Chapter 1. Belief, bias and common humanity. Blood and Bones. Anger and Frustration.

For me, poetry is the distillation of a moment.  A play is the distillation of a life.

There's a lot of weird stuff about.  It's only to be expected, I suppose.  With seven point odd billion individuals in the world dreaming their dreams and thinking their thoughts, a lot of stuff is bound to come out weird.   How is it that someone can invent a rather gruesome bunch of chemicals, pump it up with carbon dioxide and persuade the rest of the world to drink it?  How can they fry some pink animal derived mush, and persuade us to eat it as if it was food?  Perhaps the really weird thing here is how the rest of us let ourselves be persuaded that these things are good to eat and drink when we have much more palatable things on our kitchen shelves? Such as drain cleaner. And isn’t it interesting that the description I have just given could apply equally to a bottle of Dom Perignon as much as one of coca-cola and to a tartare aller-retour at Heston Blumental’s drive by establishment as to a Macdonald’s burger?

We seem to be living in a world completely out of joint. Trump, Brexit, Putin.  This is the age of irrationality; The Great Endarkenment. Reason and truth no longer have any meaning.   This is the world of hyper reality where we convince ourselves that what we know perfectly well to be Untruth is in fact the Truth. The world is mad and we are all mad in it.  And I'm the worst of the lot. Because I'm a writer working in the world of theatre.  A time waster at a useless piece of frippery that merely adds to the madness because it depends upon people pretending to be someone else uttering words they didn't think up in a stuffy black room that we're all kidding ourselves is the deck of a ship or a ballroom in eighteenth century Vienna or the surface of Mars.

So how does this world madness manifest itself to me sitting at my desk overlooking the bay and distracted by kittens in hats on Facebook? I see people running along the clifftop earphones clamped to their ears completely cut off and unaware of some of the most beautiful sights and sounds in the world. I see it in conspiracy theories about chem. trails and faked moon landings on the internet, in an obtuse willingness to believe the unbelievable and in an urge to take unimportant things far too seriously while there is a disengagement from the things that really are important. I see it in our cowering before self aggrandising slobs who have muscle enough to transform gossip and down-right lies into some sort of ugly narrative for a bleak future in which they become the leaders and priests and only those few will have power to rape and pillage the world with impunity and I ask why we do not rise up to take back the world for ourselves? I see it in a totally bizarre world order that places accumulation of stuff before concern for our neighbour. A world where some are enabled and encouraged to accumulate more and more and more while others are screwed down by a form of austerity not seen for a hundred and fifty years. Where this pursuit of accumulation becomes as mindless as sucking on a mouth ulcer and diverts us from the more interesting things we could be doing with the one precious life we have been granted.  And where this pursuit of greed is being promoted to us as a common good in a relentless propaganda storm from those who already have more than enough. Where what we once all owned is being snatched away and sold off to the highest bidder so that we now have to pay some obscenely adipose feline for what is ours by right while the majority of us sink further and further into poverty. Where the whole fabric of our society is being deliberately ripped apart before our uncomprehending eyes.  And I ask myself how does this all relate to our existence as a story-telling, metaphor using species?  How is it, that the very thing that has made the human species rise up and achieve the possibility of a rich and fulfilled life for us all has been subverted through advertising and propaganda and downright lies into a strangulation of the soul to bring riches beyond comprehension to a very few and misery to so many?

And how is it that the people with the greatest influence in the world are the cheap pulp fiction writers like L. Ron Hubbard who I saw with my own eyes ripping off people in Corfu while he lounged on his motor yacht draped with bikini clad lovelies and Ayn Rand whose laughable, totally daft ideas are yet again echoing down the corridors of the White House and Wall Street and whose books are being promoted to shelves of every Republican politician and industrialist in America and, I bet, on many of the fifth formers at Slough Grammar school.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for me to quibble about the work of other writers.  We all need to earn a bob or two and I have written a few pulpy pieces in my time and I do feel a warm glow when people say “Your play made me think differently about the world.” Where it all goes tits up is when this sort of fantasy becomes taken for a philosophy and people who should know better take it as some sort of truth.

When you have barricaded the doors and shuttered the windows against the marauding lawless mob and you sit in front of your smoky fire (You have stuffed up the chimney to avoid grenade attacks) with your arsenal of assault rifles and machine pistols What do you think about?  Who is your friend?  Because you will need a friend to talk to at least.  Perhaps you could find someone in another fortress who could trade you a parrot and you could teach that to recite “There is no such thing as society” over and over as you slowly starve to death. If you don't go mad first.

And we still see this facile fifth form fantasy ideology played out in contemporary politics despite the obvious flaws in the thinking. We cannot, in our crowded world, function alone.  The idea of retreating to a small cabin in the woods with a pile of gold and a shotgun to hold the rest of the world at bay would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic. 

This seeping disengagement has caused some of the great human catastrophes of the twentieth century and on into our own, so why is it surprising that we writers should feel we are the ones with a duty to attempt to take back the only thing we still have in common: this language of poetry and metaphor and try and make it a tool for exploring the human experience and place it in a cockpit of the imagination where we can all use it to explore together what it is to be human and how we go about our humanity? In this era of stuff and accumulation of stuff and money for money’s sake and activity for activity’s sake where we yearn to blot out the reality of what is happening in the world with utter mountains of shit and we are so terrified of not having enough we go on accumulating and doing mindlessly until it becomes a habit, a psychosis, it is up to artists to try and cut through this fog of accumulation of junk and try to centre back on people.  Individuals.  Not individuals against the rest of the world- that nasty cut throat world of Ayn Rand or the individuals as mugs to be preyed on that L. Ron Hubbard would have us believe in, but individuals as part of the great interconnected network.  We need to put the spotlight on those individuals and their struggles.  We can use the full force of our imaginations to draw from what we know and place the evidence before our audiences.  We need to help people to speak to people about their hopes and fears, aspirations and disappointments.  We ought to help give a voice to those who are so trodden down by circumstance that they can only lash out in an unreasoned blind fury We need to sweep away all the bullshit of spectacle and superficial soap opera drama and try to explain to the world just what is going on.  We need to use our skills and imaginations to engage our audiences in new worlds of possibilities, new perspectives on this one. Nobody else is going to do it for us.  Not the newspapers or TV.  Not the bizarre world of the internet.  Not even the kittens.  Theatre is fantasy but it is fantasy concerning the real world.

If we writers were as bold as Hubbard and Rand we might be able to help turn the tide against a dreamt up fantasy world order to a more reasoned debate where we seek evidence before we believe and try to accord respect and understanding to our fellow human beings.  Not imposing something that has no basis in the world as it is.

And where once we might have satirised and railed against corrupt and venal governments and officials we now have to take on a great welling black cloud of hate, mistrust, and what I can only describe as a miasma of evil which seems to have no origin but which is suddenly pouring out as if from fissures and cracks in the very normality we see every day and every minute of every day.

Yet I see theatre reduced to an easy spectacle of acrobatics and effects. Somewhere where individuals can be defined only by the issues they represent instead of their inner immutable humanity. It is part of the distraction.  Playwriting has become reduced to the production of endless ten minute pieces for dodgy competitions judged by those who have no idea of what really constitutes theatre.  I see “Theatre makers” lauded who have never had the opportunity to explore and understand the true power of theatre.  The power of theatre that comes down to us in a shaky wavering line from the Greeks of classical antiquity and before that from a deep shamanistic desire to capture the world from our hunter-gatherer forebears.  A theatre that has encompassed Shakepeare, Racine, Behn, Goethe, Ibsen, Chekov. A theatre of Blood and Bones and sinew and Brains.  Big, deep theatre that requires not only an understanding of the world it lives in but, as importantly, a fundamental connection with the craft and skills of the stage and how it is a fundamental coming together of writer, director, technical staff, actor and audience.  It is us speaking together about the world. Theatre is power because it enables us to know things that others do not know and to visit places no one else has been and, because it is fleeting, that knowledge will be between us and no one else. Paradoxically, the illusion of theatre is no illusion. The magic of the theatre is real and enables us to experiment with the very fabric of reality that can only be achieved by those who have committed themselves unequivocally to its dark arts.

As my friend Skidmore would say "If you care that much about it, why don't you get off your arses and do something."

How is a song lyric different from a poem?

How is a song lyric different from a poem?  It's a question that I get asked a lot but up to now I've never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

However, just recently I've been looking back at some of the libretti that I've written  for my old friend, composer Roderick Skeaping and it suddenly struck me where there might be an answer.

In a play there has to be an internal logic; a style, a consistent voice, a set of conventions, a unity that holds the whole thing together.  Everything has to fall within this reality even if I am writing a complete fantasy set in a fantasy world in some far off galaxy.  The point is, that whatever the convention I decide upon, I have to stick within it.  People soon feel uncomfortable if the playwright moves outside the strict limits that have been set from page one.  In other words, if there are two moons in the sky and green aliens, I must ensure that I don't suddenly have three moons and purple aliens.
However, this ceases to be the case with a libretto.  The writer is suddenly free of such restrictions.  We can move from one moment seeing the world through one set of eyes to another quite different.  It is the music that provides the logic.  That is convention that binds together all the free floating ideas and images, first in one voice and then in another.  We are not bound by unity of time and space in quite the way we are in a stage play where logic comes from real dialogue in real time.
Now apply this idea to poetry and song writing.  A poem must have a structure that lures the listener or reader through the piece.  The words are paramount.  There is nothing else.  With a lyric, however, we have the music to draw us through the piece so that our ideas can range here and there, reaching out to pull in images from many sources.  In fact, the less internal logic there is in a lyric, the better the song.
I was writing a set of songs for a play with Roddy composing the music.  Most of the songs I had carefully crafted beforehand, making sure every word was perfectly polished.  But there was one song I was having difficulty with.  All I had for this was some scribbled notes on the back of an old Tesco's receipt.  Roddy propped the receipt on the piano and began to improvise.  With almost no alteration it turned out to be the most satisfactory song of the piece.

Why are Playwrights needed at all?

Have the days of the playwright come to an end?  Is there no further use for an individual who knows the craft and skills required to assemble an idea and project it through words and characters so that theatre companies may have something genuinely original and challenging to share with their audiences?  Are the  skills of the playwright entirely redundant?

Looking at the plays advertised in your local paper you might think so.  Titus Andronicus (heavily adapted by the company) A Doll's House (even more mucked about with), adaptations of novels or TV shows or films. Original work consists of “physical theatre” but not in any sense that Grotowski would understand.  Everything is larded with music, film, dance, lighting effects so that not a shred of original thought is allowed to shine through.  What playwrights’ work is to be seen is that of film and TV scriptwriters or students straight out of scriptwriting courses.

Where are the new plays that rely on interchange of ideas that challenge the audience?  Where are the plays that speak intelligently and which can cause a real emotional response rather than a manufactured sentiment.  What I see is cheap, tawdry theatrical pornography.  The simple pushing of buttons to cause easy reactions and plenty of effects to hide behind.

Of course, there are playwrights working to produce all this work but their status is so downgraded as to be that of the person who picks up the empty ice cream cartons in the auditorium between shows.  These are the people who are turning out these adaptations and “scripts” (I notice that no one writes plays any more but “supplies scripts”). Playwrights no longer seem to any natural place in the creative heirarchy, their work is filtered through a dramaturge and then director and actors will alter what emerges to suit their own needs in the rehearsal room.

So what is contemporary theatre missing by not embracing the playwright within the bosom of the creative team?  Well, first and foremost ideas.  Theatre companies tend to be notoriously inward looking.  They tend to have the perspective of the company members. They want more of what they did last year because they can’t think of anything better.  They want what the other companies are doing.  Obviously they want something that dovetails with school syllabuses and national events.   That’s all fine in itself, even Shakespeare had to write a Romeo and Juliet because every other company in London had one in repertoire at the time but if you have to do a play about, say,  some world event, make sure you’ve got someone with a perspective from outside the company who can create something different and interesting.

And what are the particular skills that we keep banging on about?  The most fundamental is that of telling a story through an interaction of characters.  Playwrights have to understand how characters work, how they manifest their inward turmoils through dialogue.  They have had to attune their ears to the nuances of speech by countless hours sitting cafes drinking coffee and listening to people speak.  They have to be able to sculpt and craft these characters so that actors can inhabit them fully and by doing so portray something directly to an audience.  They must understand the deep psychology of human nature and how real people react to real situations and events.

In addition playwrights must know how to structure a narrative so that it guides the emotional journey of actor and audience.  They must know how to build a scene to a climax, where to cut into an action and where to leave it when enough has been said.  They must distort passage of time and rearrange space so that it appears believable without becoming tedious.  They must understand how the audience perceives what is going on in front of them and what should revealed and what hidden.   They need to understand which points in the action to show and which to hide.  Which interactions to include and which to do without.  In addition they need to have some real understanding of the technicality of the theatre space itself and how the limitations of space can best serve the interaction between actor and audience.

None of this experience and knowledge is gained quickly or without a huge amount of trial and error.  The writer needs to be within the creative process from the start.  His or her skills need to be appreciated and understood by directors as surely as the technical ability of the lighting or sound designer.

Above all a playwright needs the encompassing world view that comes with age and experience.  He or she needs to be able to talk of the experiences of all ages and sections of society not just from the viewpoint of one particular set of individuals.  For this he or she must be endowed with big imagination and empathy for what they observe. The playwright must be able to create “the other”, something the actors cannot envisage themselves and to challenge them to invest themselves in this otherness.  And they must do all this with some artistry and a touch of theatrical magic.

Playwriting Competitions - Some further thoughts

Why are playwriting competitions important to the playwright?  Competitions are one of the few ways for a writer to get his or her work in front of directors and audiences. 

Over the past few years new writing has taken something of a back seat in the theatre world.  However, writers do not stop writing just because it is no longer fashionable.  The ideas keep coming, the muscles need to be exercised. Apart from commissions I probably write at least one complete new play a year.  This is completely for my benefit but it is a loved little thing even if it will soon be an unwanted orphan and join the other orphans in the drawer in my desk I like to call The Orphanage.These little waifs and strays have little chance of finding a home to go to. It is of little use packing a little suitcase and sending them off to producing managements and directors because a) They aren’t considering new work b) They haven’t got time to consider new work because they are too busy boiling up a three handed version of Timon of Athens.  So my little waif is intercepted even before he reaches the door of the Playhouse by a stern beadle called a dramaturge. The dramaturge comes in two forms  - the embittered older writer who enjoys giving a sound kicking to someone else’s snivelling foundling or a fresh faced young person for whom this is the first job after their university writing course and who has never actually seen a play except once when he or she was in the sixth form.  Either way the dramaturge is there to keep your off spring as far away from the theatre space as possible.

There is another little wrinkle that amuses us writers greatly and that is the “emerging writer syndrome”.  ACE delights in funding new writing from new writers. These are youngsters with the same background as the dramaturge (2). The emerging writer may well be full of ideas but they need to learn the craft and so their work is usually a vehicle for the director and company to lay into leaving very little or the emerging writer’s work to emerge.  But, of course, having learnt something from this experience they are now no longer an emerging writer so they have immediately excluded themselves from ever being commissioned to write a second or even third piece.  Thus skill and experience drains away and the status of the playwright takes even more of a hit.

So the competition circuit becomes an important conduit for new but not emerging writers and us old hacks to get work to the public and to try and recover the idea of plays that are not written to a formula.  To charge us a fee for the privilege of actually being read by a potential management is adding insult to injury.  This is where the new and important ideas will come from.  Apart from the fact that I can’t afford to fork out £20 I feel demeaned to be considered such a low specimen in the theatrical hierarchy.  For us a competition is a sort of audition, we may not succeed but we know at least we have given it our best shot.  But are actors charged £20 a head to audition? Lighting designers, £15 a pop for an interview?  How much would you charge an Artistic Director?  Or a dramaturge?

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.

Suspension of Disbelief

Please tell me if this is a copyright image.

I was watching a programme called Mystery Maps on television tonight in which a psychologist mentioned the role of "Suspension of disbelief" in people who see ghosts or witness UFOs and suppose them to be aliens. In other words, their readiness to believe is so heightened by being in a suitably spooky environment such as a dark wood and having recently seen a film about aliens, even the most innocent of sightings of a light will be interpreted as something other worldly. The term "Suspension of disbelief" was coined by Samuel Coleridge Taylor in 1817 as a necessary condition for any narrative be it film, novel, play or even just a nursery tale. We have to disregard the fact that we are actually only seeing flickering images on a screen or reading some very abridged description of the world, or even that we are hearing something utterly preposterous.  In the theatre world suspension of disbelief is our stock in trade; the audience are required to believe that this is not a stage but the battlements of a Danish castle, that this person is not an actor but is Hamlet Prince of Denmark, that he is experiencing genuine emotions not that he is just reciting lines of text.  Some people find suspension of disbelief a tricky idea and cannot become totally immersed in the play, but the vast majority of people will.  I would go as far as to say it is an inherent capacity in the human make up. Quite why that should be, I can't say, but after years of playing with it, I know it does work.

This is an example that happened in a play I was directing and it still astonishes me to this day.  We were performing a quite serious version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It was written by a very clever playwright, Jem Barnes. In the particular scene I am thinking of, Doctor Frankenstein is in his laboratory.  He has just animated the creature who is still lying on the experiment table.  Suddenly, there is a knock at the door.  Not wanting anyone to see this abomination, the Doctor covers the creature with a sheet before going to open the door. It is a colleague who wants to know what Frankenstein is up to.  Frankenstein is loath to tell him.  Eventually the visitor goes to the table and snatches up the sheet but the creature has vanished. At this point there was always a gasp from the audience and after the show people would ask how the disappearance was engineered.

Here's how it worked.  We were a small company of four actors and so everyone had to play several parts. In order that these changes of character didn't appear comical, they were done in full view of the audience. No clever lighting effects, just actors changing roles.  In this scene the same actor was playing the creature and Frankenstein's colleague.  He was lying on the table when Frankenstein covered him with a sheet. There is a knock at the door. The actor then stands up in full view of the audience, replaces the sheet and then walks round the set to enter from the other side as the colleague.  It is he who crosses to the table and is astonished when there is nothing there.  The point is that the audience became so used to the convention of role swapping that somehow they edited it out of their consciousness.  They had immersed themselves in the story and their suspension of disbelief was total.

In other words the audience had chosen to follow the artificial narrative and disregard the patent, obvious truth that the actor had just walked from one place to another.  I can believe utterly that there is a parallel effect at work with sightings of UFOs and ghosts.  We see what we choose to see. It is still a genuine experience, we really have seen a ghost but the reality is that of a narrative not of the measurable everyday world.  The programme also pointed out that numbers of sightings of UFOs always coincide with the release of alien films at the cinema. A reasonable explanation as far as I'm concerned and that's from someone who has seen a ghost in a theatre.  But that's another story altogether.

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?”