The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  However, even audience-response theorists admit to imponder-able uncertainties. Both Susan Bennett and Herbert Blau, intellectually astute about performer–audience relationships, have been frank about the difficulty of defining the audience in a sufficiently precise way, in order to make it into a reliable object for analysis and study. Bennett has admitted, ‘we lack any detailed picture of the theatre audience and, in particular, their role(s) in the production-reception relationship.’9 Herbert Blau also confessed

  ‘we simply do not know, in any reliable – no less ideal or accountable

  – sense, who is there . . . We are despite this still likely to generalise

  . . . about what the audience, with its disparate, cross-purposed, alienated, and incalculable perceptions, feels and felt.’10

  This reveals a problem. On the one hand, the audience is bruited 7 Signs of Performance by Colin Counsell (Routledge, 1996), p. 2.

  8 Ibid., p. 22.

  9 Theatre Audiences, p. 86.

  10 The Audience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 355.

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  as the creator of meaning and on the other it cannot be pinned down in order to elicit the meaning of any given production. There is no way, in fact, in which an audience can be appealed to for these meanings. If, at the same time, there can be no definitive material evidence of live performance which can be appealed to in support of any argument about meaning we are, seemingly, on shifting hermeneutical sands.

  In the day-to-day world of performance, audience reaction is palpable and this is always taken into account by those involved in the production. If a play is designated as a comedy and no one laughs, something must be done about it. If Shakespeare’s Hamlet produces laughs in (say) the bedroom scene between Hamlet and his mother, Gertrude, something must be done about it. The measure of applause, silence etc. – all the sounds of response from the audience – are different ways of registering the ‘meanings’ being communicated and/or received. But this does not make it easy to theorise, because it is a response from that audience to that moment in a production.

  However, this does not mean that discussion of ‘audience’ in any meaningful, collective sense is impossible or irrelevant, just that one must be very careful indeed about how the term is used. It is important to distinguish between an indeterminate conception of audience, and something more specific and empirical. Creative writing pedagogy often uses the grand-sounding phrase of ‘writing for an audience’, as if the writer/dramatist can identify what this means on the basis of a real definition of his/her putative audience.

  In fact, more often than not, ‘audience’ is used as a posh synonym for the more down-to-earth ‘market’.

  Publishers and theatres do have very clear ideas about markets and audiences (the people who will spend money to buy their goods i.e., consumers), whatever ‘meaning’ they may derive from the

  ‘good’, once it is bought. Regional theatres, which rely heavily on local audiences, will have guidelines for what sorts of shows will fill their theatres and in these circumstances it can make some sense to

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  think of a particular audience. But there is always the show/book, which is the exception. This is quite different from, say, the work of TIE companies who can often very clearly define the age, gender and cultural mix of their audiences, since they discuss and prepare their work together with the schools they are visiting.

  Audience as political and social entity

  There are circumstances where a general situation is so topical, so public and urgent, that audiences can be assumed to be bound together by their interest. For example, during the Lebanon war in the Middle East in 1983–4, three of the main Israeli theatres put on versions of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, ‘as a profound political protest against its futility and the tragic results for all involved, and particularly against the Israeli right-wing government’.11 At the Habima Theatre the stage was designed as a huge tent, with Israeli army and Bedouin costumes to draw visual parallels. For these theatre audiences the political/artistic comparisons fed into a climate of discussion and immediate political involvement. The concept of ‘audience’ here operated as a synonym for certain kinds of community, sharing certain cultural and/or political contexts and concerns.

  Since the end of censorship it has been possible to make topical theatre; the already much referred-to 1970s took advantage of this.

  During the political difficulties between the UK and Northern Ireland, events were sometimes dramatised and in recent years there have been similar docu-dramas – for example, the Frost–Nixon interviews, and various verbatim and trial plays. These only refer to an audience in the most general sense: they are plays about subjects topically in the newspapers and high up on the political agenda, and 11 ‘Theatrical Responses to Political Events’, Shimon Levy and Nurit Yaari ( Journal of Theatre and Drama, vol. 4, University of Haifa, 1998), p. 100.

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  the assumption is that audiences will be interested in seeing dramatic versions onstage. However, even here little more than ‘interest’ (i.e., enough to buy a ticket) can be assumed. There may be as many different shades of opinion in the auditorium as there are people.

  Theatre and semiotics

  In the area of performance theory some of the most interesting work has deployed semiology and semiotics to provide models to help understand the various elements which comprise performance.

  From a practical point of view these analyses are most likely to be of immediate use to directors and designers, who in any case already have very acute perceptions about cultural expectations as they relate to set design, costumes, props etc. They may not articulate these in terminologies deriving from theory, but they will know, as practitioners, that a bare stage with an orange box, which can become a table, a chair or a bed at will, will carry very different kinds of resonances from a fully furnished naturalistic ‘room’ with a proscenium arch to frame it. Again, it is worth stressing that this should not end up as a competition between intuition/experience and intellect.

  A key initiating text in the field of semiotics and theatre area was written by Keir Elam. He applied post-Saussurian theory:

  ‘Semiotics can best be defined as a science dedicated to the study of the production of meaning in society.’12 When applied to theatre in particular, it is connected with ‘the complex of phenomena associated with the performer-audience transaction . . .’ This is distinguished from a discussion of ‘drama’: ‘Drama, on the other hand, is meant by that mode of fiction designed for stage representation and constructed according to particular (“dramatic”) conventions.’13

  12 Elam, op. cit., p. 1.

  13 Ibid., p. 2.

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  Elam tussled with the relationship between text and performance:

  ‘This is not . . . an absolute differentiation between two mutually alien bodies, since the performance, at least traditionally, is devoted to the representation of the dramatic fiction. It demarcates, rather, different levels of a unified cultural phenomenon for purposes of analysis.’14 It is useful to be reminded of Terry Eagleton’s very clear account of how the object for semiological analysis (the performance or production) comes into being: ‘A dramatic performance is clearly more than a “reflection” of the dramatic text; on the contrary . . . it is a transformation of the text into a unique product, which involves re-working it in accordance with the specific demands and conditions of theatrical performance.’15 The practical process which links the dramatic and performance texts is encapsulated by the concept of transformative labour.

  Competence and pe
rformance

  The notion of prepared, theatrical performance, distinguished from the anthropologically based notion of roles ‘performed’ in everyday life, is returned to a parallel with ordinary life in Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance: the first refers to

  ‘the ideal general grammatical knowledge of a language possessed by a speaker of it, and “performance”, the specific application of this knowledge in a speech situation’.16 This has echoes with Saussure’s notions of langue and parole, which establish a relationship between a system and specific instances of its use.

  In this context, to understand anything about performance must entail an understanding of its conventions, consciously or not, theorised or not. Performance combines what is heard with what is seen; we speak and write about going to ‘see’ a play/performance 14 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

  15 Eagleton, op. cit., p. 51.

  16 Performance by Marvin Carlson (Routledge, 2003), p. 56. First published 1996.

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  but, as Herbert Blau has pointed out, what we witness is through a combination of seeing and hearing: ‘what we think about the relationship of the visual and the aural affects our understanding of the theatre’s conventions, how we approach the stage, interpret plays, favour forms, or understand their history.’17

  An understanding of dramatic conventions includes both the internalisation of what makes drama a distinctive written form, but also its staging/realisation. Everyone involved in creating performance, ‘including playwrights, have access to shared discourses, and so can employ shared codes/logics . . . ’18 Theatre thus ‘encodes meaning not merely in its overt utterances, its content, but also in its form . . .’19

  The performance triumvirate

  In terms of the specifics of performance-based creation, theatre theorists have also drawn on the work of Charles S. Peirce: Peirce distinguishes three kinds of sign: the Icon, where the sign resembles the referent, as the actor resembles a person or a stage table resembles the real thing; the Index, with a causal or contiguous relationship to the referent, as smoke indicates a fire, a soldier’s marching stride infers his profession or a knock signifies someone on the other side of the door; the Symbol, where the meaning is purely conventional and relies on the agreement of all the parties involved, so that when an actor speaks the word pig we all understand that the sound refers to a particular four-legged animal . . .’20

  17 Blau, op. cit., p. 100.

  18 Counsell, op. cit., p. 14.

  19 Ibid., p. 9.

  20 Ibid., p. 10.

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  Thus, for example, dimming lights onstage clearly indicates night –

  this corresponds to the ‘Index’ category. Aston and Savona also provide a useful glossary: ‘(i) icon: a sign linked by similarity to its object, e.g. a photograph; (ii) index: a sign which points to or is connected to its object, e.g. smoke as an index of fire; (iii) symbol: a sign where the connection between sign and object is agreed by convention and there is no similarity between object and sign, e.g.

  the dove as symbol of peace.’21

  Performance theory and the Death of the

  Author

  The tension between written and performance texts has ironically become additionally vexed by the analytical attention directed at the elements of performance. By sleight-of-thought this leads to a version-in-drama of the Death of the Author: ‘Once the “doing” of theatre is reinstated, then the notion of individual authorship is also challenged . . .’22

  Quite why this has happened is curious. There is no reason, theoretical or otherwise, why such a conclusion should follow. The fact that theatre theorists seem to like the idea that notions of individual authorship have been superseded may stem from a desire to provide a validating equivalent to the popularity of that powerful postmodern conceit, the Death of the Author. Or, perhaps, to insufficient knowledge about the way the writing process works.

  Some theorists are aware of an uneasiness: ‘One of the major thrusts of reader-response theory is to downplay the centrality of the author in artistic production. Theatre, however, has already long decentralised the playwright on behalf of the producer, director and actors. The generation of meaning in the theatre is more 21 Theatre as Sign-System; a Semiotics of Text and Performance by Elaine Aston and George Savona (Routledge, 1998), p. 6. First published 1991.

  22 Ibid., p. 2.

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  complex, and involves more kinds of participants, than literary practice does . . .’23 While this last comment is accurate, it leaves open the matter of how text creation can be addressed, without subsuming it into other functions of drama creation. Ultimately –

  pace chapter 1 – the very expansion of attention in performance theory serves to close down, if not annihilate, the written text and, with it, the significance of the dramatist.

  The Death of the Author and the fourth wall

  The space between performers and audience is known as the fourth wall, defined in cultural theory by the concept of the ‘frame’. This demarcates the space and relations within which the performance takes place, and allows for communication between performance and audience.

  In a curious conceptual paradox, devaluing the written script and the dramatist, along with focusing attention on the stage (the frame) from the audience’s point of view, has indirectly also displaced attention on to the fourth wall. This is rarely discussed in the theory, perhaps partly to do with a wholesale acceptance of the legacy of Brecht’s theory of theatre. His theory – or, perhaps more accurately, politicised intentions for theatre – was, together with his plays, an important influence on the radical drama of the 1960s and 1970s.

  Antonin Artaud had written passionately about doing away with stage and auditorium, asserting that written dialogue belonged in books, and Brecht himself actively developed forms of writing and performance where members of the cast moved in and out of

  ‘character’, to speak directly to the audience (along with other devices, such as captions onstage).

  However, rather than doing away with the division between performers and audience, and taking down the fourth wall, such 23 Theory/Theatre by Mark Fortier (Routledge, 1997), p. 94.

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  devices ironically draw attention to it even more. As Herbert Blau has put it, ‘Periodically in the theatre we want to reduce this distance, if not abolish it, modulate it for intimacy . . . the fourth wall may be down, or up, but the mural still lingers, and it lingers from the archaic theatre: no matter what it is that we see, in great things or small, something more is being repressed.’24

  Direct address to the audience focuses attention even more sharply on the fourth wall, that framed and invisible divide between performers and audience. The audience can respond only within strictly demarcated conventions and this shared knowledge is precisely part of the pleasure of testing the fourth wall. At the same time the more it is tested, the more it is reinforced. The fourth wall is never abolished in performance.

  Even in a more active interaction between performers and audience, where the latter may come onstage, it is the performers who are always in control. Music-hall heckling and banter are, in some ways, the supreme example of this. The show must always go on. Those who make theatre know this: ‘it is sufficient . . . for an actor of power to speak a powerful text for the spectator to be caught up in an illusion, although, of course, he will still know that he is at every instant in a theatre. The aim is not how to avoid illusion . . .’25

  This is the great excitement of drama: the illusion and the willing collusion in the illusion. The difficulty lies in the acknowledge
ment that ‘there is no constant relation between text and performance in drama’.26 Herbert Blau has expressed this acknowledgement of illusion in its historical context: ‘There is . . . a kind of graduated voyeurism in the history of the theatre. It has to do with how different periods distance themselves from the object being looked at, the body of performance . . .’27

  24 Ibid., p. 159.

  25 The Empty Space by Peter Brook (Penguin, 1977), p. 88.

  26 Drama in Performance by Raymond Williams (Penguin, 1972), p. 174.

  27 Blau, op. cit., p. 86.

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  Audience as active

  This does not in any way accede to the idea that the audience (individually or collectively) is ‘passive’. The act of reading a book, or watching/hearing a performance, is a supremely active one. If it were not, no one could claim that audiences or readers actually

  ‘create’ meaning. Audience members scan, receive the material and process it. Performers onstage detect collective audience responses: the quality of rapt attention, lack of attention in small movements and rustling; more vocally, laughter of many different kinds – all these attest to the activeness of audience response at the moment of performance. The activity continues for the audience after the performance is ended; in discussion, argument, in processing and thinking about the experience.

  Conclusions

  There is no doubt that the development of performance theory has transformed ways of approaching theatre studies. However, its over-strong demarcation from the praxis of production and performance leads it at times to devalue the written text and the dramatist (even while, ironically, heavily relying on such texts and dramatists to illustrate its work) and, in the interests of a misplaced radicalism, to oversimplify the relations between performance and audience: