Playwriting E-Book

Stephen Jeffreys

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 528

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

For over two decades, Stephen Jeffreys's remarkable series of workshops attracted writers from all over the world and shaped the ideas of many of today's leading playwrights and theatre-makers. Now, with this inspiring, highly practical book, you too can learn from these acclaimed Masterclasses. Playwriting reveals the various invisible frameworks and mechanisms that are at the heart of each and every successful play. Drawing on a huge range of sources, it deconstructs playwriting into its constituent parts, and offers illuminating insights into: - Structure – an in-depth exploration of the fundamental elements of drama, enabling you to choose instinctively the most effective structure for your play - Character – advice on how to generate and write credible characters by exploring their three essential dimensions: story, breadth and depth - How to Write – techniques for writing great dialogue, dynamic scenes and compelling subtext, including how to improve your writing by approaching it from unfamiliar directions - What to Write – how to adopt different approaches to finding your material, how to explore the fundamental 'Nine Stories', and how to evaluate the potential of your ideas Written by a true master of the craft, this authoritative guide will provide playwrights at every level of experience with a rich array of tools to apply to their own work. This edition, edited by Maeve McKeown, includes a Foreword by April De Angelis. 'What Stephen Jeffreys doesn't know about playwriting isn't worth knowing' Stephen Daldry 'Stephen Jeffreys is as important a teacher as he is brilliant a writer… Without him, I wouldn't have been able to write the plays that I have written' Simon Stephens 'An incredibly useful writing helpmeet. As witty and humane as its author' Emma Thompson 'What Stephen taught me has shaped my mind and I have shared this with countless writers' Kwame Kwei-Armah 'Stephen was a true mentor… I still draw upon much of what he taught me today' Abi Morgan 'Like a bird in the air, Stephen was utterly in his element as a teacher. We sat spellbound' Phyllida Lloyd 'I had the great pleasure of working with Stephen on his play The Libertine. Would that all playwrights had his openness, his talent, his hard-headedness, his experience, his enthusiasm, his audacity, his complexity, and perhaps best of all his talent and interest in eliciting the best in others' John Malkovich 'Stephen's wit was legendary. "Wit": from the proto-Indo-European word "weid" meaning "to see"/"to know". Stephen "saw" clearly and "knew" profoundly; which is why we sought out the clarity of his words and learned deeply from his laughter' Simon McBurney 'Stephen was more than just a great bloke whose easy laugh set a room alight; he was a genuine geek, an obsessive about the craft of writing… As I read, I was reminded again of his deep connection to plays and how they work. There are gems in here, there is guidance, there is the spirit of Stephen Jeffreys' April De Angelis

Leseprobe

STEPHEN JEFFREYS

PLAYWRITING

Structure, Character,

How and What to Write

Edited by Maeve McKeown

Foreword by April De Angelis

Afterwords by Simon Stephens,

Abi Morgan and Roy Williams

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

April De Angelis

Editor’s Note

Maeve McKeown

Introduction

1. Structure

Theatre Events Structure

I. Story Structure

The Three Elements of Story

The Three-part Story: Macbeth

The Advantages of Conventional Story Structure

Story Structure in Plays with Multiple Characters

II. Time and Place Structure

Open/Closed Time and Place

1. Closed Time, Closed Place

(a) Choose an interesting location

(b) Use the interval

(c) Plot devices

(d) What happens offstage?

2. Open Time, Closed Place

3. Closed Time, Open Place

4. Open Time, Open Place

The three-act play

The four-act play

The multi-scene play

The two-set play

Recurring settings

Panorama plays

A dominant scene

Lots of scenes

Scene changes

III. Experimental Structures

Disrupted/Simultaneous Time and Space

1. Disrupted Time, Closed Place

2. Disrupted Time, Open Place

3. Disrupted Time, Simultaneous Place

4. Open Time, Simultaneous Place

Playing with Narrative

Mimimalism

Inundation

Interruption

Repetition

Appropriation

Subverting Other Dramatic Conventions

Character

Language

Theatre’s Relationships with the Audience, the Artist and the World

2. Character

I. The Three Dimensions of Character

1. The Character’s Story

The Past: The Backstory of the Play

The Present: The Action of the Play

The Future: What Happens Next?

2. The Character’s Breadth

Physical Characteristics

‘Fads and Quirks’

What the character says about themselves

What other characters say about them

What they do

What the writer says about the character

3. The Character’s Depth

II. Working with Character

Aristotle’s Four Criteria

‘Good’

‘Appropriate’

(a) The character who is appropriate to the the task, and succeeds

(b) The character who is appropriate to the the task, but fails

(c) The character who is ill-equipped for the the task, and fails

(d) The character who is ill-equipped for the the task, but succeeds

‘Lifelike’

‘Consistent’

Personality Types

Jung’s ‘Compass’

Extroverts and Introverts

The Myers–Briggs System

Other Tools

Observation

Character Relationships

Number of protagonists

Group characters

Harriet Walter’s ‘Six Keys’

3. How to Write

I. Six Kinds of Logic

Deductive and Inductive Logic

Causal and Off-the-wall Logic

Dialectical and Poetic Logic

II. Dialogue

Types of Dialogue

Ordinary Speech

It’s not consecutive

False starts

Interruptions

Self-correction

Private code

Bad grammar

Character-based Dialogue

The Authorial Voice

Neutral Dialogue

Tools for Writing Dialogue

Grice’s Conversational Maxims

Maxim of Quantity

Maxim of Quality

Maxim of Relevance

Maxim of Manner

‘Actions’

III. Writing Scenes

The Left-brain Approach

The Visual

The Structural

The Right-brain Approach

IV. Subtext

Analysing Subtext

Writing Subtext

Three Types of Subtext

4. What to Write

Foxes and Hedgehogs

I. Types of Play

Autobiographical Plays

The Zeitgeist Play

The Parallel-world Play

The Specific-experience Play

Researched Plays

The Microcosm Play

The Verbatim Play

The Workshop Play

Historical Plays

Plays Based on Historical Characters

Historical Situations

Historical Themes

Adaptations

Well-known Novels

Lesser-known Novels

Other Books

Movies

The Form-led Play

The Specific-commission Play

II. The Nine Stories

Group One: Beginnings

1. Romeo and Juliet: ‘The Love Story’

‘The Love Story’ inverted

2. Orpheus: ‘The Gift That is Lost’

Orpheus inverted

3. Jacob and Esau: ‘The Rival Siblings’

Inversion: siblings united

Group Two: Middles

4. Circe: ‘The Spider and the Fly’

Circe inverted

5. Tristan and Isolde: ‘The Love Triangle’

‘The Love Triangle’ inverted

6. Achilles: ‘The Fatal Flaw’

Achilles inverted

Group Three: Endings

7. Cinderella: ‘Good Triumphs in the End’

Cinderella inverted

8. Hercules: ‘The Hero Who Keeps Going’

Hercules inverted

9. Faust: ‘The Debt That Must Be Paid’

Faust inverted

Combining Stories

Endings

5. Epilogue

Redrafting

Submitting Drafts

Meeting with Literary Managers or Directors

Lunch Theory

The Four Criteria for Accepting Commissions

Your Voice

Afterwords

Simon Stephens

Abi Morgan

Roy Williams

Appendices

I. Fifteen Dos and Don’ts of Playwriting

II. A Map of Three Sisters

III. Types of Chorus

IV. Recommended Reading

Index of Names and Titles

Index of Subjects

About the Author

Copyright Information

Foreword

I first met Stephen in a bar at the Riverside Studios, Hammersmith, in 1988 at a playwriting festival where an early play of mine was being read. I approached a tall man with a head of hair who looked friendly to ask if he had change for the cigarette machine. He did. We got into conversation. It was Stephen Jeffreys. I had struck gold.

As Writer-in-Residence at the theatre company, Paines Plough, Stephen had instituted a regular meeting of writers called ‘The Wild Bunch’, which met to discuss the craft: writers took turns to lead sessions on subjects such as exposition, three-act structure, dialogue, scene structure or even ‘What makes you tick?’ He invited me to join. It was the first time I had come face to face with the writer’s craft, and it was all news to me.

Stephen was more than just a great bloke whose easy laugh set a room alight; he was a genuine geek, an obsessive about the craft of writing. His mantra could be guessed at – Fit the content to the form – with the emphasis on the latter. Every second on stage had to be interesting, and the only way to do that was to understand the medium you were working in, which was theatre not the novel. The novelist can dive inside the minds of characters, and give the reader every corner of their protagonist’s brain – a playwright can’t do that. How to get the inside outside was part of the quest, part of the immense jigsaw puzzle of technique that needed to be assembled to write a great play – with the caveat that craft must support the imaginative vision of the writer. I became Stephen’s successor as Paines Plough’s Writer-in-Residence, and had the luck to travel the country with him, watching him give writing workshops. I took furious notes.

One time he asked a participant to sit facing the rest of us. He called him Character A. ‘He’s very hungry,’ said Stephen. ‘The dramatist’s job is not to let the character tell us that fact but to show us. How do we do that?’ The group pondered. They decided that another character, B, should come and sit next to the first and begin eating a packet of crisps. What does Character A do? Snatch the crisps? Befriend B? It was the beginning of a scene full of subtext, wants, conflict. It was a perfect method of teaching the number-one theatre rule of all time: to show, not tell. Stephen just came up with stuff like that on the spot. Awesome.

Stephen always stressed that the word ‘playwright’ was spelled that way because plays were crafted for three-dimensional space, not merely written – they were made like a wheelwright would make a wheel or a shipwright a ship. We were craftspeople: that was Stephen’s great insight and passion, which he pursued with generosity and brilliance his whole life, and which he conveyed to countless, grateful aspiring playwrights who wanted to ‘wright’ their plays but to whom the mysteries of structure seemed opaque. Stephen had an admirable clarity of vision and a genius ability to teach through exercises and insights that was pretty breathtaking. His ‘closed space/open space/closed time/open time’ matrix is now legendary as a tool for examining the relationship between form and content. His knowledge of plays was encyclopaedic. Listening to him, one realised that an intimate knowledge of existing plays was an invaluable resource for a writer.

So here in this book, thankfully, Stephen has downloaded his brain. As I read it I was reminded again of his deep connection to plays and how they work. There are gems in here, there is guidance, there is the spirit of Stephen Jeffreys always full of wonder at the amazing, complex, flexible invention the play is. The craft he illuminated in this gift of a book is there, just waiting for us to connect to it with our imagination, vision and passion in order to write the next good play, which is the lifeblood of the institution we are all devotees of: the theatre.

April De Angelis

Editor’s Note

Stephen and I started working on this book in 2012. I had been working with Stephen for three years by this point, as the administrator of his ‘Playwriting Masterclass’. I first met Stephen when I was an administrator at Out of Joint theatre company, who were producing his play The Convict’s Opera (2008). As a young, aspiring playwright, I cheekily asked Stephen if I could attend his Masterclass and offer some admin support in exchange. Ever the affable and supportive mentor, Stephen allowed me to assist his then administrator, who subsequently handed the baton over to me, and I managed the next two Masterclasses myself.

I knew that Stephen was keen to write up his Masterclass but never had the time to do it. I recorded the Masterclass of June 2011 with a view to this. So, during a break from my PhD in 2012, I suggested to Stephen that I transcribe the audio recordings and write the first draft of the book. Stephen unhesitatingly agreed.

We spent a couple of weeks sitting at Stephen’s kitchen table. We worked on some sections of the book, reading the material for the first draft out loud. I asked him to expand on various points, and critiqued aspects of his ideas; I think Stephen liked that I pushed him. Stephen had big plans for the book. He wanted to add sections on using props and writing community plays, and to write a new chapter on ‘Getting Produced’. But things didn’t transpire as planned. Despite my repeated attempts over the next few years to encourage Stephen to finish the book, his schedule was overflowing and mine was too, so we could never find time to continue.

Eventually in November 2017, Stephen emailed that he wanted to resume work on the book. We met up, and he had a renewed sense of urgency about it. I was keen to finish the book too, but I was trying to write my own book on political theory. We both determined to set aside what time we could.

Then, in January 2018, the terrible news came. Stephen had an inoperable brain tumour. I think he knew something was wrong, which was why he had contacted me about finishing the book in November. It was truly important to him to see his teaching live on for future generations of playwrights. Whatever held him back before no longer seemed to matter. I travelled down to London and worked with Stephen and his wife, the theatre and opera director Annabel Arden. But by the third meeting in March, Stephen was no longer able to speak in full sentences and Annabel had to translate between him and me. It became clear that Stephen was unable to continue the work and that it was over to me.

From day one of this project, way back in 2012, we had discussed referencing more plays by women and people of colour, and from different cultures. This was something Stephen was as passionate about as I am. As a mentor of many female playwrights, and having taught in Cuba, Hong Kong, Palestine, and Uganda, Stephen was onside. Frustratingly, in the 2011 Masterclass, he mostly referred to plays by British white men from the 1970s to 1990s. I had pointed this out to him, and he was keen to correct it, but he never got round to it. I have tried to ameliorate this to some extent by spending time in Stephen’s library – a treasure trove of plays by women, plays from Africa, Asia, and all sorts of obscure old plays – and adding details about them where appropriate. I used the plays Stephen owned, as well as the databases (see below).

Another aspect of the book that Stephen meant to spend time on was the sequence on ‘The Nine Stories’ (see here). Again, with his immense knowledge of theatre, I’m sure he would have added many more examples of stories for each myth. I have fleshed out what I can, drawing on his notes and comments, and the databases he had drawn up, as well as on input from others mentioned below. It should also be noted that, because this book is based on transcripts of lectures, I had to fact-check it retrospectively.

The databases mentioned in this volume were always included in Stephen’s ‘book’ for his Masterclasses, and supplied to participants. The databases provide an analysis of plays according to the number of scenes, the structure, and the underlying myth, as well as miscellaneous observations. I have collated the most recent databases I could find in Stephen’s office (dated 2014), and they are downloadable at www.nickhernbooks.co.uk/playwriting. In the book, I have included two other pieces of writing I found in his office as appendices: Stephen’s analysis of different types of chorus, which he worked on for his play based on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (2005); a list of ‘Fifteen Dos and Don’ts of Playwriting’; I have also included the recommended reading list from the Masterclass ‘book’.

My heartfelt thanks to Annabel for her support, insight and wisdom throughout this process. Also special thanks to Nick Hern for allowing me to take this on, and to Nick de Somogyi for his great edits. Also to April De Angelis and David Edgar for reading a draft of the text and making very helpful suggestions. Despite the constraints, I think we have ended up with a book that will be an invaluable resource for generations of playwrights to come. Stephen’s Playwriting Masterclasses were legendary for the wealth of useful, practical information they imparted about an art form that is notoriously mystifying. I think we’ve captured at least some of that magic in these pages. I hope that, together, we have cemented Stephen’s legacy.

Maeve McKeown

November 2018

Introduction

My starting point is that nothing that I can say or teach you will turn you into a playwright: you must have something that you want to say. You have to have the urge to say something onstage, and that is something I can’t give you. Most people have learned fascinating things from their life or lived through extraordinary experiences, had brilliant ideas or imagined great things. What I will try to do in this book is to save you years of work by transmitting certain techniques, tools and tricks that can help you to translate your experiences or ideas into your play.

Aristotle’s assessment of playwriting in the Poetics remains to this day the greatest attempt to explain this mysterious craft. I have read many later books on playwriting, some going back to the nineteenth century, and most of them are not very helpful to the aspiring playwright. Either they tend to view plays in an overly academic manner or they tend to be too simple. What I think playwrights need is a practical guide to writing plays, including techniques, approaches, and story ideas, providing them with the tools that they can apply to their own work.

The first time I went to a playwriting workshop, I was running it, and so when I became Writer-in-Residence at Paines Plough, a new-writing theatre company, I sought to remedy this lack of teaching. I set up a group of playwrights called ‘The Wild Bunch’ whose intention was to teach each other everything we knew. We took it in turns to teach sessions, and we learned a great deal. I carried on learning about playwriting through working with writers over many years, including spending twelve years at the Royal Court Theatre in London, reading five plays a week, and running playwriting masterclasses. But more than anything else, I have learned about playwriting from working on my own plays. Writing plays is difficult. It’s rather different from writing poetry or novels or songs. It’s a very particular type of writing with its own set of skills. What I’m trying to give you in the following pages are mostly things that I’ve learned myself the hard way. The ideas that you may already be familiar with are in the first section of my chapter on structure, where I talk about traditional story structure in order to provide the starting point for my own theories. The rest is material that I’ve worked out for myself, or have found via actors and directors or from a range of unlikely sources. So I hope that in this book you will find something completely different, which will help and inspire you to write.

Its central idea, which I will keep coming back to, is that writers tend to fall into two groups. There are those who are terribly good at things like structure, organisation, getting the characters on- and offstage, and making sure that the plot is watertight; the tendency of writers like these is that they may be a little unimaginative and possibly lack that sense of poetry, metaphor, and the unexpected. Whereas the other type of writer tends to be brilliant at coming up with great visual images, understanding the psychology of the characters, or finding beautifully poetic moments or metaphors, but they seem incapable of getting the actors on and off the stage in the right order, or finding an overall shape for the play. I rather crudely refer to this as left-brained and right-brained writing: the left-brain being responsible for our organisational, rational and cognitive capabilities, and the right-brain being more poetic and spontaneous. There’s been some recent work on the theory that the left-brain and right-brain are fundamentally different, which of course concludes that it’s a bit more complicated than that, so I enter a disclaimer here that I’m using those terms in inverted commas. When I say ‘left-brain’ and ‘right-brain’, I don’t mean that I have any real grasp of neuroscience, but rather as a convenient way of labelling and thinking about these different types of approach to writing plays.

The aim of this book is to help you to recognise and improve upon the part of playwriting that you’re not good at. While reading the last paragraph, you may already have instinctively identified with one of the approaches to playwriting; if so, that’s a good start! Because the key to playwriting, in contrast to other forms of writing, is that you do need to develop both these sets of skills. You can just about get away with being a novelist who doesn’t have a great grasp of structure, for instance, but it’s very hard to do that in theatre; conversely, a play that is beautifully organised but has no driving metaphor, no inner life, will be received by audiences as being very efficient but very dead. Another way of looking at it is to think of the difference between a ‘bird’s-eye view’ of playwriting, where you look down and see the whole map of a play spread out before you, and a ‘worm’s-eye view’ of playwriting, where you’re peering up from a muddy field, you have no idea what’s going on, but you are richly in the moment – which I imagine worms to be. The central theme, which I’ll come back to in each chapter, is to try to look into yourself, and to woo those skills that you feel you don’t have.

The Playwright’s Methods

The shape of this book is a necessary fiction. I describe character, structure, dialogue, and theme as if they are separate entities. In practice, they merge in unpredictable ways: a structural idea pushes a character further; a suddenly conjured line of dialogue opens a window onto a theme, and so on. Writing plays is a holistic process, but writing about writing plays requires compartmentalisation. I must therefore stress that there is no correct order of doing the work: it is unlikely that you will ever proceed along the path Structure– Character–Dialogue–Subtext, etc., without ever checking back or marching forward.

In my view, the area most playwrights need to work on is structure. In playwriting, the overall structure generally yields the individual unit of the play, which is why a grasp of structure is fundamental. But the process can work the other way round, too. When he began writing The Caretaker (1960), for example, Harold Pinter believed that one of the three characters would be murdered by one of the others. As he journeyed down the road, however, the characters developed differently, and such a climax no longer seemed appropriate. In other words, his moment-by-moment experience of creating the play led him to redefine his master plan.

My advice here is paradoxical: on the one hand, I suggest that playwrights respect their working processes; most likely they are self-discovered (and therefore valuable) and have been road-tested and found to be trustworthy. On the other hand, however, I would counsel playwrights to seek to branch out from those familiar processes; we must battle all the time against our own clichés and the common tendency to write the same play over and over again. Throughout this book I will show you different ways of approaching the same problem, and I encourage you to try those methods that don’t come naturally to you.

What Playwrights Do

A playwright is an artist who plans four-dimensional events. These events begin in the playwright’s imagination and, over a period of time, get set down on paper. Then a group of fellow artists (a director, and lighting, sound, and costume designers, etc.) apply their imaginations to create the physical conditions to realise the dramatist’s vision. Finally, the written text will be performed by actors in a three-dimensional space to a live audience. The play has made a journey from a hidden place to a place where nothing can be concealed. The resulting transaction between actors and audience is the fourth-dimensional point of the process.

This bare description of the act of writing plays illustrates two important principles, which define the kind of work playwrights do and which sets us apart from other kinds of writers, such as novelists, poets, and screenwriters:

1. The playwright’s work is performed to a live audience in a real space in real time.

2. Playwrights are part of a creative team. We are the primary creators, arguably the most important creators, but we do not stand alone in the way that the novelist or poet stands alone.

For the playwright, these conditions are simultaneously confining and liberating. Certain effects lie outside the natural range of theatre: we are hard put to render the inner turmoil of Dostoevsky’s protagonists or the sheer pyrotechnics of Coppola’s recreation of the Vietnam War. But by capitalising on the immediacy of our medium, and by providing opportunities for our collaborators, we can open up a huge range of possibilities. This process begins in the mind of the playwright and this, we shall see, needs to be an unusual instrument – or at least an instrument that has been trained to operate in an unusual way.

The Art of Playwriting

If you think about the way an audience receives a play, it’s very different from other art forms. If you are reading a novel, maybe you’ll read forty pages on the first day; the next day you have a domestic crisis so you won’t read anything; the day after that you may read a hundred pages; the day after that you read about five pages before falling asleep; and the next day you’ll get completely gripped and finish the book. Essentially, you choose when it all happens. Or imagine you’re in an art gallery, and you see a sculpture: you can generally choose how much time you spend looking at that sculpture – you can spend half an hour, you can spend ten seconds, but it’s your choice. In the theatre, however, as an audience member, if you’ve lost attention and dropped out at some point, then the show has gone on without you: there’s no rewind button; you can’t go back. A play happens live, in real time – that is the basic condition of writing for theatre – and as a playwright you have to learn to deal with that.

It’s always frightening when you see audiences tune out at the same time. If I have a play on at the Royal Court, during the first preview I will generally watch the play and take notes; but for the second preview, I will sit in one of the seats at the side of the stage in the gallery and watch the audience. I watch to see at which points they start, literally, to lose the plot. Audiences tend to switch off all together, and when they do that, it’s probably your fault as a writer: there’s something wrong with the play; this is the bit where it’s not interesting. A novelist can get away with writing a self-indulgent description of the countryside, say, because the reader can always think, ‘Oh yeah, I’ll just skip that bit.’ But you can’t do that when writing a play. If you lose the audience, even for a minute, it’s very hard to get them back, because they are holding on to a continuous piece of wire, they are following the story second by second. Our responsibility as playwrights is to make every single second interesting. This is our great problem, and also our great opportunity.

In his Poetics, Aristotle argued that the elements of a play could be ordered according to importance. The order is as follows:

•  Plot

•  Character

•  Language

•  Music

•  Spectacle

(Intriguingly, if you reverse this order, you find the key to successful West End musicals – spectacle first, and plot last!)

I’ve basically followed Aristotle’s advice in this book, so my first chapter is on dramatic structure, which is essentially a left-brain activity, and the least well understood aspect of playwriting. Dramatic structure is actually very simple; it’s the application of simple shapes to three particular dimensions – story, time, and place – each of which will be explored in detail. In Chapter 2, we will then look at ‘Character’, and how to generate and write credible characters. The third chapter offers some analysis as to how to write plays, including looking at dialogue (Aristotle’s ‘Language’), how to write a scene moment-by-moment, and the challenges of writing subtext, as well as exploring what I call ‘The Six Kinds of Logic’, which are the different approaches writers take to playwriting. My fourth and final chapter examines the crucial issue of ‘What to Write’, including different types or genres of play, and my take on the idea that there are nine basic stories.

I

STRUCTURE

Structure usually inspires one of two emotions: fear or loathing. The fearful know there are rules, but they don’t know what those rules are, and they definitely don’t want to talk about it. The loathers think that structure is for nerds. It’s boring and uncreative. They see playwrights as artists, not technicians. They also don’t want to talk about it.

In response, I want to clarify three things about dramatic structure. The first is that dramatic structure is simple. It is the tying together of three elements – story, time and place – each of which we will look at in detail in the following chapter. With practice, the process of structuring becomes instinctive, helping you to build plays with greater insight and confidence.

The second is that structure is potentially the most creative area of playwriting. Structure is not necessarily mechanical or formulaic. The building blocks are easy to grasp and infinitely adaptable, and once you understand conventional dramatic structure, it’s much easier to write unconventional and experimental plays. By the time you have reached the end of the section on ‘Experimental Structures’ below, you will have a whole new palette of colours to play with.

The third is that by working with structure, you will save an enormous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent in that most unrewarding form of pseudo-work: rewriting dialogue.

The important thing with a play is to make sure you have the right structure. I’ve read and seen many plays where the author had a great idea and then structured it in the wrong way. For example: an emotional piece, which would have made a perfect ‘pressure-cooker’ play (see here), instead written like a cool television screenplay with too many scenes. You may have experienced when writing a play, that at some point it takes charge; you have lost certain options and you’re being pushed into choices that you don’t want to make. These problems usually occur because the structure is wrong.

After some time learning the basics of dramatic structure, you should be able to choose instinctively the correct structure for a play. An exercise I often set myself is, whenever I’m sitting on a bus and I see a newspaper, I pick it up and choose a story. By the end of the bus ride, I will have worked out the structure of the play that would best tell that story. Ask yourself questions such as, ‘How would I do that story in the theatre?’, ‘What kind of play is it?’ Eventually, by habit of thought, and by using structure creatively, you can work out the shape of the play. You might not have the play perfectly worked out in ten minutes, but you will probably get ninety per cent of the story right by using the simple tools conveyed in this chapter.

There is, of course, a danger of using dramatic structure in a formulaic and uncreative way. And so in the following pages, I will not only look at conventional dramatic structure, but also at experimental structures. My theory is that quite conservative-looking and old-fashioned structures can be radicalised; you can take any dramatic structure and do something exciting with it. But in order to do that, you have to know what the structure is doing in the first place.

Theatre Events Structure

A play is an event. So before analysing dramatic structure, it is worth discussing the shape of an evening in the theatre, as this affects the structure you choose. Of course, theatre events differ from society to society, but I want to think briefly about writing full-length plays in the theatre culture of early twenty-first-century Britain, and the changes that have occurred even in my lifetime.

In this era, people mostly receive drama from television. But the way in which an audience experiences TV drama is different to the theatre. When you watch something on TV, you can easily change channels or switch off; there is no reason to stick with it. But when you go to the theatre, you have paid to see a play. You have committed time and made complex social arrangements involving a date or a babysitter. You have come to a particular theatre to see a particular play. Therefore, theatre audiences have expended time, money and thought on a play before it has even begun, and this has a big effect on the beginnings of plays.

I remember once at the Royal Court, a couple beside me were discussing at what point they would leave if the play wasn’t very good. They decided on twenty minutes. I’ve met many young, inexperienced screenwriters working in TV, and they are obsessed with the first ten seconds of the script – someone’s got to be killed or someone’s got to take their clothes off. The audience must be hooked from the outset because they are always on the verge of switching off. But the same isn’t true for theatre. The playwright has twenty minutes to gain the audience’s interest. The beginnings of theatre plays are different from those on television: you don’t actually have to do much.

In terms of pace, the first half of a play should be longer than the second half. If the first half is an hour, and the second half is an hour and fifteen minutes, audiences perceive it as slow. As you go along, the audience wants more. Think of it this way: if your first half is a car journey at 40 m.p.h., the second half needs to start at 50 or 60 m.p.h., and by the end it needs to be pushing 90. There must be more in the second half: not more words but more action.

The interval is one of the things people most fear when they have their first play produced. It’s a worrying moment for a playwright: you’re probably in the bar, and you are hyper; your hearing is heightened, and any even slightly discouraging remark you hear tends to hit home, straight to the heart. The worst possible conversation to overhear is when someone says, ‘Well it’s… hmm… yeah,’ and someone else says, ‘There’s a very good Italian restaurant around the corner – can’t we go there?’

If you are going to have an interval, plan for it. There are two important components to consider. The first is the ‘first-half closer’. This is the playwright’s defence mechanism against the exodus to the Italian restaurant: the fascinating incident that is so exciting that the audience needs to come back to find out what happens next. This is achieved beautifully in a play by David Pownall called Master Class (1983), which is set in the Kremlin in 1948 at a musicians’ conference. For the first fifteen minutes, we don’t see Stalin, but people are saying things like, ‘Oh God, what if Stalin comes in?’ Then Stalin, one of the most horrible people ever to have lived, comes in – and what’s he like? He’s marvellous! What a lovely chap, nice-as-pie Uncle Joe. Then we have fifteen minutes of Stalin cracking jokes and tinkering with the piano. All of a sudden, he picks on Prokofiev, who has been seriously ill. ‘We have all of your work here,’ Stalin says, and his lackey, Kirov, pulls back a cupboard revealing Prokofiev’s work on vinyl records. ‘Let’s hear one,’ Stalin says. Kirov picks up a record, hands it to Stalin, who smashes it. ‘Let’s hear another one.’ And he does the same thing, repeatedly. We understand that not only has Stalin got Prokofiev where he wants him, but he can destroy his entire life’s work if he wants to. The playwright has created a powerful visual image. And at that point we have the interval. So the audience spends the interval thinking, ‘What’s going to happen when we come back?’ Such a big effect is not compulsory before the interval, but it’s valuable if you can do it.

The second thing to consider is what happens during the interval. People have a limited time to do a lot of things – go to the loo (which can take forever in the West End, especially if you’re female), get your drug of choice – a drink at the bar, a cigarette, or whatever will get you through the second half – and talk to your friends. It’s a big agenda, so generally the audience spends the interval rushing around. The result is that, after the interval, the audience are rather like schoolchildren after a windy breaktime; at this point, almost anything will be funny. This is a trick that is well worth knowing: after the interval is what I call the ‘comedy zone’. You can put this to the test next time you go to the theatre.

The comedy zone has different implications depending on the type of play you are writing. If you’re writing a funny play, you need to put some good material here. Don’t waste anything that’s too good; use something that’s quite good and then build from there. If you’re writing a serious play, schedule a sequence after the interval, say five to ten minutes long, in which you indulge this and then suddenly turn it on its head. One of the most exciting things you can do as a playwright is to have an audience laughing, and then cut the laughter and hit them with something serious. The moment of turning something funny into something tragic is magical; after that, audiences want more.

In the UK, until the late fifties and early sixties, two intervals were the norm, even with classics such as Chekhov; in contrast to nineteenth-century Russian productions, where there was an interval after each act, and the author was required to go on stage to receive their applause (or not, as the case may be). Laurence Olivier famously quipped that by the time the audience had had their third gin and tonic, they didn’t care whether the three sisters get to Moscow. That argument carried the day in the end; his 1967 production of Three Sisters had one interval, which then became the norm. Over the past few years, the trend is to have plays without intervals. This started with Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997), which ran for an hour and forty-five minutes with no interval, which, incidentally, is the amount of time scientists have calculated that an audience can tolerate without needing to go to the loo; any more than that and you are pushing it. Allegedly, audiences are becoming cash-rich and time-poor and don’t particularly like intervals. Then again, Jez Butterworth’s smash-hit Jerusalem (2009) had two intervals, so feel free to play with it.

Now we’ve considered what an evening in the theatre looks like, it’s time for the three elements of structure: story, time and place.

I

Story Structure

The great thing about story is that it answers the question as to why we in the audience are interested in a play. We are interested because the story slowly unravels, and we are gradually (or in certain types of play, quickly) presented with something that we must follow, second by second. The reason why plays and films still tend to be story-based, whereas novels are less welded to sequential narrative, is that narrative is still the best way to keep people engaged.

The Three Elements of Story

There are two questions to bear in mind when thinking about story: ‘What happens next?’ and ‘Why do we care?’ The answers to these questions are determined by the three elements of story, which I’ll demonstrate with the following examples.

Story One

A beautiful young man meets a beautiful young woman, and they go out, and start to fall in love. Then they do fall in love. They decide to meet the prospective families. The prospective families meet the boy and girl, and think they’re marvellous. And eventually the couple decide it would be good to get married, and there’s no problem. They get married and they are immensely happy, and they also have hugely fulfilling careers. Then they decide to have children, and they do, and the children are absolutely beautiful and talented and fulfilled in every possible way.

What’s wrong with this story?

The problem with this story is that there is no conflict. It is therefore fantastically boring. It doesn’t matter if conflict is people shooting each other or arguing about who gets the last chocolate. The content of the conflict is not important, but conflict there has to be. Conflict is one of the crucial three elements of story because it reveals character (which we will talk about more in Chapter 2). Also, conflict leads to more conflict, and through these series of conflicts, the audience makes discoveries about the play’s characters and themes, and – hopefully – gains some insight.

Story Two

It is World War Three. A group of twenty survivors have banded together in a ruined theatre. They have a large supply of tinned food and all the Rocky movies and that’s it. They decide that they will make the best of the situation, but things go badly. There is a series of rows and killings, and eventually only two people, a couple, are left. In the wake of the chaos, they have some food left and some of the Rocky movies. However, things deteriorate. They get on each other’s nerves and have a huge argument and eventually one of them leaves. The last survivor is left alone with a dwindling supply of food and movies and eventually decides to commit suicide.

What’s wrong with this story?

In this story there is plenty of conflict, so that can’t be the problem. You might have observed that the first story went like this:

Story Two went like this:

What Story Two is lacking is any reversal. It becomes predictable because we understand that the writer’s worldview is a pessimistic one and this view is pushed relentlessly. There is no change or contrast, nothing to challenge the views of the writer. Even the most potentially depressing plays, like King Lear (1605), have moments of hope, such as the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia.

We have established, then, that a story needs conflict and reversal. We do not want a play that looks either like Story One or Story Two. Perhaps, then, we want something that looks more like this:

Let’s look at Story Three:

Story Three

A handsome, debonair and enlightened theatre critic accepts an invitation to review a drama festival in Australia. He gets on his flight but, unfortunately, halfway there the plane blows up and everybody except him is killed. But because of his extraordinary buoyancy, he floats in the ocean for several days and survives. He finds himself washed up on a small island, which is inhabited by a tribe that lives off fishing. The critic knows nothing about fishing, but he’s been to Oxford and applies all the knowledge he’s gained from the plays he’s seen of real people doing real work. He looks at the set-up of the community and says, ‘I think you can improve the way you fish.’ And, indeed, they put his plan into action and catch many more fish. Suddenly the tribe is more prosperous. He is accepted, shoots up the hierarchy and is offered the chance to marry the daughter of the head of the tribe. Forgetting that he has a family in London, he embraces the marriage and this culture, and eventually becomes chief. But one day they’re on a boat and a shark attacks and smashes the boat; everybody is killed, apart from the critic. He is washed ashore and finds himself in an industrial community and realises that he will have to work. He finds a job in a ball-bearings factory and, again, he has seen lots of political plays so he knows the thing to do is to organise the union. He becomes the key figure in the ball-bearings factory union. Unfortunately this annoys his supervisors, so on the way back to his hovel one night they fire several shots at him, but he escapes, leaps aboard a motorboat and heads to the ocean again. He arrives at a rock and decides he’s had enough of this excitement and wants a contemplative life. So he sits on the rock and meditates for the next two years. Slowly people passing by in boats notice him and he becomes a cult figure. A small band of followers flock to the rock, then they build a temple, and he becomes a major religious figure. However, at that point (possibly divine intervention), the church is struck by lightning and everybody except him is killed. And that’s the end of the first half.

What’s the problem with this story? Why is it possibly worse than the other two?

What this story doesn’t have is delimitation. Very simply, there is no beginning, middle or end. If the story stopped when he starts working in the ball-bearings factory, for example, you would have a shape you could work with.

If you are painting a landscape, where do you stop? You could always try to paint the whole visible world, but it is a painter’s job to choose something to put in the frame. Part of what we decide when we’re writing a play or a film is where we put the frame around the action. The frame can be large. In Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1956), for example, we look at one family over twenty years; the action starts during the Spanish Civil War and it ends during the Hungarian uprising. Yet this play works because our attention is focused on six carefully chosen scenes over the twenty-year period. But in my story about the theatre critic, there is far too much material. So as well as requiring conflict and reversal, we also need to ask, ‘When does it stop?’

And there we have the three elements of story: conflict, reversal, and delimitation.

The Three-part Story: Macbeth

Now that we know the three elements of any story, we can look at story structure. The classic storytelling model is the three-part story, which I will analyse by using Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). I will look at what the play does, why the structure is successful, and what it tells us about stories generally. I use Macbeth because you are probably familiar with it but, instead of looking at the psychology of the characters, as you may be used to doing, I want to focus exclusively on the structure of the play.

You might notice that the scripts of Shakespeare’s plays are organised in five acts, but I don’t believe he thought of them in those terms. There are several theories as to why his plays are divided that way. One is that it was a decision made by the publishers of the First Folio edition of his collected plays, after his death. Another is that he was following Seneca, and other classical dramatists, who wrote in five acts. The third is that there were no public lavatories at the Globe, so during the course of a Shakespearean play you needed four opportunities to go wherever you could. In general, British and German plays of the time tended to be in five acts, whereas French, Italian and Spanish plays were in three, but those divisions are fairly arbitrary. In terms of the story structure of Macbeth, however, the divisions are not arbitrary but rather are based on climactic moments.

Part One

The play opens with a short scene with the three witches. It’s quite noisy, there are lots of sound effects, and it’s usually dark. It’s hard to discern the story; all we see are three strange women and they refer to Macbeth. In the second scene, we see the King of Scotland, Duncan, with his sons and noblemen. They meet a bleeding soldier who reports that Macbeth displayed great bravery in battle against the Norwegians. A nobleman, Ross, enters and tells the King that the Thane of Cawdor disgraced himself in battle. Duncan orders Ross to go to Macbeth and to bestow on him the title Thane of Cawdor. So at the beginning of the play, Macbeth is talked about in a supernatural context and then as a great military leader, so we have two different notions about his character from the start. At this point, the play could be about Macbeth, but it could actually be about anything; it could be a play like Coriolanus (1607), where a successful military ruler goes off to great exploits, but we don’t yet know.

In Act One, Scene Three, we meet Macbeth and he meets the witches. They tell him that he will be king. This is what is known in Hollywood terms as the ‘inciting incident’ or ‘initiating incident’. This is the point when we know the play is going to be about Macbeth becoming or trying to become king. This focuses us on what the play is about. In his asides (soliloquies to the audience), Macbeth reveals that the witches’ prophecy has shaken him to his core. He wants to be king, and this realisation reveals a tension between his ambition and his guilt, because to be king, he would have to kill Duncan. This opens up the first level of conflict in the play – inner conflict – which is what goes on in the character’s head. Macbeth is with his friend Banquo, but he cannot confess to the ambition he is feeling because it’s an illegitimate emotion and potentially entails committing treason. Macbeth himself begins to set up obstacles: I want to be king; why don’t I just hang around and wait for that to happen? Perhaps that’s not going to work, so perhaps I should kill Duncan? In the next scene, Macbeth meets Duncan, who invites himself to Macbeth’s house, providing the opportunity.

Act One, Scene Five begins with Lady Macbeth reading a letter from Macbeth, telling her about his encounter with the witches. She is enthralled by the idea of the Macbeths as king and queen, so when Macbeth comes home and says that Duncan is coming to stay, she urges him to seize the opportunity. Macbeth doesn’t want to kill Duncan, and Lady Macbeth advocates for killing him. This provides the second level of conflict in the play – interpersonal conflict. We have juicy scenes between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth essentially saying ‘I’m not going to do it’/‘Yes you are’. Conflict is proliferating, which is good; that’s what we want. Eventually, at the end of the first part, Macbeth does kill Duncan and becomes, by the rather mysterious rules of succession, king. This is the climax of Part One. We don’t actually see the murder but we see the effect; we see Macbeth coming out of the chamber with the blood and the daggers. At the end of Part One, Macbeth becomes king. At this point there’s a little dip of dramatic action: Shakespeare has given us the Part One climax, and takes the tension down a notch with the Porter’s speech; a moment of comic relief. This could be a one-act play.

Part Two

People often tell me they can write a one-act play or a short play, but cannot write a full-length play. So in answer to that problem we ask the question: ‘What can Macbeth do now?’ The answer is that, having had this large ambition, he must conceive of a larger ambition. The larger ambition he devises is to stand alone. He would like to found a dynasty, but he doesn’t appear to have any children; although Lady Macbeth sometimes suggests she has had a child, there are no visible children around. It has been prophesied to Banquo that his children will be kings, and so Macbeth’s next journey is to become a tyrant. After killing Duncan, Macbeth hires three murderers to kill Banquo and his son Fleance, so that Banquo’s sons will not threaten his crown. The murderers succeed in killing Banquo, but Fleance escapes. Macbeth begins to unravel, seeing Banquo’s ghost at a dinner party in the castle. He is shaken and resolves to see the witches again to find out if his position as king is secure.

Macbeth visits the witches who offer him three more prophecies: to beware Macduff, that he will not be harmed by any man ‘of woman born’, and that he shall be safe until Birnam Wood comes to his castle on Dunsinane Hill. Macbeth, still unsatisfied, wants to know whether Banquo’s heirs will be king, and the witches show him eight future kings, all descendants of Banquo. This fuels Macbeth’s tyrannical paranoia, the dramatic tension rising all the time. Macbeth sends more killers to Macduff ’s castle in Fife. Macduff has fled to England, but Macbeth has ordered that everyone related to Macduff be killed. This results in a worse crime than he committed at the end of Part One – the murder of Macduff ’s wife and all his children. This is the climax of Part Two. Notice how these acts of violence punctuate the play and form the climactic moments.

Again there is a little dip here. It is characteristic of Shakespeare’s plays that after the Part Two climax, the hero gets a break; the hero is off for three scenes. The effect of this is interesting. In Shakespeare’s tragedies, the attention is almost exclusively on the hero, so taking the hero out of focus means that when he comes back again he seems to have changed or aged. In Macbeth’s case, when we see him next he has become intoxicated by the idea that he cannot be harmed until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, which he believes is impossible, rendering him invincible. He has become completely unfeeling, which is a significant change from the character we met at the beginning of Part One.

Part Three

Macbeth seems to bestride Scotland like a colossus, and at this point, the third level of conflict comes in. Macbeth has become such a tyrant that the scattered opposition begins to unite and we get conflict between a human being and their society, or in some cultures at war with nature itself: extrapersonal conflict. The hero is fighting against huge forces. So there are three levels of conflict: inner conflict, interpersonal conflict, and extrapersonal conflict. Always ask yourself, of any play you’re writing, ‘Where are the levels of conflict? How many levels of conflict am I working on at any given moment?’

The opposition forces organise and come to Dunsinane to confront Macbeth. The prophecy is that Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane, and what happens, as a simple camouflage device, is that each opposition soldier chops down a tree and carries it in front of himself. And this is one of the great images of Macbeth, because it gives us the image of both society and nature rising up against this tyrant. Incidentally, when I was doing this workshop with a group of Arab writers in Bethlehem, they told me that this is a tenth-century Arabic story and that Shakespeare stole it, about which I had no idea. However this medieval story got back to Shakespeare, he used it to powerful effect, because it does these two things at once. At the end, the tension ratchets up further, until eventually Macbeth dies, his head chopped off. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth has gone from being gung-ho about murder (in contrast to Macbeth’s squeamishness) to having a breakdown and killing herself. Their stories are mirror images of each other, creating contrast.

You can see that we have fulfilled our three criteria for a story: multiple levels of conflict, several reversals, and a clear framework. The story stops when Macbeth dies; there isn’t a further scene where Macbeth escapes from battle to fight again another day, because that would be a rollercoaster and, as everyone knows, rollercoasters make you sick after a while. There’s a limited amount we can invest in a character’s rises and falls. Note that there are stories in which people will accept seven-part structures – action movies like Indiana Jones, for example. In these films, each successive climax has to be more interesting, so if the hero is tied to a railway line after fifteen minutes, by the end there will be an army of opponents, snakes down his trouser legs, he’ll be tied to a lamp post and there’s a bolt of lightning heading his way, etc. The thing to remember is that we’re not emotionally engaged with action stories; we know it’s a game. When we are writing something with emotional engagement, we cannot absorb too many twists and turns in the storyline.

One of the things that’s intriguing about Macbeth is that he pushes himself right to the end. He throws down his sword and says, ‘I won’t fight.’ But because he’s Macbeth, he repents and thinks, ‘Just a minute, there’s still a chance – I will fight!’ He pushes it as far as it will go. It is not until he discovers that Macduff was ‘from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’ that he realises it’s over. One of the keys to writing plays (though I’m not suggesting all plays should end in death and mayhem) is working out how far, within the context of the play, you can push a character.

If we look at the play from Macbeth’s point of view, the story structure looks something like this:

The first part goes well, the second part also goes well, but the third part goes very badly. In climactic terms, he has reached the height of his power by the end of Part Two and he is dead at the end of Part Three. The reversal of his happiness is crucial. The value of the central character at the end of the second part is always the opposite of what it would be in the third part.

Let’s look at the Hollywood happy-ending model. This is fundamental to movies (and I’m about to ruin any Hollywood movie you’re ever going to see). The shape goes like this:

In the first part, things go well for the characters, then the worst possible thing happens to them in the Part One climax. In Part Two, they struggle against their inner demons and, because they are ill-equipped to meet the challenge, things get progressively worse. But their fortune suddenly changes and they succeed by the end of Part Three. In movies Part Three tends to be about fifteen to twenty minutes long. The effect is a sense of uplift or a rush of happiness, because you see people surviving against the odds. The worst possible thing happens to a character, they survive it, and then they get the best possible thing that can happen to them very, very quickly. The worldview that humanity succeeds over evil is endorsed. It’s remarkable how consistently this Hollywood happy-ending model has been applied, irrespective of genre. In the melodrama of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), for example, Chief Brodie (Roy Scheider) has happily moved with his family to Amity Island, but hates going on the water; then he has to catch a giant shark – which, in a thrillingly sequenced Part Three, he succeeds in killing. And in the broad comedy of Meet the Parents (2000), Greg Focker (Ben Stiller) blissfully proposes to his girlfriend, but then falls foul of the disapproval of his prospective father-in-law (Robert De Niro) – with whom he finally successfully unites in order to win back her love.

The Hollywood model is the inversion of Macbeth. Macbeth is the tragic model, and what makes a tragedy tragic is that you see the character at the height of their powers, making their eventual decline seem all the more awful. Macbeth quickly descends from untouchable to dead.

The key to writing story structure is deciding how to get your character into the worst possible situation and how to get them out of it. The classic formulation of this would be: in the first part you get your character up a tree, in the second part you throw stones at them, and in the third part you get them down again. I once attended a conference for writers in Birmingham, led by David Edgar, in which a writer said, ‘I’ve got a problem with my play. I’ve got him up the tree and I’m throwing stones at him, but he seems to like it.’ In real life, this can happen, but in a play you have to find the reversal.

Story patterns of this formula are simple, but they are effective. They work because they deliver conflict and reversal, and there is a clear three-part framework. Let’s not get too formulaic about this, however. Some screenwriting manuals will tell you that you must have the inciting incident on a particular page, and that’s nonsense. With a good story, you will find your own shape for it. If you are struggling to find the shape for a theatrical play, you can always use the interval as a guide. Remember that more incidents are packed in, and the story unravels at a faster pace, in the second half.

A note on where to place the inciting incident

The world record is probably in The Government Inspector (1836). Right at the start of Gogol’s play, someone comes on and says, ‘We’re going to have an inspector.’ Someone else asks ‘What kind of inspector?’; to which the reply comes, ‘A government inspector’. So you know precisely what’s happening in the first three lines of the play. But of course you don’t have to do it like that. There can be a certain amount of playing around until you get to the crunch of what the play is really about. Indeed, Shakespeare tends to do rather a lot of this, entertaining audiences with a little comedy, mystifying them. It can be interesting for audiences not quite to know what the play is about. There comes a moment, however, when you need to set light to the fuse and you shouldn’t delay it too long. At some point you need to focus the audience on the story.

A note on the three levels of conflict: inner conflict, interpersonal conflict, and conflict with society and nature