Writing for the Stage E-Book

Anthony Clark

• Herausgeber: The Crowood Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Crowood Theatre Companions
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 309

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The theatre is an essential art form that is forever evolving. A well-written play can make us laugh, cry, cringe, or reflect. It can confirm what we already know, or it can introduce us to new worlds. It can relax us, or incite us to action. Writing for the Stage – A Playwright's Handbook is a step-by-step guide to dramatic writing. Drawing on proven methods and professional insights, this book explores the mechanics of playwriting and the skills needed to create a compelling story. It aims to help readers understand the art and craft of writing for the stage and avoid some of the pitfalls. Topics covered include defining a play; starting points; the importance of structure; the first draft and rewrites; placing the work and negotiating rehearsals and, finally, the playwright in a devising context.  

Leseprobe

Writing for the Stage

THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HANDBOOK

Nick Sidi in Taking Care of Baby (2007) by Dennis Kelly. Premiered at The Door, Birminham Rep. Photograph: Robert Day

Writing for the Stage

THE PLAYWRIGHT’S HANDBOOK

Anthony Clark

First published in 2021 byThe Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, MarlboroughWiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2021

© Anthony Clark 2021

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 903 7

Disclaimer

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace and credit illustration copyright holders. If you own the copyright to an image appearing in this book and have not been credited, please contact the publisher, who will be pleased to add a credit in any future edition.

Cover design by Maggie Mellett

CONTENTS

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION

1WHAT IS A PLAY?

2GETTING STARTED

3THE IMPORTANCE OF STRUCTURE

4PROGRESSING YOUR PLAY

5FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE

6PRE-REHEARSAL

7REHEARSAL AND BEYOND

8THE PROFESSIONAL PLAYWRIGHT

9MORE OPPORTUNITIES

APPENDIX WRITER’S CHECKLIST

LIST OF PUBLISHERS AND AGENTS

NEW WRITING VENUES AND COMPANIES

RECOMMENDED READING

INDEX

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the playwrights I have worked with and students I have taught who have convinced me of the important role theatre can play in shaping the life of the individual and, therefore, the evolution of society.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following for their help in preparing this book: Delia Goddard for patiently putting up with me talking through the contents of each chapter; designer Jessica Curtis for letting me include her design drawings, and Nicola Clark, Ruari Murchison, Ian Tilton, Robert Day and Tristram Kenton for their generous help with the photographs.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Robert Day: pages 8, 24, 61 (bottom left), 63 (top), 75, 82 and 124

Tristram Kenton: pages 12, 28, 32, 38, 59, 61 (top left), 63 (bottom), 66, 78 (both), 85, 106, 131 and 136

Delia Goddard: page 15

Kevin Ung: pages 22 and 120

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anthony Clark read Drama at Manchester University, following a BA Hons degree with a Post-Graduate Diploma in Playwriting. He is currently working as freelance director and playwright, as well as course leader for MA Directing, and MA Dramatic Writing at Drama Centre at Central Saint Martins. He also has his own company, Theatre Accord. Previous posts include: artistic director of Hampstead Theatre (2003–10), associate artistic director, Birmingham Rep (1997–2002), associate director, Birmingham Rep (1990–97), artistic director, Contact Theatre (1984–90) and assistant director, Orange Tree Theatre (1981–83). He has freelanced extensively, working with companies that include The National, RSC, Young Vic, Bristol Old Vic, Leicester Haymarket, Nottingham Playhouse and Tara Arts.

His recent plays include: Paradise of the Assassins (Theatre Accord National Tour, 2016), Our Brother David (Watford Palace, 2012), Naked Not Nude (Linbury Studio LAMDA [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts], 2014 and Platform Theatre, Central Saint Martins, 2018), The Eighth Continent (Tristan Bates, 2013). Earlier plays include: The Power of Darkness trans. Tolstoy (The Orange Tree, 1983), Wake (The Orange Tree, 1983), Tide Mark (RSC Pit, Thought Crimes Festival, 1984), Green (Contact Theatre, 1985), Matter of Life and Death (50th Anniversary Lorca, Lyttleton Theatre, NT, 1986). And several adaptations for children, including: The Little Prince (Contact Theatre, 1986), the award-winning Red Balloon (Contact, 1990; Bristol Old Vic, 1991; Olivier Theatre, NT, 1996), The Pied Piper (1993), Pinocchio (1996), Winnie The Witch (Birmingham Rep., 2001), Little Wolf’s Book of Badness (Hampstead Theatre, 2007). Several of his plays have been published and produced throughout Britain and internationally. The Red Balloon was produced as a Boxing Day Special on Radio 4.

INTRODUCTION

The theatre is an essential art form that is forever evolving. My observations about playwriting are based on my work as a professional director and playwright, and as an artistic director of three theatres in the UK over the past forty years. I have always had a particular interest in giving opportunities to emerging playwrights, as well as producing new plays by more established writers. In recent years I have enjoyed leading an MA course on playwriting for Central Saint Martins, the University of the Arts, London. I have also written, had produced and published a number of original plays and adaptations for a range of different audiences. I like to think I know something of the tremendous effort that goes into writing for the stage, and the challenges the playwright faces in trying to get their work produced.

Gregor Henderson-Begg and Alan Rothwell in the premiere of Philip Ridley’s Krindlekrax (2002) at the Nottingham Playhouse.

This book is not a history book about the evolution of playwriting. It will be an introduction to emerging playwrights and a reminder to others of some of the skills needed to write a play. It is not a definitive manual, because stage conventions go in and out of fashion, as the content and context in which plays are produced changes. It is not a book of rules. There will always be successful plays that emerge that don’t adhere to any of the rules that practitioners and academics identify as essential to playwriting. No teacher is infallible. My aim is to help you to understand something of the art and craft of writing for the stage and to avoid some of the pitfalls. It is to encourage you to make the most of the medium, and to enjoy writing stories in dialogue that speak directly to the times in which you are writing. Different theatre companies’ commissioning and programming imperatives change constantly in response to public taste and funding priorities. It is important to keep up to speed with what is happening by going to the theatre regularly, reading as many plays as you can and trawling the industry websites.

Given my experience of programming, producing and directing, I will also look at the role of the playwright in the production process.

It is not within the scope of this book to explore in any depth the work of playwrights not writing in the English language. I would urge you, however, if you are serious about developing your craft as a writer, to look at what has been, and is being, achieved by playwrights and theatre-makers in other parts of the world. Keep up with any visiting international touring programmes, and the work presented at prestigious international theatre festivals. Details of which are all available online.

Throughout the book, the ‘you’ I refer to will be ‘you’ the playwright.

I started writing plays whilst at Manchester University doing a BA in Drama because I was enthused by the way my teachers taught the subject, the energy and talents of my peers, and I felt passionately about what was going on in the world at the time. It was the late 1970s, a time of punk, the east and the west were still building their nuclear arsenals, racism was rife in all walks of life, and second-wave feminism was making me think about the cultural and political inequalities women faced. I felt I had political things to say and I wanted to see certain things happen on stage that I believed had never been done before. I wanted to create the story and to control the story. Looking back, I have to admit that my knowledge of what had been done, and what was being done, on stage at the time was negligible. All fired up, I wrote and directed my first play at nineteen, a domestic tragicomedy called The Wall. It was set somewhere non-specific, involving a series of arguments that divided a family of four in two. I can’t remember what their initial falling out was all about, but maybe that was the point. In the course of the play, the characters dismantled the back wall of their kitchen, which was made up of roughly painted cardboard boxes, and rebuilt it across the room… as a crude metaphorical representation of what was literally happening to them. They built it over the kitchen table, so that the two sides couldn’t contact each other. It was a naive allegory, perhaps, for The Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Germany at the time. I remember very little about it other than that one side of the family eventually found a way to communicate with the other by talking under the table.

I’m sure the play was not a good read, but it played well according to the reviews. The success of a play is not measured on how well it reads, but on how well it comes across in performance. The playwright is dependent on a range of collaborators for this.

As well as exploring some of the mechanics of playwriting in this book, I have identified who these collaborators might be, and the playwright’s relationship to them. The alchemy that occurs when a group of theatre artists and practitioners focus intensely on a particular production is amazing. The opportunity to put the results in front of an audience can be truly exhilarating.

Plays like poems concentrate experience.

At the same time as globalization is leading playwrights, amongst others, to explore how far experience can be said to be universal, the obligation in the UK to diversify audiences through the promotion of culturally specific, authentic work that celebrates ‘difference’, is growing. So that these two imperatives don’t work in opposition to each other, playwrights might do well to take their cue from visual artists and musicians, who have for years thrived on synthesizing cultural influences in their practice. In the theatre, however, audiences and critics are quick to accuse playwrights and practitioners who do this of cultural appropriation, of not fully understanding the context and significance of the material they are using. I, personally, am excited by an eclectic approach to production and new forms of theatre emerging through cultural synthesis. That said, I believe playwrights should use whatever means they think appropriate to speak to their target audience.

Whilst I have been writing this book the whole world has been in the grip of a global pandemic and has had to do what it can to slow down the spread of Covid-19. Theatres in the UK have been closed for the past six months, and although some outdoor theatres and a few indoor venues, where it is financially viable to perform with safe distancing, have managed to reopen, the industry shows no sign of returning to ‘business as usual’ for the foreseeable future. Covid-19 has been devastating for theatre artists, with many losing regular employment and a vast number of freelancers losing opportunities to work. My own new play She, which was due to do a national tour this autumn (2020), has had to be postponed for a year. In response to the crisis, many theatre companies have broadcast old productions online, and many individual artists have entered the digital realm to participate in the creation of stories that reflect the human condition back to humanity. People around the world have turned to the creative sector for entertainment and guidance. The online initiatives, however ingenious and good, are no substitute for live performance. Those of us involved in the creation of theatre, and those who hanker to see it, are missing the human scale, the thrill, the joy and reassurance, of the collective live event – entering the space as an individual and becoming part of an audience.

Theatre is about the great art of living together, and post-Covid-19, I hope people of differing ages and backgrounds will once again come together at the same time, in the same space, to experience the same sequence of events and arguments, and to walk away entertained and enlightened.

Anthony ClarkSeptember 2020

1

WHAT IS A PLAY?

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Ever since humankind evolved to communicate, we have been using storytelling to pass on knowledge, and rituals to connect with others and help us come to terms with, and control, the unknown. Plays happened, when storytelling combined with ritual.

Caroline Faber and David Kennedy in Abi Morgan’s Tender.

It is impossible to be definitive about what a play is. Suffice to say that at an impressive performance of a play, the participants, both the actors and the audience, will experience consciously and subconsciously, the purpose and power of art.

The purpose of art being to confirm or better our understanding of the world. The power of art being to ravish our senses and stimulate our intellect.

A play is a distillation of actions, thoughts and feelings derived from real life, expressed in dialogue and stage directions, by a playwright or group of theatre-makers, for the entertainment of an audience or readers. A play can make us laugh or cry or both. It can confirm what we already know or it can introduce us to new worlds. It can relax us or incite us to action. It can, of course, do a combination of all or any of these at the same time.

The form and content of a play is determined by its historical context. A theatre-maker’s initial response to the world may be an emotional one. Then, with a learnt or instinctive curiosity, some will want to investigate why they feel the way they do and share their discoveries with an audience, whilst others will be more concerned to find a way to generate a comparable emotional response in the audience and leave them to derive meaning from it. If they are interested in cause and effect drama, then the chances are that the playwright will construct a linear narrative. If not, they may choose a more expressionistic, non-linear form. Both approaches invite the audience or reader to reflect on their own experience.

More often than not, a play, like any work of fiction, is an inventive construction of an imaginary world inspired by the real world. It needs to be sufficiently informed by your own experience for us to empathize with the plight of the characters, to follow the narrative and be challenged or reassured by the ideas contained therein. At some level, the audience will always need to recognize something of the world of the play to make sense of it.

For centuries people talked about ‘hearing’ plays and then they talked about ‘seeing’ them, as the theatre strove, using whatever means it could, to make the action more visible and the spectacle more impressive. The descriptive panorama of Elizabethan action, conjured in the imagination through language, gradually gave way to representation of reality that would fit the ‘picture-frame stage’. As an aesthetic, realism still dominates theatrical presentation, because it is the easiest to relate to. In the first half of the twenty-first century, with the popularity of ‘site-specific’ and ‘immersive’ theatre, and the blurring of the lines between ‘drama’ and ‘performance art’, people have started to talk about going to ‘experience’ a play. Plays are often performed in non-traditional, flexible venues. There is even a theatre for the ‘connected generation’ in virtual space, which incorporates various social networks into the production and presentation of shows.

Tripti Tripuraneni, Rani Fantania, Asif Khan and Skye Hallam in rehearsal for Paradise of the Assassins (2016) by Anthony Clark based on the book by Abdul Halim Sharar.

For many years, plays in UK theatres have been patronized by the people who have the time and the money to spend on them. As a result, the stories presented have tended to reflect the concerns of a particular demographic – the prosperous middle-class. There are theatre companies, however, led by artists who are not driven by the commercial imperative to make a profit but by a strong belief that theatre can play a vital role in the integration of society and contribute to the well-being of the individual, who have striven for years, and are still striving, for a more inclusive theatre. By choosing a wider range of stories and presenting them in less familiar forms at affordable prices, these companies do what they can to ensure access to under-privileged, minority groups of artists and audiences. Supported by public funding, a number of trusts and foundations, and contributions from philanthropic donors, they are targeting new audiences and extending the boundaries of the art form.

As our understanding and appreciation of global diversity increases, so does recognition of our common concerns; for example, the effects of climate change, the inequities of capitalism, religious fundamentalism, racism, identity, gender, the role of the individual in society and so on. Our plays need to address these concerns across constituencies within our communities, and globally. Our future and the future of the planet will be determined by what unites us, not what divides us. This approach over time will inform what is popular and commercial.

WHY ARE PLAYS CALLED PLAYS?

It is no accident that plays are called plays. To be able to play is essential to our development from childhood to adulthood and to our evolution as a species. To play is instinctive. It is the means whereby we reflect on our own experience to make sense of it, and on the experiences of others. It is also how we experiment with what ‘might be’.

Poster for Playing by the Rules (1994) by Rod Dungate, a first play commissioned and produced in the Door at Birmingham Rep.

Our individual survival is dependent on our ability to integrate with others, and our route to integration is to acknowledge what we do and don’t share with them. Witnessing a play can offer us the opportunity to explore known and imagined circumstances. It allows us to rehearse life experience in a safe place – a place where we can test, objectively, certain truths; a place where different constituencies within the community can explore their differences, or have their identities reaffirmed. We are a species that needs to understand each other and who we are.

WRITING FOR LIVE PERFORMANCE

There are many similarities between writing a play for live performance and other media, but there are also some significant differences. Across all media, if you are interested in narrative, you have to have a story that is plotted to reveal your themes. Interest in your story will be maintained, primarily, through your ability to generate tension. Tension is generated by you charting carefully when to reveal what happens to your characters and why it happens.

Characters reveal themselves through their ability to initiate and respond to what is going on. What is going on, where and when, establishes a play’s atmosphere. Tension is maintained by a play’s atmosphere.

It is assumed that characters on screen can be presented more subtly than those on stage and, therefore, if you want to write ‘big’, ‘loud’, ‘demonstrative’ characters, then write for the stage. It is also assumed that if your story requires many different locations, this could present an insurmountable challenge to a theatre production team. Again, not necessarily the case.

In film, you tell your story primarily through action and visuals.

In TV, like writing for the stage, your story and themes unravel primarily through dialogue, although action and visuals are, of course, important.

For audio, radio and podcasts, your story is told entirely through sounds and the spoken word.

Going to see a live performance, like going to see a film, is a collective experience, but it differs in one crucial way: the relationship between the audience and the performer is an interactive one. It relies on two-way communication. Essentially, the audience are crucial collaborators in the event. The event requires them to participate, albeit to different degrees, depending on the type of performance. At one end of the spectrum, they may be required to respond by sitting silently in rapt attention occasionally laughing, gasping and crying, and at the other, to actively call out, to vote or even to get up and participate in the action.

Audience response can affect significantly what happens on stage and vice versa. This is what makes live performance so thrilling and so different from night to night. It is why some audiences feel they have to see a show more than once, and why actors love working in the theatre. Performing live is a risk. Actors get a ‘buzz’ from it. It is why they talk about having ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nights.

A writer who is frustrated and made anxious by the variables in live performance should not write for the stage; they should write novels instead.

When you go to the theatre, a contract is made between the audience and the actors. The deal is that the actors give to the audience and the audience show their appreciation. The more audience appreciation, the more actors will play it. Have you ever noticed, at the beginning of a show, how quickly an audience wants to announce its presence to the performers? It is often prepared to laugh at the most unfunny line or piece of ‘stage business’, just to let the performers know they’re there.

Without audience response, the performance is nothing more than a rehearsal.

An audience may be made up of many different constituencies, but the ambition is that they are brought together as one to witness an event in the same ever-changing world as the actors. The lasting impact of the occasion is assured when audience and performers appear to be feeding off each other.

It is for this reason that people who love the theatre talk about the impact of great productions lasting far longer than that of any film.

People say that one of the most significant contributory factors to the force of the impact, is that the event is at a human scale, inclusive and intimate.

THE AUDIENCE

What people are looking for, consciously or not, when they go to a play, is a shared emotional and intellectual experience. Have you ever noticed how, at the start of a performance, the audience is disparate and nervous, and then, as the play progresses, they evolve into a psychological crowd unit, that unconsciously discovers itself? They start acting as one, silent and in awe, smiling and laughing, restless and bored. This experience of knowing that lots of other people share the way you feel and think can be reassuring, thrilling and empowering.

A large, diverse audience in the Main Auditorium at Birmingham Rep – a theatre that prides itself on sharing stories for and about its multicultural city.

It is a conundrum for playwrights and programmers alike whether they should lead and shape the artistic tastes of their audiences, or whether they should respond to what they already know they want and give it to them. It is best to do a bit of both, and never to underestimate the power of the new and unexpected, to diversify and increase the size of the audience. A writer who wants to make a living must be aware of whatever is currently ‘going down well’ or ‘trending’, as well as having an eye to what could be popular in the future. A ‘Live Arts’ programmer, in order to balance the books, will want to reward loyalty by fulfilling their audience’s expectations, but should also be keen to attract new audiences.

New plays are seen as a useful tool in finding new audiences. Playwrights not yet represented by the establishment are seen by some as vital to its survival.

In many arts’ institutions, alongside whoever is in charge of choosing what plays should be done, marketing departments are responsible for keeping and finding audiences. ‘Marketing’ would expect to be consulted about programme choice and audience targets.

Marketing departments speak a different language to most playwrights. They tend to refer to audiences as customers, and they treat them the way any retail business would. They are keen to find out about their habits and their ‘wants’ through endless satisfaction surveys. Theatre-goers are regularly asked, in much the same way as on- and offline shoppers, diner-outers, gym attendees, cinema goers, and live music and gallery visitors are asked, to give a free evaluation of their experience, and suggestions as to how that experience might be improved upon. Satisfaction with the play is measured alongside satisfaction with the foyer ambiance, the wine list and whatever else. It would be a full-time job to accede to all their surveys and as far as theatres are concerned, there are too many variables to guarantee a meaningful result. Playwrights should never be over-influenced by the statistical findings of marketing departments and focus groups. They can give you an inflated sense of your influence or crush your voice and confidence.

Michael Mears in Life After Scandal (2007) by Robin Soans. A verbatim play investigating the multimillion-pound industry built on shame, showing how names are blackened and reputations soiled. Premiered at Hampstead Theatre.

The dichotomy for many writers, as to whether they should write for themselves or for a specific audience, is not a useful one. Write for yourself but accept that who you are includes the audience.

Art can follow in the wake of popular taste, but great artists lead far more than they are led.

A COLLABORATIVE AFFAIR

The theatre is a collaborative art form, and a playscript must serve as a template to engage the intelligence, and to inspire the imagination, of a range of artists with different skills (musicians, designers, animators, choreographers and actors) and technicians (lighting, sound, video and digital), all of whom will contribute, to a greater or lesser degree, to the impact of the event.

Historically, however, instructions for the performance have not been paramount in the preparation of playscripts; although there are writers for whom the stage directions are as important, if not more important, than the dialogue. Bernard Shaw’s reputation for elaborate and literary stage directions is second to none, and the impact of some of Samuel Beckett’s plays rely on his most particular sparse instructions for production.

Most of the time, those members of the public who read playscripts for pleasure have to work hard to imagine their potential in performance. They have to think what the world of the play might look like, what a particular actor might contribute to their role, how might the sound and lighting be used and so on. It is a challenge at the best of times, but when, as in the case of some modern plays, there is no fixed identity to the characters and no linear narrative, it can be particularly daunting. In Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000), for example, in her evocation of the bipolar experience, the Voices could be doctors, nurses, lovers or whoever… there are no named characters. It is the same in Martin Crimp’s play about twentieth-century obsessions Attempts on her Life (1997) and Simon Stephen’s play Pornography (2008), which is a response to the London terrorist attacks of July 2005. Alice Birch’s play Blank (2019) about what life is like when adults feel absent from it, is sixty scenes long and she challenges the reader or producer to cherry pick the however many scenes and make their own play out of it.

It is much easier to appreciate a play by seeing it in performance, when many of the choices that will have frustrated you whilst reading it have been made.

Depending on the status of the writer in the collaborative production process, a playscript may be seen as something sacrosanct – not a word to be changed without the writer’s ‘say-so’ – or as nothing more than a stimulus text, a text that can be deconstructed and reshaped to reflect the interests and concerns of the group working on it.

SUSPENDING YOUR DISBELIEF

To suspend your disbelief is to accept the stage truth as reality. Stage truth is ‘reality edited’ – edited to create a particular atmosphere, to tell a certain story, to entertain a one-off audience.

To suspend your disbelief is to know that what you are seeing is pretend reality, but to pretend that you don’t know that. By suspending your disbelief, you can immerse yourself in the performance and surrender to the dramatic action, or you can view it objectively, analysing the thesis as the drama unfolds. To suspend your disbelief and engage empathetically with a performance, a second artificial, theatrical world that contains its own truth has to have been created by the production.

Writers, directors, designers, musicians and actors will all use conventions specific to the medium to create this world. For example, if an actor lets the audience know that whenever they are sitting on a particular chair, then they are in the cockpit of an aeroplane, through the repeated and consistent use of the chair in this way, the audience will accept the convention that that’s where they are. It is a stage truth.

THE STAGE CONVENTION

A stage convention is a rule that can be set up by the writer, performers and production makers, which the audience understand through repetition to mean a certain thing. It is the consistency of their use that ensures their effectiveness. Commonly, the fewer resources available to a production team, the more they are reliant on establishing conventions to help tell the story. Popular conventions include the use of: slow motion, freeze framing (arresting the action to suggest a passage of time or to shift an audience’s focus), the use of soliloquies (a solo speech by an actor that gives an insight into what they are thinking), the use of a narrator or chorus to set the scene or comment on the action and an actor’s aside (a direct comment to the audience within a scene). You can make up and establish your own conventions in a performance. Although audiences will want you to be consistent in the way you use them, it is important to remember that by breaking a convention, you can add to the significance of a particular dramatic moment. For example, if you were to take out a real gun in the last scene of a production in which (up until that point) the audience had accepted bits of wood as guns, it is likely to have a far greater impact than if you had been using real guns all along.

WHO IS A PLAYWRIGHT?

The word itself – playwright – is a compound word with no linguistic basis in the word ‘writing’. It derives from two Old English words ‘plega’, meaning brisk movement, and ‘writha’ meaning worker. The word serves as a reminder that plays are constructed. They are literally wrought.

A playwright is an observer who wants to share their actual and imagined experiences of life with others. A playwright writes stories in dialogue, creating contrasting characters in multiple situations. These impart the playwright’s concept – the concept being the idea that governs the play.

The arrangement can be as ingenious as the pattern of a symphony and take as long to structure. Their words can define and determine the parameters of the performance, however abstract the content might be.

Playwrights write for a whole variety of reasons. Some deeply personal – to work through their own anxieties, emotional and ethical – and others, more publicly minded, write to question the times in which they live and to speculate on how the human condition can be improved. They write to ask searching questions, and they hope to change the world, if not globally, then somebody’s world, through their incisive observation and comment.

Both types of playwright seek to identify and share the truth about what they have observed and feel about the world.

There are other playwrights who write for the sheer pleasure of hearing actors say their words. Others still are fixated with potential critical and financial success.

Whatever the reason, playwrights should write out of an urge to create. If you don’t feel the urge, I would urge you not to do it. Why? Because, for most writers, it is such hard work and the rewards are meagre, unless you are lucky enough to hit the jackpot.

EXERCISES

Exercise 1

Choose a well-known folk or fairy story. Transpose the world of the story to a different time and place, in prose. Assuming your story involves characters, even if some of them are anthropomorphic, choose whose perspective you are going to tell the story from and why. Write between 500 and 1,000 words. Once you have written it, decide whether what you have written would work better on stage, screen or as audio. Having decided, list your reasons why.

Exercise 2

Remember what you did on your last birthday. Write the story of that day in prose. Now look around the room that you are in. Consider the objects and who is in the room. Rewrite the story of that day as a play, and stage it quickly, using the resources available to you. Note what conventions you have used to tell your story.

Exercise 3

By adding no more than two lines to each of the following three lines of dialogue, change the nature and atmosphere of the exchange. For example, A and B are madly in love and it’s a summer day; or, A and B are about to commit a crime and it is cold and late, and so on.

A: I thought you’d never get here.

B: Well, I’m here now.

C: Let’s do it then.

Exercise 4

Practise using a dramatic convention:

THE ASIDE

A convention where the actor talks to the audience without the other characters on stage knowing that’s what they’re doing.

Write a speech for character who is having to tell another about why they are late for something. While they’re giving their reasons to the other character on stage, they are taking time out, in an aside, to explain to the audience the truth.

TIME WARP

Write a speech for a character who is having to tell the story of their life in thirty lines. Choose a phrase like, ‘I would still be there’ or ‘I didn’t know any better’ that is repeated in the storytelling, and every time it is repeated, the story leaps forward five or ten years.

OBJECT OWNER

Write a speech where Character A is talking to Character B about an object that holds a particular significance for them. The object embodies the spirit of the owner. The reader has to guess who it is.

2

GETTING STARTED

The stressful time is the blank page at the beginning. When you’re starting to see things being made flesh, and you’re able to respond to that flesh, that’s really exciting.

Jack Thorne (playwright, 1974–)

You are alert to the world. You have seen something. You have heard something. You have felt something. You have thought something. Your imagination has been fired and you want to share the experience with others. You have the urge to write a play. Why a play? Because you have a facility with dialogue, and you recently went to the theatre, and the connection between the performers, their characters and the audience gave you an experience like no other. You laughed and you cried. The hairs on the back of your neck stood up. You shivered, tingled and thought differently about the world when you left the performance. You want to change the world. If not for everybody, then for somebody. You want to write a comparable entertainment for anyone who has the good fortune to read it, wants to contribute to the production and experience it live.

Two students on the MA Dramatic Writing Course at Central Saint Martins.

Your mind is a smorgasbord of ideas and impressions, but… when you sit down in front of a blank sheet of paper and pick up your pen, or perch in front of a screen and place your fingers on the keyboard, nothing comes out. The impulse to write is there, but you don’t know where to start.