by Paul Ashton
come very much into play.
There is a recent movement and collective of ‘Monsterist’ playwrights
who are sick of making small choices and instead want to make bold ones,
THE MEDIUM 19
leading to plays on a grand scale such as Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s exploration
of suffragism in Her Naked Skin at the National, or Richard Bean’s family
saga spanning a century on an East Yorkshire farm in Harvest at the Royal
Court.
Yet there is also an increasing ‘miniaturism’ in the form of writers,
directors and actors with no money putting on readings, showings and
productions with a minimum of scale, or writers delving into short-form
theatre.
This is the hard choice for the early stage playwright. Be big and bold
or be focused and doable? Well, it is possible to do both. You can be bold
within severe limitations. And no amount of screen projection, holographs,
VJs, DJs, flashing lights and hydraulic sets will compensate for characters
and story that do not engage. The reason Seven Streams worked was due to
the intense, focused attention to character amidst the ambition of scale and
design. And a lot of small studio-space plays are barely worth seeing because
the characters are not worth spending the time with. (But then neither are
they in many a big, brash West End production.)
Fundamentally, you don’t have to worry about whether your script
will get made at this point. I always say to write the play you want to write
and to hell with the realities, the theatrical politics and the chances of it
getting made. You won’t get commissioned later for having played it safe in
the beginning, when the only person reining you in was yourself.
THE DIRECTOR
The director can be your greatest challenge, your biggest headache, and yet
your most valuable asset (and friend). In some ways, especially in dedicated
new writing companies, theatre is the writer’s medium. But in more recent
history, it has become as much a director’s medium. If the playwright is
dead, this is less of a problem. But if the writer is, like you, alive and well
then it’s a more complex relationship. Every writer’s style will differ, but it’s
worth remembering that directors can and will feel restricted by lengthy,
unnecessarily detailed stage directions; they enjoy the scope to bring their
own vision and mercurial touch to your play. When it works, it’s magical.
When it doesn’t, it’s despairing – and invariably it’s the writer and play
that will come away feeling and looking worst off for the experience. The
20 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
more open you are to the potential in the collaborative medium, perhaps
the less likely it is that you will write yourself into a corner.
Whether apocryphal or not, the story goes that when Harold Pinter
directed his own plays he drew a sharp distinction between the two roles of
writer and director, and in rehearsal referred to ‘what the writer might
intend’ rather than ‘what I mean’. Not many writers are capable of success -
fully, objectively directing their own writing. Do yourself a favour: think
like a writer, not a director. And if you do want to direct your own work,
then you need to learn to be a director – and this is most usefully done by
first directing other writers’ plays rather than your own.
THE ACTOR
We’ve always needed great actors (obviously). They aren’t always easy to
control or keep consistent. I had to discipline a very experienced actor for
messing around on stage – but the night he brilliantly ad-libbed his way
out of a big hole dug by a forgetful stage manager was the moment I
realised how indispensable he was. In theatre, you are reliant on actors in
a way alien to radio, film or TV, because once the play starts there is little
you can do from the comfort of your seat. But if you create characters that
actors can really sink their teeth into, they’ll probably love you for it and
veer less from what you have actually written than they otherwise might.
DIRECTING THE ACTION
As a writer, you direct the action rather than direct the play or direct the
director. Stage directions in ancient theatre and classical English theatre
were traditionally sparing, simple, affecting the action rather than describ -
ing the set. And this is because an elaborate ‘set’ is a relatively modern
phenomenon.
Extremely detailed description came to the fore in the realist works of
Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw, though this was more to do with setting the
scene rather than a continuously dense dramaturgy throughout the play.
I’m not sure stage writing has quite recovered from this – at least not in the
work of anxious, aspiring, precious, protective writers who have not prac -
tically engaged with the production process. The simple fact is that dense
stage directions are usually not good to read; they are somehow alien to the
THE MEDIUM 21
usual purpose of a stage script, which is to show the action. Directors hate
them, actors hate them, designers hate them.
Thankfully experienced dramatists tend to know better and to have
more faith in what they do with character, story and space, so that they do
not need to rely on overwriting the stage directions.
Read Gary Owen’s Shadow of a Boy and you will see spare, minimal
stagecraft in all its preg nant glory. The point is that plays are written to be
played. It’s not the play wright’s job to weigh the script down with unneces -
sary words. It’s the playwright’s job to craft a play that will play.
THEATRE AND METAPHOR
Theatre is also the place where metaphor can inhabit a space and grow. In
film, if you point a camera at a dead bird then it remains a dead bird and
no amount of pointing will really change that. In theatre, a dead bird can
become a symbol, a metaphor that grows and develops and deepens by its
continued presence. Chekhov’s The Seagull is not about a seagull, even
though there is an eponymous dead seagull in it. The Seagull is about the
death of dreams, ideals, ideas and aspirations in both the asphyxiating
boredom of a provincial town and the destructive anonymity of a big city.
This only works in theatre because only in theatre does the metaphor grow
and linger in the physical and theatrical space.
RADIO AND THE ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT
‘THEATRE OF THE AIRWAVES’
If you ever hear anyone suggest that radio drama is the ‘theatre of the
airwaves’, strike it from your memory and consign it to the dustbin of poor
understanding in which it deserves to remain. Quite how the form, medium
and experience of theatre might translate and transpose to audio broad -
cast, I’m not exactly sure. Many (though not all) writers are able to write
well for both forms. Beyond this, the main similarity between the two is
that it’s much more likely that a writer will get an original idea before an
audience in theatre and radio than in film or TV.
22 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
CINEMA OF THE AIRWAVES
This is also an imperfect way of simplifying the form and medium – but I
/>
think it’s much closer to what you as a writer could be thinking. The most
powerful radio has the ability to provoke lasting images in the mind, and
this is akin to the visual scope of cinema. If you can apply the potential
fluidity, scale, scope, visual imagination and ambition in the best cinema to
your radio writing, then you will be setting off on the front foot rather than
finding yourself sinking in a quicksand of words, words and more words.
THE CONTRADICTION
There is an inherent contradiction in scriptwriting for radio: you are utterly
reliant on the effect and power of words, in particular dialogue/monologue
writing, but story and drama can quickly be smothered and weighed down
by too many words, too much dialogue – heavy blocks of monologue and
‘speeches’. The reason for the reliance is because you only have the sense of
hearing and the medium of sound through which to tell your story. You can’t
use literal visual images and physical relationships as you can in theatre, film
and TV. Radio is purely acoustic, purely audio, and sets a constant challenge.
AUDITORIUM
The radio audience’s auditorium can be any number of places on the sur -
face – anywhere you can receive and amplify a signal, or listen again online.
But actually, the true auditorium of radio is in the head and in the mind –
the space into which the ears channel the sound. For radio more than any
other medium the success of the play depends utterly on its ability to
stimulate the private auditorium that each listener individually possesses.
When you become a passive, casual listener of radio drama, you are essen -
tially not hearing, not listening, not in the auditorium, and it will wash over
you, as soon forgotten as it is heard.
THE PUREST FORM
Perhaps there’s no such thing as a pure or purest form. But for the
scriptwriter, radio is certainly the most naked dramatic form – the one in
THE MEDIUM 23
which your words either stand up and carry the whole production, or buckle
under their own dead weight. There are few other distractions, no places to
hide, and only so much that a director, producer or engineer can do to mask
a poor or workmanlike script. So if it isn’t the purest form, then perhaps it
is the one in which the purities and impurities are most starkly and
candidly on display. Brilliant when it works, leaden when it doesn’t.
THE AUDIENCE
Another reason why it is the most naked form is because the medium tends
to define the audience experience narrowly. In the past, before the ubiquity
of TV, families did listen to radio together. A testament to the power of that
experience is the story of the Orson Welles radio production of War of the
Worlds, which when it began wasn’t framed as a fiction and so set off a
panic in many a listener (as recaptured in Woody Allen’s film Radio Days).
But increasingly radio drama is something people tend to listen to alone.
Here lies another contradiction. It is the most intimate, direct and
therefore naked of mediums, and yet because it is unusual for it to be
experienced in group settings, it is almost impossible to measure how
affecting that intimacy is, because it’s more difficult than with other
mediums to observe, feed off, share with, experience with. As a writer, you
can get deep into the audi ence’s head – yet you will never really get to see
them being an audience. This isn’t as true of radio comedy, which is
frequently recorded before a live audience; but radio drama will tend to
remain a leap into the unknown, measurable only by listening figures or
letters, calls and emails of praise or complaint.
ONLY FOR RADIO
You should always ask yourself if your idea is something that would only
really work on radio – or would work best and most powerfully on radio.
What if your story is set on a chaotic battlefield in the middle of a dense
fog? Or in the Gobi desert in a sandstorm? Or a black hole in outer space?
What if? It may be you would never get the money to shoot these settings
with a camera crew. It may be that the listener’s mind is the ideal canvas
on which to project them. The radio version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy will in my opinion always be the best – nothing looked cheap,
24 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
nothing was cut due to excessive expense, the characters and settings
always ‘looked’ like you expected them to in your head, and anything was
possible, no matter how weird.
ACOUSTIC ENVIRONMENT
Radio isn’t about sounds and SFX (sound effects) so much as it is about
significant sound and acoustic environment. Here’s an example of SFX:
The sound of a car engine rumbling away. The car slows and stops.
Handbrake on, engine off. Door opens, then closes. Door locked.
Footsteps. Gate creaks open and shut. Footsteps down garden path.
Key in door lock, door opens, then clicks shut. Footsteps down corridor.
Kettle switched on and kettle boils. A tinny radio is turned on.
A mobile phone rings.
So, a lot of SFX. But really, nothing at all of significance has happened –
except perhaps, potentially, the mobile phone ringing. Every other sound
signifies nothing of meaning – no story. They are just noises. It is amazing
how much time and energy new writers can waste on meticulous detailing
of SFX to no dramatic end. It is usually more powerful to simply state the
acoustic environment, get on with the scene and story, and allow the pro -
ducer and sound engineer to do the rest.
SCOPE
On radio, you can be fantastically bold with ideas. You can literally do
things and go places that would be impossible or expensive in another
medium. And not just physical things and places. You can go into the womb
with an unborn baby. Into the conscious head of a physically inert ‘coma’
patient (though this has been done a great deal now). To the centre of the
earth. Into the guilty part of a character’s conscience. In radio, there is
unique imaginative scope and potential. In any other medium, such things
might appear very odd – yet in radio, they don’t appear half so strange.
You can work on the grandest scale imaginable or go direct to the most
intimate part of a character and audience’s mind. You can be ambitious. You
can be fluid in the storytelling and challenge the audience’s sense of disori -
entation because they only have one sense with which to orient themselves.
THE MEDIUM 25
You can explore the physical and subtextual space between words. You can
make silence truly silent. You can’t read a character’s facial expression –
but you can play with the intrigue around what they mean by what they say.
You can help the audience create their own unique personal visualisations
rather than simply laying it out on a plate for them. The acoustic environ -
ment is a unique storytelling arena.
VOICE
Some assume that words and dialogue are the most crucial thing in radio.
I would say, rather, that it is voice. The character’s voice is truly crucial. It
is what we use to filter thei
r personality, the drama and much of the action.
How the voice communicates with us will set the tone, feel, pace, rhythm,
experience of the play.
Many plays are, like much theatre, film and TV, made of realistic
‘exterior’ action and dialogue, where characters interact and the drama is
in the tangible external world. But you need not be limited by this.
Voice over (VO) is very hard to achieve because action on radio barely
exists without voices of some kind, therefore it will be a ‘voice over voices’,
and that way potential confusion lies. But you can go ‘close’, rather like in
a theatrical soliloquy, where you can hear what other characters can’t,
where you are privy to a direct line into a character’s head, thoughts, feel -
ings, opinions, point of view.
You can write monologue, where everything we hear is from one voice.
This is extremely hard to do well and needs to be dramatic – not simply to
relate or explain the story, but to live and breathe the story in the moment.
You can write ‘narration’ – but again be careful. Don’t write a blank, exposi -
tory narration: great narrators are subjective, have voices, opinions and are
not necessarily trustworthy. You can use voiced epistles – letters. You can
use voiced diary.
Language is crucial. Not just words, but how a voice is characterised
and expressed – as in Lee Hall’s Spoonface Steinberg, in which a young girl
who is dying has a language that is poignantly all her own.
Language is everything. And you can interplay between any and every
different form if that is the most effective way to tell your story and voice
your characters. As Katie Hims says, ‘A voice can inspire a story in the same
way that a face can.’
26 THE CALLING CARD SCRIPT
MUSIC
Don’t underestimate the power of music to express, underscore, underline,
counterpoint, contradict and undercut your story and characters. A well-
chosen movement, aria, song, refrain, beat and rhythm can tell the story of
a thousand words and express a gamut of emotions. But again, keep it
simple, clear, specific and meaningful. Think hard about what the music is