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.

The Playwright's Craft - Collaboration

Theatre is considered by many to be a bastard art-form because it is not the work of one person.  It is the coming together of actors, designers, makers of all descriptions, clever technicians, and above all, an audience.  Theatre is unique in its need for this great collaboration and for its essential ephemerality.  For a short while these many people with all their skills come together and then it is over and gone and lost forever.  There may be film or video of this moment but this is only a record not the moment itself.  

And for me it is this sense of collaboration, of this coming together of a family devoted to this one production, almost like a workshop manufacturing a great machine, is what fascinates and beguiles me to want to experience this process over and over gain even though it can be exhausting, annoying, frustrating and can drive you sick and mad.  And I have experienced pretty well every role within that family.  I have been an actor, director, stage hand, electrician,writer so I know what it’s like to be an unnoticed cog in that particular machine.  And I have learnt something of the psychology and management skill that is required to turn that unruly mob of talented individuals into a coherent working group with a common aim and output of great beauty and emotional force.

At various times, particular individuals or skills are in the ascendancy; audiences may be drawn by the work of a particular actor, director, designer or writer but the thing itelf is still an overall collaboration in which every single part contributes to the whole.  

So at the South West Theatre Makers Conference on Saturday I was interested to hear how Chris Chibnall approaches this collaborative effort.  Chris is clearly someone of great skill and imagination.  He wrote “Broadchurch” for the television and has just written the first new work for Salisbury Playhouse for ten years.  He has a long background in theatre so he is worth listening to. For him the collaborative process involved an actual writing process during the rehearsals themselves.  A couple of scenes would be run through with the actors, discussions would ensue and then he would go home and rewrite accordingly.  The next day these two scenes would be rehearsed and the next two scenes examined and subsequently rewritten.  This is a total collaboration in which the actors and the director have a direct input on the writing process.

For me the process is different.  I love the cut and thrust of the rehearsal room and the lurching towards an understanding of the meaning or working of the play.  Cuts and edits and even reordering may take place as the actors explore the piece but for me there is no rewriting.  I claim the right to maintain the artistic integrity of the piece, I have spent at least six months creating these characters and their interactions, and I have mapped out the journey that I want the audience to take. I have chosen exactly the order and structure of the story and the interactions that will demonstrate the moments that I think have most force and relevance.  I hve developed and pared the dialogue until it can convey exactly the nuances that I have intended.  I have considered points of view of the spectators and how they will experience them.

To a contemporary theatre maker this may seem an old fashioned and reactionary approach but I consider myself a craftsman who has served a forty year apprenticeship in that craft.  I still don’t know everything about theatre and how it can work but I do know about this particular play.  Once I have written it, I am happy to hand it over to the other craftspeople and artists who will make it work for an audience.  I am not so arrogant as to believe that I have any right to the final say on the production or the absolutely essential skill of performance. But to me, the play as I hand it over is complete in its construction and all I ask is the respect of the other practitioners that I give to their work.

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?

Playwriting Competitions - Why I won't be entering.

2014 seems to be a good year for playwrights.  There is a sudden burst of interest in our craft.  Competitions are springing up all over the UK and many of them with prestigefull regional companies as part of the headline.  The latest include The Royal Court Liverpool.  I applaud these initiatives and  efforts to publicise the event . I think this sort of competition can be worthwhile and an excellent way to get playwrights to rise to the challenge of getting new material in front of new managements. However I must explain why I will not by entering or recommending anyone I know to enter despite the lure of a £10,000 prize.

I disagree strongly with the idea of paying a fee to enter.  In the case of one it is £15 and Liverpool Hope Prize it is a whopping £20.  Not an earth shattering amount but quite a chunk for some of us who are struggling to make ends meet.  What I really object to is the reduction in the relationship between the playwright, director and company.  In the past this has always been one of equals.  By charging the playwright a fee you are saying, in effect, “you are an appellant, a lesser part in the process”.  Playwriting has now become a vanity hobby rather than a serious craft. I have seen the status of playwrights whittled away over the last few years.  A writer who has spent his or her lifetime wrestling out the details of a craft and an art form is no longer considered part of a team who creates something new and thrilling.  As a director I have worked with new and emerging writers, they are indeed, the future, they are the ones who will shake up the industry but there is also something to be gained from those who are serious about their art and craft.  Neither should be charged for the privilege of reading their work.  In the case of the Liverpool prize one of the judges is John Godber.  Would the Royal Court charge him £20 to read one of his plays?

You will undoubtedly counter by saying that this small fee goes towards administrative costs.  This, of course, is a nonsense.  I believe it is up to you  to raise the money to fund the exercise properly.  Did you not include “administrative costs” in your original budget?  

In future I ask you to accord due respect to the artists and crafts people you rely on to create your programme and not expect playwrights to subidise it.

Please don’t think my in any way antagonistic towards you, your company or the competition. I merely argue against the underlying assumptions.  Best of luck.

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.

Paradise Retailed

For a bit of fun we were challenged by the Bournemouth Poet Laureate James Manlow to write a glosa.

The glosa is a poetic form developed in Renaissance Spain. The opening quatrain is taken from the work of another poet that we want to acknowledge.  This is followed by four stanzas, each of which is generally ten lines long, that elaborate or "glosses" on the cabeza chosen. Each ending line (10th line) of the four following stanzas is taken from the cabeza.  I’ll leave you to guess which poet I am paying tribute to. (The spelling is as in the original.)

Paradise Retailed

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That dewy morn among the endless shelves

Of Tesco, ASDA or that other one,

That adamantine chain with carpark dire

The dismal Situation waste and wilde

No light but rather darkness visible

Each hell more sulphrous than the other ones

As far remov’d from God and light of heav’n

As any fruit flown in from Afric’s shore,

They took the easy path through racks of booze

The World was all before them.  Where to choose?

Then pausing, sought a respite from the crush

But found Another hell with queues that stretched

Nine times the space that measures Day and Night.

The pimpl’d youth, he with his horrid crew

That witness’d huge affliction and dismay

Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:

Allowed them precious little time to choose

Designless from the list and thus they sate

And contemplating Eden side by side

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

Then back among the throng in effort wide

A struggle Just to snatch an apple from the shelf

Among the jars and jaffas and the jeans

Our parents’ parents struggled with the lines

For all the world like serpents at the tills.

They stood enrapt by horrid writhing scrums

With hundreds and with thousands trooping came.

They shook their heads and headed for the door.

Whilst others pushed and shoved just anyhow

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

At last had gain’d the portals of that place.

The outer world seem’d now a beauteous park

Like  paradise regain’d In contrast stark.

The gleaming chariots in lines array’d

To carry off the booty from the store.

Our Adam and his Eve from seeming hell

Had ’scaped th’eternal madness of that place,

Eschewed the driven path that others took,

Envelop’d in the blessed aer of day,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.