Peter John Cooper
Playwright Poet Performer
Featured post
Tuesday, July 19, 2022
19th July - West Cliff GreenThe heat has continued all night and the morning has brought the same, dead blue sky and intense sun. There is enough breeze on the clifftop to make the temperature just about bearable. The birds are strangely quiet apart from the gulls which squabble over last night's take-away boxes. Every patch of shade is taken up by the coffee drinkers and early picnic lunchers. But during the afternoon a grey film of cloud slides across the sky, temperatures drop and the little breeze fills chilly. The cloud thickens and takes on that yellow colour that presages a storm. But it does not manifest apart from a few distant rumbles of thunder and ten minutes of large thundery drops of rain. People on the beach are undeterred and by late afternoon the cloud is thinning, the sun reappears and heat is building again. #bournemouth #westcliffgreen #July #summer
Saturday, September 09, 2017
La Boheme at the Royal Opera House, London
One of the perks of knowing the right people is getting to
see things that we couldn’t otherwise afford.
Yesterday we were privileged to see the open dress rehearsal of La
Boheme at the Royal Opera House. An Open
DR is the last one before opening night and apart from some of the singers
trying to conserve their voices and not singing out this was the production as
you will see it from Monday.
La Boheme is the one art event where boxes of tissues are
more in evidence than ice creams in the foyer.
It is a pretty simple love story.
Consumptive Girl meets boy who falls in love. Boy, afraid he is too poor
to help pretends to be jealous and they part. Girl, has a fling with rich viscount to pay the
bills. But dying, returns to boy and coughs
her last in his arms. On the way, we
meet tarty girl who laughs at life and death.
And a bunch of arty youths trying to fend off starvation with a lot of
banter. You probably know some of the tunes and the bit about “Your tiny hand
is frozen.” See, a surefire weepy.
The previous production had become a bit of a warhorse and
had rumbled on for something like fifty years at the ROH so the time had come
for something fresh and it’s this season’s hot ticket.
Except…. This
production has gone out its way to disengage the audience. The settings are bare and stark and rely on in
vision scene shifting on the open stage that was popular in the 1980s. I
think that sensation of disengagement was most in evident with the harsh, flat
lighting which made the first scene where the candle blows out and Mimi and
Rudolfo are hunting for Mimi’s key in blank studio lighting, seemed perverse. I even asked whether this was merely there
for the cameras at this rehearsal but apparently not. Allied to this there was some odd staging
moments where the fourth wall seemed to appear and disappear at random moments
and where, having established it at one point, the singers lined up and sang at
it. There was also an amount of cold-acting
from all and sundry the like of which I haven’t seen since the last local
production of “A Christmas Carol.”
Please movement directors have a look at how people actually move when
they are cold and hungry.
I’m happy to say that there were one or two beautifully
orchestrated stage pictures.
Particularly the street scenes with the chorus and youngsters and, most
touching and perfect of Mimi and Rudolfo exiting through the snow storm at the
end of Act 3.
But the end, sadly, not a moist eye in the house. This was Boheme lite. Boheme with nought percent emotional
engagement. Perhaps we were being shown
some other aspect of La Boheme that has never been explored before. But I fear I missed it.
Oh, the singing was nice. And Antonio Pappano and the pit band
were working hard to give us a good show.
Definitely one to shut your eyes
and hum along to.
Friday, March 03, 2017
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
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Blood and Bones Theatre. Fairy Tales
Please let me know if you own this |
Let’s
talk about fairy stories. Let me think
about some of the narratives that others have created and which, I think need
challenging. Later I’ll talk about how theatre should be involved in the
process. First, Let me map out some of
the ways I think we are being diverted from the authentic, the plausible and
the genuine and led into a sham world where issues are beyond our grasp. Let
me, for an example, consider the plethora of conspiracy theories and hoaxes I see
promoted on the Internet. Why do we get
so worked up about them? These are flung
about and consumed with the same zeal as Coca Cola and Macdonalds or Dom
Perignon and Heston Blumental’s snail porage and with the same disregard to
nutrition. And despite any evidence to
the contrary, conspiracy theorists will cling on to these ideas like drowning
sailors to a piece of driftwood or politicians to their scrap of power so that
no-one can prise their fingers therefrom.
Here’s a fairy story:
There was once a wicked witch in the West. Originally she was from the
East where she had believed that everything that mattered could be weighed and
measured and there was no need for any of the airy fairy flim flam that so many
mortals worried about. But she had a rather beastly time in the East so she
transported herself on her broomstick to the West where she developed a grudge
against the gooey, sticky parts of mortal life that made her feel unhappy and
she came to want to destroy everything that could not be weighed and
measured. She thought that everybody
else should shut themselves in a cupboard and just go away. But nobody would
listen to her silly ideas so she wrote all her grievances in a little book. And then she died and with her last breath
she cursed the world and wished that all mortals be turned to stone because in
that way they could be weighed and measured. At first, anybody who read her
book laughed at it because it was very silly and childish. (And very badly written.) But one day some
greedy and selfish crooks thought that they would do better out of the world if
greed and selfishness were the made the things to be, so they took the wicked
witch’s silly book and said to all their friends that this book had magic
powers and would change the world as they wanted. And gradually the book was passed around and,
because these men said that the book was true.
Slowly, slowly, the magic spell began to work and a dark shadow was
unleashed upon the whole world because everybody believed that this was true and,
what’s more, how things had to be. And
faster and faster, all the good things that were in people’s hearts like love
and friendship (because the wicked witch had said such things were unfeasibly
gooey and sticky) were replaced by selfishness and greed and hate and fear and
everybody felt unhappy but they didn’t know why. And they began to blame everything that was
good and speak out for the evil things that were now rampaging through the
world even though they were making themselves more and more unhappy. And one of these crooks whispered in the ear
of another powerful witch from another country and she said that everything
that had gone before was now to be forgotten and laughed at. And so it was. The darkness descended on the world like a
thick choking fog. And people had no way
of defending themselves against it and they began to turn to stone because a
stone is easily weighed and measured.
OK
not a very good fairy story but the best I can do. It’s here to illustrate the notion that ideas
can be passed around and believed despite any evidence to the contrary. This is called cognitive bias. We are all cognitively biased one way or
another. There are many things we
believe because… well, because we believe them.
And the unhappiness it causes is called cognitive dissonance.
If
you haven’t guessed already, the originator of all this tale is Russian born
pulp fiction writer, Ayn Rand. In Ayn
Rand’s grindingly awful world stability would be achieved by having no
government and with all individuals concerned only with their own ends.
Altruism would be discounted and only self-interest allowed. What is
frightening is that her bonkers belief became widespread among people who
became big players in Silicon Valley and, eventually, though Alan Greenspan right
into the heart of US government where the ideas brought about the collapse of
two world economies; that of South east Asia in the nineteen nineties and the
whole western economy in 2008. We shudder at this nonsense, these bizarre ideas
of individual isolation one from another which have so thoroughly soaked into
contemporary society through the vectors of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
the latter who famously said “There is no such thing as society”.
Yes, it’s true, she did actually say that in an interview with Women’s Own
Magazine on 31st October 1987 and it was an idea directly channelled
from Rand.
While
these policies derived some intellectual underpinning from economists such as Friedman and Hayek, it was essentially Rand’s philosophy that was at the
stony heart of the whole enterprise.
And
when this philosophy was put into action it devolved power from governments to
the banks. And the banks had only one
end in view – accumulating money. It was an extraordinary display of open and
naked greed, a great slobbering banquet that continued for years until nearly
every cupboard and fridge was empty whilst the rest of us looked on in
horror. This was Ayn Rand’s philosophy
of self-interest written on a world scale.
And in the end it was the small person who was left with a monstrous
bill for the beanfeast which he or she was absolutely and utterly unable to
dispute. What’s more the small person was made to feel the guilty parties in
this farrago. We feel powerless before
this swelling tide. We cannot cope so we turn our faces to the wall, reach for
the remote control or pound, pound, pound mindlessly along the clifftop and in
the end we do nothing at all about it.
“But,
hey! Hang about!” Says Skidmore looking up from his
drink.. “Here you are banging on about
not believing in conspiracy theories of the world and you’ve just farted out
one of the biggest. The virtual collapse
of Western Civilization brought about by a pulp fiction writer. How come you
can believe in this and not the one about the moon-landings or whatever?” Well, OK., Skidders. You, of course, have me banged to
rights. That is my cognitive bias coming
to the fore. Except that I would defend myself by saying that actually all of
this is well known and documented. The
people involved are open and have discussed it.
They admit to it openly. The perpetrators speak freely about it with
little remorse. The banks did a job and they got away with it, bonuses and all.
So this is a conspiracy that is actually happening now and is a proud part of
modern economics.
OK.
Here is another story and one I was involved in and know, hand on heart,
to be true.
I
was travelling by train down Italy and happened to share a compartment with a
young Swedish guy. He was affable and
easy going but for some reason he felt compelled to show me the contents of his
suitcase. It was literally stuffed full
of bank notes. He happily explained how
he had sold everything he owned and was taking the cash to join a group in
Corfu, the then headquarters of the Scientology movement. I knew nothing about Scientology and he
persuaded me to meet up with him on the island and he would show me round. As it turned out the headquarters was a large
rusting hulk moored in the harbour. The
acolytes, having handed over all their worldly possessions were living and
eating in communal dormitories in fairly Spartan conditions. Nothing strange there. There was any number of weird cults living communal
lives at that time. Except that the
“Clears” the officers or priests or whatever they were, seemed to have a high
old time frequenting the bars and taverns of the town and the founder of the
cult, the science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard was living further down the
quayside in a large white motor yacht draped with bikini-clad lovelies.
Cognitive dissonance on the grandest of grandiose scales. I declined the
opportunity to throw in my lot with them.
And
the same applies to the Nigerian Princess scam and other hoaxes. Apparently the far-fetched nature of the
narrative is designed to eliminate all but the most gullible. The scammers want to weed out anyone who
might cause trouble but for the poor unfortunate who falls for the scheme they
will be drawn gradually into a web of intrigue.
Once you have parted with your details, or even the thousand dollars the
Princess needs to pay bribes, you are hooked and you will put aside your doubts
because you are now afraid of losing your first investment or even from fear
that you will be made to look stupid by not following up on the deal. The
deeper in we get, the more we earnestly believe and the harder it is for
rational thinking to apply.
And
as I dig deeper into this morass I seem to see that what ties this all together
and fuels its onward march is this disengagement I was talking about
earlier. Not only a disengagement from
politics but from humanity itself. All
of these phenomena that I've touched on have their roots in a distancing from,
not only the levers of power, but the actual machinery of common human
existence. The Conspiracy theorists,
The Randists, the Scientologists, the Bankers, the Rhapsodists, the Capitalists
and other hoaxers and scammers. Who can tell them apart? They see a world so maddened that it can be
driven for their own ends. And so they can disseminate their own stories, the
conspiracies, the year zero, the religions, the accumulation of money -
anything to give them some justification for their existence. Their stories spread. We desire an explanation for the entirely
unearned misfortunes that befall us. It seems somehow easier to believe a
complex lie than the simple truth. As Joseph Goebbels is often misquoted as
saying “in the big lie there is always a certain
force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more
easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than
consciously or voluntarily”. In other words “The bigger the lie, the easier it
is to believe.” Thus the welter of
propaganda of the press and the internet is lapped up by people who feel they
simply do not have the time or the resources to cut through to the truth. The stories become the narrative of a
whole people and, as such, they become the truth of the politicians, the
spiritual leaders, the wealthy that they can manipulate to maintain their status.
"We were taught that we were
being persecuted because we were God's chosen people and that the world outside
didn't understand us," Anna Baron The Polygamists Daughter.
So,
Skidmore, I’m going to try to engage
with the world and encourage all other artists to fill the gap that the media,
both official and social, have left or have deliberately avoided.
Theatre
is, and should be the art of engagement.
It is collaborative, social. It
contacts the deepest levels of human experience. But yet I know that if I try
to use my playwriting to counteract this nonsense then I am in danger of losing
my perspective. My own cognitive bias
will become only too apparent and that may not ultimately fit with the
characters I portray. What’s more a one
sided polemic can only be as dull as ditchwater to an audience. I must see and understand. I must engage with my subject matter in a way
that will allow my characters to speak with their own truth. Above all I must let the audience engage with
my characters and tease out a different narrative from the one they might have
accepted up to that point. But in order
to do that, I must follow Nietzsche’s thinking and endeavour to understand
myself first.
Wednesday, February 08, 2017
Chapter 2a) Belief, Bias and Common Humanity. A meditation on playwriting in the Age of Untruth. Apollo and Dionysius.
The
authentic narrative is a sensory explosion occurring within an intellectual
context. We know it when we feel it as acutely
as we feel a kick on the shins at a chess match.
So
can theatre, the greatest illusion of all, articulate anything meaningful about
combatting trickery and fraud? In other
words: is it possible to create a plausible, authentic narrative within all
that fakery? I’m going to stick my neck right out here and say that is exactly what
theatre it is for and what it was first invented to do.
Playwrights
control and guide the emotional journey.
The audience experiences something different from what they know, thereby empathising and
understanding at a deep, visceral level.
I’ll
come back to the mechanics of theatre and writing for it in a later chapter But
I also want to explain how I feel theatre has become side-tracked away from its
primary function. The desire for an
instant gratification has reduced many forms of theatre to spectacle. Exciting and thrilling funny and even
emotionally engaging it may be but in the end, hollow and without heart. That is not to decry the theatre of spectacle
but it loses so much more that it could be doing. Theatre may not be able to change the world
but it can certainly set out to engage and challenge.
At the core of
live theatre experience is the fact that each performance is new and
different. No actor can reproduce the
exact same circumstances of performance night after night. He or she brings themselves to it with all
their own foibles and disappointments.
And we all know that the audience is different performance by
performance. The reaction to the wild
shamen on stage maybe quite different on a wet Thursday afternoon from a joyous
Saturday night out.
The actor is
key, he or she is living, breathing and sweating. It is up to the playwright to give the actor
the means to create that rank, odorific moment.
And the shape of the play provides the narrative underpinning that will
make this more than a moment in time. Plays happen here and now right in front
of and, perhaps, in and around the audience.
The actors are constructing and driving characters and their stories
right in front of our eyes. Plays happen
to everyone in this room.
Peter
Brook, in his seminal work “The Empty Space” decries a form of theatre he terms
“Deadly Theatre”. “A doctor can tell at once between the trace
of life and the useless bag of bones that life has left; but we are less
practised in observing how an idea, an attitude or a form can pass from the
lively to the moribund. It is difficult to define but a child can smell it
out.”
Jerzy
Grotowski when he talks about physical theatre, is not talking about empty
acrobatics but in the direct, living engagement of the actor with the text.
“Why
do we sacrifice so much energy to our art?
Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves...art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.”
― Jerzy Grotowski
Not in order to teach others but to learn with them what our existence, our organism, our personal and repeatable experience have to give us; to learn to break down the barriers which surround us and to free ourselves from the breaks which hold us back, from the lies about ourselves which we manufacture daily for ourselves and for others; to destroy the limitations caused by our ignorance or lack of courage; in short, to fill the emptiness in us: to fulfill ourselves...art is a ripening, an evolution, an uplifting which enables us to emerge from darkness into a blaze of light.”
― Jerzy Grotowski
Antonin
Artaud when he describes a Theatre of Cruelty. “I would
like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open
door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door
that opens onto reality.”
― Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings
― Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings
These
great thinkers about theatre are all trying to capture is the idea of
Authenticity in performance and production. They want genuine commitment to the
performance by performers and audiences alike. If a performance does not leave
us shaking with emotion, angry, fearful, delighted, in love with the world,
then it has failed. Actor and audience
alike should feel challenged, uplifted, crushed, beaten and absolutely
shattered. And, in that communion, a
sense of well-being and grace.
On
the other hand, apparently, the other great thinker about the role of theatre
in the twentieth century, Berthold Brecht, propounded the idea of making the
audience less engaged emotionally in a work by proposing an Epic Theatre that
stripped the spectator of the need to identify emotionally with the
characters or action before him or her. He
felt it should instead provoke rational self-reflection and a critical view of
the action on the stage He was concerned that emotional engagement engendered
complacency in his audience and he employed what became known as “alienation techniques”.
In fact the word “alienation” used in this
context is a bit of a red herring. I think the Brecht, like Brook and
Grotowski, was driving at undermining
the primly defined conventions of theatre as he saw it. The Deadly Theatre of the glossy, bourgeois
light comedy. He wanted to give the pendulum a push in the opposite direction. He
was a man of the theatre and understood the necessity of emotional engagement
in his plays even if he didn’t preach it. Ironically, Brechtian Theatre has become a
style of the mainstream. Contemporary
audiences are much less challenged by such techniques than they might have been
in the 1930s. We have absorbed Brecht
and his ideas into the mainstream. Brecht
was not trying to undermine theatre as a whole but to “re-function it” and to
make it more relevant and challenging.
For
me, the key to this is Nietzsche’s idea in “The Birth of Tragedy” that the
individual can lose themselves in a collective Dionysian event and thereby
undergo an ecstatic transformational experience while recognising the
authenticity of the created world and how it coincides with the real.
In
Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. Apollo is the god of
reason and the rational, while Dionysus is the god of the irrational and chaos.
The Greeks did not consider the two gods to be opposites or rivals, although often the two
deities were entwined by nature. The
Apollonian is based on reason and logical thinking. By contrast, the Dionysian
is based on chaos and appeals to the emotions and instincts. - Wikipaedia
Thus
theatre explores our need for authenticity twice over. First in the great Apollonian consistent
world that that the playwright creates and reports on and secondly in the
Dionysian immediacy and transformative power of the event itself.
Note, that I am not saying what form that authenticity takes, just that the drama needs to have both plausibility and deep engagement with its subject matter. And that must come from the playwright. If you like, that predicates a third form of Authenticity, that contained and manifested in the playwright herself.
Nietszche
suggests that the only way we can attain any form of enlightenment is by
scrupulous self examination.in which we disclose the furthest reaches of ourselves. By implication he says there is a rich inner
life to be explored and that truthfulness in this exploration is the only
virtue. If, as playwrights, we want to observe
truth in our work then we must chase down the inner workings of ourselves and thence our
characters as if we were the Spanish Inquisition.
But
in this fractured, opinionated world of 2017, which writers have the resources
either in time or expertise for this critical examination of themselves and
their own writing? Where are the
great works that seek to portray and explain the current divisions in society? Where are the contemporary “Three Sisters” “Hedda Gabler”. Where are the bold playwrights like Aphra
Behn or Dario Fo? Sadly, playwrights are losing opportunities to write with
such engagement, to construct towering mountains of ideas or to create worlds
of experience. And without those
opportunities, the skill withers away. Many of the current ways into
playwriting are to blame. The ten minute
sketch or the monologue are excellent introductions to the art but they are not
the art. A ten minute play is really a
sketch and while it may be funny, thoughtful, clever, witty it simply does not
have the room to construct a proper narrative or to follow characters that are
allowed to build and develop. The ten
minute sketch is an art form in itself but it is not playwriting. And I believe this is where we are losing the
skills and sensibilities required in constructing plays. Writing a play is a marathon not a
sprint. It is a five day test match
rather than a T20 Big Bash. Emerging
playwrights ought to be given real incentives to write real plays, and, I
suggest, as soon as the plays become big and challenging with room for big
ideas then audiences will be enticed back as they always are to the authentic
narrative which has no counterpart in the other media..
Many young
writers have these important imperatives in their work. They may be dealing with
the big subjects but unless there is room for their work to grow in size and
scope then they will not be able to create the theatre that is so desperately
needed. At the same time, they hear only
the glib quick cut language of film and television making. They are not sufficiently exposed to the
theatrical narrative style which requires time to develop. Theatre needs to be more contemplative and
require exposure over longer periods than the disposable media.
I have suggested
before that there ought to be some way for young writers to serve the sort of
apprenticeship that I had. I was given opportunities to work alongside
established playwrights and directors, to sit in on rehearsals, to stand on the
side of the stage and watch actors at work.
I was given the opportunity to handle a few rewrites for other writers
and eventually to work with studio companies on my own works.
It is essential
that theatre is grabbed back from the accountants and gatekeepers. And wrested from control of the large
commercial funders who would seek to channel the inspiration of the
creatives. We must join forces with
like-minded creatives and producers and
write the sort of theatre that needs to be written.
Theatre
in its greatest form is like a towering moving crystal ice sculpture loud with
trumpets and voices that has the power to drive an audience to the further
reaches of their feeling and comprehension.
Today it has become the artform smashed into a million tiny glittering
shards, all beautiful in themselves but unable to generate the visceral
response that Brook and Grotowski and Artaud were challenging us to
provide. And if we are not careful, if
we do not show young writers how to aspire to creating this greater thing,
those fragments that are left will melt away altogether leaving us infinitely
poorer.
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Chapter 12 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity
Filling the Empty Space
Skidmore
and I were having a drink in a bar one evening after attending a performance of
some dire piece of performance work masquerading as drama when he suddenly said
“I’ve written a few pieces for the magazine at Uni, I think I’ll have a go at
writing a play next. How do I go about
it? What sort of story is best for a play?
How long should it be?” And
suddenly everything goes all wobbly and the room spins round and round as in an
old episode of Doctor Who. Mind you I
had been drinking home brewed scrumpy all evening but I did think this was one
of those portals into those time loops where our actions are repeated over and
over again for ever and I had had this conversation so many times before.
I
asked, as I do every time “Why do you want to write a play? Why not a novel or a short story or a poem?”
“There’s
a competition I’d like to enter. I definitely
think I could win it. All I want is an
idea and I’ll give it a go.”
Well,
that’s an answer I suppose. Not one I
wanted to hear. Perhaps I should have
phrased it differently. “What is the
idea you have that can only be expressed as a play? What are the particular attributes of the
narrative that make it so that it can only be expressed in a play? Plays are hard work and if you could express
yourself in a short story or even a haiku, you’d have a lot less heart-ache.”
But
this time our young hopeful is not to be put off. “It can’t be that
difficult. You write them all the time.”
Well,
yes, I couldn’t disagree. There is no
actual law against anyone having a go at such an undertaking. And in answer to his initial enquiry I had to
admit there are no actual rules about how much and what subject. And I never,
ever advise people about how they should write. But I liked Skidmore for all
his rather callow, erratic, exuberant approach to the world and I didn’t want
him to get involved in something that might make him unhappy so I thought I
might try and guide him with a few pearls.
All
right, I say “How much experience do you have of theatre? How much do you know about that unique
relationship between actors and audiences?
What do you know and expect of your own relationship with the audience?”
“I
don’t think I need to go into that too much.
That’s for the director to sort out.”
That
is also true. Up to a point. Directors need to be given freedom to explore
the subject and don’t need to be told how to direct a play. Particularly by someone like Skidmore. But that’s not what I’m driving at, either.
“So
you’re saying that you don’t need to engage with the audience yourself? You place your work before them and they like
it or lump it. A tiny bit arrogant,
don’t you think?”
Skidmore
frowned at that. I don’t think he’d ever
been called arrogant before. Then he
brightened as he always does in adversity. “I think you’re deliberately
misunderstanding me. Anyway, the play is just the words. I leave the gubbins to the techies.”
Now
there you are wrong, young Skidmore.
Comprehensively irredeemably wrong.
Plays are not works of literature.
They are one part of a huge collaborative effort by actors, directors,
lighting people, audiences, cleaners, ice-cream sellers. That’s why I say to all new writers who have
to listen to me ranting on from my stool in the corner of the bar: “Before you
put pen to paper you must get to know theatre and the way it works. You need to have all that firmly planted in
your mind, the smell of sawdust and of paint, the sounds of rehearsals in a
draughty hall somewhere, the anxiety of the producer that the thing is about to
work. You need to know all this because
a play needs to come from the theatre and is not bolted onto it. Have you read Peer Brook’s “The Empty Space”?” But when I looked up, Skidmore had ceased
listening and was attending to his I-phone.
The
answer I should have given right from the start was, “If you want to write
plays then start by getting stuck into theatre.” I really was getting worked up. This was a subject I had decided views on and
I wasn’t going to be ignored. “Now
listen here, young fellow. It doesn’t
really matter whether it’s professional or amateur but you must understand theatre
as a living, breathing organism before you can begin to think about delivering
the instructions that will prod this leviathan into motion. It also doesn’t really matter what you are
going to do within the theatre. Just be
somewhere where you can observe and learn.
When I got thrown out of school I hitch-hiked to London and not knowing
anything better, I went from stage door to stage door asking if there was any
work to be had. By some extraordinary
fluke heard of a job as a stage hand. It
was from the vantage point of the side of the stage that I was able to watch
great actors and theatre makers at work.
Later, I became a very junior stage manager in the North West of
England. It was sitting in on rehearsals
in freezing cold rehearsal rooms, marking up prompt copies with coloured
pencils held in shaking gloved hands that I learnt how the hidden mechanisms of
plays actually work. What paths the
directors and actors took through the intricacies of scripts, how they came to
understand what a play was about and how best to serve the script…” I tailed off because Skidmore had lost
interest in my c.v. altogether and had wandered off to drink tequilas with some
old buddies from Uni. Leaving me to carry on musing about the subject.
Theatre
is the oldest expression of some of the deepest human instincts. The playwright’s job is to lead the complex
process of thought that leads to that expression. Yet in the twenty-first century many of the
enormous possibilities of drama have been lost to a superficial welter of
acrobatics, music and visual effect while the skills of playwriting, character
construction and dialogue have been downgraded to that of mere pen holder for
other theatre makers. For three thousand years, theatre has provided a crucible
of thought and argument. It has
challenged the status quo and reflected on the great changes in society and
watched civilizations come and go. It
has mocked the privileged and epicene and it has raised to our consciousness
those who are oppressed and down trodden.
It has provided relief in the times of crisis and serious dialogue when
things were going smoothly. It can be
both ridiculously funny and jarringly emotional. It provides high ritual and low cunning. But because playwriting is seen as something
of a dilletante pass time, the subject of many university theses, it has lost
its heart and soul. Aspiring playwrights like Skidmore are
encouraged to write ten minute sketches for competitions instead of committing
the years of work necessary for real drama.
“What
you want to do Young Skidmore, is devote yourself to cutting through all the
obfuscation and razzamatazz and get back to the heart and soul of the
thing… Read Peter Brook… Skidmore… Skidmore!
Thursday, November 03, 2016
Chapter 11 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity
Secrets
and Lies – Inner dialogue
Barry: Can you still get Ty-phoo?
Andrew: I got some in for when the vicar called.
Barry: That might be nice.
Andrew: Last year. It’s at the back of the cupboard.
Barry: Don’t
go to any fuss. Earl Grey would be fine.
Some liars are so expert they deceive themselves. -Austin O’Malley
People
tell lies. That might come as a bit of a
shock to you having lived your life in your sheltered, honest-to-goodness
tell-it-like-it-is neighbourhood. But
let me assure you that some people are capable of ejecting absolute
eye-popping, heart-stopping, teacup-dropping humdingers of lies. In fact, some people are so given to telling
whoppers that they can’t tell where truth ends and lies begin. And, sadly for us, neither can we. Sometimes we find we have lived right next
door to someone who has been living their whole life as a lie. And when the police call to ask us if we
suspected anything of our serial killer neighbour we say with hand on heart “We
didn’t have the slightest clue, officer.
Not a whisper. The chap was the
quietest, kindest, nicest church-goer you could ever have the pleasure of
sharing your gardening implements with.
Mind you, there was the time the shears came back with suspicious stains
all over the blades and he said he had pricked his thumb on a rose thorn.” And so on and so forth. And we wonder about the clean living vegan on
the other side who borrowed the electric drill once...
What I mean to say is that we all have an
inner life very little of which we share with other people. And sometimes we find out about it and
sometimes even the owner of the inner life is not aware of it. But for an actor studying a character they
are to play, it is the inner, secret life that is not written in the dialogue
that they will sniff out like a truffle hound.
In the gaps that your dialogue allows, the actor will try to find the
actual words that remain unspoken but which motivate and drive the character
forward. In most cases it is the secret
inward dialogue that the character has with him or her self that is more
important than your actual words on the page.
This is a secret world that the actor inhabits from curtain up to the
final climax. It is the place where all
the debate and decision takes place.
What happens in the pauses in a play by Pinter? The dramas, the actual material drama happens
in the pauses.
The
great neurologist and theatre director Jonathan Miller says We must
allow for the way in which the unconscious works and guides our speech quite
unwittingly. This doesn’t just mean
the Freudian slip but the way in which our unconscious brains are working on
problems that we may have quite forgotten about. How often do we retreat into that secret
world until our partner says: “You’re quiet.
What are you thinking about?” To
which our answer is usually “Nothing”.
Now
here is an interesting conundrum for the playwright: how do you write something
invisible and unstated? Something that the character herself has no awareness
of? The inexperienced playwright may
include stage–directions. “He crosses to
the table, furrowing his brow and looking anguished.” Well, forget that sort of thing. The actor finds that demeaning. It is the actor’s job in association with the
director to worm out the inner dialogue.
Even less do you want to write the inner dialogue into the text. “You look worried Harry.” “Yes I am suffering fearful flashbacks about
that car-accident in which that young girl was killed by my stupidity last
year.” “Oh dear, I hope you’re not going
to brood about that over dinner.” “I probably will, although I shall attempt to
put a cheery face on it.” What you must do as a writer is to make sure that you
have the inner dialogue with the character yourself. You must examine thoroughly the psyche of the
character and make sure that they behave entirely truly to both their inward
and outward dialogues. There will be
tiny nuances . He or she might alter
their speech by just one word to give a little hint to the outside world of the
inner world. What was it we used to say
in church? “The outer visible sign of an
inward invisible force.” Because it is
surely the inner force that drives the character through the play. Think about
a play like “Cat on Hot Tin Roof” where the whole structure of the play is
driven by the lies that the protagonists hold close to them. This drives the
characters towards the inevitable climax. This is fine detail work and requires
close inspection of every single word you have written in the later drafts.
The unseen and unspoken topics that are never uttered are usually to
do with shame, guilt embarrassment. They touch on status and emotional
engagement. Intentions in these areas
must never be referred to directly. What’s more characters must be careful to
engage in such a way to indicate whether they want to discuss these ideas or
not. The idea of opening or closing is well known
to actors and improvisors. An open
question leads to a thoughtful and, possibly, lengthy reply. “What did you think of the pas de deux in Act
2?” Leads to a fuller discussion than
the closed question: “Did you like it?” The closed question encourages a “yes”
or “no” answer while an open question leads on to greater things.
I read an interesting piece in which some teacher suggested that
playwrights should never employ questions as part of dialogue writing. I think I see what she is driving at but you
still have to deploy an interrogation at some point. Obviously the clever playwright will imply
the questions but we still want our interlocutor to ask “Well, did you murder
Celia?” in some way or other.
Some
thoughts about Status
For most people the huge self examination that goes on throughout
all interactions is that of status. As soon as we walk into a room of strangers
we are weighing up the appearance, speech and manners of everyone else in order
to establish our place in the pecking order.
Status is vital to our understanding of the world but it is not as
straightforward as whether one speaks with a cultivated accent or has polished
shoes, though these outward signs do play an important part. And status is itself can be fluid and
mutable. I walk into the room and at
once I am on my guard, ready for an opportunity to exhibit my knowledge or
wealth. I must preserve my status at all times and, where and when possible,
increase it. This is more than just
getting one over on your adversary. One
can increase one’s status whilst appearing to lose it. Thus you can make what appears to be a gross
error in manners in the eyes of one person but it may result in admiration from
others.
Consider opening and closing questions in the following dialogue. And how are Andrew and Barry asserting status
through their use. Thus:
Andrew: Cup of
tea?
Barry: Not if
it’s a problem.
Andrew: No problem.
Barry: Are
you making one for yourself?
Andrew: Earl
Grey or Typhoo?
Barry: What
are you having?
Andrew: I’ve got
both.Barry: Can you still get Ty-phoo?
Andrew: I got some in for when the vicar called.
Barry: That might be nice.
Andrew: Last year. It’s at the back of the cupboard.
And so on.
Andrew asks “Would you like a cup of tea?” in as off hand way as
possible. Barry must never reply “Yes” or “No”. These are forceful,
closing words which represent a status assertion and, as such, serve to reduce
one’s own status. (The answer “yes” Implying something like: “You
are too stupid to recognise that is why I am here” and “No” implying “I
wouldn’t drink that gnat’s piss you served up last time.”) Thus Barry must
reply with a status neutral question: “Are you making one for yourself?” and so
throwing the status problem back to Andrew who must reply with a further
question: “Do you prefer Earl Grey or Typhoo?” Barry’s answer: “Can you still
get Typhoo?” is nearly a status assertion in itself. “I may have some in the back of the cupboard.”
Is a winning stroke. Yet notice how long Barry can hold out without every
giving a direct answer to the original question.
I’m not certain how this operates in other parts of the world but in
the UK this is typical of a complex status interaction in which both speakers
are fencing to an unwritten but well understood set of
rules. There are similar rules to follow in interactions concerning
the weather which are really coded for one’s emotional engagement with the
world and must be kept carefully guarded at all times.
It used to be axiomatic that in polite society one avoided
conversing about religion, sex and politics. In our dialogue here,
of course, these are the only safe topics of conversation.
And whether this particular case is especially British or not, I’m
willing to bet there will be similar sets of unwritten rules throughout the
world.
Some
thoughts on Irony
We all know about Dramatic Irony.
It’s a stock in trade for most playwrights wherein we let the audience
in on a secret that the protagonist in the play is unaware of. It’s where the audience nudges each other and
says “he’s riding for a fall.” Greek
Drama is chock full of ironic situations because the audience should be well
acquainted with the story in advance.
The best place to see it in action is in pantomime with a thousand kids
screaming “It’s behind you.” As the Dame
is cheerfully unaware of the ghost creeping up behind her.
Irony is our way of distancing ourselves from problems or
problematic people. It gives us an
outside view. It prevents us getting angry.
In order to be ironic about something we need to be detached or held
apart from the source of our irritation.
And irony is also a signal to others who may be our allies. Sending out an ironic smoke signal allows
those who agree with our point of view to sidle up closer to us with a knowing
wink without always raising the suspicions of those who are the target for the
irony in the first place. Irony sets us
apart but also joins us together. The
knowing versus the ignorant. The
Insiders against the outsiders. And here
we’re stepping on dangerous territory.
As soon as we have defined an otherness then we are as guilty of
shredding the network we are so wanting to build.
So
we need to be careful with an ironical inner dialogue that it’s not the playwright
speaking directly to the audience over the heads of the characters in the play.
And
here is another fascinating aspect. You
the playwright are in conversation with the actor and director about the inner
dialogue through the words you have written, but how much do you want to reveal
to the audience and at what point? Do
you want to let them into the secret at the beginning so they can watch the two
levels of the play at once, or leave it to the end as a grand deus ex machine
reveal? More likely you will want to
leave a little trail of clues throughout the piece that, if you are clever,
they arrive at the truth at the moment the other characters discover it. It’s
clever if you can pull it off. I always
find it annoying when as an audient you have realised the truth of a character
in act 1 while the characters on stage don’t see it until two acts later. You’re almost climbing out of your seat to
shout “Can’t you see? He did it?”
You, the
playwright need to understand what your characters are not saying. What topic is known by one or all of them and
is being ignored? What is, as they say,
the elephant in the room? And what sort
of code are your protagonists using to avoid mentioning it?
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