In the second paragraph we home in on Jimmy and Cliff in more detail, with the narrative voice occasionally reversing its vantage point, to ‘jump’ back behind the action, moving from first person plural to third person singular. So ‘ we find’ that Jimmy ‘ is a tall, thin young man about twenty-five, wearing a very worn tweed jacket and flannels’. But then we are ‘told’ with certainty that he ‘ is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity . . .’ etc. He and Cliff are described in terms of their physical appearance (Cliff is ‘ short, dark, big boned ’) and their contrasting personality traits, in an authoritative third-person narrative voice.
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The point has already been made about the generalised
‘instructions’ to set designer and props manager, or set builders.
The same is now true for costume: what is a ‘very worn’ tweed jacket? What colour(s) is it? What sort of flannels? Grey? What kind of grey? What is he wearing under the jacket? On his feet? What colour are his socks? What happens if the best actor to audition is thirty-five, not that tall and not that thin? What assumptions do we conventionally make about what twenty-five ‘looks’ like?
Even the description of Jimmy’s personality, presented by the narrator, as either ‘ sensitive to the point of vulgarity’, ‘ simply a loudmouth’, or ‘ almost non-committal’, do not necessarily cohere.
Clearly, these are post hoc ‘interpretations’ of a persona, made by someone who already knows about him and his social context. ‘We’, the audience, are not in that privileged position, since the play has not yet begun. If the ‘instructions’ can also be seen as addressed to the actor about to play Jimmy, there are no specific clues about how the traits described are to be projected into the performance. In any case, during the course of rehearsal an interpretive decision might be made that he is not simply a loudmouth, or that he is neither sensitive nor vulgar, but possible just a sadist. I am not arguing that this is a right or better interpretation, just that it is possible and that such possibilities might produce very different sets of character
‘motivation’ from the ones in the stage directions, while absolutely adhering to exactly the same dialogue.
The third paragraph returns to the third person singular narrator.
Alison is now the subject of this paragraph but, unlike with the men, the vocabulary about her is metaphorical, rather than psychological, resorting to musical metaphor: in ‘ the uneasy polyphony of these three people’, Alison is ‘ tuned in a different key’, ‘ often drowned in the robust orchestration . . .’. The last four lines of this final paragraph pull out to the front of the auditorium again, describing the room, its sounds, returning full circle to the ‘ early evening’ of the opening direction.
After this stylistic completion, the play’s initial ‘action’ begins.
Jimmy throws down his paper and the dialogue takes over.
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Extra- and intra-dialogic stage directions
On the first full page of dialogue in Look Back in Anger there are three further kinds of stage direction:
JIMMY
Well, you are ignorant. You’re just a peasant. ( To Alison.) What about you? You’re not a peasant, are you?
ALISON ( absently)
What’s that?
JIMMY
I said . . .
In the first speech Jimmy is responding to Cliff, telling him he is a peasant. He then asks someone else whether she/he is a peasant.
Since Alison is the only other person onstage, it must be addressed to her. Whichever way Alison emotes the phrase ‘What’s that?’ she is indicating (honestly or not) that she hasn’t, apparently, heard the remark. Jimmy repeats what he said. While on the page, the presence of the stage direction increases the clarity of the change of addressee (we already know that there are three people onstage, so it isn’t strictly necessary to clarify). However, as soon as the scene is read aloud or performed, it is entirely clear that there is a change of addressee.
Later on in the scene:
JIMMY ( shouting)
All right, dear. Go back to sleep. It was only me talking . . .
The stage direction appears to be addressed to the actor playing Jimmy, about the level at which he might pitch his speech. Of course, aggression or frustration can be expressed in a number of different vocal ways: shouting is merely one option. If, during rehearsal, this line proves to be more ‘effective’ if it is not strictly ‘shouted’, then the spirit of the stage direction could be said to be observed, without interpreting it as a literal shout.
Besides which, shouting is itself a vocal delivery of highly
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variable pitch. There are shouts and shouts.
Finally, the third kind of stage direction. After Jimmy says: JIMMY
. . . She’s educated. ( To her.) That’s right, isn’t it?
Cliff replies:
CLIFF ( kicking out at him from behind his paper) Leave her
alone, I said.
JIMMY
Do that again, you Welsh ruffian, and I’ll pull your ears off.
A switching of addressee is signalled in the first speech (as before).
In the next speech there is an instruction for physical action to the actor playing Cliff. Now, from Jimmy’s retort – ‘Do that again . . .’
– we know that Cliff has ‘done’ something (i.e., this is an ‘intradialogic’ indication that something has happened. The action draws a strong response: ‘I’ll pull your ears off.’ We know from (most important) both the dialogue and stage directions at the beginning (less important), that both men are reading newspapers. So the action might be newspaper-related but, clearly, it doesn’t have to be.
At three different levels the stage directions, intra- and extradialogic, are unstable:
1. First, they are invariably narrated, here in the third person and first person plural. This signifies the presence of a
‘character’, a voice ‘outside’ the fiction proper. It is common, of course, to assume this is the ‘author’s’ voice, simply because it is a set of instructions provided with a voice of putative authority from outside the fictional world.
However, as we know, they could have been written by anyone at all: director, scribe, stage manager or a publisher’s editor. The narrative voice is couched so as to represent someone who knows about the conventions of theatre and
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performance, but the distinctive necessity of authorship predicated by the dialogue is – fundamentally – irrelevant for the stage directions. It is also a bracketed ‘novelistic’
device.
2. Intra-dialogic stage directions confirm that physical ‘action’
(to simplify, for the moment) will inevitably always be indicated, to some extent, from within the dialogue itself. A line leading up to what is written as a stage direction will always indicate, or prepare the ground for, the stage direction: Cliff’s ‘Leave her alone, I said’ comes before Jimmy’s ( shouting) and a line of dialogue following a written direction will always indicate that something different or physical has just happened – in other words dialogue following physical action will (at some point) be a reaction to the physical action. This is because, as we shall see more clearly in chapter 10 on dialogue, every speech event or physical event is a reaction to what has gone before. It cannot be otherwise. In any case, Cliff also ripostes with ‘Stop yelling’, which is a much clearer indicator than shouting of the pitch of his voice. Although, even here, this could be ironic/sarcastic. Jimmy might whisper and Cliff might send him up by referring to it as ‘yelling’. Again, I am not saying this is a right or better interpretation, just that it is possible, since f
orms of articulation and delivery onstage come within the purview of ‘interpretation’.
3. Directional instructions ( to her) which precede lines are there to ease the reading-on-the page process and directions on how to speak a word or line may be the right/best way, but they may well also not be. In any case all such directions within and between the dialogue are always – and must be –
totally up for grabs during rehearsal and exploration.
In other words all stage directions on the page are inherently unstable. This is a polite, semi-academic way of saying that they are jettisoned and/or ignored as soon as any
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significant rehearsal process begins, because they are, from the point of view of production, ultimately and genuinely irrelevant and/or redundant. This is a drama, not a novel.
To stand a chance of being relevant and convince anyone that they are/have been carried out, they would have to be part of a novel, where all the text has the same status in relation to readability – i.e., fixed at publication. The dialogue in a drama always remains fundamentally stable in a literal sense, even though its delivery/enunciation is not.
The critical loyalty of director and performers is, and can only be, simply and entirely and literally, just to the dialogue.
4. The fourth level of instability is an extension of the relationship between written text and performed text, and that is the relationship between different signifying systems.
Dialogue on the page continues to be the same ‘language’ to the letter in performance, but now heard rather than read, enunciated rather than written. The ‘meanings’, therefore, belong to different systems and to different material processes, which owe their effectiveness to different forms of transformative labour – reading, interpreting and realising, in the mind and onstage.
Conclusions
This chapter does not consist of a set of instructions about how to write stage directions. It does not lay down rules or guidelines about what stage directions must or must not be, or which ones other practitioners like best, which ones they ignore most readily and which ones they swear at. It argues that students need to understand the historical variability of stage directions and to be extremely sceptical about any idea that they are justified as ‘instructions’ to the production team. The best way of understanding this is through a
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mixture of direct experience of production, together with a study and analysis of the historical variability of stage directions.
From the point of view of the written text it is possible to characterise the mixture of dialogue and stage directions as constituting a dual identity, in which one part (directions) is always ambiguous (not always usefully so), while the other (dialogue) is not.
However, even this does not go far enough. When considered from the point of view of the art and practice of writing, something more interesting emerges. While from a semiological point of view the two systems of signification (page and stage) clearly share the written text in common, from the student’s point of view there is another writerly lesson to be learned. If a student becomes supremely interested in writing stage directions, imaginatively immersed in the detail of such writing, it may mean that his/her imaginative predilections are drawn more strongly to prose fiction than they are to drama. This is always worth considering seriously.
A course in studying the art of writing drama could as easily lead to a student’s discovery that this is not, after all, where his/her imaginative/writing skills lie. At least he/she will have understood why.
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9 The compleat dramatist – preparing
to write
The main argument throughout this book is that the process of creating (writing) a dramatic text is, from the point of view of the writer, complete in itself. This does not invalidate processes where there is devising or company workshopping, but the latter do not provide the necessary internalising of writing and performance conventions which each would-be dramatist must experience. It means that any drama-writing pedagogy must be approached from the perspective of its relatively autonomous status. This is not a return to the good old days when drama was simply studied on the page, to the exclusion of any understanding of the complexity of performance, and of the many ways in which meanings are created in the interface between writing and performance. It is an argument for stressing that the dramatist him/herself is in charge of the learning and writing process, however much he/she may learn about what performers and directors do.
Any course of study which addresses itself to the written dramatic text still must, in some form, treat the text as a literary artefact, of a very distinctive kind. Its specialness lies precisely in a relationship to production through performance, which is one of the distinguishing features of drama, in comparison with prose fiction and poetry. Indeed, until this can be fully recognised I suggest that the traditional dichotomy between what theatre studies ‘does’ with published texts and how the newer discipline of
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Performance Studies analyses performance will be perpetuated.
At the same time the recognition that the dramatic text is always conceptually complete as a special kind of literary artefact makes it possible to free up critical and theoretical work to address it for what it is. The important issue here is that the dramatist is necessarily in charge at every point in the process. This applies from the submission of the first draft, the rewriting processes, the final decision about what goes into rehearsal and what is published.
Copyright
This corresponds, of course, to concepts of authorship which have been questioned and challenged by theory, but not overthrown or usurped by it. This is as much to do with the economic position of the dramatist as it is to do with any concepts of ideological purity.
Copyright and ownership of a text mean that its author, overwhelmingly in an insecure freelance position in the artistic economy, is able to earn from further exploitation (sales) of the work. Any drama is as much a commodity as anything else in our capitalist economy (wrong or right, this is a fact). Further earnings mean royalties from sales of books, or from further productions, where the dramatist receives a royalty (percentage) of income from the theatre.
At the producing end of the process it is entirely accepted that, intertextuality notwithstanding (another important development in literary theory) individual authorship is always attributed. Each text, whichever conventions and traditions it belongs to, is a unique combination of elements – linguistic, conceptual, imaginative.
Otherwise there would be literally no difference between one poem and another etc., etc.
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The story so far
This book began by charting the different histories, cultural and educational, which have led to the prevalence of a number of clichés, the most overarching (and misleading) of which is that the dramatic text is incomplete. This disenfranchisement of text and dramatist has come from a number of directions, all ultimately damaging to any productive idea of exactly what it is that the dramatist does and what she/he produces. Each of these other perspectives suppresses the point of view of the dramatist and, indeed, subsumes issues involved with dramatic writing into issues appropriate to other practices. These include the practical business of production; the academic practice of performance and theatre studies; and the literary study of the novel.
On one side the imperatives of production and performance have diminished the dramatist and his/her responsibility towards the written text; on the other it has been seen as a novel manqué, lacking features intrinsic to the novel and thus making it impossible
or, at best, difficult, to ‘read’. Performance theory, with its exciting insights into understanding the sign systems which create meanings through visualisation and representation, has also directed attention away from the written text. For serious students of the art of writing drama, some in-depth study of all these is important, so that they can understand the ideas in relation to which their learning process takes place. At the same time an understanding of the exciting range of possibilities of dialogue in performance through some experience of acting is also critical.
From prose to dialogue
Part of the problem derives from the linguistic features of the dramatic text itself: the co-presence within it of ‘narrated’ prose (via stage directions) and of ‘pure’ dialogue, presented quite free (it is
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thought) of the surrounding contextualisation of the novel. Because of the necessary links with performance, assumptions that the dramatist somehow ‘writes’ or inscribes, or even is able to inscribe, the process of production within the written text itself has also confused matters.
For the purposes of the remainder of this book, there is one very obvious starting point. This is that writing drama is a distinctive form of the imaginative mode of thought, realised in and through dialogue alone. Not primarily and not alongside other ways of writing. Dialogue is all and dialogue is all there is. This is not to deny the relationship with performance, nor to deny shared elements with other forms of imaginative writing – prose and poetry. It is not even to deny that dramatists have included, and some might well continue to include, stage directions. They are, however, secondary, subsidiary, provisional and a compensatory element.
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