Blood and Bones. Play writng in the 21st Century.

Blood and Bones Theatre

Theatre is the oldest expression of some of the deepest human instincts.  The playwright’s job is to establish the complex process of thought that leads to that expression.  Yet in the post-rational twenty-first century just when they’re needed, many of the enormous possibilities of drama have been lost to a welter of superficial acrobatics, music and visual effect while the actual skills of playwriting - character construction and dialogue and as a vehicle for understanding the fundamentals of human nature - have been downgraded such that the playwright him or herself is thought of as mere pen holder for other theatre makers. Playwrights are kept at arm’s length from the creative process by the dread shadow of The Dramaturg and the play reading committee.

This series is not a handy how-to-do-it guide but rather a personal meditation on the place of the playwright in contemporary theatre.   It suggests that if theatre is to survive it needs to re-engage with its audiences by offering something to challenge the immediate attraction of film, television and other narratives. It needs to find its soul again and offer what is its unique properties.  To do this it needs a powerful cohort of playwrights and it needs them once again at the heart of the playmaking process.  Playwrights like me need to stop titting around with ten minute sketches and applying cap in hand to futile competitions.  We need to be bolder, braver and prouder of what we do because I firmly believe we can contribute in some way to getting the world back to a more humane, rational way of progressing.

I am particularly fortunate in that I was able to learn my craft in what, with hindsight, appears to be a golden age of theatre.  I have had opportunities to work alongside great actors and within companies who believed in the essential power of drama. I have been able to learn from people who knew their craft and I hope I have been able to pass that on in writing workshops and as a director working with young and established actors to this day.

So, if you are a playwright, actor, director. Audience member or all round lover of theatre come with me on my ramble through my own head as I try to understand what it is I’ve been playing with for the last forty years

The Playwright's Craft - The final polish

There's one last process before you hand the script over to the director and cast- this is the final polish.  You've done everything you need to make the play work: you've got the narrative structure right, you're telling the story in a crisp, stylish way, you've got the scenes in the right order and the overall dynamics look good.  You've edited out all the dross and you've got the characters speaking in their own voices.  The interchanges of speech and action flow naturally and easily. You've done your grammar and spell check (making sure it's set on UK English if it's for the British stage). The play is finished. Except for the Final Polish.

The Final polish is that last little bit of tweaking time.  It may be a couple of hours, a couple of days or, perhaps, if you've finished ridiculously early, a couple of months. The best thing is always to put the thing away and come back to it with as fresh eyes as you can manage.  Now read the play for one last time.  And make sure you read it it closely, not the sort of skim that you've given it up to now. You're on the look out for those little anomalies that the actors will pick up straight away; little solecisms of speech and character.  Ask yourself "How does this character know this?" "Where did that piece of information come from?" "Shouldn't this character be aware of that fact before now?" and so on. Actors are notoriously good at spotting these errors and inconsistencies.

If there is time in the rehearsal room you may be able to make these adjustments but don't count on it.  Rehearsal time, as I've said before, is for rehearsing not for rewriting. And if you iron out these little glitches beforehand you will appear that much more organised and the actors will have more confidence that the rest of the thing is going to work.

At this stage I am not suggesting rewriting anything, you should be far beyond that necessity.  No, I'm talking about tiny details that can be rectified with one or two words or, at most a sentence. I've just finished polishing a piece that relied on two characters knowing each other but I realised I hadn't made that clear.  It only took a "I think I've seen you in the Co-op" when they first meet to settle that.

So there you go.  Final little tweaks and it's ready to go into pdf for sending off.  Good luck.

The Playwright's Craft - Character

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. 

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 get your notbook out 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.

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.

Yet, somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some sort of exchange takes 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.

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.  It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the real feelings of our character is 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.  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 itslef.  If you find you have to resort to stage directions than you need to recast the speech. 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 that.  You need to show how that ambition is manifested or hidden.

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?”

The Playwright's Craft - The Continued Presence of the Actor

I have been trying to fathom what it is that makes a play different from other forms of narrative.  How it engages with an audience, what experience it can give that is different from a film or television script, what it is that makes it supremely visceral and moving and why it is a form or art that must be understood and developed and why those very particular qualities need to be kept and passed on to this new generation before they are lost forever.

Why is it that film script writing is different from playwriting? Is it simply because they are different media?  Film relies on visual imagery for its narrative drive and impact.  Theatre relies on the interplay of character through action and dialogue.  Yes, film includes these as well but they are not the driving force.  Consider this:  3 quick images 1) A man sitting by a lake. 2) Ripples on the lake surface. 3) A woman weeping.  There you are, a suicide by drowning told in less than two minutes.  The play in the theatre cannot approach this.  The theatre does not rely on an image stream but by observing the interplay of characters so that we can understand the why rather than the bald facts of the event itself.

But that is not really enough to describe the difference fully.  We must think of the engagement with the audience.  In a play these interactions are taking place in front of us.  We are in the room with the protagonists. As an audience we are, to all intents and purposes, part of the action. We cannot just turn away from unpalatable interactions.  The impact of theatre lies in the extended working out of an argument, a fight, a love scene.  It is now, it is actual, it is here.  The actors are always aware of the audience.  Their performance varies from night to night based on the reactions of the watchers. In a world that is increasingly second hand this is our one place to access the actual world of human interaction.

But now we come to the most difficult concept for the script writer to grasp:  that of the continued presence of the actor on the stage.  Consider our three scenes above. The character sitting at the side of the lake.  Then his empty seat and the rippling water.  The playwright has to deal with the question: Where does the actor go?  Must we see him jumping into the water?  We cannot simply have the actor dissolve or vanish into thin air.  Of course, there are ways to signal to the audience that actor’s presence is, as it were, no longer required. We can establish a convention that the audience understand and accepts. We can use lighting or a convention in the play itself. Of removing a piece of costume, say.  We could use the simple action of an actor laying down his hat to mean that he has died. But that is only a solution to a perceived problem. What is more profitable is to use the actor’s continued presence to tell the narrative in a different way.  We do not show the event itself.  We deal with the events leading up to and the reactions of other characters after.  We accept much more the reality of the situation because we see it unravelling in front of our eyes.  We hear what drives our suicide.  We understand.  We feel it because we are there with these characters.

So let us think of the continued presence of the actor at a little more depth.  What extra is it giving us as an audience?  Well, for a start, we know that the character we are watching is going to have to run through the whole development arc there in front of our eyes.  Nothing can be hidden.  There is no camera trickery or cutting away to provide mystery.  The character may well lie about themselves but we can see the lies.  That is why theatre has a particular access to the truth.  It may be agonising and difficult but we cannot avoid it.  This is part of the idea of Theatre of cruelty as propounded by Antonin Artaud.  The Greek dramas knew this and made this a rule.  It is all up there on the stage for you to see.

Plays for the Future (Part 3)

So I've written about rescuing old scripts and how I'm trying to make them available for a new age of readers and performers.  Now another tricky step.  Preparing them or publication.The problem here is that every publisher has a different way of formatting scripts for the page and they will want them prepared in their format even before considering them. Over the years I have developed my own style which works well in the hands of the actors.  This is not unlike the way film scripts are formatted with plenty of empty space .  for actors to write notes and to insert text small text changes in the rehearsal room.  And with the use of scripts on tablets it looks clean and easy to read on the screen. So  I prefer now when writing a new play is to write directly in this format, and as I'm updating old scripts I want them in this format too.

Here is an example of the way I like to do it from "She Opened the Door":

THE MOTHER

Did you ever feel this place was haunted?

THE MAID

No.  No.   Only by the Missus....  she has a weird presence.  She shuts herself away in her bedroom  in the attic for most of the day but sometimes....  she haunts the house like a ghost

THE MOTHER

When they were digging the well they found a pile of skeletons six foot deep.   All piled on top of each other.  They come from Roman times so they weren’t Christian.  That’s what they’ve built her home on.  Heathen foundations.

She says it again Louder

Heathen unnatural foundations this house has.

THE OTHER WOMAN returns arguing with EMMA.  They are carrying costume hats and scripts

EMMA stops

EMMA

What?   What did you say?   This is a Christian household.

THE OTHER WOMAN

I though your son had eschewed all that.    I thought he had become a humanist.  We have had many discussions on the subject.  I wish I could agree with him on every point he makes

EMMA

Humanist he may be but he still accompanies me to church on Sunday.

THE MOTHER

All I was saying that there were skeletons buried in the garden.   They found them when they were building the house.

But publishers tend to follow a format that saves space and paper. Thus(from Sherlock Holmes and the case of the Vanishing Author):

Budd: Well, what do you think?  
Doyle: It’s a bit grim.  
Budd: Nonsense. It’s a room of great character. You’ll do well here. Look at the height of the ceiling. That’s grandeur.  
Doyle: It’s a mausoleum. I can hear the voices of the dead.  
Budd: That’s just the plumbing, Old man. By jingo, this is big enoughto be a second Lord’s. Here bowl me one of your famous googlies.
(Budd seizes a bat. Doyle bowls. The ball eludes Budd.)
Doyle: Howzat?  
Budd: All right. No need to be a Clever Dick.  
Doyle: It was only a dolly drop, old man.  
Budd: I didn’t want to pull it through the window.  
Doyle: See if you can get your bat to this.
(He makes to bowl a fast bumper. Budd pulls away)
Budd: Oh look there’s a separate room for all your equipment.


I suppose they both have their advantages but for me it means I have to format everything in at least two styles and that is very time consuming as no software however sophisticated can change one into the other.



So, which one do you prefer? Is one better for reading and one for working in the rehearsal room as I suppose or do you have different views?

Plays for the Future (Part 2)

So, phase two of my stumble through the detritus of my writing career.  Having begun to make sense of the files already in digital format (although difficult and time consuming to drag into the modern world) I have now moved to  the pre computer age. In the later days  I had a good electronic typewriter and scripts are relatively easy for the OCR software to scan and produce a digital form that bears some resemblance to the original. (Sorry, OCR means Optical Character Recognition and it's a fiendishly clever piece of software that renders what it scans in words and letters that are in a  format that computers can use).  Anyway, as I said, relatively straightforward with a good, clear original but going back further, scripts were cyclostyled.  That is, typed by typists using big old machines onto stencils and then run though a machine the squeezed ink through the stencil onto paper. This was the only way of reproducing several copies so that cast members had a script each.  However, these stencils reproduced very erratically and the quality of the reproduction was in line with the ability of the typist and the newness of the typewriter.  As these got older the letters became worn away and many couldn't punch through the film leaving these scripts with  gaps, letters missing and general haziness because of the medium.

The mighty Gestetner Duplicating Machine

So this is the material that I'm working from now.  Faded, yellowing on thick, old fashioned paper, sometimes barely readable to the human eye let alone by OCR software. Oh, and one other handicap, most of these old scripts have been stored in a succession of wet old sheds and garages.  The paper has rotted and mice and slugs have made away with large chunks.  Trying to make sense of these crumbling documents is more archeology than reproduction.  Sometimes I have a few handwritten notes that can guide me but often I have to interpolate paragraphs and pages using my rather inadequate memory.  What I shall do to reclaim the plays that have  vanished altogether, I'm not sure.

The Playwright's Craft - Pig Unit

My new play “Pig Unit” is about my experiences of working on a pig farm some years ago. I hasten to add that while the situation is true, the drama is not.  I’ve got most of the dialogue down and I’m quite pleased with that.  I love the process of writing dialogue and getting it down to a sort of abstracted verisimiltude.  That usually means cuttting and cutting.  Slicing away sentences and whole paragraphs until I’ve pared it down to that almost incoherent series of non sequiturs that contain just enough information for a conversation to carry some sense to the protagonists.  And also remembering that real life people have difficulty conveying meaning, not listening to what others are saying and, sometimes, just lying.

The next stage, which I find more challenging is trying to order the set pieces, that is scenes within the main flow of scenes, that tell the story to the audience.  One of the characters comes out with a long piece of explanation about himself and what motivates him.  But where do I put this revelation?  Too near the end and it well appear like an Agatha Christie denouement.  Too near the beginning and it will have less impact without the audience knowing the other characters thoroughly.  And I want it to plant a few ideas that will play out at the end.  What’s more, I have to ask, which of the other characters will need to know about it?  Will they be present when he spills the beans? Or will the news filter through to them piece by piece?  And how will the other characters react? Will they realise the significance of the revelation there and then or will it be a slow burn with them reaching a slow dawning of understanding? Will the audience find it too obvious or can I disguise it in some way as if our character is appearing to reveal one thing whilst accidentally revealing another?

There are no rules to guide the writer here so the simplest way is to try the passage in different places in the play.  Cut and paste is a wonderful tool.  And with each experiment, if I read it out loud as I always do, I will rootle out what is right and most effective for the piece.