Dialogue - The Heart of Playwriting
NOBODY SHOULD EMBARK ON THE DANGEROUS PATH OF PLAYWRITING UNTIL THEY HAVE SPENT AT LEAST SIX MONTHS DRINKING COFFEE IN A BUSY CAFE. PREFERABLY ONE YOU HAVE TO CATCH A BUS TO GET TO.
Skidmore: I’ll do this. (nods to counter)
Steve: Eh?
Skidmore: Watchawan?
Steve: (Purses
lips. Makes bubbly noise.) You come up on the dogs?
Skidmore: (Pulls lips back over teeth. sighs) Uh?
Steve: Cheers
(Sucks teeth.) Uhhhh...
Skidmore: (To barista) (makes despairing look)
Capuccino. (Gestures to Steve)
Steve: Nah.
Skidmore: My treat. I said. (Closes eyes)
Steve: Had
one here. Last week. Came in to see… (Makes grimace. Laughs out loud for no apparent reason)
Skidmore: Hurry up. (Nods to Queue.)
Steve: (Puffs
air. Tuts. Shrugs. Nods) I don’t think… Milk. (Grimace again. Mouths) Fridge.
Skidmore: (Raises eyebrows) Eh?
Steve: I
d’no. Americano then.
Skidmore: (To barista) No milk
Steve: Cheers.
Barista: Anything else?
(Skidmore
looks at Steve. Steve shakes his head)
Barista: That’s five pounds exactly.
(Skidmore
looks hard at Steve)
Steve: Eh?
(Skidmore
shrugs. Studies shelves behind counter. Steve
pays.)
Barista: I’ll
bring them over.
Steve: Cheers
I’m
not being entirely whimsical. The
idea is that as a play wright, as any sort of writer, you should listen to
people talking. As much and as often as possible. You need to listen closely and at some length
as you sip your americano. You
also need to blow the dust off your notebook and write down what they say and,
most important, the way they say it. Until
you have spent hours and hours doing this and have acquired some understanding
of the way people speak to each other; the speech patterns and rhythms, then
you cannot begin to write plays. Because
the stuff of plays is made up of the interactions and interplays of
characters. If
you can’t get that, then you can’t write a play. Anybody can write a play that depends on situation
or plot but to write a play that depends on character requires an understanding
of how to build a character and how that character develops within and around a
plot. Indeed, how the character and the plot are
inextricably linked. What
happens in a play can only happen because of that character and that character
drives what happens. And we reveal that
character by the way they speak.
There
are no rules about getting a character to speak. Indeed, you will find out very quickly as you
listen, that there are absolutely no rules to conversation at all. Trying to record and reproduce is virtually
impossible. Conversational
speech is broken, halting, discursive, unsettled. Entirely without grammar or syntax as described in
the conventional manuals. Sentences
have no verbs. They do not link
one to another. They are made up
partly of words, partly of sounds and partly of gestures.
What’s
more, dialogues have very little logic. It
is quite possible for one person to espouse several quite contradictory ideas
at one time. Sometimes our
interlocuters speak in other voices (the actual meaning of “irony” by the
way). Most of the time conversation does not follow the
neat ordered pattern of question and response we would expect as writers. Most of the time people will only talk about
themselves. Each question or
statement being answered or interrupted by their own experience. As a student
of conversation, I sometimes feel that the whole purpose of 90% of
conversations is entirely existential.
That is, we are reaching out into the void merely to say “I am here”.
Yet,
somehow in this mish mash of half formed sentences and ill formed ideas some
sort of exchange does take place. It
may be indirect and convoluted but eventually some idea may be conveyed to the
other party.
So
what do we playwrights learn from this? Firstly,
that our characters need to be freed from the conventions of written
speech. This gives us the opportunities to learn about the
reality of our characters. Our
character can grow with our discovery of their little tics and
irregularities. And I don’t mean
that that gives us licence to write in some sort of ridiculous Dick Van Dyke
cockney voice. I mean that we can
discover the outward signs of the inward workings of a character though their
speech. And as we write it we need to speak it out loud. We
are trying to record a spoken interchange so it only exists in some bare
notation as words on a page. In writing
dialogue it is, perhaps, useful to think of the words on the page as a sort of
code that reveals your intentions for the characters.
Secondly,
we need to remember that most conversations are about anything but the subject
in hand. This is especially true about complex and deep subjects. Previously
I mentioned our inbuilt willingness to suspend our disbelief. If you ally that with our need to co-operate
and collaborate in social situations you can begin to see how inevitable it is
that we will say things in a conversation that we may not believe in an attempt
to maintain the interaction. As
playwrights we need to understand and to embrace these apparent lies.
It takes quite a bit of beating about the bush before the
real feelings of our character are flushed out. This is what makes the process of play watching so
enjoyable. The audience are
voyeurs trying to understand something from the snippets of half formed
conversation they are allowed to overhear. As in real life in any coffee bar, we try to work out from these snippets,
what is going on in their lives. What
sort of people they are. And, of course, our characters are often
unreliable witnesses. They
lie, they prevaricate, they say the very opposite of what they really think and
feel. But as the watchers begin to know and understand
they begin to get more and more drawn in and engaged.
Thirdly,
we need to avoid the need for stage directions. If you’ve got the voice right then there is no need
to interject (humorously) or (bitterly) it must be there in the speech
itself. If you find you have to resort to stage directions
than you need to recast the speech. I would never present a play for
performance as written above. It’s for
the actor to discover the little gestures and informal sounds that carry the
character through that interchange. Similarly, as a director, I get annoyed by
writers who write detailed character descriptions in the stage directions but
do not carry them through into their actual speech and actions. It is not good enough to describe a character as
“Young dynamic and ambitious” You need to show those attributes. You need to demonstrate how that ambition is
manifested or hidden through what they say and the choices they make in
conversation.
Fourthly,
plot needs to correlate with the characters you are drawing. If you are beating your characters into a particular
plot twist or situation then you have either got the plot wrong or the
character or, most likely, both. The
actions that a character takes are the ones that define that character and are
defined by that character. If
there is a surprising plot or character twist you need to ask yourself whether
you have buried that possibility deep within the psyche of the character you
are working with. You need to ask yourself “does it contradict anything that
has already been laid down?”
Quantum thinking and speaking
In
an article from New Scientist Of
September 2011, Mark Buchanan
tries to relate the mathematics of the quantum world to human
interaction. An explanation, in effect, of our fuzzy way of going about
things. It casts an interesting light on the puzzle I have as a
playwright - the sheer impossibility of capturing or reproducing human speech
in all its wide, broken rambling, halting form but while still managing to
convey some sort of meaning. I have never managed to find a way of
notating speech in anything resembling a realistic, believable way.
Pinter arguably came the closest to making this work but he still had to resort
to a rather mannered "pinteresque" approach. Of course, a
playwright does not necessarily want to reproduce everyday speech
exactly. It would be massively tedious to the audience, and probably
totally incomprehensible but there is an inbuilt urge towards getting closer
than we have managed up to now. The reason being that we may wish to
describe in our plays a more realistic way of describing the trains of thought
of our characters. And those are inexorably linked to the way they
speak. I need to read the article several more times to get some deeper
insight but I like its drift.
