The workshop as therapy group
From another point of view, related to the idea that CW is a form of 11 Creative Writing; education, culture and community (NIACE, 2005), p. 211.
12 Ibid., p. 206.
13 Ibid., p. 133.
14 Ibid., p. 156.
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self-expression, Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson have suggested:
‘Creative Writing classes may become, on occasion, arenas where deep feelings and emotions are unearthed and expressed, and teachers and group leaders may sometimes find themselves in the position of counsellor or therapist, without the appropriate skills to act as such.’15 Teachers need ‘to be aware of the importance of creating in the classroom a “holding environment”, to use Winnicott’s term, within which participants can feel safe enough to engage more closely with their inner worlds. This can be done by organising peer support within the writing group itself, or through the availability of individual consultations with the tutor, or by having available counselling or psychotherapeutic backup which can be used when necessary.’16 This conflates pedagogic and therapeutic structures and procedures, and gives CW teachers an impossible – if not emotionally dangerous – responsibility.
These conflictual pedagogic models are shoehorned into a practice that renders the workshop a house of correction, built round rewriting, rather than writing. Untheorised (or, at best, very under-theorised) principles of ‘criticism’ are translated into by turns brutal and patronising exchanges. This devolves the conceptual oppositions into the student–teacher relationship, as well as in CW’s relationship to its own histories – those of literature, literary criticism and literary theory. The apparent sanctuary within which creativity is supposed to flourish turns out to be a repository for a set of emperor’s clothes, which do not fit. It is in this academic context that teaching and learning the art of writing drama takes place.
Theatre workshops
Joan Littlewood’s pioneering work at the Theatre Royal, Stratford 15 The Self on the Page, ed. Celia Hunt and Fiona Sampson (Jessica Kingsley, 1998, 2002), p. 12.
16 Ibid., p. 33.
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East in London was called ‘Theatre Workshop’, and ‘workshop plays’ became a characteristic label for a great variety of theatre work during the 1960s and 1970s. However, the egalitarian process of the political/alternative theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s had an ironically paradoxical relationship to writers. On the one hand there was much talk of removing the so-called tyranny of the dramatist (and the director). On the other hand, after a period when all skills, including writing, were taken on by everyone in the group, groups began to acknowledge that writing was a skill that was important in its own right. Writers were then brought into, and participated in, the group devising process. This was productive in a different way, and raised some interesting, and not always comfortable, questions about who ‘owned’ the text. The individual writer might have put the words on paper, but the members of the group (who were, in fact, employing the writer) also often wanted control of the content and the performance’s ‘message’.
Although much was made of sharing all skills, in practice these groups tended to be performer dominated – inevitably, because of the numbers involved. This gave performers valuable experience of control in deciding on the subjects of plays and on the ‘message’
they contained, a contrast to their relative powerlessness in the rest of the professional theatre. It also meant deciding where touring shows were performed and building active relationships with audiences before, during the shows, and/or in discussions at the end of the performance. Theatre in Education groups created plays about specific subjects, targeted at particular age groups; performed in schools, they often had, and still have, an active relationship to many of the subjects or topics taught more formally in the classroom.
As has already been mentioned earlier, some of this work was influenced by visits from companies from other countries. For example, a visit by the American La Mama company in 1967
influenced director Max Stafford-Clark, who ran the Traverse Theatre Workshop in Edinburgh from 1969 to 1972. He brought
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writers (sometimes teams of writers) together with the performers.
He was not the only one to work in one of a range of versions of this participatory group approach: ‘The process of shaping or creating a script during rehearsals, of relying on the ideas of a whole company rather than upon an individual writer, has played a decisive part in the activities of the fringe since 1968.’17 Subsequently, Stafford-Clark set up the Joint Stock theatre company in the early 1970s, where he continued to work in this way. A writer and subject matter were decided on, then a company of performers hired and everyone (with Stafford-Clark as overall director) researched, discussed and improvised for a number of weeks. After this the writer went away and wrote the play, drawing on the previous group work as she/he wished. The same company then rehearsed and performed the play.
At the end of the process the play was credited to the individual dramatist, rather that to the whole company.
This way of working was slightly different from the more overtly campaigning, radical political theatre groups, such as Red Ladder, or the Women’s Theatre Group. Where Joint Stock always retained the traditional roles of director and writer, these other groups worked for some time on the principle that everyone could do anything, with each person developing all the skills needed to prepare and perform a theatre piece. Red Ladder emerged from a London group called Agitprop, which initially produced posters, leaflets and pamphlets. The group took the name because they used a red ladder in one of their early shows, to illustrate the hierarchy of class.
Conclusions
Of course, all these approaches are entirely valid; they are often exciting, stimulating and skill-expanding. However, they have never supplanted the traditional writerly role for more than a short period 17 Disrupting the Spectacle by Peter Ansorge (Pitman, 1975), pp. 47–8.
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of time. In the right circumstances such group-devising practices can be useful for writers to learn ‘from within’, as it were, about production and performance, but they teach little or nothing about the art of writing drama as a skill in its own imaginative and literary right. For new and/or young writers, such work can be immensely valuable, and it is telling that for virtually all the professional dramatists who began their work in this way there came a point where their own imaginations and decisions about writing became paramount.
This is not because they learned all the necessary skills and could then branch out on their own, nor that they acceded to the dreadful bourgeois individualism of narcissistic literary production. It was (is), rather, that often, precisely because of the experience of trying to merge imaginations and forms of expression in writing and performance (different systems of signification, as the semiologists would say), important realisations were made. These consist of an understanding that while we all live, experience, think, imagine and write in cultural contexts, the location for the melting pot which processes and individuates the shared context is the dramatist’s imagination. Writing is fundamentally a solitary job, whatever the form.
Different ways of working are not intrinsically opposed. Students of writing drama benefit a great deal from working with, interacting and acquiring some training in performance and directing, but this is only likely to be possible in drama colleges, where practical performance-based work is part of what’s on offer, or in a
‘workshop’ context offered by a theatre/company. But even within this kind of context, each imagination and intellect must come to terms wi
th its own resources and the skills entailed in writing cannot be collapsed into, or confused with, the skills entailed in performance and production. The conceptual and imaginative work necessary for written work of any complexity may coexist with, but can never be superseded by, group work. The art of writing drama is, in the end, not a collaborative art.
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7 The concepts in how-to books on
dramatic writing
The poeisis of drama (the making/writing of the dramatic text) has its own how-to literature. Books about writing film scripts tend to be format and formula driven, generally on market-based models of successful Hollywood films. It goes (almost) without saying, that even following these models meticulously will not necessarily result in a script which will be bought and filmed.
Analysing the foundation blocks of drama-writing books is an interesting exercise. Each book, implicitly or explicitly, lays down a set of principles, on the basis of which the author recommends certain approaches to the act and art of writing. Since the drive behind the books (as with all creative writing texts) is practical – to guide people into writing drama – theorisation of the practice of dramatic writing rarely figures consistently. Distilling and analysing the principles conveyed by the books is important, and also provides some succinct material for discussion in class.
Some basic rubrics cross-reference (consciously or not) approaches to writing prose fiction. Both genres share certain identifying structural features and issues concerning content or subject matter. At the most basic level, the matter of narrative, or story, or plot (whatever the niceties of distinctions between each of these) and ‘character’ (however defined) are held in common. While dialogue is part of the armoury of novelistic devices, it takes on quite a different, and major, status in the drama. This, along with drama’s
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relationship to performance, means that the manifestation and realisation of any common fictional principles in the writing process are very different.
Additionally, the how-to books reveal notions which owe allegiance to traditions of literary criticism derived from the novel, to some of the tenets of creative writing pedagogy and to theatre
‘theory’, reaching back to Aristotle. Indeed, there are some who still assert that Aristotle’s principles are the guiding spirit behind today’s mass medium of film, as if to argue that there are eternal, universal
‘rules’ for drama. As we shall see, matters are not so simple.
Linda Cowgill has claimed that Aristotle’s dictates can simply be applied to screenwriting.1 There is also the wonderfully titled Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilisation, by Michael Tierno. In 1949 the second edition of John Howard Lawson’s book, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (first published in 1936), appeared.
Expanding the book later to include a second half devoted to film, Lawson commented that ‘Contemporary theories of technique are still based to a remarkable degree on Aristotle’s principles,2 and that
‘Aristotle is the Bible of playwriting technique’.3
Robert McKee took a more historical approach. While Aristotle considered story as primary and character as secondary in drama, McKee pointed out that these principles were reversed as the novel became dominant. Even though McKee asserted that the argument about the primacy either of story or character is specious, he himself still privileged character: ‘The revelation of true character . . . is fundamental to all fine storytelling.’4 McKee also offered a structural estimate of the number of ‘events’, relative to different genres: a film may have between forty and sixty, a novel more than sixty and a play fewer than forty. Of course, this 1 Secrets of Screenplay Structure (Lone Eagle, 1999), Hyperion, 2002.
2 Ibid., p. 1.
3 Ibid., p. 9.
4 Story, p. 103.
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all hinges on what one means by ‘events’. In general terms, however, this is consonant with the fewer number of words the dramatist has at his/her disposal and the differentiated implications in terms of structure.
The following summaries come from a wide range of how-to-write-drama books: The Crafty Art of Playmaking by Alan Ayckbourn; Dramatic Technique by George Pierce Baker; New Playwriting Strategies by Paul Castagno; The Sound of One Hand Clapping by Sheila Yeger; Stage Writing by Val Taylor; The Playwright’s Guidebook by Stuart Spencer; Playwriting by Sam Smily; True and False by David Mamet; Three Uses of the Knife by David Mamet; Theory and Technique of Playwriting by John Howard Lawson; The Playwright’s Workbook by Jean-Claude van Italie; Playwriting by Noel Greig; Writing a Play by Steve Gooch; The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri; The Playwright’s Handbook by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn.5
Each of the following sections reveals differences of opinion and contradictions, a great deal of serious commitment and often a singular lack of argued clarity in the books. Of course, this can be celebrated as diversity and variety, but it also testifies to the complexity and, at times, muddle in argued understandings of what constitutes the art of writing drama.
Action or character?
There are differing views on, and sometimes a conflation between, whether action or character is the prime determinant of drama. This is not a new debate and seems no nearer to being clearly understood or resolved, because the terms are never really defined. The issue 5 Faber, 2002; Da Capo, 1976; Routledge, 2001; Amber Lane Press, 1990; Crowood Press, 2002; Faber, 2002; Yale University Press, 2005; Vintage, 1999; Vintage, 2000; Putnam’s, 1949; Applause, 1997; Routledge, 2005; A & C Black, 2004; Isaac Pitman, 1950; Plume, Penguin, NY, 1996.
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takes a particularly vexed form because of the concomitant of performance, where the concept of ‘action’ carries the empirical reality of three-dimensional physical movement.
Baker, Lawson, Pike and Gooch argue that ‘action’ is the more significant, ‘character’ is argued as primary by Archer and Smily.
Most how-to books agree that drama generally has a ‘protagonist’, or, in Aristotelian terms, a ‘hero’, a single central character. Finally, in almost every one of the books discussed, dialogue only appears in one of the last chapters (if not the last), almost as an afterthought.
Sometimes it is actively warned against as a dangerous device or activity, which might get in the way of the ‘real’ thing. This argument is often presented for methodological reasons – on the grounds that other kinds of preparation are necessary before the dialogue itself comes to be written. By implication this resonates with the form of the novel in which, indeed, dialogue is secondary.
This curious state of affairs is evidence of a conceptual problem in coming to terms with the distinctiveness of dramatic writing and a tendency (subliminal, conscious or not) to bring its principles in line with those of the novel.
Action, conflict and crisis (actions speak
louder than words)
In criticism and theory of the novel, terms such as story or narrative or plot are commonly used. Indeed, literary theory has developed a strand of thought called narratology, which theorises the nature of narrative itself, as well as providing models of stories – fairy tales and myth are often cited as exemplars. In discussing drama, terms such as ‘action’, ‘conflict’, ‘crisis’ become the norm, eliding into concerns about character and ways in which ‘character’ and ‘action’ interrelate. As we shall see, references to the imperatives of performance
– onstage and in rehearsal – also influence the ways in which these issues are formulated in the books.
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La
wson’s inclusive definition owes as much to what happens in performance as it does to the conceptual work of the dramatist:
‘Dramatic action is activity combining physical movement and speech; it includes the expectation, preparation and accomplishment of a change of equilibrium which is part of a series of such changes.’6
A more specific definition of action for him is: ‘Any change of equilibrium constitutes an action.’7 In other words, an ‘action’ is a sequential moment in the narrative (story, plot).
In drama the particular narrative imperative is characterised as
‘conflict’. According to Pike and Dunn, conflict is ‘struggle, clash.
Controversy, disagreement, opposition, collision, fight.’8 Lawson pinpoints the nature of the conflict and its representation: ‘The essential character of drama is social conflict – persons against other persons, or individuals against groups, or groups against other groups, or individuals or groups against social or natural forces – in which conscious will, exerted for the accomplishment of specific and understandable aims, is sufficiently strong to bring the conflict to a point of crisis.’9
The concept of crisis, a central, or most significant narrative moment, is considered essential: ‘Crisis: a state of things in which a decisive change one way or the other is impending.’10 Gooch stresses the importance in terms of ‘a climax to the central bone of contention within the play, a moment where the clash of forces within it is at its keenest . . .’11 The climax, or central narrative moment, then leads to ‘the unknotting or disentangling of a complication’ – what we might also call the denouement.12 This narrative arc is then generally presented as the structure within which the drama is/must be written.
6 Lawson, p. 173.
7 Ibid., p. 171.
8 Pike and Dunn, p. 33.
9 Ibid., p. 168.
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