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Encore Theatre Magazine
::Front Page::

:: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 ::

Playwrights and Playwrongs

There's a very good and intelligent piece by Philip Hensher in The Guardian, talking about the difficulties that novelists have writing good plays and that playwrights have writing novels. Hensher's a critic, a novelist, a journalist and a librettist, and so when Encore saw the opening, we feared the worst.
There's a daft view around that's been voiced by people as diverse as Bryan Appleyard and Martin Amis that (a) plays are easier to write than novels, (b) playwrights are therefore lesser writers than novelists. I remember Appleyard claiming this on the rather stupid basis that there were far fewer words in the average play (which is an argument that should startle most lyric poets). Martin Amis, meanwhile, in his 1995 novel The Information, offered an acerbic guide to the field:
Richard was obliged to review, one after the other, the fiery mediocrities of the London stage. No famished bard, no myopic storyteller. Instead, an elaborately quenched Marxist in black leather trousers. Richard had hated all the poets and novelists too, but the playwrights, the playwrights . . . With Nabokov, and others, Richard regarded the drama as a primitive and long-exhausted form. The drama boasted Shakespeare (which was an excellent cosmic joke), and Chekhov, and a couple of sepulchral Scandinavians. Then where were you? Deep in the second division. As for the dramatists of today: town criers, toting leper bells, they gauged the sickness of society by the number of unsold seats at their subsidized Globes. They were soul doctors demanding applause for the pitilessness of their prognoses. And also, presumably, and crucially, they made a lot of money and splashed their way through all the actresses (p. 360).
Now, of course, as theatre workers, and obviously very alert to the differences between author, narrator and character, Encore assumed that Amis could be talking in character, and that the ignorance and prejudice expressed by the text at this point was part of Amis's attempt to sketch the character of a minor and resentful novelist. However, Amis has said much the same sort of thing in interviews. Fortunately for us all, Amis hasn't attempted to raise the level of the stage by writing for it - one can just imagine what his overheated prose and prissy literary hardboiledism would sound like in the mouths of actors.

Hensher's piece, though, is commendably even-handed. He observes that the intensity and immediacy of stage dialogue can sometimes seem flat and meretricious in a novel. Somehow, the stage places such intense scrutiny on language that good writers learn to effect a dense economy in stage terms that becomes overheated and clotted when read at a novel's pace. But he also observes the long history of novelists failing in the theatre, with Henry James's Guy Domville being the most glittering example. These novelists failed because they could not live without their prose descriptions, their access to the internal spaces of their characters, their ability to cut around the action. While Hensher perhaps understates the stolidity of contemporary playmaking, his basic point is sound and well expressed:

A novelist and a playwright might seem to be doing similar things. In fact, the tasks are quite different. Dialogue and external action are only two of the novelist's tasks; they have to flesh out the world with evocations of place, of physical appearance, the sense of time passing. A playwright's task is more austere. There's no alluding to people's thoughts in the lazy way of novelists: playwrights have to do everything through the way their people talk, and the way they move and act in tangible ways. A playwright venturing into the novel won't necessarily know how to write a description, where you can usefully allude to something unseen, or how to move from place to place. A playwright's tools are more refined; a novelist's toolbox is bigger.

Given the abject place the theatre has in the affections of most people writing in the literary pages of our broadsheets, this is a surprisingly smart and sympathetic piece.

On the other hand, we're not quite sure what Mark Ravenhill's on about in his latest piece. To be fair to him, it has been subedited, on the front page of the website anyway, with the title 'Mark Ravenhill on why teaching playwriting is a waste of time' - an assertion that, to his credit, Mark doesn't ever quite make. Of course, some kinds of playwriting teaching is a waste of time; much of that McKee-inspired structural stuff seemed designed to suck the joy out of any would-be playwright turning writing into a kind of feng-shui. (Sadly, this seems to be very widespread in the US.) But all? Midway through his confessional, Ravenhill declares:
The trouble is, the more I write, the less I feel I know about writing - certainly, the less I feel I can articulate what is going on when I'm doing it. And the more suspicious I become of anything that pretends to be a rule of playwriting. But tell a workshop participant that there are no rules, that they need to discover what a play means to them and write something that is unique to their sense of the world, and you are likely to be faced with a sullen customer who feels they aren't getting their money's worth.
Much of this is right, about the lawlessness of creativity and the consumerist mentality of students, but he's confusing teaching with teaching rules. It may be a value to teach the very things that Ravenhill passionately presents here as key to writing.

It turns out that his article isn't actually about whether you can teach playwriting. It's about the workshop culture created by funding arrangements. Whether Rose Fenton is right in the article to be so supine before the funders -'It's not us who wants the workshops. It's the funders. They demand them, so what can you do?' (as if she hadn't put a programme of workshops on the application form in the first place) is unclear. Certainly workshops, as it seems in Mark's case, whether the workshop leader doesn't know why they're doing it and has no faith in the point of doing it, are doomed to failure. But Encore isn't sure we needed an article in the Guardian to tell us that.

Philip Hensher's article, in fact, seems to me to express some simple and important truths about writing for the stage. I wonder if he does workshops?


...
Comments:
What a peculiar piece. Philip Hensher asserts (it says) that "the intensity and immediacy of stage dialogue can sometimes seem flat and meretricious in a novel." No, he doesn't. I am, I admit, a careless reader, but I can't find this anywhere in Hensher's article. Nor the quoted remark about the intensity of dramatic writing being hard to read "when read at the novel's pace", whatever that may be. Hensher seems instead to be stuck on some notion of stage dialogue being easy to enunciate, a welcome but not wildly rewarding skill, I would have thought. The Encore theatre-worker seems to be citing, and much admiring, an imaginary piece that he or she would rather like to have written him/herself. I wish that he or she had done so, as I like the Encore pieces flooding out in such profusion this week. I like the 70's angry-student pieces, and the anxious '80's revisionist ones too. Whoever wrote about the twin streams of the Royal Court was well on the ball. Back to earth: the real and actual Hensher piece was a no-no from the moment it became apparent that it would nowhere mention that fine novelist/playwright David Storey. The fact that Hensher thought that Beckett's plays Not I and Rockabye could equally well be read as prose, was the clincher. Hensher clearly didn't know that each owes its entire existence to a stunning visual image quite irreproducible in print. Had he seen either? (Don't be daft.) Had he read them? (Mmm ... just about ... but then the telephone rang.) I can't imagine why you people were so impressed. Having said all this, I think the real story is the dog that didn't bark. Is anyone reading Encore? Does anyone other than the occasional lonely old geezer plant a comment? Regards to you all.
 
Don't be so hard on yourself. You may be a lonely old geezer but there are many more of you out there. In fact, if you'd like to use the Encore comments as a lonely-hearts ad space, please feel free.

You might be right about the Hensher piece, but a bit of debate's healthy innit?
 
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