Plays are NOT Literature
Plays are not written to be read on the page. They inhabit a different space from prose or poetry. Or even monologues or songs. The peculiar shared space of the stage is immediate and almost drunkenly Dionysian. It is not ordered in a literary way. My words as a playwright are a series of hints and nudges to an actor to enable them to create characters in situations where those characters can carry my ideas to an audience. It is a largely technical exercise.
Escaping the Storm - AsOne Theatre Company. Sorcha Martin, Eltjo de Vries, Jane McKell, Phoebe Sharman.
As a playwright I have to bear in mind at all times the fact that I am only contributing a third of the playmaking process. I am only one side of a triangle that is completed by the actor and the audience.
A drama is formed by an interaction between characters in an environment. The environment is made up of the framework of choices that I present the audience through the agency of the actors. That interaction is manifested mainly through speech because that is the principal form of communication of humans. The speech of a play we like to call dialogue. Dialogue functions not so much through the meanings of particular words but through its implication – what students of language call “implicature” – a hidden code that is understood by the context it occurs in. But dialogue has separate functions for the actor and the audience. For an audience the dialogue unrolls around them in a breaking wave. But I must structure the dialogue so that it is clear to the actor what the intention of the piece is. I am speaking to the actor through the dialogue. And through them to the audience. The actor and the audience are, as it were, just as present on my desk top as my dictionary. They are ever present. The actors have to know what the Intention of the piece so that they can then transmit this step by step to the audience. I help the actor by defining the environment where the interactions of characters take place. Not the physical environment; that is the job of the designers and directors, but the dramatic space constructed out of the choices I make in the dialogue.
I don’t need sit here at my keyboard and tell the audience things in the way they might need watching a film or reading a novel. Exposition and description are superfluous. Exposition lies in the head of the actor. They will have spent their time in rehearsal teasing out a backstory that fits my words and which enables them to colour the words they speak. Thus, I do not have to clumsily describe the time and space (“Hello, what are you doing here in crumbling and draughty Blackwood Manor on the remote Yorkshire Moors at three o’clock on a rainy Tuesday afternoon? And why are you pointing that gun at me?”) The audience can see all that for themselves. They can experience all that in an instant. Any exposition is contained within the Intention of the actor. They know where they are and why they are here. They ARE the character in that moment.
Similarly, I avoid physical description of the characters. Physical presence is what the actor contributes. Characters can be assumed by actors of all ages, sizes and dispositions. And as long as they follow the patch I have laid out, they can walk it in whatever manner they find appropriate. Thus, I allow the actor to bring their own self and skills to the part and, in this way, challenge them to find something new; something more than the written dialogue. I am opening a conversation with the actor and allowing them to contribute to the finished work.
And by doing this I am also beginning a conversation with my audience. And like any conversation in the real world at a bus stop or in a café it will be disjointed and puzzling to the outsider who is not actually present in that time and place. In other words, the disinterested reader of a script. As much as possible I will leave aside good literary conventions of clarity, conciseness, and structure. In co-operation with the actors I am creating moments in the here and now just as moments are created in the real world. These are messy, ill defined. The only difference being, that they are chosen by me and it is the choices that define the moment. The difference with a novel, say, is that in there the past there is contained in the reality of the printed words. We can turn back the pages to find the clue we missed. We can rerun a video countless time to wring out every bit of emotion we are being fed. In a play that emotion is gone in an instant. What might elicit tears in one performance might equally bring laughter in another. A play has no existence outside the moment. It is here and gone. Any attempt to recapture that fleeting moment by reading a script is to discover a poor, sorry thing that has no real meaning.
The audience inhabits a space that is immediate and entirely of this moment. The actor has to pretend they have no idea what is happening even though they have carefully planned it over several weeks of rehearsal.
I am creating a moment, a series of moments. A giant hoax with only the actors in on the joke. Literature? No. I using artifice to reach out and create a create a moment of reality with a group of individuals that finds themselves in a world where it is increasingly difficult to sit down in communion together.
The nearest thing I can think of to what I contribute to the play making process is that of the architect. I will not be living in this edifice in the way the actors and audience will be. I am designing and assembling a moment, a series of moments, made up of speech, characters and intentions. The moment of performance is made by the interaction of actor and audience. I am not even there when the performance takes place. Over the past year my plays have been seen in Bangalore, India, in Montana in the US and in Rochdale. I have no way of knowing how any group of actors or audiences are going to find truth in my words. I just hope they enjoy their time together.
