Desperate Acts

The Role of the Audience in the Process of Playwriting

Christine Roberts

Introduction

With the exception of a small group of playwrights who create their plays through workshopping techniques, most playwrights engage in this process of creation as a solitary act. Who then is the playwright writing for? Is s/he writing with a particular audience in mind or is the play driven by an exploration of themes and ideas which are then deemed more suited to a particular audience? Does the playwright write as a literary exercise or is the notion of its performative aspects taken into account at the time of writing? To a certain extent the answer to these questions clearly depends on the individual playwright, but the decisions made by a playwright are mediated by his/her access to the means of the production of these plays.

Theatre is a live, interactive medium so although plays are clearly written texts, in my opinion they should be written to be performed. It is here the first complication in the notion of audience occurs. For a play to be performed it usually means an acceptance of that play by an established theatre or theatre company. The Artistic Director of a theatre is driven not only by aesthetic concerns but also commercial ones. His or her (and as we will see later in this chapter, it is usually his) concept of audience may differ greatly from the playwright's. If his main consideration is to ensure a commercial success then clearly he will be looking for a particular type of play which will guarantee this. What of the playwright who is tackling themes which may not be considered 'mainstream'? Or is writing in a style which is not easily classifiable? What happens to these texts? In this chapter I aim to explore the variety of ways in which playwrights generally, and female playwrights in particular, overcome this second perception of the concept of audience; and why, despite their considerable success as writers they continue to be under-represented in mainstream theatre. As Lizbeth Goodman points out, if 'serious' theatre is safeguarded by men who regard women as the exception, then as they come under increasing threat from financial cut-backs and decreasing funds they revert towards safer territory.

There is a desire to see theatre as a place that is all about taking risks, as a place that is about experiment and not stasis. But clearly theatre is a place that allows for certain types of chance-taking and not others; it is possible for theatre to be a world that pushes boundaries, but leaves some intact.

I would maintain this happens for reasons not only linked to those of gender but also because of particular themes and styles adopted by playwrights of both sexes. So, how many of these considerations is the playwright aware of during the act of writing a play? Indeed, how many of these should the playwright be aware of when writing? What happens during this process?

The Act of Writing

The most basic of questions has to be, does the text of a play stand as a literary piece of writing? If so, the writer is writing with one audience in mind - the reader - who then becomes responsible for imaginatively providing additional information such as gesture, movement, use of time and space, etc. If, however, we accept Raymond Williams' notion that "the text does no more than prescribe an effect, of which the means must be worked out performance", the writer's relationship with both his/her audience and the actual written text is a much more complex one.

Playwright Sarah Daniels describes this process of writing for theatre as getting harder, not easier, the more she becomes aware of its complexities. She cites Bryony Lavery as describing it as "a big nutty fruit cake made up of the script, the director, the designer, actors, technicians and audience". Daniels continues to explain that when it works, it does so because everyone has invested talent and passion in it. A brilliant script, she suggests, does not necessarily make a brilliant play. Similarly, a dull script can 'glow' with brilliant direction, design and acting:

The playwright has to learn to 'let go' to enable the process to happen. There will always be things in a production which were not how I saw them in my head. The skills and imagination which directors and actors bring can enhance a play greatly. (Although, I am sometimes left feeling like a big nutty fruit cake all on my own and, at the risk of sounding sensational, however dangerously on the edge of wanting to shout, 'No, I didn't mean it like that at all').

Derrida's explanation of how theatricality is deferred is useful here. He explains that the dramatic component is encoded "in the writing itself: the clause structures, for example remain stable, as does the order of speech - but other aspects are differently coded, between dramatic writing (always in writing for theatre) and the context- specific conditions of actualisation".

Not all writers are so philosophical about letting their work go however. Arnold Wesker states in his seminar paper 'Playing with the writer's rights' that "when I go to a theatre it is the author's voice, his or her perceptions ... that I want to hear, not the actress's". He continues:

if the director is imposing his views in a stage production by cutting text, rearranging the sequence of events, placing the action in a setting different from what the author has imagined: and if the actress is interpreting the unfaithful wife as a ruthless woman, then how will you know what it was that the author wanted to say?

He also makes the case that given the many opportunities for misrepresentation in the theatre, many directors are now writing their own plays, many actresses directing their own performances and many writers 'sculpting their own work'.

No matter how much a writer wishes to control the interpretation of her/his work when writing for production s/he must be prepared for the encoding and decoding of the text which take place at many different levels. These stages are clearly indicated in Aston and Savona's Theatre as Sign System. They set them out as follows in four stages:

• The dramatist encodes the text in terms of her/his perception of its function as a blueprint for theatrical production.

• The director decodes the text, initiates a process of commission or collaboration with a production team and arrives at a mise-en-scene.

• The designer re-encodes the text to develop a portfolio of designs, within a predetermined or negotiated brief and subject to interpretative, spatial and budgetary constraints.

• The spectator decodes the production, works upon and is worked upon by the visual dimension as an integral aspect of the reception process.

From the playwright's perspective the important point here is the awareness that the writing is a 'blueprint for production'. A playtext may stand on its own as an outstanding piece of literary text (Shakespeare and Beckett bear testament to this), but essentially a playwright writes texts to be physically realized. This factor alone dictates viewing not only the prospective audience differently, but the very act of writing. The objective is to construct an informed performance text.

As Aston and Savona point out, the concept of time (present, chronological, plot, and performance) is an important consideration when constructing a text for performance. How time is used in the text is dependent on the style and intentions of the writer; how it is interpreted in performance is largely dependent on the director and actors. But this consideration alone dictates a very different process of creation. The very use of the word text also needs to be considered in that two very different forms of dialogue are employed. Ingarden employs the terms Haupttext('primary text') and Nebentext('ancillary text') to differentiate between the dialogue of the characters and the stage directions which frame that dialogue. In performance the spoken word may not always be paramount; theatre is essentially symbolic and other visual or aural elements may acquire equal if not more importance. Similarly the role of stage directions varies in importance depending on both the individual writer and the style of performance. Some writers consider them important not only to give added information but also as an attempt to retain some autonomy over their work. They can also be viewed in more creative terms when the primary text of dialogue gives way to physical or visual dimensions of the performance. Essentially they provide a starting point for those involved in the production of the piece but once in production, they can also be totally disregarded.

The director Deborah Warner failed to realise the authority of Beckett's stage directions and, in choosing to disregard them in 1994 when directing Footfalls at the Garrick Theatre, brought the wrath of the Beckett Estate on her head. As a result the production was abruptly terminated and she has since been banned from producing any of his work. These are general considerations; obviously emphasis is placed according to the individual playwright. Sarah Daniels believes that style is often given more credence than content. To her the importance of the writing is paramount:

I'm afraid I'm old fashioned enough to think, I don't care how beautiful, ritzy, glitzy, dazzly or weird anything looks, I want to be intellectually and emotionally involved in it. I want to engage with it on a gut level.

Whereas Debbie Isitt, having trained as an actor, places emphasis on the role of the actor in creating the relationship between audience and play:

Without the actor's influence, correct interpretation, creativity, contribution, the dramatic experience wouldn't exist. That's how the art form of theatre works.

She would certainly be supported by the actor Peter O'Toole who in a recent article in The Observer(11 July 1999), cited the rise of the director's role, as personified by Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall, as one of the main reasons he has given up theatre-acting. He saw their role as interpreters of text as an affront to the professional actor who had been trained and had honed his craft. Ironically O'Toole's longstanding friend Richard Burton held a very different view. He was outspoken in his condemnation of the profession of acting, seeing it as a mindless activity, referring to the writer as the only creative person in the process.

Structure, for Phylis Nagy, is the major influence on her writing. She states that, "I actually think that plays are structured the way certain forms of music are structured. ... I couldn't write anything without bearing in mind the principles of musical composition". She is also very sceptical when writers explain how in the process of writing "the character took over" and suddenly the play was "writing itself". "It isn't some mystical process," she says, "whereby no one knows what they're doing. ... We're not mediums."

Helen Edmundson writes very much with the actor in mind, to the point that her texts have been accused of 'looking slightly odd'. She believes that knowing how an actor acts means she can cut the words back:

I do that naturally and I do it even more when we get into rehearsal. They'll be playing a scene and I'll think, 'That's just so obvious. He really doesn't need to say it because he's doing it'.

Without losing sight of the power of the written word, some playwrights write with a very clear visualization of images and how they will work physically and symbolically on stage. Symbolism happens when elements become more significant than their tangible meanings, and this is why, when effectively harnessed, theatre becomes such a powerful resonator of meaning. It is obvious that as a playwright you cannot predict how an audience will respond or control how it reacts, but as Sarah Kane commented, "You have to know what you want to do to them. What I think about when I'm writing is how I want it to affect me and the best way to achieve that".

Clearly the 'best way to achieve that' will depend on the individual writer's personal perspective. Although the writing of a playtext for performance involves a difficult and complex process, in many ways I feel the real difficulties occur after the play has been written. At the time of writing autonomy generally resides with the writer. But not for long. As Jenny McLeod states, "playwriting is a process where you pass it on". So if you want your plays to be performed (and if you write plays, why wouldn't you?), the next realisation, as pointed out by Winsome Pinnock, is that as a writer you are dependent on individuals to make it happen. "It doesn't matter how much you write, it has no power if people don't allow it to be heard".

So what are the factors which dictate whether your work is heard or not? This question involves the exploration of a wide range of people, institutions, social and cultural factors. They are diverse in their motivations and powerful in their influences.

Constraining Factors

Throughout this section I will be examining five areas which can be seen as having a constraining effect on the production and promotion of playtexts. At times these interrelate, but I will attempt to give a focused analysis of the individual areas and the extent of their influence on the production of both the play and the playtext.

Gender

Many of the issues explored in this section apply equally to both men and women playwrights. But I feel given Jennie Long's survey What Share of the Cake Now?, a more focused analysis of the particular difficulties facing female playwrights is needed. This survey was the follow-up survey to one commissioned by the Womens' Playhouse Trust in 1985/6 which looked at patterns of employment and the status of women in English theatre companies in receipt of Arts Council revenue grants. Entitled What Share of the Cake?, it found that whilst there had been some positive developments in the position of women in the theatre, they were still proportionately under- represented. Jennie Long's survey was carried out in 1993/4 and, at the moment, gives the most up-to-date picture of the current situation for women involved in all aspects of the theatre. One of the most disturbing figures relates to the production of plays by women. In most cases, the numbers have actually decreased since the 1985/6 report:

Productions written, devised or adapted by women, or from books by women, account for only 20% of all work performed in 1994. In 1985/6 the figure had been 22%. Out of the 417 plays produced during 1994 (this involves not only building-based theatres but also touring companies and annual clients) only 83 were by women.

The under-representation not only occurs on the stage or in performance, but also in print.

Charlotte Keatley reports a recent meeting with the critic Michael Billington, who sees himself as a great supporter of new writing. He has recently published a book of collected reviews from his years as a theatre critic:

I think Serious Money and Light Shining in Buckinghamshire(both by Caryl Churchill) are the only plays by a living woman in the whole collection. ... [A] book like that says to other people 'The theatre has been constructed by men, directed by men. ... These are the milestones. These are the representatives of our society'.

Theatre managements often maintain that women do not currently submit the number of plays that men do. Graham Wybrow, the Royal Court's literary manager, says that out of a sample batch of scripts he looked at recently, only 189 out of one thousand were by women. "This necessarily means that the ratio of work selected by them will be lower". Jenny Topper, Artistic Director at Hampstead Theatre makes the same point. But as Stephenson and Langridge acknowledge, number-crunching both is, and is not, at the heart of the matter:

The responsibility lies with theatres too. The theatre establishment expends little energy, in real terms, to welcome new women writers into the theatre or to value the more established playwrights. What would inspire fledgling dramatists to submit plays when they see the work of good, experienced female dramatists frequently being undermined and undervalued, not only by critics, but by theatre practitioners themselves? It's a self- fulfilling prophecy.

When we consider that not one play by a living female playwright has ever made it to the main Olivier Stage at the National (the closest Caryl Churchill got was the medium-sized Lyttleton), or that the four plays showcasing the Royal Court's Young Writers Festival in December 1998 were written exclusively by men, the situation looks bleak.