The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

  2 Baker, op. cit., p. 279.

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  because they compensate for something the dramatist has been unable to do ( pace Baker), or because they are truncated versions of something the novel can do better; or something which, more fully written, belongs in a novel: this is all an extension of the

  ‘incomplete’ status generally attributed to the dramatic text. In any case, stage directions can never compete with their equivalents in the novel. As Martin Esslin wrote, ‘verbal accounts of the visuals lack the evocative power descriptive passages hold in narrative literature.’3

  The inadequacy of such description, compared with its potential adequacy in the novel, has been reinforced by some critics.

  Raymond Williams suggested that stage directions indirectly perform a function which is more explicit in prose fiction: ‘Much of the detailed description of atmosphere, character, look, gesture and manner of speech comes in fact from another literary form, the novel, in which this kind of description can be direct.’4 To clinch the argument that stage directions are either indirect or incomplete in comparison with the novel, he makes the salutary point that if Chekhov had spelled everything out, he would have ended up writing a novel.

  Main or subsidiary

  Aston and Savona have argued for stage directions and dialogue to be seen as integral parts of the same (if ambiguous, ‘incomplete’, in their terms) text. They take as their guideline theorist Roman Ingarden’s distinction between the dialogue as ‘ Haupttext’ (main text) and stage directions as ‘ Nebentext’ (subsidiary, marginal text).

  The fact that such a distinction is necessary at all again refers outwards to, on the one hand, the novel, and on the other to the processes of production/performance.

  3 The Field of Drama, p. 81.

  4 Drama in Performance, p. 129.

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  Acknowledging ‘the status of the novel as the dominant literary form of the modern period’, Aston and Savona have attempted to heal the breach between the two textual elements: ‘it is hardly surprising that the play-text is often read as a novel manqué’,5 by suggesting ways in which to follow Ingarden and see ‘stage directions and dialogue . . . as complementary and interdependent signifying systems’.6

  This appears to be supported by Patrice Pavis: ‘For the text itself, notation traditionally takes the form of linguistic transcription, with its own methods suitable for indicating change of speaker and the author’s or director’s stage directions. But as soon as one wishes to describe the unfolding of a concrete production, the system of notation must take account of an unlimited ensemble which can cover visual and acoustic phenomena expressed by means of stage systems.’7 Aston and Savona rely on stage directions as the written signifier of an active connection between written text and performance: ‘the implication that the dual identity of the dramatic text, its simultaneous existence as literary artefact and as blueprint for production, may be argued with regard to the stage directions –

  the guarantors, as it were, of the text’s theatrical potential –

  themselves.’8

  There is no real sense in which the stage directions actually do or can guarantee the text’s ‘theatrical potential’, since, as we shall see, stage directions and dialogue generate different kinds of ambiguity in relation to performance. Additionally, whatever their complete/

  incomplete status, stage directions can always be read as part of a distinctive kind of written text in its own right – i.e., they are ‘read’

  as prose, rather than dialogue. While the form of the novel allows for an integration between two different modes of writing (prose/

  5 Aston and Savona, op. cit., p. 72.

  6 Ibid., p. 73.

  7 Patrice Pavis, Language of the Stage (Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1993), p. 113.

  8 Aston and Savona, op. cit., p. 75.

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  dialogue), the form of the drama, both on the page and in performance, does not operate so seamlessly.

  From directions to performance

  Aston and Savona assume a linear progression between text and performance: ‘the reading of a performance action from the text is a logical and straightforward proceeding.’9 In fact, it is anything but.

  They indirectly acknowledge this by suggesting that some stage directions are addressed to the performer, and that ‘the directions which are relevant to the work of the designer, the lighting designer and the technician may be regarded as constituting an outline brief’.10 As we shall see later, there is a qualitative difference between the addressees (literal) of dialogue and stage directions (putative).

  The reality is that one can, and should, take stage directions as an entirely different kind of guarantor: of redundancy. As soon as the dramatic text goes anywhere near the production process, one can guarantee that the stage directions will – effectively, because they must – go out of the window and be ignored. Dialogue, on the other hand, can never be jettisoned; it must be explored, reproduced and transformed from written to spoken form.

  Aston and Savona’s book does, however, provide some fascinating categorisation of stage directions, with implications for writing dialogue. Dividing them into the ‘intra-dialogic’ and the ‘extradialogic’, they make a distinction, which, for the purposes of this book (see later in this chapter) draws attention to the indicators from within the dialogue itself that some ‘action’ has happened. The categories include elements which apply to character identification, facts about appearance, information about voice and facial expression. This is an interesting exercise and is well worth reading.

  9 Ibid., p. 76.

  10 Ibid., p. 133.

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  However, it may help to compound the ambiguities attached to stage directions, rather than clarify what they are, what they cannot be and what relevance they may or may not have for the dramatist as writer.

  Aston and Savona are not the only ones to assume a straight line from stage directions to performance. Where stage directions have been addressed in the how-to books, authors take a similar approach. Val Taylor suggested that they are instructions ‘to a member of the team . . . try to think of them as invitations’.11 Adrian Page actually seemed to believe that through stage directions ( Nebentext) ‘a playwright can ordain exactly how the dialogue is to be played and what effects should derive from it’.12

  Directors must, of course, ‘interpret’ stage directions – or not.

  Director David Jones, working with film, has offered a comment which can, effectively, also stand for directors’ attitudes to stage directions: ‘with a movie script it is much more difficult to strike a balance between the writer’s concept and the continual nudge towards how the thing might be directed.’13 The scripts he read in Hollywood were ‘horribly full of directorial comments, which I don’t think should be there . . . they not only tell you at great length what every character is feeling at every moment . . . but also they tell you what you are feeling about what the character’s feeling . . . What I want is the events, the characters and what they say, then there’s a mystery left in the story and I have a job to do.’14

  Two material arguments gainsay the idea that stage directions are genuine, workable instructions to the various skills involved in production, and that they lead straight to performance. This is connected with the argument that there are different systems of signification operating in writing and performance. In the case of dialogue the language moves from written to spoken or enunciated 11 Taylor, op. cit., p. 118.

  12 The Death of the Playwright edited by Adrian Page (Macmillan, 1992), p. 6.

  13 Jones and Nelson, op. cit., p. 48.

  14 Ibid.,
p. 49.

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  form. The word ‘fish’ on the page will recognisably sound as ‘fish’, although how it is said/inflected is subject to what we call

  ‘interpretation’, which depends on narrative context and purpose. In the case of stage directions, the written form becomes redundant in principle. In practice, while it may be a pleasantly suggestive part of reading the text-on-the-page, it can never be precisely matched or correlated with what is visualised, or non-linguistically represented.

  There is an assumption, by analogy with the conventions of the post-classical musical score, that dynamics and expression markings are the equivalent of stage directions; that is, they are instructions for performance. This is only partially the case. Metronome markings, which define the duration of a particular ‘length’ note, can be included, to give a precise guideline for the basic pulse of a piece or movement in a piece. So, for example, a crotchet = 85 can be precisely set on the metronome and the pulse followed by performers. However, in practice, this is likely to vary (deliberately, or by chance); it might be above or below 85; it might, according to the aesthetic vagaries of conductor or performer, be speeded up to 100, or slowed down to 60. The 85 is a technical approximation, which in performance is more likely to refer to gradations of speed between different sorts of ‘fast’ and different sorts of ‘slow’.

  What does not, however, allow of variety is the fact that all the notes of the piece are very carefully demarcated relative to the dominant pulse or note value. The move from written to aural (the sounded) can be precisely correlated; that is, a note in the appropriate place on the stave indicates a ‘C’ at a certain pitch.

  However, even this is historically variable. Our current reference point, that the sound of an A = 440, works for classical and modern music, but anything written before (say) the middle of the eighteenth century might well have been played at one of a number of slightly lower pitches. The early music movement has extensively explored such historical documentation, with the result that the same marking on a stave (say, our middle C) can sound at one of a number of possible (all aurally quite close together) pitches. In

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  Renaissance music, in any case, such markings were virtually entirely absent; it is not until the era of Classical music and after (the full era of public staging of both concerts and theatre) that such additional musical ‘stage directions’ arrived.

  Historical studies of stage directions in drama confirm this variability and instability. There is very little documentation of the way plays were actually staged between the 1580s and early 1640s.

  The editors of A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama 1580–1642 collected over 22,000 examples of stage directions.15

  There is no certainty about whether or how these were or might have been observed in performance, nor about who actually wrote them down: dramatist, stage manager, scribe? There is also no way of knowing whether the directions were written in before or after the first or subsequent performances.

  It is often the same with published plays today. Stage directions might just as easily be a notated record of what happened in the first production and included by the dramatist, rather than what the dramatist wrote as part of his/her ‘own’ text. Of course, in a sense this is a testament to the contribution of ‘teamwork’ to the written text, post hoc. If the dramatist doesn’t like what the director did, because she/he owns the copyright to the written and published text, she/he may change it at will, and there will be no record of the director’s work on the page.

  The plays published by Samuel French for the amateur market make a point of including fairly detailed drawings of the possible stage settings, and lists of props and costumes, to help guide the amateur production process. These are more likely to come from the play’s first production, rather than from the pen of the dramatist. The same may, of course, apply to any changes to the dialogue during rehearsal of the first production of a new play; changes approved by the dramatist may appear in the published text, or they may be ignored, as the author returns to his/her 15 Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson (Cambridge University Press, 2000). First published 1999.

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  preferred version.

  Extra-dialogic stage directions

  Customarily, a written drama will begin with some indication of its setting, its time and/or the characters who first appear on stage. The following quotations are examples to support my arguments.

  Anyone interested in the changes in stage directions through the twentieth century should take a selection of drama from different decades, to see how the practice has been changing. Generally speaking, as the twentieth century progressed, stage directions became more sparse. This is partly to do with some of the post-1968

  explorations of more open styles of staging, away from the

  ‘traditional’ proscenium arch.

  These are the opening words of three plays, all stage directions, written over the span of nearly a century. They are offered for analysis, not as lessons for how to write stage directions, or as examples of what to avoid:

  ‘ A pleasant room, tastefully, but not expensively furnished.’ ( A Doll’s House, Henrik Ibsen, first published 1879.)

  ‘ A fine spring morning on the river Meuse, between Lorraine and Champagne, in the year 1429, A.D., in the castle of Vaucouleurs.’

  ( Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw, first published 1924.)

  ‘ The Porters’ one-room flat in a large Midland town.’ ( Look Back in Anger, John Osborne, first published 1957.) As opening sentences, they have a number of things in common: first of all, none of the sentences has a verb. Each is couched in a declamatory style, like announcements. The first and third describe an interior location (room, flat), the second a more general geographical location and the time of day. Ibsen indicates the class orientation of the room’s owners and his sentence could be read as

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  implicitly addressed primarily to the set designer. Shaw creates a novel-like cultural setting, which also pinpoints the historical distance of the action flagging the fact that this is a history play.

  Osborne’s is the only opening to mention any people – the Porters

  – and it implicitly assumes that the reader is likely to be English and will understand the oblique reference to the ‘ Midlands’. All three sentences, in their different ways, could be implied as addressed most directly to the set designer. If they appeared as the beginnings to novels, they would be ‘read’ as stylistically unusual, quirky even, in relation to conventional prose-based expectations.

  On further examination, all the opening stage-direction sentences turn out to be little more than the most basic and general of

  ‘instructions’, rather than information which can be literally translated into a performance text. What is ‘ pleasant’, ‘ tastefully’, ‘ not expensively’? What does a ‘ fine spring morning’ look like? How ‘large’

  is the town? How is it to be indicated, if at all? Is it background information, or visual clue? Interpretation, interpretation, interpretation. Interpretation inevitably opens up the possibility of deviation.

  The declamatory openings signify the dramatic convention of the here-and-nowness, the present continuousness of the stage moment/performance. This is ironically reinforced by the absence of a verb and therefore by the absence of any tense referring to either an identifiable past or an identifiable present. Performance, with the audience there, always takes place within the demarcated space and time of the ‘performed’, continuous present. As with poetry, which more conventionally and acceptably dispenses with verbs, we read the opening sentences as taking place in an abstract present
. We thus read informed by a number of conventions in mind: those of performance, poetry, drama and prose.

  After the opening announcements, the prose settles into more sequential paragraphs. The stage directions at the beginning of Look Back in Anger consist of three substantial paragraphs. The first is ‘addressed’ to the structural controllers – the designer and the set

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  builders: ‘ The ceiling slopes down quite sharply from L to R.’ There is a generalised list of furniture: ‘ a heavy chest of drawers’ – but what colour, how large, who decides whether it is ‘heavy’, and is ‘heavy’

  to be somehow visible, detectable? The paragraph is written in the third person, in the present tense. The directional indicators, ‘L’

  and ‘R’ (Left and Right), are theatrical shorthand, suggesting that the narrator has some relationship to them from wherever she/he is positioned. By analogy with the lack of verbs in the opening sentences, this device also flouts the conventions of prose.

  Since the ‘scene’ is what is (implicitly) onstage, this might suggest that the narrator is on the stage, and that L and R are to his/her L and R. However, the next paragraph changes the perspective. The first sentence, ‘ At rise of curtain, JIMMY and CLIFF are seated in the two armchairs R L respectively’ suggests that they cannot be seen until the rise of the curtain, i.e., it is only then that they can be seen from the front of the stage. The next sentence confirms this, pluralising the narrative voice: ‘ All that we can see . . .’. The narrative voice is now ‘in’ the (plural, ‘we’) audience, as it were: ‘ At rise of curtain’ (note the shorthand again, no definite articles), and then, if the narrative voices are now positioned in the audience, R and L are reversed. That is, the audience’s ‘right’ is actually the ‘left’ of anyone standing onstage. The sentence contains two narrative vantage points simultaneously, before jumping off the stage and settling in the auditorium.