (generally, as soon as the audience has seen the drama). This cannot take into account the longer-term impact of a dramatic work, and the ways in which time and memory affect the ‘meaning’ it will carry for its spectator(s).

  Anthropology

  The theorisation of ‘performance’ derived its initial impetus from the disciplines and approaches of anthropology. The significant 3 Blackwell, 2002, p. 29.

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  study was Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Here the rituals and ceremonies of everyday life were elaborated into a metaphorically articulated series of roles and performances. Goffman ‘built his work on the basis that everyday life is framed and performed’.4 Richard Schechner developed this work, relating it to theatre and comparing the assumptions of Western traditions with those from other
performance cultures:

  ‘Ritualised behaviour extends across the entire range of human action, but performance is a particular heated arena of ritual, and theatre, script and drama are heated and compact areas of performance.’5

  The social performance rituals associated with sport, religion and theatre, for example, share certain features, particularly those defined by time and place, and the presence of an audience. A certain predetermined sequence of events takes place in designated places, at specified times. Some of the same conditions apply to other kinds of dramatic performance – film, TV, radio, video. Performance theory, when applied to theatre, demonstrates particularly clearly the insights and problems as they apply to the process of writing drama.

  Schechner makes distinctions between the different elements of performance: ‘To summarise thus far: the drama is what the writer writes; the script is the interior map of a particular production; the theatre is the specific set of gestures performed by the performers in any given performance; the performance is the whole event, including audience and performers (technicians, too, anyone who is there).’6

  4 Performance Theory by Richard Schechner (Routledge, 2003), p. 296. First published, 1977.

  5 Ibid., p. 9.

  65 Ibid., p. 87.

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  Performance and meaning

  Performance theory, concerned as it is with meaning at a number of levels, does, however, have some baseline problems, particularly in relation to live performance: ‘Theatre is . . . a live art, and its liveness poses two obstacles to study. First, it leaves us with no recallable text, no convenient and definitive reproduction we can take away and examine at leisure . . . theatre involves the simultaneous presence of both spectator and performer.’7

  If part of the argument is that meaning is crucially created by the audience, then the nature of the entity ‘audience’ must also be identified and characterised, in order to be clear about the authorship of such meanings: ‘The meanings offered by a particular theatrical event, then, are produced in the interaction between auditorium and stage. Theatre governs its own reading by establishing relationships, ways of viewing that enable the audience to make sense of the theatrical text . . .’8