9 Months To Birth Your Play
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Metaphor & Imagery by Iman Qureshi
Opening notes
It’s my humble belief that theatre is able to carry metaphor more powerfully than any other art form. (Come at me, poets…) This is because of the extent to which audiences are required to suspend their disbelief.
An audience member obviously knows that the actor multi-roling first as a 52-year-old Scottish taxi driver, then as a 16-year-old ingénue, then an irate pigeon, is actually their mate’s girlfriend Mary who’s in her last year at drama school. But they’re willing to believe and collude in the fiction.
And because audiences are in this playful, imaginatively open mindset, they are actively looking for meaning everywhere. Is that shawl now a squirrel? Is that pole now a tree? Is that floor now a lake? Is that light now the moon? Did that person who walked off stage actually drown in the dark, icy lake?
There is something about the trust of this suspension of disbelief, this act of co-creation, this “yes, I will believe that adult woman bobbing her neck furiously back and forth is actually a pigeon” that feels particularly vulnerable. If I think about it, apart from the theatre, the last time I believed a pole was a tree and a floor a lake was when I was a child. In the theatre, my cynicism has been left at the door. My mind and heart are open.
The entirety of theatre is in fact a metaphor. Some dead playwright is famous for writing “All the world’s a stage”, but actually the inverse is true: the stage is a metaphor for the world.
What all this means is, not only are audiences able to grasp metaphor better in theatre, but its impact is all the more powerful.
Take David Greig’s play, The Events. It calls for a community choir on stage. They don’t really have a role other than to stand there and sing occasionally. But as the play which is really a two-hander progresses, we learn that it’s about a mass shooter who gunned down an entire community choir. We realise that the choir on stage represents the dead. What a gut-punch. One actor plays the only survivor of the event, while the other multi-roles as the shooter, a therapist, as the survivor’s wife. It’s one of my all-time favourite plays, elevated by the ghostly choir singing on stage.
But wait, what even is metaphor?
I called on Uncle Google to help me out with a definition:
When it comes to theatre, I think metaphor is something more nebulous, more ethereal. It’s a way of bringing to life, or expressing the otherwise inexpressible. A meaning that’s gleaned, or a feeling that’s experienced which is made all the more poignant because it reaches outwards to an understanding beyond that which is in front of you. Really, it’s the original IYKYK – if you don’t know, you’ll probably miss the greater meaning of the metaphor. I think this is why it’s so hard to achieve as a writer; you need to make it obvious enough that an audience gets it, but not so obvious that it’s on the nose and ceases to be a metaphor.
Audiences love metaphor because it makes them feel clever. Like they’ve worked out a secret meaning all by themselves. And when I miss a metaphor (and I often do) I feel exceedingly stupid. Even writing this blog has made me feel hugely vulnerable because I discuss a lot of examples, and I’m terrified that I’ve missed a metaphor or gotten it completely wrong.
It’s a difficult thing to get right, and it works in mysterious ways. But when it works, it’s hugely rewarding.
Searching for a metaphor
Metaphor can be found in anything – locations, objects, rituals, or jobs. The best ones run right through the play, manifesting the journey of the characters, the play, the story.
A metaphor’s job is to capture, enhance or enrich a play’s theme, to deliver a message or feeling without having to spell it out. It’s economical, but also poetic. It’s the thing that can string together disparate elements of a play so that the result is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Take for example, Samuel Bailey’s play Shook. Set in a young offenders’ institute, we spend time with three teenagers taking a workshop which is meant to prepare them to be fathers themselves. Running right through the play, like a stick of rock, is the theme of parenting. As they fumble with strapping nappies onto a doll, we grasp almost wordlessly how these young lads, children themselves, are lost boys abandoned by a system that’s stacked against them from the moment they’re born.
Exercise 1:
List out the themes of the play you are working on, and circle the one that feels most important or salient to you.
Imagery and metaphor
Theatre is three-dimensional, which means metaphors can operate on several planes; through language, sound, or image. Often the thing that an audience will take away is a single, iconic image. Think of Hamlet with his skull or Agamemnon dead in the bath, or Eve and her apple, or Romeo and Juliet in a deathly embrace.
Think of Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie; the collection of glass animals becomes a metaphor for a woman deemed so fragile that she is kept on a shelf, away from the world.
For me, the launching off point of a play can be an image. Here are some images that have inspired a play I’m currently working on:
Hotel Room, Edward Hopper
Reunion, Salman Toor
Syed Ross Masood and E.M. Forster
Requiem for an Owl, Mats Andersson
They might not seem related, but in my mind they are!
Exercise 2:
Start an image bank. It could be just a folder on your computer, or a scrap book. Find around 10 images which speak to what you’re writing. They don’t have to correspond directly, they could just evoke a feeling, or be a photograph of an object that represents the theme you’re interested in. But you never know what those images might offer you. For example, I love the suitcases in the corner of the Edward Hopper painting, and they’d make for a fantastic metaphor for what I’m working on.
Location as metaphor
Think about plays like Annie Baker’s ‘The Flick’. It’s set in a ‘falling-apart movie theatre’ – immediately we’re in a place of the past. The world outside is surging forward with technology and progress, but here, in this theatre/cinema, we’re sitting in nostalgia, unloved and abandoned in its ‘falling apart’ nature, but also representative of a space where that age-old tradition of story-telling takes place. It’s a comforting escape from the world outside, but also isolated, as a bit of a time warp caught in the past. The theatre becomes a metaphor for the characters loneliness and ennui, and their search for connection and meaning in their own lives through stories.
Location can also be synecdochal – a part to represent the whole. For example, Mike Bartlett’s play Albion features a contested garden, which becomes a stand in for a nation that is torn between modernity and tradition.
My own play The Funeral Director is set in a funeral home; the metaphor of burial and death helped me convey what it means to live a life in the closet as a queer person.
Exercise 3:
Can you think of other plays where the location makes for either a powerful metaphor or synecdoche?
Exercise 4:
Set yourself a timer for 3 minutes. Speed-list out a list of all the possible locations you can think of. Circle any that feel like they somehow represent or speak to the theme you identified earlier.
Finding the right location which also works as a metaphor to carry the central theme, can often unlock the play. I would say this was the case for both The Funeral Director and The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs.
Once I’ve identified what this crucial location is, I like to draw it out. Not how I think it’ll look on stage, that’s for a director and set designer to work out. But rather, how it looks in the alternative reality universe of the play itself.
Once I’ve done that, I like to draw out how I see the world of the play at the start, and the world of the play at the end. This was a tool I found really helpful for The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs. The play begins in a dilapidated community centre. As the play progresses, the leaks and creaks increase, and by the end of the play, the building is without electricity, boarded up and marked for demolition. The building becomes a metaphor for a community that is struggling and straining to hold together.
Similarly, in Sarah Kane’s Blasted begins in a luxurious hotel room but is eventually transformed into a horrific conflict zone.
Exercise 5:
Draw out the key locations of the play you’re working on and see if any lend themselves better to carrying a certain metaphor. Part of this could be drawing how the location physically changes over the course of the play.
- Pay attention to entrances and exits, where they might lead off to – a bathroom? A smoking patio? A bedroom? An execution chamber? Draw the world just beyond too if it’s helpful. It’ll inform the tone of the world we are in as compared to the world outside.
Props
Props can also help tell a story. A half-packed suitcase, a vase of dying flowers, or a row of empty whisky bottles can carry tonnes of metaphorical meaning at the start of a play before anyone’s said a word.
In The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs, the piano became a central prop, something that silently, consistently, keeps the choir all in tune, and kept them coming back together. It’s also the thing that reunites them at the end, offering some hope for the future.
Exercise 6:
List out all the props that might possibly belong in the location you’ve drawn and think about how each might hold a greater metaphorical significance.
Exercise 7:
If you’ve got a sense of characters, select one prop which signifies something crucial about each person.
Metaphor and Accretion
Finally, try not to mix your metaphors. Think of a metaphor as a sedimentary rock, slowly building up layer after layer. If you’re using gardening as a metaphor for aging and life, stick to that world: you can have soil and seeds and plants and flowers and changing seasons and growth and death. But then don’t randomly throw other metaphors like, I don’t know, puppies and fairies and rain and baptisms to also represent life. Stephen Jeffreys calls these ‘image systems’.
Exercise 8:
Do you have an ‘image system’ in mind? Do some writing sprints to flesh it out and think of all the things that might be related to that metaphor, or linked in that ‘system’. Once you’ve got that down, see how you might be able to use any of it in your play.
Form and Metaphor
This is one that I confess I find difficult to achieve in my own work. One play that I think does it very well is Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide. Three generations of women from the same family each live their life out on stage simultaneously, as a metaphor for how the trauma of the past is always alive in the present.
Another example is Caryl Churchill’s Blue Heart – two one-act plays. The first, Heart’s Desire, is about parents yearning for an absent daughter. The second, Blue Kettle, about a son supposedly searching for an absent mother. Each play has a formal trick; the first resets mid-scene repeatedly, with minor changes or developments, while in the second the language disintegrates until it is almost entirely comprised of variants of the words “blue” and “kettle”.
Goodness knows what Caryl had in mind when she wrote these self-described ‘anti-plays’, but to my mind they represent how people tend to search for life’s meaning in our children, but ultimately, children can never deliver that. And so each play dissolves into unsatisfactory empty words replayed over and over, devoid of meaning. It’s a play where the meaninglessness of language is a metaphor for the meaninglessness of theatre, but also of life. I find it a frustrating play, because I feel like Caryl is having a laugh at my expense: here I am sitting in a theatre searching, longing for meaning just like the hopeless parents in the plays, but joke’s on me! There is none! Which is why it’s not my blue kettle personally, but it might be yours.
I suppose a guiding principle when it comes to form should be to never start with the words “I want to experiment with form”. Form should always follow content. Chicago (the musical) is a fantastic example, which uses the fact that it’s a show itself, to reveal how a murder trial is actually just a massive performance.
Exercise 9:
Have a think about how the theme you’re interested in exploring can be represented or complemented through form.
Closing notes
Metaphor is the thing I come back to when my writing is feeling very pedestrian or the play I’m writing isn’t hanging together as a whole very well, and just feels like a bunch of disjointed scenes of people chatting.
That said, the truth is you’re probably already writing metaphor whether you know it or not. We’re more intuitive than we know as writers, and the above is meant to be a few additional tools to add to your kit if you’re feeling stuck. I hope it’s helpful.
Happy writing!
About Iman Qureshi…
Iman is an award-winning writer for stage, screen and radio. In 2018 she won the prestigious Papatango New Writing Prize with her breakout play THE FUNERAL DIRECTOR which premiered at the Southwark Playhouse before touring the UK (English Touring Theatre/Papatango). Iman’s latest play THE MINISTRY OF LESBIAN AFFAIRS premiered to great acclaim on the Soho Theatre’s main stage in May 2022 (Damsel Productions/Soho Theatre, dir. Hannah Hauer-King).
Iman is writing the book and lyrics of a musical for the Almeida Theatre, as part of the inaugural Genesis Almeida New Playwrights Big Plays programme, and she is also working on plays for the English Touring Theatre, Royal Court, Bush Theatre, and Papatango, as well as being under commission to write the book for a new musical. Iman is developing work for the screen with Wychwood, Joi Productions and Paramount+ with whom she was signed to a First Look Deal in 2021. In 2023 Iman took on a year-long attachment as Writer in Residence at the National Theatre.
She was previously selected by Film London for their London Calling short film slate with her short HOME GIRL, directed by Poonam Brah which was also selected for the 2019 BFI Flare Festival, and her short film THE CEREMONY (Open Sky) was selected for the Vancouver International Film Festival 2022, and won Best Screenplay at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image. Writing with warmth and humour, Iman is interested in ethics, empathy and musicals.
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