The Art of Writing Drama

by Michelene Wandor

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  which goes all the way through the story (i.e., Hamlet himself), he is never ‘told’ in isolation, but always in relationship.

  I have argued that drama is not about writing ‘character’. Even though each individuation must have a coherence, subscribe to appropriate registers in relation to the overall writing style of the dialogue, nevertheless, drama does not ‘stem’ from character, but consists rather of relationships and the events with which they are involved. There is no alternative in drama to writing relationships, while a novel may consist of narrated events or thoughts or feelings, which always remain within the perspective (and narrative voice) of individual figures. As was demonstrated in the diagrams (see chapter 10), the building of relationships is a complex, compounding matter.

  In drama-writing how-to books students are asked to write biographies, sketches or backgrounds, providing a full history of their characters. Of course, there is a great deal which can be useful in information of this kind – the students must decide at some point whether their figures are male or female, roughly how old they are, what their situation in the world/family/relationships is etc. However, apart from the procrastinatory function of writing this as a prose biography, the fine details often do not settle until the narrative creates its own imperatives. As with the categories of subject matter and theme, I suggest writing a biographical sketch only after the event, when the play itself is complete. At that point the student only invents biographical information which is directly relevant to what happens in the play. Sometimes this stage will suggest some different imaginative possibility, which could influence the narrative and might be used for rewriting.

  Rewriting and further writing

  When students type up their work after class, I urge them not to do any major rewriting at home, or to extend the scene they have

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  written. Small changes are fine. This is in order to keep the imaginative process to the structured class time. If, during the course of the semester or year, they want to write more, I encourage them to write whatever they want (of course) outside the class, thinking about the issues that come up in class and applying them to their writing. On structured courses, in any case, the assignment is likely to consist of a complete twenty-five- to thirty-minute drama, worked on independently.

  If the course runs over more than one term/semester, I begin the second term with more freedom of choice for the students. I suggest that this time they might start their play from something (subject matter) they are sure they want to write about. This encourages conscious thinking and planning. Sometimes students will have clear ideas, sometimes they may not, until they have written a couple of scenes. Or a student might choose a historical subject or event, and read and research alongside his/her writing. This generates a process which involves a transformation of fact into fiction, or of mixing fact with fiction, as well as having to address the question of the language the student is using for the dialogue. Hamlet does not speak Danish and neither does he speak in medieval tropes. He speaks in Shakespearean iambic pentameter. If someone wants to write a version of Hamlet, will it be clothed in some contemporary street argot, will it be in free verse, will it be in landed-gentry strains? Whichever it is, the dialogue must always strive after the illusion of spontaneity.

  After class

  The class-based work I have described builds all the skills of writing drama gradually and cumulatively. Within a single semester/term it is possible to complete a short drama, which, in microcosm, covers all relevant issues, as well as allowing each student to develop her/his imaginative and writing skills. Dealing with the larger architectonic

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  scope of a full-length drama, or even an hour-long piece, is much more difficult. It is analogous to the difficulty of ‘teaching’ the novel in creative writing classes. In both cases my approach is based on a long-standing educational principle that what is taught in class/seminar is thorough and comprehensive, and aims to provide the student with the intellectual and practical abilities to work independently. Students do not bring in longer work which is absorbing them at home. In other words, the class does not operate as some kind of impossible collective dramaturg to ‘help’ students to write their longer plays.

  In this context there is much to be said in favour of encouraging students to meet separately in groups they organise themselves, if they want to bring in extracts from longer pieces on which they are working, hear fellow classmates lift the work off the page and even, if they want to, invite comments. This is best done without any teacher or tutor figure present; it enables students to apply analytical procedures independently (if they want to), or simply hear their work read out without comment.

  During my classes I encourage students to see at least one stage drama during each term/semester. Pretty well everyone watches television anyway and many go to see films. But the experience of seeing a stage play enhances another aspect of the knowledge of immediacy. In an ideal world, students would return to see the same production two or three times, to mark similarities/differences in performance on different days with different audiences.

  We take a short time – half an hour or so – to discuss the play they have seen. This is not a critic’s review – it is not a discussion about whether they liked or disliked the play, whether they enjoyed it or not, whether they thought performances were ‘good’ or not. If someone does make a value judgement, it provides an opportunity to begin to investigate the criteria – the idea that performances must be ‘convincing’, ‘believable’, ‘real’ – that all hover behind the quick shorthand responses most people make to performance. The main push of the analysis in class is to encourage students to be able to

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  settle completely into the enjoyable experience of watching a complete, seamless performance, while at the same time keeping the analytical part of their brains ticking over: separating the dialogue (the words they hear) from the way they are performed; from the way they have been directed; from the impact and effects of music, lighting, spectacle etc. It doesn’t matter what the production is – it can be a lavish musical, or it might be a shoestring production in a room above a pub. It is the act of developing observation and analysis that is important. The ability to analyse what one sees increases the pleasure of the experience and gradually, over time, can be internalised and applied to the writing process itself.

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  14 Culture and representation

  The issue of cultural representation has a particular urgency for those beginning to study the art of writing drama. This is not a return to the creative writing cliché that students ‘must’ write about and from their own personal experiences. The work on other languages, and the various Englishes available in any given group of students, is directly related to their own cultural, social, educational and ideological positioning, and therefore – in one way or another – this is part of their mental, intellectual and imaginative make-up. One of the consequences of an effective pedagogy in the art of writing drama should be to enable each student to reach a better and more productive understanding of his/her own imaginative resources. This is what enables students to reach a point where they can more consciously choose their own subject matter – a moment directly relevant to the drama they write for assignments, where they have complete freedom, and to any writing they may want to undertake in the future.

  Language can be a route into cultural resources specific to each student, and lead to ways of writing dialogue which enable discussion of dialect, rhythm, pace, even what is commonly considered part of developin
g ‘character’, but character in and through relationships. It enables discussion of register and idiolect.

  In an ideal classroom world there should be time to read and discuss texts which deal with socio-linguistics. At the very least, each

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  student stands a chance of having his/her imagination (perhaps even memories) expanded, to develop ideas about subject matter and the way in which this might be explored through writing drama.

  This leads into areas of more trenchant understandings of socio-cultural positioning, as they impact on imaginative writing. Each student is, in some way, positioned as part of a class, ethnic, religious, gender-based group, and sometimes a complex combination of more than one of these categories. This is not to suggest that any one category is monolithic in itself, or that a crude line between (say) class and drama can predict the ‘message’ of such imaginative work. And, in the end, each student decides for him/herself whether issues of class, gender, ethnicity etc. interest him/her at a conscious level. What emerges from the imagination, subconsciously and unconsciously, may, of course, be quite another matter. It all comes down to the critical interpretation of the work, with evidence.

  Gender as a case study

  Discussion of the relationship between gender and drama is still, despite some of the benefits of feminism, necessary. Women writers were formative in the development of the novel and its readership, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this century women novelists have a relatively secure place as producers of fiction. In drama, however, the story is very different. Gender distinctions, balances and imbalances, operate in all cultural and social groups, and each has its own interests and perspectives to bring to the art of writing drama.

  Feminism in the 1970s drew attention to gender imbalance 1 Carry On, Understudies; theatre and sexual politics by Michelene Wandor (Routledge, 1986). First published in 1981. Post-War British Drama: Looking Back in Gender by Michelene Wandor (Routledge, 2001). First published 1987. Plays by Women, ed.

  Michelene Wandor (Methuen, 1982–5).

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  throughout the theatre industry.1 A compendious list of plays written by women consisted of over 400 entries for women playwrights from the tenth to the twenty-first century, showing that, gender imbalance notwithstanding, many women had written plays.2 Even so, women dramatists figure as a minority in the professional dramatic media, just as they do as artistic directors of theatres – a survey in 1984 found that only 12 per cent of artistic directors were women and while the figure had risen in 2006 to around 19 per cent, the situation still demands attention.3

  Women dramatists

  Aristocratic women wrote courtly masques, but it was not until actresses appeared on the Restoration stage in the late seventeenth century that women began writing for the stage professionally – the best-known of these is Aphra Behn, who is popularly seen as Britain’s first professional woman dramatist. Women dramatists have come into prominence during moments of historical and cultural change: during the Restoration, when actresses were for the first time officially welcomed/allowed on to the stage; in the early part of the twentieth century during the women’s suffrage movement; then again in the 1970s during the second wave of feminism. Many of the plays written for the Actresses’ Franchise League (founded in 1908) were produced by the actresses themselves, because they wanted new material. During the 1930s sisters Angela and Joan Tuckett wrote and produced plays on women’s rights, as part of Unity Theatre’s socialist theatre programme.

  The situation of women playwrights bears a close relationship to the position of women in the theatre industry at large. The sexual division of labour operates in a pyramid-shaped structure, where men dominate both at the apex and at the base, in the technological 2 She Also Wrote Plays by Susan Croft (Faber, 2001).

  3 Lyn Gardner, ‘It’s time we got angrier’, Guardian, 4 April 2007.

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  and manual labour areas of backstage production, as well as at the artistic ‘top’, making major executive decisions about the dramatists who are commissioned, the plays produced and the subject matter staged.

  Women working in the theatre industry (apart from actresses) tend to cluster in the middle of the pyramid. Although since the nineteenth century there has been a strong tradition of women costume and set designers, the top professional designers are almost all male. Women tend to work in areas which reflect ‘servicing’ roles similar to those in other industries, and in the domestic division of labour – the housekeeping parts of theatre: secretarial, adminis-tration, assisting, personnel, casting, wardrobe, publicity. The pattern is similar in the film and television industries. All these jobs are, of course, vital and highly skilled, but they are also jobs which are largely behind the scenes, not particularly well paid and rarely given the credit they deserve, whether staffed by men or women.

  The figures for women playwrights, judged on the basis of produced and published drama, are depressing. In 1985 Methuen, the main drama publisher in this country, listed eighty twentieth-century dramatists, of whom seven were women; just under 10 per cent. In 1999 Methuen’s catalogue showed an increase in published women playwrights, up to 15 per cent. Also in 1999, in the catalogue of drama published by Nick Hern Books, the percentage of plays by women dramatists was around 12 per cent. A selective survey of plays running over two weeks in 2006 showed little change in the gender balance.4

  There is also a related knock-on effect in terms of subject matter,

  ‘character’ distribution, and therefore the relative employment opportunities for male and female performers. In Methuen’s catalogue in 1985, information was given for the male–female ratio of characters in the plays: 2,212 male characters and 908 female characters. While it is not necessarily the case that women 4 ‘Women in Theatre Survey’, Sphinx Theatre Company, 2006.

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  dramatists will write more parts for women, the real point is that this kind of statistic actually does confirm that, despite the fact that drama schools tend to be careful to take equal numbers of male–female students, the women will have a much harder time finding jobs and will, on average, earn far less than their male counterparts (star salaries notwithstanding). The gender balance, in terms of the gender-based content of plays, is very strongly male-weighted.

  This results in (acknowledged or not) an imaginatively male-gendered perspective in both narrative and theme or message. It affects the ways in which women are ‘represented’ in plays as characters, and the ways in which the gendered human agencies in drama drive and focus the action, dialogue and relationships. In this sense the content and perspective, the multiple-voiced points of view, of drama are ideologically ‘policed’ far more explicitly than the content of novels, since plays are only published once they have achieved some interest and/or success in performance. Thus the composition and operation of the theatre industry itself has a more direct impact on how many women dramatists are commissioned, encouraged and, effectively, ‘allowed’ to make a professional career as dramatists. By analogy, the same will apply to male and female dramatists from other cultural groups and, indeed, to the relatively small number of dramas written by men and women from other cultural groups in general.

  When it comes to plays for the thriving amateur dramatic movement in the UK things are different. Amateur companies often produce plays which have been successful in the professional theatre, but there is also a large market for plays especially written for amateur performance. Samuel French specialise in this area, with plays for mixed casts, all-female and all-male casts. Their catalogue of plays for the amateur market overall reveals about 15

  per cent
of the writers as female, except for the category of one-act plays for all-female casts, where about half the plays are by women dramatists.

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  It is clear from this that there is something of a decisive performing amateur/professional divide. At amateur level there are more performing actresses than actors; at professional level the opposite is true. More women write plays for the amateur market, especially where they have all-female casts, but male writers dominate in both spheres.

  The public nature of the dramatist’s ‘publication’ has some bearing on the choices writers make about where they will work. A dramatist may be present during rehearsal for at least some of the time and may, in any case, confer with the director during the rehearsal period. Rehearsals may involve changes, modification, explanation, justification, sometimes exciting, sometimes difficult and painful, often defensive. This is a more public (not collaborative) procedure than the relatively private editorial relationship between, say, a novelist and a publisher’s editor. The dramatist thus needs to ‘come out’, as it were. She/he cannot hide behind, or take refuge behind the safety of the published text. The dramatist’s name will appear outside the theatre, on leaflets, on posters. In movies the writer’s name will be much smaller, appearing after the stars and (often) the director.

  For a woman dramatist to take on this kind of public authoritative voice (a voice with authority, but without executive power) means that in some way she will, de facto, be challenging the dominant image of the male as moral, literary and aesthetic arbiter. However conservative or anti-feminist she might be, however she might think or believe that there is no longer any need for feminism any more, her empirical presence as a woman playwright puts her in a minority, a relative exception who proves the rule.