The schedule for the Postgraduate Diploma in Writing for Performance here at The Arden has finally been finalised! A solid programme of workshops and events hosted by both core and visiting staff await students starting January 2007 - (the lucky things!)
Giving time over to writing during the course of one intensive year is certainly a luxury, a great opportunity, the start of a very special journey - I can't wait to get started!
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This is week three of the writing course at Arden and I am just starting to get to grips with ‘play analysis’. I will share my thoughts on ‘The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol’, based on a story by John Berger and adapted by Simon McBurney and Mark Wheatley, of Theatre de Complicite. I am old enough to have been around when Theatre de Complicite (founded in 1983) brought their shows to the North. I saw a couple of performances in Leigh. I think they were 'The Visit' around 1988, and Help! I am alive, probably in 1990. I have not seen them perform since but every year at the Edinburgh fringe festival anything that is physical theatre is top of my list to see. I cannot remember any narrative at all, just this feeling of complete absorption and astonishment. I had never seen any theatre like this before – now I know it is ‘Physical Theatre’. It seemed to me that the actors' ability to become anything before my eyes took metaphor to deep and subtle places. So when I saw ‘Three lives’ was a T d C piece I could not imagine how it would be fitted between the covers of this slim volume. It’s an easy read, but I can not judge it as a play script as my memory of the unique way TdC works makes me see it moving in my mind’s eye. I loved the way the play spans a whole lifetime, from Lucie birth to her death and the multiple themes, hints of war, collusion with the enemy, the harshness of peasant life, gender issues, avarice, power – it is all here and all so tangled up I found I could not write a neat summary of ‘theme’ or ‘story’. Dialogue is mainly sparse and quick but stage directions are shocking, weird and wonderful - for example ‘All seize pig, take it squealing to bathtub where it is slaughtered…. The women take buckets of offal to other side of stage where they…make blood sausage” (page 34). Or how about the lovemaking scene on pages 20 –21 where swinging planks, spilt milk, butter and breasts build a picture both erotic and brutal without resorting to crude and obvious gestures?
The other intriguing thing is that the play is in 'parts' and not acts or scenes so the time-scale is able to slide forward easily, including seamless transitions between life and death. Monologues, particularly by Jean, are used towards the end of the play to make you cast your mind back over all the preceding action (see pages 42-43 and p.46.). Finally, as all the critical reviews say, there is optimism in Lucie’s death but it seems to me to be only the optimism of laughter and ridicule in the face of the inevitable banal and crude cruelties of poverty.
Questions:
1. This play does not appear to conform to the ‘unity of time’ demanded of Aristotle’ poetics – is that because it is using physical metaphor to span time rather than monologues or dialogues?
Perhaps speech would make the passage of time sound ponderous and ‘unreal’ so you have to have some kind of theatrical device if you want to shift through time like this play does.
2. Whilst I can see it may be useful to think in terms of ‘writing actor proof lines’ for TV soaps where rehearsal times are short, is this the same for theatre?
Michael Radcliff says in the introduction to “Three lives…”
‘The actors’ imagination creates theatre as much as those of the writer or director ….” So how does a writer of plays take this synergy into account if he or she must work alone, without access to improvisation or inclusion in the transformation of his or her play to performance?
Here is a link..
'We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves'.
Ways Of Seeing, John Berger. 1972
It seems to me that this is key in the first few weeks of exploratory writing undertaken on the Postgraduate Diploma in Writing For Performance. Our principle aim as tutors has been to start a process of questioning; what is my impulse as a writer? How can I create an original, resonant piece of drama? What is the difference between story and plot? When is the right time to start writing dialogue? Since being immersed in the depths of their stories the writers grapple with who their characters are, what they want, what prevents them from achieving this too easily and what the outcome will be. Taking breathing time in all this is scarce. I urge them therefore to take timeout from all that plotting and see the poetry - it's a full moon and I can't help it!
'We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.'
and our faces, my heart, brief as photos
John Berger - 1984
We read, misread and re-read the sky each time we take the time to look. The writer writes and re-writes, somehow emerging from the black empitness and edging a little closer to the clear vision.
Breathe deeply - happy writing.
Dear Carolyn,
I tried to reply sooner, but computers have been conspiring against me. Mine is still in the shop having a new hard drive and other things fitted and the college website seems to have been off line since Friday. Very frustrating!
Anyway, I read your comments with interest and your insights into the play offer us a valuable addition to the discussion we had. My responses to your questions are purely from my own point of view as a writer and audience member. For me, the use of physical metaphor as a device for spanning time works in several ways. This technique can quicken the pace of the drama and induce an audience response/interpretation on quite another level from verbal exposition. I think these physical metaphors form a language that appeals deep down, to our humanity. Some people may call it our souls. Whatever name you give it, there’s no doubt it engages us emotionally, while speaking to us intellectually.
Your question about ‘actor proof lines’ is really interesting. From my own experience of sitting through endless hours of dull speeches in the theatre, I respond instinctively and positively to economic dialogue which conveys meaning, context and content in a clear, thought provoking way. It’s like poetry. The right words in exactly the right place.
As for your question about working alone, without access to improvisation, my feeling is that if I was attempting to write in a style which involved storytelling and physical theatre, I would do my utmost to find a group of talented, imaginative actors who would help share and develop my vision. I do think that collaboration of this sort has to be wholehearted on the part of the writer. If you are too ‘precious’ about your work, you could miss the unique ‘ways of seeing’ that emerge from the creative process. On the other hand, I have no illusions about how hard it can be working with actors, especially if they are more driven by their egos than a desire to create in a collective way. I suppose I’m saying, you have to choose your actors carefully.
Hope this helps a bit, all the best, Helen
Dramaturgy Workshop 12/02
Some considerations:
What is a dramaturg? Script editor? Censor? Collaborator? The enemy of creativity? A nurturing body operating between the writer and director?
Development Dramaturg: A professional working with a new writer to enable them to develop their play.
Production Dramaturg: A professional who works with the director – a specialist on the text who works on the concept of the directing.
Does the dramaturg take away the power of the playwright?
I think a dramaturg occupies the middle ground between the writer and the director, let me know your thoughts.
Grappling with the Dramaturge.
Be Proud Of Me was commissioned by Mousonturm in Frankfurt. It wasn’t a great deal of money but it wasn’t an expensive show and they made it possible. The devising process was tough, we were working with slides in a blacked out section of our bitterly cold rehearsal space on New Canal Street. Work on this show was dropped in, a week here, a week there, between a host of other projects and touring commitments.
Mousonturm were basically hands-off in their engagement but when they heard that a first sketch version of the show was to be presented in Birmingham, Thomas Frank, our mild-mannered commissioner was straight on a plane.
We had always been a bit twitchy about showing things before they are finished but it seemed worth getting a bit of a steer on this one. After the showing Thomas asked if we could talk together about what he had seen. We sat in a cafe and having noted a few things he thought interesting about what he had seen he then started, in a very delicate but direct way, to take the show apart. Initially it was shocking, in Britain no one ever seems brave enough to actually discuss what they’ve seen in the theatre. I was shaken, he seemed so down on the show I started to worry that we was going to withdraw his commission. Then, eventually the penny dropped. I asked him “are you doing that dramaturge thing?” I had read about this continental figure, the director’s critical friend, now I was experiencing.
Thomas kindly explained how the typical relationship works. “After a rehearsal the Director and Dramaturge will sit down together. The Dramaturge will say ‘that scene did not work, it was far too long, you must cut it in half’, the Director will then reply ‘I agree, that scene doesn’t work, but this not that it is too long, but that it is not nearly long enough, it should be twice the length’” Reassured by this story I continued to listen to the critique before giving a tentative response.
Back in the rehearsal room I ran a selected range of the dramaturge’s thoughts past the devising team and, bearing them in mind, we carried on devising. Ultimately Thomas’ contribution was valuable in the way he had hinted it might be. He posed questions the answers to which informed our understanding of what it was we were trying to make. Things he identified as weaknesses in the show became key elements, which, when fully developed, he was very keen on. This didn’t matter, he forced us to have a strong opinion about them and to commit to them more strongly.
My suspicion is that Dramaturge-Director relationships are unique to the combination of personalities involved and the circumstances in which they are working. Certainly my only other experience of working with a dramaturge, Wouter van Ransbeek, who helped develop Of All The People In All The World for Theater Der Welt 2005, was radically different. Wouter and I were much more relaxed, we met much more, shared ideas and enthusiasms readily and extensively. He took a healthy possession of the show and we laughed together a great deal.
Speculating with next to no knowledge I suggest that the Dramaturge role holds a greater role in theatrical cultures where the Director would otherwise be an isolated figure of great authority. In a devising company working as collaboratively as Stan’s Cafe the role of Directors critical friend feels inappropriate. Maybe within the dynamic of Stan’s Cafe Amanda Hadingue has probably taken a similar position within the devising team and in other circumstance Craig Stephens has been that alternative questioning, prompting voice and council.
James Yarker 9/2/7
Have just read the stuff about Dramaturges. I am not sure I understand fully what the process is but then suspect you have to be part of it, I can glimpse something of the usefulness of a 'critical friend' or is it more than this? Still not sure of where that leaves the writer - almost a sort of glorified transcriber of the process of collaboration? Over w'end I was talking about why should a writer would bother to write plays if good theatre experiences arise out of collaborative processes and improvisation and we came up with this "Writing for the theatre is only worthwhile when the time and reflection the writer invests leads to a multi-layered richness that could never have been achieved as a result of the actors and the director working within the time and space constraints of improvisation." I'll have to think through the implications of introducing a dramaturge to this process
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