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

Chapter 10 - Belief, Bias and Common Humanity

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.

Where Can I Read Your Plays?

Some people have asked me where they can obtain copies of my work.  Well here is (as close a I can manage) the complete list of plays.  There are 42 including collaborations and short pieces. Some of them are obtainable from my online publishers LazyBee Scripts and one is published in paperback form by Roving Press Ltd.  The rest are in dusty old folders on my shelves. Click on the links for contacts.

Title	M/F	Outline	Running Time	Obtainable From
The Spirit of the Land	4F/4M Plus extras	The church closes and the battle begins over the next few years to transform it into an amenity for the village. Vested interests and crooked dealings lead to a final scene set in the floods of 2014 with the villagers gathering in the encircled building.	4 Acts/ 4Scenes 120 minutes	Not available for production yet
He’s Dead	2F/3M	Rose's horrific nightmares become reality when her friend Maria is fatally stabbed. As the plot twists and turns ulterior motives are gradually revealed	2 Acts 85 Mins	LazyBee Scripts
A Brief Encounter with MURDER	3F/6Mplus one	A restful holiday in a 1940s themed holiday home becomes a bizarre murder mystery as Mother goes missing with a bearded fisherman and a fat vicar lies dead in the front room. Was it the Rat Catcher, the Carpet Fitter or the French Dressmaker? And who is the Man with the Big Hammer?	2 Acts 70 mins	LazyBee Scripts
Pig Unit	3M/2F	Polish immigrant Paluszki comes towork at the Pig Unit with bullying Leonard and sniping Flint. When Leonard's adoptive Mother and a local girl earning money to go to college appear on the scene all hell breaks loose. And then Leonard disappears...	2 Acts 6 Scenes 90 minutes	Spyway Projects
What Would Jane Say?	1F	Jane Austen comments on her books from a 200 year perspective. She joins an online dating site and bickers with Cassandra over her cellphone.	2 Acts 70 minutes	Not available yet
Anning’s Fossil Depot	1F	Schools and young people. Mary Anning talks about her life and work and reveals her last illness	1 Act 40 minutes	Spyway Projects
The Cabinet Maker’s Daughter	1M/2F	Mary Anning, the Mad Woman of Lyme, is dying from breast cancer. Under the influence of pain deadening narcotics administered by bad tempered nurse, Susan she hallucinates about her life. When her longtime love appears is it a dream or reality?	2 Acts 90 minutes plus interval	Spyway Projects
Guerilla 3 short plays for street performance	3 F or M	Everyone Wants to be Somewhere Else - 3 overlapping mobile phone calls delivered through megaphones Free at the Point of Delivery - A bizarre new NHS Steampunk - The Colonel and street girl Lou meet in a dystopian future	3 x 5 minutes	Spyway Projects
Mrs Adapta Iago's Knitting Circle	3F/ 1M	The knitting circle has been meeting in the front room of Mrs Adapta Iago's bungalow every Tuesday and Thursday evening for the past forty years. But everything is not as it seems - there's conspiracy in the air. What is the project they've been working on all that time? Why are the knitting circle members all intellectual women graduates from one of Oxford's top colleges? What is the secret they want to keep from Michael, the bus driver? What actually did happen to Magda? What is the solution to the four colour problem? And what happened to Connie's rash? This darkly comic tale is as full of twists and turns as a ball of wool.	2 Acts 4 Scenes 98 Minutes	LazyBee Scripts
She Opened the Door -The Wife and the Women who Haunted Thomas Hardy	4F	Controversial reassment of Thomas Hardy's first wife by Emma. At the time sh was thought more than a little eccentric but might there have been a very real reason for her behaviour? Something to do with an overweening Mother-in-law perhaps?	2 Acts 80 minutes	Published in paperback by Roving Press Ltd. With supporting research and notes on the production.
Eve of War	1F	Knights inshining armour or gas masks and refugees? What stories will Nanny Cummins read from her book “Little Arthur's History of England” toexplain the oming horror to her small charge? And will that mean confronting the darkness buried in her own past?	2 Acts 90 minutes	Not available for production
Welcome to the Future	1 F/ 1M plus 1 child	Jimmy wakes on New Year's day in the year 2000 to see a world transformed with silver suits and hover cars.	20 minutes	Spyway Projects
Chelsey and Baz (With Tara Dominick)	1F/1M	Rich heiress Chelsey alone on her yacht picks up castaway Baz from his raft in the middle of the ocean. His story changes minute by minute and so does the posibility of romance.	35 minutes	Spyway Projects
The Lady of Shallott	1F	Bad tempered Arthritic Jacqueline watches the goings on in the street below from her window . A group of kids smokingin the bus shelter. A policeman practising for his role in a Gilbert and Sullivan production. Meanwhile she tries to complete a tapestry for the local shopping centre.	2 Acts 50 minutes	Spyway Projects
Conversations at the Sorrento - A bouquetof short table plays for performing in cafe spaces	Various	A woman is dumped by her husband via her mobile phone. Two walkers consider what would have happened if one of them had fallen from the clif. Two members of the flower show committee try to have a meeting. An elderly day tripper tries to decide whether to have a panini for lunch.	5 x 10 and 15 minute pieces.	Spyway Projects
The Town Hall Fish	Various but minimum 4F /3M plus 6 girls, 1 boy and several extras.	A day in the life of a small seaside town. Various characters come and go and a disagreement escalates between and the manage of the local aquarium. At the end of day the sight of a drowning sailor makes think she has seen an angel.	2 Acts 110 minutes	Spyway Projects
Dead Air	1F/ 1M	Susie Strong hosts the Very Very Very Early Show on Radio Violet. But today nothing in the stdio is working and with the studio technician not due in for another hour or two she's on her own. Then she hears footsteps in the corridor outside.	2 Acts 40 minutes	Spyway Projects
The Time Machine	2F/ 2M Plus puppets	Adaptation of H.G.Wells' story. But with the added complication of two white mice hiding in the machine and who get trapped in the future.	2 Acts 70 minutes	Spyway Projects
We Call it Home	Various	An history in songs and sketches commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of a Scout and Guide headquarters in Dorset. Very specific but could be used as a blueprint for similar events.	40 minutes	Spyway Projects
Dick Whittington and his Crazee Cat	1994	Knockabout, updated version of the traditional pantomime.	2 Acts 90 minutes	Spyway Projects
Captain Pugwash and the Monster of Green Island	4 M plus 1 F to play Tom the Cabin Boy	Based on characters created by John Ryan. Pugwash wants to stand as toen mayor but he needs to make a grand gesture to be elected. He decides to set sail for Green Island to capture a monster for the town zoo. Black Jake stows away on board the black pig and pandemonium ensues.	2 Acts 90minutes	Licence for characters needed. Reading copy only Spyway Projects
Shahrazad (with the Company)	2F/2M	Adaptation and conflation of some of the original Arabian Nights tales as Shahrazad and her sister Dunyazid take on the wily old King Shahria and try to put off her execution.	2 Acts 70 minutes	Spyway Projects
The Trumpet Major	F 1/M4 with doubling. 8 without doubling The old Anne Garland could be doubled by her younger self.	Thomas Hardy's novel of life in the Napoleonic era, with soldiers massing to repel invasion, and village life in turmoil as a result.	130 mins	LazyBee Scripts
Hiawatha	2F / 3M	Adaptation of the Longfellow poem. The story told by a band of Jesuit priests traversing the wilds of Canada.	80 minutes	Spyway Projects
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Vanishing Author	1F/2M	Author Conan Doyle is gradually taken over by his creation Sherlock Holmes, but then the attempt to kill off his creation, results in Holmes using all of his skills to escape death.	2 Acts/ 5 Scenes 90 minutes	Published by LazyBee Scripts
The Runaway Train (with Jem Barnes)	2F / 3M	Pantomime play. Something is blocking the drains in the small wayside station where the old engine Ethel May Winthrop is being restored. But what happened to the gold that disappeared on her fateful last run? Requires full size practical steam engine.	2 Acts 90 minutes	Spyway Projects
Little Arthur’s History of England	1F	Original version of the play “Eve of War”		No longer available for production
The Mayor of Casterbridge	2f / 3M	A faithful retelling of Thomas Hardy's well-loved novel for small company. Michael Henchard sells his wife after a bout of drunkeness. Vowing never to drink again he does well and rises to become Mayor. But when his wife and daughter reappear years later his life spirals into tragedy.	90 minutes	Spyway Projects
Jane Eyre (with Helen Palmer	2F /2M	An adaptation of the Charlotte Bronte novel for a small cast in flexible settings.	80 minutes	Spyway Projects
Painting the Clouds with Sunshine	1F/2M	Young girl has dreams of Hollywood in the 1930. Her adventureson the way to stardom	70 minutes	Spyway Projects
Robinson Crusoe	2 F / 3M including cross dressing dame and principal boy	Traditonal panto for small cast touring prouction	80 minutes	Spyway Projects
Little Red Riding Hood	19792 F / 3M including cross dressing dame and principal boy	Traditonal panto for small cast touring prouction. Little Red Riding Hood lives in the greenwood with her father Robin and outrageous Grandmother. The Sheriff of Nottingham disguises himself as a wolf for the usual reasons. With songs.	2 Acts 80 minutes	Spyway Projects
I Want to Fly	2F/2M	Play for young people in schools with classroom particiption. Four characters want to learn how they can fly and explore the history of mankind's attempts to do so.	Half day project. Play itself round thirty minutes	Spyway Projects
Brog Seven (with Jem Barnes)	2F /2M	A play for young people about Energy Conservation. Christine and he mother run a launderette. Brog Seven arrives from the year 2401 to sabotage their machines and point out what their misuse of energy will mean for the future. Meanwhile the dastardly Sir John Montague wants to corne the energy market for his own ends.	40 minutes	Spyway Projects
Krondos (with Jem Barnes)	3 F or M	A play for young people about Energy Conservation. Representatives from three planets meet to decide which is the most efficient energy source before the Galaxy runs out altogether.	30 minutes with discussion	Spyway Projects
The Web (with Jem Barnes)	1f / 3M	A play for young people about Energy Conservation. Perhaps the Wheeler Energy Box will be the answer to all our problems. But the villainous Grabbitt and Runne have their eyes on it fo themselves.	30 minutes	Spyway Projects
Damion and the Plague of Words(with Jem Barnes)	1F /3M	A play for young people to encourage reading with participation. Prince Damion is losing control of the kingdom through a md deluge of words. Perhaps the children can help by taking the words topiece and reassembling themin a more organised way.	30 minutes	Spyway Projects
The Jolly Farmer (with Jem Barnes)	1F/ 3M	The life and times of eighteenth century political activist William Cobbett. With songs.	80 minutes	Spyway Projects
A Grave Matter (with Jem Barnes)	1F / 3M	A hot summer in the seventeenth century and the wife of a prominent Basingstike business man is buried aive twice. Humorous retelling of a genuine piece of Basingstoke history.	80 minutes	Spyway Projects
Mummers’ Play	All sorts of permutations for a cast of five	Performance version of the ancient tradition with plenty of modern allusion and knockabout humour.	20 minutes	Spyway Projects
A Christmas Carol (with Jem Barnes)	Cast of five	An adaptation for flexible company of Charles Dickens' evergreen tale. Interspersed with traditional carols	90 minutes	Spyway Projects
Whistling	2M	A young volunteer visits an elderly blind man holding out against eviction	1 Act 40 minutes	Spyway Projects

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.