DRAMATIC STRUCTURES

Plays tell stories. They move through time – this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and so on. They are rooted in narrative, or plot (see Chapter 3 below for a deﬁnition of ‘plot’). Critics have tried to suggest that plots must conform to certain rules, or types, to be effective. Such is the old nostrum for drama, the ‘three unities’, which argued that plays must be set in a single

place, must be no more than a day in duration and must contain a single focused plot. Experience has undermined this argument. The Russian formalists suggested that there were only seven basic plots for stories, though the variations allowed are extremely diverse. The American critic Northrop Frye (1912–91) suggested four kinds of plot which he identiﬁed, perhaps wilfully, with the seasons. One useful distinction which may be made to indicate how plot affects structure is to consider the end of the play. Thus, Shakespeare’s Richard III has a ‘closed ending’:

Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again. That she may long live here, God say Amen.

(William Shakespeare,Richard III, Act 5)

The Good Person of Szechuan by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), on the other hand, has an ‘open ending’:

There’s only one solution that we know: That you should now consider as you go What sort of measures you would recommend To help good people to a happy end.

Ladies and gentlemen, in you we trust:

There must be happy endings, must, must, must!

(Bertolt Brecht,The Good Person of Szechuan, Epilogue)

Embedded in the plot of the play is the theme, or themes, the subjects the author wants the audience to consider, the bees in her bonnet. The playwright does not have the luxury of the novelist, who can, like Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) in War and Peace, expand at will on his theories of history, heroism and the like. The playwright must select events, construct dialogue and so on in order to allow the theme, or themes, to emerge. The themes in Hamlet might be revenge, or justice perhaps; in Waiting for Godot, they might be boredom, or friendship, or time, or all of these, and more. Thornton Wilder wrote of

a succession of events illustrating a general idea – the stirring of the idea; the gradual feeding out of information; the shock and counter- shock of circumstances; the flow of action; the interruption of action;

the moments of allusion to earlier events; the preparation of surprise, dread, or delight – all that is the author’s.

(Thornton Wilder, in Toby Cole,Playwrights on Playwriting, p. 108)

It is not, incidentally, the director’s or actor’s.

One way of highlighting the theme may be to introduce a second story, or subplot, which may evoke parallels, develop the themes in unexpected ways, or offer alternative perspectives. In Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling, the tragedy is echoed by a comic subplot set in a madhouse, so that the mix is a potent one of absurdity and terror. In King Lear the subplot about Gloucester is so interwoven with the main plot that each intensiﬁes the com- passion and fear which Shakespeare creates in the other. In Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, the second plot does not even begin until the play is half complete, and then it becomes the central focus of the story. In other words, Brecht separates the two plots, and plays them one after the other, even though they are supposed to happen simultaneously, thereby dissipating any sense of dramatic urgency and re-angling the expected climax.

Dramatic plot almost always involves exposition, that is, a laying out of information the audience will need to understand the plot, or the author’s treatment of the material. Again, the playwright does not have the luxury of the novelist, who can recapi- tulate what has happened in the past before the main action begins in many novelistic ways. The playwright’s way must be different. In Hamlet, the return of the old king, or rather the appearance of his ghost, enables the exposition to occur remarkably easily. In The Tempest, Shakespeare had much more trouble, and the second scene in this play has Prospero relating to his daughter – in perhaps too much detail – what is sometimes today called the ‘backs- tory’. In Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, the author parodies crude playwrighting by having the radio announce that a ‘man has been seen’ in the vicinity of the action, and a few moments later the charlady speaks into the telephone: ‘Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring.’ Ideally the dialogue will contain the information the spectators need in an interesting way: who are these characters? What is their relationship? How is the situation sig- niﬁcant? How has it become so?

Finally, the dramatic plot usually involves a climax and a denouement. The climax is the highest point of tension in the play, and usually occurs late in the plot. But ‘all is revealed’ in the denouement, when everything is untied, or wound up, the problem is solved, or what was unknown becomes known. The climax may be unwound catastrophically, as in, say, Hamlet, when the stage is strewn with corpses, including that of the hero. Alternatively, the denouement may show that in this story ‘all’s well that ends well’. This is usually more problematic than it may seem, however, as for example at the end of Twelfth Night, when the ‘happy ending’ is marred by the curse of Malvolio.

All these are matters for the playwright.

DEVISING

One way to produce a playtext is for the theatre company to dis- pense with the playwright and create a script specially tailored to its own concerns and personnel. This process is usually known as ‘devising’, and it is precisely its collaborative nature which distin- guishes it from playwrighting. Indeed, when ﬁrst practised to any great extent in Britain in the 1960s, devising was seen as a way of subverting the ‘great tradition’ of literary drama, though this attitude is now considered unnecessarily oppositional, and perhaps discounts the sheer variety of devising practices.

The basic tool in the devising of any show is improvisation. The creators, whether an egalitarian group or under less democratic circumstances, always develop their ideas through improvisation, which means that thinking and experimenting is theatrical and physical, not intellectual. This may not always be regarded as a strength, but it does mean that improvisation-based devising tends to be well grounded in the inherently dramatic. It also means that each member of the group has some input, however slight, into the work. Moreover, it seems that improvisation as a process resists institutionalisation as well as the tyranny of tradition.

The particular 1960s mix in radical and artistic circles of liber- tarianism, progressive politics and a desire to break free from the social and cultural constrictions and repressions of the stagnant afﬂuence of postwar capitalism directed new attention to processes of creation rather than ﬁnal production. One result of this was the

development of performance studies in universities (see Chapter 1 above). Another was the increasing attraction of anti-establishment ideals of collectivism and participatory democracy, which had long sustained the lonely radical Theatre Workshop in Britain, where Joan Littlewood (1914–2002) led the most artistically challenging and politically progressive company of the time. But she domi- nated the group, so that when they researched in libraries and through improvisation material about the First World War, for instance, it was she who controlled the creative work, and she who shaped it into Oh What a Lovely War. At the same time, similar artistic and political drives were being articulated in the USA, where ﬁrst the Living Theater and then also its offshoot, the Open Theater, were formed on deliberately progressive principles. Both produced striking work, such as the Living Theater’s Paradise Now and the Open Theater’s The Serpent, but it was notable that though collective creative practices were advocated and explored – all the actors researched material, read and discussed it – in the end, as with Theatre Workshop, both groups depended to a large extent on the strong personalities of their leaders – Julian Beck (1925–85) and Judith Malina (b. 1926) of the Living Theater; Joseph Chaikin (1935–2003) of the Open Theater.

Later in the 1960s a number of politically-motivated British groups dedicated more or less wholly to devising were established. The best known of these was probably the Agitprop Players, who became Red Ladder, and who operated as a collective, by which they meant that all members took equal responsibility for all aspects of the productions. The group would choose a subject, research it in whatever ways seemed appropriate, and share the fruits of their researches. From this, further research was likely to be called for. The ﬁrst ideas were meanwhile being explored dra- matically through improvisation, and a synopsis, perhaps a scenario, was worked out. Again this skeleton was subject to criticism and discussion, and was modiﬁed, and further developed. By now a ‘proper’ script was emerging, and the embryonic play could be cast, rehearsed and presented. It sounds idyllic, and the group lasted – with changes in personnel – for two decades, but it was not all always as easy as this description may make it seem. The collective principle can turn to mere anarchy, though Red Ladder members had regular political meetings to question their own working and

guard against such a development. It can also conceal anti-democratic hierarchies based on personality. In other words, the political ideals of such a group may collide with their aesthetic ideals.

Red Ladder were one of the best known among a throng of ardent left-wing theatre groups, most of them devising their own scripts as a matter of principle, who were active in the 1970s. Interestingly, though they repudiated the capitalist state in which they lived and worked, most of them were funded by the government’s Arts Council. It was probably predominantly their inﬂuence which led to the introduction of devising processes in the work of many of the much less politically-driven community groups and theatre-in-education companies of the time. When the Thatcher government came to power in 1979, state funding of these groups stalled, and by 1990 hardly any of the political agitprop devising companies remained.

Their place was taken on the fringes of mainstream theatre, however, by companies whose work was based in physical performance, and who have largely survived into the twenty-ﬁrst century. Often distinctly a-political, or political only by the way, these groups used much more sophisticated theatre skills to develop their own pieces, including dance, mime, traditional Asian forms, circus skills and masks. The content of their shows may have sometimes seemed more naive than those of their political predecessors, but their versatility and theatricality were much more advanced. Among the most prominent of these groups were Theatre de Complicite´, Forced Entertainment and DV8, all founded in the 1980s, and all using ensemble improvisation techniques to create their productions. The companies usually researched their subject matter, and discussed its implications together, but when they came to dramatise the material, they sought theatrical forms, bizarre physical images or movement sequences. Their props were often culled from the circus – stilts, ladders, ropes from the ﬂies above the stage. Though still touring, and usually regarding themselves as fringe theatres, they were happy to produce what was basically entertainment, and they were not averse to collaborating with mainstream theatre groups, as when Theatre de Complicite´ made The Street of Croco- diles with the National Theatre in London.

Before 1968, no company which devised most of its work received any formal subsidy. In the early twenty-ﬁrst century, approximately

thirty did. Whereas in the middle of the twentieth century only a tiny handful of people understood anything of devising processes, now devising is taught regularly in higher and further education, at drama schools and even at GCSE ‘A’ level. ‘A’ level also pro- vides examinations in circus skills, physical theatre, and more.

Devising always takes longer than rehearsing a scripted play, for obvious reasons. Indeed, for some of the companies mentioned above, a new show can take as long as two years from initial conception to ﬁnal production, but that is partly because time is allowed for the ideas to mature on the brain’s back burner, while other projects con- tinue. Nevertheless, the emphasis is often much more ﬁrmly on the process of creation than is the case in the mainstream theatre, and it is argued with some force that group creation allows for multiple perspectives, for a de-centred and non-dogmatic approach, and for chance discoveries in rehearsal to be brought forward. It is, however, noticeable that all three devising companies mentioned here are led by a dominant male director – Simon McBurney (b. 1957) for Thea- tre de Complicite´, Tim Etchells (b. 1962) for Forced Entertainment and Lloyd Newson for DV8.

For all that these groups exist mostly outside the conventional theatre sector, it may be that they offer more to the speculative audience than most traditional theatre companies.

Summary

The ‘text’ of a play may refer to its written script; or it may refer to what is performed.

Playtexts are written in dialogue; dialogue contains a subtext, which is often regarded as the ‘real’ drama.

The playwright contrives a text which operates in time and space, and creates dynamic stage images.

Playscripts are set out conventionally, with a list of characters, and divisions into acts and scenes. Dialogue is set out conventionally, too. Dramatic plots are so developed that the playwright’s themes emerge. Dramatic structure includes exposition, climax and denouement. Devising is an alternative way of making a play without a playwright.

It is notable, however, that most successful devising is achieved under strong leadership.

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In document ROBERT LEACH -Theatre Studies_ the Basics (2008) (Page 41-49)

DEVISING

FURTHER READING

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