Chapter 10 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

Dialogue - The Heart of Playwriting

NOBODY SHOULD EMBARK ON THE DANGEROUS PATH OF PLAYWRITING UNTIL THEY HAVE SPENT AT LEAST SIX MONTHS DRINKING COFFEE IN A BUSY CAFE.  PREFERABLY ONE YOU HAVE TO CATCH A BUS TO GET TO. 

Skidmore:            I’ll do this. (nods to counter)

Steve:                   Eh?

Skidmore:            Watchawan?

Steve:                   (Purses lips.  Makes bubbly noise.)  You come up on the dogs? 

Skidmore:            (Pulls lips back over teeth. sighs) Uh?

Steve:                   Cheers (Sucks teeth.) Uhhhh...

Skidmore:            (To barista) (makes despairing look) Capuccino. (Gestures to Steve)

Steve:                   Nah.

Skidmore:            My treat. I said. (Closes eyes)

Steve:                   Had one here. Last week. Came in to see… (Makes grimace.  Laughs out loud for no apparent reason)

Skidmore:            Hurry up. (Nods to Queue.)

Steve:                   (Puffs air. Tuts. Shrugs.  Nods)  I don’t think… Milk. (Grimace again.  Mouths) Fridge.

Skidmore:            (Raises eyebrows)  Eh?

Steve:                   I d’no.  Americano then.

Skidmore:            (To barista) No milk

Steve:                   Cheers.

Barista:                Anything else?

(Skidmore looks at Steve. Steve shakes his head)

Barista:                That’s five pounds exactly.

(Skidmore looks hard at Steve)

Steve:                   Eh?

(Skidmore shrugs.  Studies shelves behind counter. Steve pays.)

Barista:                I’ll bring them over.

Steve:                   Cheers

I’m not being entirely whimsical.  The idea is that as a play wright, as any sort of writer, you should listen to people talking. As much and as often as possible.  You need to listen closely and at some length as you sip your americano.  You also need to blow the dust off your notebook and write down what they say and, most important, the way they say it.  Until you have spent hours and hours doing this and have acquired some understanding of the way people speak to each other; the speech patterns and rhythms, then you cannot begin to write plays.  Because the stuff of plays is made up of the interactions and interplays of characters.   If you can’t get that, then you can’t write a play.  Anybody can write a play that depends on situation or plot but to write a play that depends on character requires an understanding of how to build a character and how that character develops within and around a plot.  Indeed, how the character and the plot are inextricably linked.  What happens in a play can only happen because of that character and that character drives what happens.  And we reveal that character by the way they speak.

There are no rules about getting a character to speak.  Indeed, you will find out very quickly as you listen, that there are absolutely no rules to conversation at all.  Trying to record and reproduce is virtually impossible.  Conversational speech is broken, halting, discursive, unsettled.  Entirely without grammar or syntax as described in the conventional manuals.  Sentences have no verbs.  They do not link one to another.  They are made up partly of words, partly of sounds and partly of gestures.

What’s more, dialogues have very little logic.  It is quite possible for one person to espouse several quite contradictory ideas at one time.  Sometimes our interlocuters speak in other voices (the actual meaning of “irony” by the way).  Most of the time conversation does not follow the neat ordered pattern of question and response we would expect as writers.  Most of the time people will only talk about themselves.  Each question or statement being answered or interrupted by their own experience. As a student of conversation, I sometimes feel that the whole purpose of 90% of conversations is entirely existential.  That is, we are reaching out into the void merely to say “I am here”.

Yet, somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some sort of exchange does take place.  It may be indirect and convoluted but eventually some idea may be conveyed to the other party.

So what do we playwrights learn from this?  Firstly, that our characters need to be freed from the conventions of written speech.  This gives us the opportunities to learn about the reality of our characters.  Our character can grow with our discovery of their little tics and irregularities.  And I don’t mean that that gives us licence to write in some sort of ridiculous Dick Van Dyke cockney voice.  I mean that we can discover the outward signs of the inward workings of a character though their speech.  And as we write it we need to speak it out loud. We are trying to record a spoken interchange so it only exists in some bare notation as words on a page.  In writing dialogue it is, perhaps, useful to think of the words on the page as a sort of code that reveals your intentions for the characters. 

Secondly, we need to remember that most conversations are about anything but the subject in hand. This is especially true about complex and deep subjects. Previously I mentioned our inbuilt willingness to suspend our disbelief.  If you ally that with our need to co-operate and collaborate in social situations you can begin to see how inevitable it is that we will say things in a conversation that we may not believe in an attempt to maintain the interaction.  As playwrights we need to understand and to embrace these apparent lies.

 It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the real feelings of our character are flushed out.  This is what makes the process of play watching so enjoyable.  The audience are voyeurs trying to understand something from the snippets of half formed conversation they are allowed to overhear.  As in real life in any coffee bar, we try to work out from these snippets, what is going on in their lives.  What sort of people they are. And, of course, our characters are often unreliable witnesses.  They lie, they prevaricate, they say the very opposite of what they really think and feel.  But as the watchers begin to know and understand they begin to get more and more drawn in and engaged.

Thirdly, we need to avoid the need for stage directions.  If you’ve got the voice right then there is no need to interject (humorously) or (bitterly) it must be there in the speech itself.  If you find you have to resort to stage directions than you need to recast the speech. I would never present a play for performance as written above.  It’s for the actor to discover the little gestures and informal sounds that carry the character through that interchange. Similarly, as a director, I get annoyed by writers who write detailed character descriptions in the stage directions but do not carry them through into their actual speech and actions.  It is not good enough to describe a character as “Young dynamic and ambitious” You need to show those attributes.  You need to demonstrate how that ambition is manifested or hidden through what they say and the choices they make in conversation.

Fourthly, plot needs to correlate with the characters you are drawing.  If you are beating your characters into a particular plot twist or situation then you have either got the plot wrong or the character or, most likely, both.  The actions that a character takes are the ones that define that character and are defined by that character.  If there is a surprising plot or character twist you need to ask yourself whether you have buried that possibility deep within the psyche of the character you are working with. You need to ask yourself “does it contradict anything that has already been laid down?”

Quantum thinking and speaking

In an article from New Scientist Of September 2011, Mark Buchanan tries to relate the mathematics of the quantum world to human interaction.  An explanation, in effect, of our fuzzy way of going about things.  It casts an interesting light on the puzzle I have as a playwright - the sheer impossibility of capturing or reproducing human speech in all its wide, broken rambling, halting form but while still managing to convey some sort of meaning.  I have never managed to find a way of notating speech in anything resembling a realistic, believable way.  Pinter arguably came the closest to making this work but he still had to resort to a rather mannered "pinteresque" approach.  Of course, a playwright does not necessarily want to reproduce everyday speech exactly.  It would be massively tedious to the audience, and probably totally incomprehensible but there is an inbuilt urge towards getting closer than we have managed up to now.  The reason being that we may wish to describe in our plays a more realistic way of describing the trains of thought of our characters.  And those are inexorably linked to the way they speak.  I need to read the article several more times to get some deeper insight but I like its drift.

The Playwright's Craft - Direct Address to the Audience.

You are sitting in the cafe sipping your americano and thinking idly about nothing in particular.  The cafe owner is ostentatiously polishing your table and rearranging the sugar bowl in a meaningful way.  He lifts your copy of the Independent and wipes underneath it. Perhaps you have been there a little too long for one cup.  But at the prices he charges these days...

At the corner table two more coffees, a capuccino and a mocha, grow cold as their owners are deep in conversation.  You catch the occasional word.  What was that?  “Bomb?” “Knives?”  You become intrigued and angle yourself slightly to see if you can catch some more. “Slitting and gutting” accompanied by demonstrative arm gestures. You pick up your newspaper and lean towards them in its lee.  The cafe owner has given up and gone back to making hissing noises with the Gaggia so that you miss a chunk of the conversation.  Now you push your chair right out and lean sideways until you are nearly sitting at their table instead of your own.  “I swear by The Readers Digest Cookery Book.”  “Yes, the best ice cream bombe recipe there is.”  “And thanks for the advice on the trout”.

Ah well.  I’ll overhear more than a discussion on the culinary arts next time.  But something else occurs to me.  It concerns our inbuilt human desire to overhear other people’s conversations and, more importantly, to make something out of it.  We are hard wired to take in, to solve clues, to understand without all the information being present.  Our understanding might prove to be inaccurate but we still delight in gossip and trying to unravel something about the characters and situation involved.  Presumably in the early days of our species such understanding was a vital tool for being able to trust the people you were hunting alongside.

And so with theatre.  Writing for the theatre is a process of offering titbits of information to the audience so that they can follow and begin to fabricate an understanding from what is happening there in front of them.  This why I believe theatre grew up as a medium for dialogue between characters and why I find, as a rule, direct address to the audience rather untheatrical.  An audience member needs to arrive at their own interpretation of a character which, quite often, will be at odds with that of the writer.  So much the better, it proves that there is both depth and width in the writing.  It provides an experience more akin to real life.

And there is something else: the direct address is a deliberately alienating device.  We all know about Bertholt Brecht and his attempts to break down the barriers of theatrical convention.  But he’s done that, did that, over eighty years ago.  He was successful.  We understand the complexity of an ironical, alienated world.  Because that’s the one we live in during the twenty-first century.  We have moved on.  As writers we have to consider what live theatre really has to offer in these days of Big Brother, Jeremy Kyle and I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here. Direct address to the audience has become the language of television; almost every programme relies on that device from news, to comedy to scientific documentaries.  They all have to be presented to us. And Ironically, given the glass screen that separates us, I think that’s where it works to greatest effect.  Television is broadcast outwards, pushed towards us.  Live theatre is a medium for allowing an audience to come in, to enter a new and different world from the one they inhabit on a daily basis. We invite the audience to overhear, to become part of an event that is happening right there before their eyes.  We do not need devices to push them away. On the contrary, we need to study the craft and skill that enables an audience member to become absorbed, to become part of what is going on.  

For me, I think Direct Address shows a bit of a lack of trust in the audience.  As with all artists, the watchword ought to be: Do your work, don’t apologise, don’t explain. We don’t need to turn the theatre into the lecture hall. We need to trust that the audience has enough sympathy to be able to unravel even if they don’t understand fully.  And that we don’t need to bombard them with our vision of what they ought to be seeing.

Duane's Cowboy Boots

Duane took a gulp from his paper cup.  It was coffee.  It was black coffee.  It was very good coffee.  “In a little while,” thought Duane “I will send out for a donut.  A krispy Kreme with pink icing and fudge chunks.  That will be good,” thought Duane.  He paused.  “But not yet.  I will not send out for a Krispy kreme donut yet as I must watch my waistline and I ate a donut only an hour ago.”  Duane liked to be precise in his thinking so he checked his large Breitling watch.  “Fifty five minutes ago, I mean.”  Duane corrected himself.

Duane looked back at his computer screen.  Odd words and phrases scrolled across it in an almost random way.  But there was a pattern there.  Duane knew there was a pattern there as he had been told there was.  All he had to do was to find it.  Duane liked his job.  It was very simple watching this screen and trying to see some sort of sense in it.  Duane was a CIA operative based in West Virginia USA.  He liked working for the CIA as all he had to do was to watch this screen and he could send out for coffee and donuts whenever he felt like it.   Sometimes he felt a little pang of loneliness as he saw no-one else all day long whilst he was at his post.  His orders for coffee and donuts were left on a little table outside his cubicle.  Sometimes, when he popped his head out to pick up the coffee and donuts he lingered briefly to see if he could spot anyone else in the corridor.  But he never had.  He knew there must be dozens of other operatives like him in their cubicles, staring at the same sort of screens.  Hundreds, thousands even in hundreds of other long corridors in this vast (he supposed it was vast) underground concrete complex of long echoing corridors lined with identical little cubicles. But he never saw another soul.  Not even the coffee and donut deliverers and, he supposed, there must be hundreds of them scurrying back and forth, this way and that delivering coffee and donuts to the thousands of identical cubicles in hundreds of echoing corridors throughout the concrete building.   And then when he thought some more about it, it probably wasn’t just black coffee, it was probably cappuchinos and macchiatos and double shot skinny lattes.  And maybe there was more than just donuts  out there.  Maybe there was cheesacake and apple strudel and so on.  Maybe some operatives even ordered tea and ate burgers.  It was possible.  No, it was likely.  Although he had never seen any evidence of it.

In the training for this job they had reminded him that although he was sat on his own at a computer screen all day long he was still a CIA operative, in fact he was in the front line of CIA operations as he was monitoring for possible untoward activity on the internet.  But whilst he was monitoring untoward activity he was still a CIA operative so he was expected to turn up for work properly presented in well-pressed gray suit, shiny black shoes, white shirt and a tie of a discreet colour.  He was not expected to wear rings or other jewellery.  Duane was not of a naturally rebellious nature and he knew that those of a naturally rebellious nature were the type of people who caused the untoward activity he was trying to spot.  But for all his natural conformity, after a few months of duty at his screen when he had not observed another living soul, he let his neatly coiffed hair down metaphorically and took to wearing his favourite cowboy boots under his neatly pressed gray suit.  The cowboy boots had intricate tooling all down the sides and Duane felt comfortable in them.  He had even decided on his line of defense if it came to it and he was questioned about the boots.  He would say that he was able to undertake his duty more efficiently wearing comfortable cowboy boots without all that distracting pinching emanating from the stiff, shiny black regulation shoes.  And so the months had passed and there had been no memo or directive about his cowboy boots so he sometimes even allowed them to loll next to the computer screen on the desk instead of keeping them hidden away in the dark recesses beneath it.

But for the cowboy boots Duane prided himself on being a model CIA operative. His training had been thorough and he was proud of the fact that Western Democracy was in his hands and no member of Al Quaida could possibly get the better of him.

Duane realised that he had been letting his mind wander instead of monitoring the internet for untoward activity.  How long?  He checked his chunky Breitling.  Three minutes.  He felt a sudden surge of panic.  How much traffic had passed in three minutes?  What if after his months of monitoring he had just let a direct terrorist threat pass by and somewhere a bomb was going off in a shopping mall and innocent lives were being lost.   It would be a disaster.  In the ensuing enquiry somebody would trace the lapse back to his computer and to him and he would be paraded before the rest of the operatives.  His cowboy boots would be pointed out and he would be deemed to be of a rebellious nature and entirely unsuited for this type of work.  He would be drummed out of the CIA and there might even be a bout of waterboarding (although he knew for a fact that the CIA did not indulge in that sort of practice) but, at least, he would wave goodbye to free coffee and donuts for ever.  Duane quickly scrolled back through the last three minutes of traffic and sped read until he was up to date.  There had been no untoward activity and the world and his cowboy boots and coffee and donuts were safe.

Duane noted that this had not been the first time his mind had wandered. He had caught himself wandering several times during the last week and each time he had vowed to give up the cowboy boots, go back to the regulation shiny black shoes and drink more black coffee to keep his brain sharp and active.  But then he had found at the end of the day that he had got though without there being a bomb going off in a shopping mall somewhere so he felt vindicated in sticking to his current dress code breach.

The trouble was that his work did give plenty of scope for wandering.  Duane’s job was to monitor all the facebook traffic in a place somewhere in the world called Bournemouth.  And the fact was that Bournemouth seemed to be an infinitely dull place with a lower than usual threat level and the very minimum of untoward activity.  “Bournemouth”  He tried saying the word out loud.  He said it in two distinct syllables “Bourne” and “Mouth”  It sounded as dull as the Facebook traffic seemed to be.   Like a mouthfull of sawdust. “Bourne, Mouth.  Bourne, Mouth.”  Duane couldn’t imagine where Bournemouth was or what it was like.  It could have been in the middle of the Gobi Desrt of the frozen Russian steppes.  Wherever it was, nothing ever happened there.  It was dull, dull, dull. So he took another gulp of good black coffee to wash the sawdust taste out of his mouth and settled back to monitoring for untoward activity.

The Facebook traffic that Duane had to monitor went something like this:  “Sun is shining. Where’s the factor 15? Lol.” “Great bargains in Primark. Lol”  “Another great night at the club.  Completely ratarsed. Where’s the paracetamol?  Rofl” Duane sometimes got glimpses of political unrest “The council have not emptied my dustbin again” “The council must do something about dog poo”  “When are they going to pull that eyesore down?”  These would not be followed by a Lol or a Rofl but by a group of symbols that were meant to denote a frowning face.  Duane was still puzzled why people Laughed out loud or even rolled around on the floor laughing at such inanities or got so upset about such trivialities.  In the end he realised that perhaps their lives were as dull as his without the compensation of the knowledge that they were protecting Western Democracy against an assymetric threat. 

Then, out of the blue, just as he had decided he would have another donut after all he spotted a message flash across the screen.  It said:  “Hi Duane.”  At first Duane did not register what it said.  It was such a little thing but after a split second he scrolled back to read the message again.  There it was: “Hi Duane.”  Duane studied it for a moment and then decided that there must be thousands of Duanes out there in facebook land and it was, after all, some sort of coincidence.    But a few minutes later came another one:  “What’s the weather like in West Virginia, Duane?”  Again, Duane calculated the probabilities.  Duane was a common enough name in West Virginia.  Why, he knew at least three himself. But when a third message came reading “Say Duane, what’s it like working for the CIA?”  Duane knew there was something untoward going on. He swung the cowboy boots smartly under the desk.   If he had to call a supervisor he wanted no complications.  The trouble was he didn’t really know what the procedure was in cases such as these. “Bomb in schoolyard timed to go off at midday. Lol” or “Crash jet into Bournemouth shopping mall.  Rofl” seemed fairly straightforward.  But nowhere in the training did it say anything about somebody actually contacting a CIA operative.  The next message read:  “Duane, how’s the coffee and donuts?” and Duane began to sweat.  He fervently wished he had chosen to wear the shiny blacks today.  And he fervently promised God that he would never wear his cowboy boots again if only this would go away.  But it did not go away.  It got worse:  “Are you wearing your nice shiny black shoes, Duane.”  His white shirt was wringing wet with perspiration. And before he could help himself he was sending a reply.  “Yes, of course I am.  What do you take me for a damn subversive?”.  All at once he was horrified by what he had done.  It was against all regulations.  He had admitted to someone out there  that the CIA was monitoring Facebook .  He had acted on impulse and his impulse had demonstrated his real nature.  He was as much a subversive as all those Bournemouth Al Quaida cells. He plunged his head into his hands.

With trembling fingers Duane closed the screen.  He had screwed up.  He had betrayed his colleagues, the CIA and, above all, he had betrayed himself.  No more could he draw the cloak of anonymity around himself.  He had proved himself to be unreliable, to be one of those of a rebellious nature. He might as well apply for a registration card for the Communist party.  He was finished.  The only untoward activity he had seen today was his and his alone.  Sighing, he stepped out of the cubicle.  And at once a wave of regret swept over him.  They had got the better of him – and he had never had the chance to try the apple strudel.