Playwriting Competitions - Some further thoughts

Why are playwriting competitions important to the playwright?  Competitions are one of the few ways for a writer to get his or her work in front of directors and audiences. 

Over the past few years new writing has taken something of a back seat in the theatre world.  However, writers do not stop writing just because it is no longer fashionable.  The ideas keep coming, the muscles need to be exercised. Apart from commissions I probably write at least one complete new play a year.  This is completely for my benefit but it is a loved little thing even if it will soon be an unwanted orphan and join the other orphans in the drawer in my desk I like to call The Orphanage.These little waifs and strays have little chance of finding a home to go to. It is of little use packing a little suitcase and sending them off to producing managements and directors because a) They aren’t considering new work b) They haven’t got time to consider new work because they are too busy boiling up a three handed version of Timon of Athens.  So my little waif is intercepted even before he reaches the door of the Playhouse by a stern beadle called a dramaturge. The dramaturge comes in two forms  - the embittered older writer who enjoys giving a sound kicking to someone else’s snivelling foundling or a fresh faced young person for whom this is the first job after their university writing course and who has never actually seen a play except once when he or she was in the sixth form.  Either way the dramaturge is there to keep your off spring as far away from the theatre space as possible.

There is another little wrinkle that amuses us writers greatly and that is the “emerging writer syndrome”.  ACE delights in funding new writing from new writers. These are youngsters with the same background as the dramaturge (2). The emerging writer may well be full of ideas but they need to learn the craft and so their work is usually a vehicle for the director and company to lay into leaving very little or the emerging writer’s work to emerge.  But, of course, having learnt something from this experience they are now no longer an emerging writer so they have immediately excluded themselves from ever being commissioned to write a second or even third piece.  Thus skill and experience drains away and the status of the playwright takes even more of a hit.

So the competition circuit becomes an important conduit for new but not emerging writers and us old hacks to get work to the public and to try and recover the idea of plays that are not written to a formula.  To charge us a fee for the privilege of actually being read by a potential management is adding insult to injury.  This is where the new and important ideas will come from.  Apart from the fact that I can’t afford to fork out £20 I feel demeaned to be considered such a low specimen in the theatrical hierarchy.  For us a competition is a sort of audition, we may not succeed but we know at least we have given it our best shot.  But are actors charged £20 a head to audition? Lighting designers, £15 a pop for an interview?  How much would you charge an Artistic Director?  Or a dramaturge?

Playwriting Competitions - Why I won't be entering.

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

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

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

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

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

The Playwright's Craft - The final polish

There's one last process before you hand the script over to the director and cast- this is the final polish.  You've done everything you need to make the play work: you've got the narrative structure right, you're telling the story in a crisp, stylish way, you've got the scenes in the right order and the overall dynamics look good.  You've edited out all the dross and you've got the characters speaking in their own voices.  The interchanges of speech and action flow naturally and easily. You've done your grammar and spell check (making sure it's set on UK English if it's for the British stage). The play is finished. Except for the Final Polish.

The Final polish is that last little bit of tweaking time.  It may be a couple of hours, a couple of days or, perhaps, if you've finished ridiculously early, a couple of months. The best thing is always to put the thing away and come back to it with as fresh eyes as you can manage.  Now read the play for one last time.  And make sure you read it it closely, not the sort of skim that you've given it up to now. You're on the look out for those little anomalies that the actors will pick up straight away; little solecisms of speech and character.  Ask yourself "How does this character know this?" "Where did that piece of information come from?" "Shouldn't this character be aware of that fact before now?" and so on. Actors are notoriously good at spotting these errors and inconsistencies.

If there is time in the rehearsal room you may be able to make these adjustments but don't count on it.  Rehearsal time, as I've said before, is for rehearsing not for rewriting. And if you iron out these little glitches beforehand you will appear that much more organised and the actors will have more confidence that the rest of the thing is going to work.

At this stage I am not suggesting rewriting anything, you should be far beyond that necessity.  No, I'm talking about tiny details that can be rectified with one or two words or, at most a sentence. I've just finished polishing a piece that relied on two characters knowing each other but I realised I hadn't made that clear.  It only took a "I think I've seen you in the Co-op" when they first meet to settle that.

So there you go.  Final little tweaks and it's ready to go into pdf for sending off.  Good luck.

Paradise Retailed

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

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

Paradise Retailed

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That dewy morn among the endless shelves

Of Tesco, ASDA or that other one,

That adamantine chain with carpark dire

The dismal Situation waste and wilde

No light but rather darkness visible

Each hell more sulphrous than the other ones

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

As any fruit flown in from Afric’s shore,

They took the easy path through racks of booze

The World was all before them.  Where to choose?

Then pausing, sought a respite from the crush

But found Another hell with queues that stretched

Nine times the space that measures Day and Night.

The pimpl’d youth, he with his horrid crew

That witness’d huge affliction and dismay

Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:

Allowed them precious little time to choose

Designless from the list and thus they sate

And contemplating Eden side by side

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

Then back among the throng in effort wide

A struggle Just to snatch an apple from the shelf

Among the jars and jaffas and the jeans

Our parents’ parents struggled with the lines

For all the world like serpents at the tills.

They stood enrapt by horrid writhing scrums

With hundreds and with thousands trooping came.

They shook their heads and headed for the door.

Whilst others pushed and shoved just anyhow

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

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

The outer world seem’d now a beauteous park

Like  paradise regain’d In contrast stark.

The gleaming chariots in lines array’d

To carry off the booty from the store.

Our Adam and his Eve from seeming hell

Had ’scaped th’eternal madness of that place,

Eschewed the driven path that others took,

Envelop’d in the blessed aer of day,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

The Illusion of Theatre

In the early nineteenth century it was generally agreed that playwriting was a bastard art form. Jane Austen regularly attended playhouses to delight in all manner of dramas, some of them we would regard as being fairly robust comedies and melodramas.   

     It was at this time the critic Leonard Smallpiece wrote an interesting diatribe against the practice of writing plays.  He described it as:  “The off spring of prose and poetry but a low, snivelling sort of story-telling donning showy rags and prancing about trying to catch the attention of the basest sorts of the populace.”

    That may be so but there is real skill and artistry in the writing of the play, an art that is so subtle that it goes unnoticed and is often relegated to tyros and tired executives who haven’t anything better to do with their lives.  But the whole art, that of manipulation of an audience’s awareness and expectation is far beyond what any novelist or poet can imagine. 

   Smallpiece goes on: “We persuade an audience to spend an hour or two in company of rogues and mountebanks who might as soon cut their throats as admit to their art.  These dissemblers pretend to be kings and princes.  The show themselves to be living in castles and airy palaces and they seek to convince their guests that they are attending great matters of state, battles, secret love trysts and are privy to plottings and all manner of knaveries.  And just when the watchers are about to lose patience and cast the tawdry game aside, our cheats essay an even greater illusion, removing them at once  to foreign lands and distant places.  All this with a few yards of lath and canvas, some moth eaten rags and the mesmerising power of words.

And not any words but words assembled with such care and contrivance that the watchers are unaware of how they are being directed; of how they may think this man to be a truth-speaker and this other one to be a liar; How of this woman we must be careful of because she poisons the ear of anyone she speaks to even though she is beautiful and finely dressed.

And sometimes these will come forward and say “we are but humble actors. Do not believe a word we say.” But again they are creating an illusion because they are not the actor you suppose them to be and may indeed, only be the local butcher or smith.  And when they remove their full bottom wigs and sit with you and tell you it is all a sham it is even more of a sham because that very revelation has been devised and rehearsed and practised.

   And the playwright is the most deceitful trickster of all.  He will tell you that this is so when it is manifestly not so and you will believe him. He is subtle because he will only show you what he wants you to see.  Why does he want you to witness this meeting, this passing of secrets and not another?  Why does he build your hopes only to dash them and then raise them again?  How does he engineer matters so that he asks you to consider a thing and then declares that there shall be a change of scene or, worse, an intermission so that your asking is held back and can only be answered in another way at another time.?

   And so the illusion is to make we, the watchers believe what we would not believe and to divert attention away from the very trick itself. It is the most underhand sleight worthy of any card-sharp. We are only shown what we are required see for the sake of the game even though we think it to be the whole world itself.”

   It amuses me to note that Smallpiece says “we” when referring to the audience.  He obviously enjoyed being hoodwinked as much as everyone else.

A lesson From History

It is always worth reminding  governments when their policies have become too egregious that the Middling Sort in Britain have, from time through history, said "Enough's enough"

Very soon the middling sort

Will rise against your arrogance

As we have done before:

Your fifth form economics,

Your bike-shed sniggering at the poor,

Your gradgrind education,

Founded on some mystic lore.

You believe your own ill-found

Stupidities. And now there’s more; 

You want to break the very things

We’ve worked a life-time for.

Poke the British lion and you

Will hear a muted British roar,

But be careful if you rouse the beast

Better scramble for the door

Be thankful we don’t bite off the heads

Of traitors any more.