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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Playwright's Craft- How long should a play be?

One of the things that comes into consideration when writing a play is "How long should it be?".  On the face of it that sounds an eminently daft question to which the answer should be "As long as it needs to be."  But there is a reason for the question which involves an audiences ability to concentrate and the playwright's ability to juggle all the elements needed to tell a story well.

When I started in the theatre back in the sixties, an evening of drama would be expected to last around two and a half hours with at least two intervals for drinks at the bar.  Bar takings were an important way of subsidising what went on on stage. I've known customers ask for their money back if a play ran under two hours.  And let's face it, Shakespearian audiences expected four hours with a Jig ( a shorter comedy thrown in for good measure). Of course, all of that was before TV came on the scene so audiences today are desperately consulting their watches to see if they can be home in time for the "I'm a Celebrity" catch up.  Two hours is now a maximum and I have seen pieces down to an hour and a half and even an hour.  I suppose Opera audiences are still able to concentrate for longer and there are some honourable exceptions in the theatre but these are actually flagged up with warnings about their length.  I saw a magnificent production of "The Wandering Jew" some years ago at the National which clocked in at four hours.

But for me, an ideal length is around two hours for the sort of story I want to tell.  There is usually a bit of a pattern I like to follow with a main turning point half way through and several smaller twists on the way there and back.  So that readily falls into two acts with two or three scenes in each act with the climax coming just at the interval.  The number of scenes varies but I don't like to have more than three per act or the steps become too complex and we lose audience focus.  Anything over a total of eight scenes becomes a television drama in which audiences have to rush in and out to the kitchen whilst watching and so can't be asked to watch for more than two minutes at a time.  The beauty of live theatre is that the drama unfolds before your eyes at an appropriate pace not driven by the next ad break.  Longer scenes give the characters space to breathe and demonstrate complexity and development.

So given, the format I like to work in, and given that I aim for around two hours running time I find that my best guide to length is word count. And I reckon that at somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 words including stage directions.  (Usually stage directions last as long on the stage as they do to write).  Of course, this is a bare guide but it does give me an indicatiion that I've given the characters enough room to develop fully without become windy and verbose.

The Playwright's Craft - Direct Address to the Audience.

You are sitting in the cafe sipping your americano and thinking idly about nothing in particular.  The cafe owner is ostentatiously polishing your table and rearranging the sugar bowl in a meaningful way.  He lifts your copy of the Independent and wipes underneath it. Perhaps you have been there a little too long for one cup.  But at the prices he charges these days...

At the corner table two more coffees, a capuccino and a mocha, grow cold as their owners are deep in conversation.  You catch the occasional word.  What was that?  “Bomb?” “Knives?”  You become intrigued and angle yourself slightly to see if you can catch some more. “Slitting and gutting” accompanied by demonstrative arm gestures. You pick up your newspaper and lean towards them in its lee.  The cafe owner has given up and gone back to making hissing noises with the Gaggia so that you miss a chunk of the conversation.  Now you push your chair right out and lean sideways until you are nearly sitting at their table instead of your own.  “I swear by The Readers Digest Cookery Book.”  “Yes, the best ice cream bombe recipe there is.”  “And thanks for the advice on the trout”.

Ah well.  I’ll overhear more than a discussion on the culinary arts next time.  But something else occurs to me.  It concerns our inbuilt human desire to overhear other people’s conversations and, more importantly, to make something out of it.  We are hard wired to take in, to solve clues, to understand without all the information being present.  Our understanding might prove to be inaccurate but we still delight in gossip and trying to unravel something about the characters and situation involved.  Presumably in the early days of our species such understanding was a vital tool for being able to trust the people you were hunting alongside.

And so with theatre.  Writing for the theatre is a process of offering titbits of information to the audience so that they can follow and begin to fabricate an understanding from what is happening there in front of them.  This why I believe theatre grew up as a medium for dialogue between characters and why I find, as a rule, direct address to the audience rather untheatrical.  An audience member needs to arrive at their own interpretation of a character which, quite often, will be at odds with that of the writer.  So much the better, it proves that there is both depth and width in the writing.  It provides an experience more akin to real life.

And there is something else: the direct address is a deliberately alienating device.  We all know about Bertholt Brecht and his attempts to break down the barriers of theatrical convention.  But he’s done that, did that, over eighty years ago.  He was successful.  We understand the complexity of an ironical, alienated world.  Because that’s the one we live in during the twenty-first century.  We have moved on.  As writers we have to consider what live theatre really has to offer in these days of Big Brother, Jeremy Kyle and I’m a Celebrity Get me Out of Here. Direct address to the audience has become the language of television; almost every programme relies on that device from news, to comedy to scientific documentaries.  They all have to be presented to us. And Ironically, given the glass screen that separates us, I think that’s where it works to greatest effect.  Television is broadcast outwards, pushed towards us.  Live theatre is a medium for allowing an audience to come in, to enter a new and different world from the one they inhabit on a daily basis. We invite the audience to overhear, to become part of an event that is happening right there before their eyes.  We do not need devices to push them away. On the contrary, we need to study the craft and skill that enables an audience member to become absorbed, to become part of what is going on.  

For me, I think Direct Address shows a bit of a lack of trust in the audience.  As with all artists, the watchword ought to be: Do your work, don’t apologise, don’t explain. We don’t need to turn the theatre into the lecture hall. We need to trust that the audience has enough sympathy to be able to unravel even if they don’t understand fully.  And that we don’t need to bombard them with our vision of what they ought to be seeing.

A Campaign for Real Theatre

I get asked what I’m trying to achieve with my work as a writer and as a director .  My belief is that theatre has a great deal more to reveal to audiences than that which is on offer today.  I also believe that technique is being lost because the majority of those teaching writing and directing do not understand the medium themselves. Many start teaching with their only experience of live theatre being what they themselves have been taught at college.  I am therefore trying to reach back into my early formative experiences watching great writers and directors at work and apply that in a contemporary context.

There is some terrific theatre being produced today but there is also a great deal more derivative dross.  I am particularly exercised by the plethora of what are erroneously called “physical theatre” companies.   Most of the work that these are producing is largely movement and effect based entertainments with no underlying psychological heart and requiring simplistic emotional responses from an audience.  Let’s get this straight, “physical theatre” in its proper sense does not need trapeze artists, jugglers, music and dance.  Physical theatre as proposed by Jerzy Grotowski is a form that relies on a deep, visceral commitment by the actor to the text.  It is really a way of understanding how to project narrative through an actor’s body and connect it to an audience. It requires vocal technique of a high order and physical strength as well. As drama schools spend more time teaching their students how to sing and dance the less time there is to understand this deep seated performance technique  and, consequently, the fewer young actors who understand how to find and project a character.

“Theatre - through the actor's technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives - provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions.”

 Jerzy Grotowski

I do not criticise current theatre practice, I only lament that there is so much more that theatre has to offer.  If theatre could reach down and touch it’s roots then it’s strength would be recognised as the real alternative art form to film and television that it should be.  There is something that theatre and theatre alone can accomplish and this is the genuine reaching out, heart to heart, of an actor to his or her audience.

As a director I want to find these actors who can commit themselves totally to a text and to its performance.  As a writer I want to construct narratives that require this sort of performance energy.

My particular interest is dialogue.  For me the definition of theatre is the projection of a narrative through the interaction of characters on a stage.  This means dialogue.  Let film and television tell a story through images.  Let radio tell the same story through monologue and opera and musical through song and music but let live theatre unwind a thread of narrative through a continuing interaction through speech and silences between several characters.

I have written elsewhere how hard it is to write dialogue and how to project it as an actor but, for me, this is the fundamental skill of the writer and the actor and for the director, he or she must draw the audience, unspeaking, into this convolution of words.  The director must arrive at an understanding of the text in harmony with the actors.  They must agree on interpretations which the director wil then attempt to place on a stage so that the audience can become involved in the discourse.

The problem nowadays is that bookers underestimate the ability of an audience to understand theatre of this type and complexity and look for simple stories told in simple ways.  Not that that isn’t enough in some cases but theatre has so much more to offer.   Ironically, it is the publically funded venues that fear the power of this sort of theatre.  They have to reach targets and so daren’t put on anything that could challenge or, possibly, create an adverse reaction. So I urge all bookers to make room for Real Theatre and give your audiences a taste of how theatre could be.