Why write?

Selfishly speaking, if people like you don’t write plays, then people like me will have nothing to direct. When I read a play for the first time, I am not looking for ‘polish’, I’m looking for something that feels alive, that feels as if it wants to vibrate off the page into the bodies of actors and through them to a living audience. I don’t need a play to be smart or well made, and I don’t need a writer to be polite, or to make my job easy. My heart sinks a little when I meet writers to talk about their plays and they tell me the moments, scenes, images and provocations which they wanted to include but didn’t, fearful that they would be ‘unstageable’ or somehow greedy. Messy plays are good, impossible plays are often great. The only bad plays are the dead plays. And the worst thing you could do is to retro-engineer a drama from a perception of a ‘functional’ piece of writing. It seems to me that the world isn’t terribly functional, so I don’t expect a play to tidy up human experience, emotion or behaviour.

My challenge would be for you to set pen to paper (or finger to laptop) with a purity of intention, unfettered by the compromise and muddiness which often come when we try to squeeze ourselves into more pleasing shapes. I dare you to write a play which makes someone like me really earn their money when they come to direct it.

Old wine, new bottles

Not every play tells an ‘original’ story. Scholars have suggested that only four of Shakespeare’s own plays are based around stories with no prior source. And several of the most remarkable plays of recent years have had at their core a trace or ‘heartbeat’ of another story, whether or not they present as ‘adaptations’ or ‘reworkings’. Jez Butterworth’s THE WINTERLING has a relationship with Sophocles’ PHILOCTETES, Mike Bartlett’s CHARLES III takes its inspiration from several Shakespearean tragedies and Lin Manuel Miranda’s HAMILTON reworks Anthony Shaffer’s AMADEUS. Not to mention the many more direct ‘borrowings’ we might come across in new versions of Medea or the Mystery Plays or Faust.

• Is there an ‘old story’ which might inspire you to do something new?
• Which of the old stories seems most urgent and relevant to you?
• Have you ever seen a film or watched a play and wished that you could follow the story of one of the ‘minor’ characters rather than its protagonist? What would a familiar story feel like if it were told from the perspective of someone other than the ‘lead’?

Writing blind

For all the different ways a writer might approach embarking upon a play, and for all the research and planning they might undertake in order to map out their world before they begin, there will always be writers who write from a more unconscious place, who write their plays in order to find out what happens in their plays. Harold Pinter saw a character walk down the stairs and ask another where he’d put the scissors, and then he kept on writing, with no idea who these people were, what their relationship was or what was going to happen next. The result was THE HOMECOMING, a play which contained characters temporarily called A, B and C (until their names and personalities revealed themselves to him). One way to begin writing a play is simply to begin writing a play, and to see where that leads you.

• What’s stopping you starting?
• Can you create a circumstance for yourself whereby you’re able to throw yourself at a blank page and risk filling it with words?
• What if the task was to write a play, knowing that later down the line that task could shift to ‘write a good play’?

News from the streets

There are plays only you can write, experiences only you have had, perspectives only you have gained and communities only you know. Over the last 60 or so years, British drama has shifted away from telling stories about the type of characters who dominated the stage for the preceding 400 years, and towards work which places marginalised worlds, communities and characters at the centre of the narrative.

Whether it’s the inhabitants of a sink estate, the founders of a pirate radio station, the workers in a zero hours contracts agency, the couple going through fertility treatment or the abandoned teenage sons of a wayward mother, characters about whom plays are rarely written now find their way onto our stages, and writers are increasingly bringing us ‘the news from the streets’. Shelagh Delaney’s A TASTE OF HONEY which follows the early life of a young Salford woman living an itinerant existence with her mother, through to her pregnancy and beyond was considered a radical gesture on its premiere in 1958. But its writer was simply writing the world she knew.

• Which are the experiences, encounters, situations and communities which only you could bring to dramatic life on stage?
• Who do you want to see on stage?
• Where are the stories which connect to you personally?

What if…

More than film or television, theatre is uniquely placed as a form to play with metaphor, to trade in the big questions, to ask ‘what if …’. Caryl Churchill’s play A NUMBER is written around a single question: ‘what if cloning made it possible for a father who had mistreated his son to start again by creating a copy of the boy’? From that simple question, a narrative is built: the father is visited by three separate sons, all identical in appearance, all the result of his acceptance of a radical medical trial of a new scientific breakthrough. In fact, the dramatic form only heightens this idea: we the audience are aware that we’re seeing a single actor take on the role of these three sons, and the power of the work comes partly as a result of suspending our disbelief as this single actor meets his father three times. Working from a ‘what if’ can be a really interesting way in to a play, it allows a writer to alter one or more facts in the material world and imagine how differently something would play out in this new reality.

Asking the unanswerable also allows the writer the freedom to not know something: plays which dare to imagine the world otherwise don’t have to be full of research and expertise. Sometimes it’s enough to share a question with an audience rather than answering it for them, and plays which start from a ‘what if’ can be profound and thrilling trips into the unknown for both writer and audience.

• Have you ever wondered what might happen if one of the things you had always accepted as fact was otherwise?
• Is there a big idea that you’ve been worrying away at which might be released by asking ‘what if’?
• Might you take a story or a story shape which is culturally familiar and change one key detail so that it plays out differently?

Activating an image

Sometimes, a single image might spark an idea which turns into something more. I remember asking one writer why he’d written a particular play: he explained that he woke up one morning with an image of a man on all fours barking like a dog and wrote the play in order to find out why the character was doing that. Lucy Kirkwood’s play CHIMERICA is a riff on a single image: the man who stood in front of a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Perhaps the image captured her imagination and the play was an attempt to activate that image into story.

• What are the images you return to again and again, either real or imagined?
• Why not visit a gallery or look at a collection of images online to see if you encounter the beginnings of an idea?
• Is the image you keep seeing at the beginning of the play, at the end, or does it represent a turning point for one of its major characters (i.e. does your man bark like a dog in the opening moments, or is that where the story is leading)?

Writing back

Some of the most powerful plays ever written were created in response to an event, a situation, a news story or a particular moment. These plays are often the writer’s attempt to begin a dialogue with the world around them: some are written quickly, surfing a wave of high feeling (rage, disgust, shock or joy) whilst others form slowly over time as the dust begins to settle and the play finds its form. Sophie Treadwell’s 1928 play MACHINAL was written in a fortnight as a response to events surrounding the death of Ruth Snyder, a woman found guilty of murdering her husband. A journalist, keen to feed the public appetite for details of this sensational murder case, hid a camera in his trousers and found his way into the public gallery to watch Snyder’s electrocution.

When the picture he took of the Snyder’s death, as terrifying as Francis Bacon’s image of Innocent X, appeared in the paper the next day, sales went through the roof. One can only presume that Treadwell, herself a former court reporter and keen advocate of women’s rights, was disgusted by the image. Without pausing to second guess herself, Treadwell worked solidly for two weeks on a play which follows a young woman through an unhappy marriage and into a murder trial. When her central character has her hair shaved before being walked to her death, she asks ‘is nothing mine?’ Presumably a version of the question the writer asked when she herself encountered the photograph which catalysed her writing of the play. Many of the most visceral, rich, complex and provocative plays in the Western canon are the result of a writer being confronted by the world he or she lives in and daring to ‘write back’.

• What is currently making you angry?
• Whose story are you having trouble getting out of your head?
• When did a newspaper article or contemporary event last make you stop and catch your breath?