The Writer, The Theatre, The Play

The conversation on playwrights v. writers for theatre sparked by Edward Albee and continued in various blogospherical spaces is getting progessively more fascinating. I'm enough of a writer to be well versed in the arts of procrastination, and so temporarily abandoned my own very untheatrical writing to catch up on George Hunka's argument with Chris Goode's post on Albee, and Chris's response to that. Not to mention some comments here by playwright Jodi Gallagher and others. Here I'm going to try to summarise the argument without traducing it too much (though you should really read the posts, which is worth the time): this will be long, I expect, so get a cup of tea. Or, if you're not interested, wander off elsewhere.

At issue is the vexed question of what a writer is in the theatre. Part of Chris's first post addressed why he thought conventional playwrights felt at siege in contemporary theatrical culture:

Conventional playwrights (by which I mean, those who produce scripted plays which are to all intents 'complete' before rehearsals begin, though of course they may then be modified by the influence of the staging process) currently feel under attack. I can see why they would feel that, even though nobody ever really seems to attack them as such, which means that the ferocity of (what they consider to be) their counterattack can be surprising -- though not, I think, inexplicable...

Their position glosses, roughly, like this. We who are playwrights, or support and approve of the work of playwrights, are the first to acknowledge that many elements go into the staging of plays -- acting, direction, design, music, perhaps choreography, etc. -- along with the script; and we furthermore acknowledge, with cheerful magnanimity, that theatre is nowadays made in multifarious ways, quite a bit of it privileging these other elements above the specialist craft of the writer. We accept that, and we accept that it sometimes works, and we try hard to say so....But (they would continue) the reciprocity between the "text-based" wing and the "devised" / "physical" / "visual" wing seems lopsided. Why won't they say that what we do as playwrights, with our primary originating acts of script-writing, is also legitimate and valuable in the ecosystem of the big tent? ...

I've come to see that it is this imbalance of cordiality, as it were, that so infuriates the playwrights: so a slow-burn of resentment builds up, as in any off-kilter relationship, until one quiet evening you only have to ask what's for dinner and you get a fork in the eye.

He traces some of the changes in theatre practice which might be responsible for this sense (and that Jodi also alludes to). Chris then makes the obvious, if perhaps tendentious, point that a play text is not theatre. "Not yet, not ever. It can become part of a piece of theatre, but it will never itself be theatrical unless it behaves as do the other elements in a theatrical production (including the other elements in its own production), and disappears."

In order for this to happen, Chris argues, the text has to be "broken": "A play is a little cell of fiction, secluded and complete (for all that it might treat of topical themes). As such it is a game, an ironic procedure, unable to sustain consequences outside of itself... For the play to be made into theatre, that closure has somehow to be breached." Chris posits this as a formal problem, a question of breaking the formal closure that inheres in a completed and autonomous text to permit the necessary "liveness" of theatre.

The formal problem... can be solved only when the play is configured so that its form is compatible with the terms and conditions of theatre: when those distinctive qualities that we associate with theatre are allowed, if not to occupy, then at least to touch, at one point or along one surface, the secluded area of the play. The best -- the least traumatising -- solution is to write for theatre in the first place, to write from the get-go in a way that allows for, and ideally fosters and enjoys, liveness and contingency and unpredictability and ephemerality and, above all, the turbulence of the travel between stage and audience. You can still write articulately, beautifully, rigorously, with all the craft and attention to detail that your literary talent encompasses.

This is where George comes in, with a post pugnaciously objecting to the idea of a play text being "broken":

It's not as if theatricality itself is inherently good or bad, and that a text must necessarily be sacrificed to whatever the hell this vague "theatre" is that they're talking about, any more than performers and conductors "break" a musical score in the service of some ideal of musicality. (I know there will be quibbles that theatre is not music, but both are performing arts, and there is more in common between them than not, as both a theoretical and a practical matter: both revolve around a collaboration between a composer/playwright and the disciplined live performer, and precision is basic to both.)

I am personally a bit chary of comparisons between music and writing, tempting though they are: words are very different phenomena to sound or musical notes. There's the pesky question of "meaning" for a start, which, however you define it, exists in words in a way it just doesn't in music. Chris answers here, pointing out that he and George might have more in common than their differences seem to imply, citing Beckett as, in his view, an exemplary theatre writer.

I think that Chris is quite correct to identify a necessary act of violence in the transition from page to stage. I should make clear that I do not believe that Chris is speaking of the necessity to rip a text to pieces or to ignore its imperatives entirely or even to change the words: I think that he is suggesting something rather more subtle.

The way I see it, in the transition to theatre, something that heretofore exists only as a text is translated into another medium altogether, a medium with very different demands and imperatives: it moves from the past tense of writing into the present tense of theatre. (Before anyone quibbles, I think - from my own experience of writing - that writing is always past tense). This is the case, no matter what theatricalities a writer may embed into his or her text.

There is nothing that makes an event more untheatrical than reverence for the text. (Oh, ok, reverences of other kinds can be equally deadening, but for the meantime, let's talk about writing). In my few forays into theatrical writing, I have sometimes been waylaid by this kind of reverence (also by its complete and distressing opposite, but that's a different story): it can be very difficult to get people to treat a text they consider "poetic" and "beautiful" with disrespect. Directors talk about wanting to preserve the beauty of the language, and actors begin to speak very clearly and in low voices, to fully enunciate the full, sensuous gorgeousness of the words... This, my friends, is death for a text. Suddenly, rather than being an invisible but palpable part of the theatrical experience, it hovers above it: intact, inviolate, and excruciatingly dead.

Or, to speak less personally, think of a reverent production of Shakespeare you might have seen, in which everyone is crouched beneath the text, pointing upwards to the inimitable greatness of the Bard's language, and then think how bored you were.

Where I think Chris is being consciously provocative (and, to be fair, he undermines his own hard line at the end of his post) is where he claims that "productions that emphasize this complex of signs and conditions that we refer to as 'liveness' will inevitably commend themselves more immediately to audiences and secondary commentators alike. A play which hits the bookshelves at the same time as it hits the stage has already forfeited its claim to those attentions."

As the phrase "well-made play" implies, form for playwrights is secondary to content, in other words it's there to serve the content and set it up to its best advantage; this is precisely how it comes about that it's possible to tip the content of The History Boys into different containers and, though some modification is of course required, the essence of the piece remains the same, its qualities, its 'message' (if it will own up to having one, or many). In the work that the university theatre departments now favour, the medium is once again the message, and the question of what the theatre experience is, or can or could be, takes precedence over the surface detail of who says what to whom on what topic.

Of course, I recognise instantly the kind of plays Chris is referring to - or at least I think I do: those plays in which a form is taken as given, most usually a variation on naturalistic norms, and content or "issues" are then poured into the glass. David Williamson is the archetypal local example of that kind of writing. But at the same time, it seems to me that many people who would think of themselves as basically "conventional" playwrights also approach writing a play as, above all, a formal proposition.

I know it's too easy to refer to Daniel Keene, but he's to hand and at the moment too far away to object, and he's a real Playwright; also a Playwright whose work often appears in book form, sometimes before it appears on stage. And I can say confidently, based on years of conversations, that he always approaches writing a play as a formal problem, to the point where the writing of the play is impossible until the problem becomes clear. He is most certainly a playwright who often (but not always) writes plays in the traditional way, grumbling in his study as he attempts to produce a "finished" text which exists luminously in its own right. With such a play - although, again, not in all his collaborations - he expects the actors to speak the words he has written, unless he agrees to change them.

Yet he hasn't a lot of time for the Albee position, which he equates with the "academic" playwrights in France whom French directors are always complaining about; and although he enjoys going to rehearsals, he doesn't believe he has a place there as a writer, except maybe during an inital reading. (He is not a bad director, and sometimes offers suggestions from that capacity). And nothing makes him more frustrated than overly respectful practitioners, or people who think he knows, from his privileged position as the writer, what the play is supposed to be about. How the hell, he demands, is he supposed to know? That's what other people are supposed to find out. For Daniel, meaning is something that is discovered in performance before an audience. Yet he would cheerfully (and honestly) consider himself a conventional playwright.

More interestingly, perhaps, he regards the text as an autonomous object which, when subjected to the pressures and travails of other players in the process, becomes something else. Perhaps this might be illustrated clearly by his recent insistence that the English publication of The Nightwatchman (by Currency Press for the upcoming Sydney production) preserved the original French character names (it was a French commission), although in the Australian production, the names have been Anglicised. The play as written is one thing; the play as performed is entirely another.

At this point, we might seem to be splitting hairs, and simply redefining "playwrights" as "theatre writers". But I'm not so sure: it does seem to me that the idea of the "dramatist" who "sits with the gods" (as I think Mrs O'Neill said of her husband) still has a bit of life in it.