Writing with you

The Disappearance of Sadie Jones is a play. Written on page. By me….

But now that we’ve gone through our development, rehearsal and production process, it has become a performance written in a space, with a creative team, and with you.

When my writing is occasionally published on a page it empties. As if the words have been stolen, type set, set in stone, an elegy, lost and concrete at the same time.

When I receive a book I have poems in, it sits for weeks before I can bear to look up my work.  When I eventually bring myself to do it, I skim them really quickly and never return to them after that.

I hate the finality. I suppose that the act of reading brings them alive again. I suppose when someone reads them they can live. But I don’t believe mine do, because I write for voice and space and people. Words can’t move when they’re trapped on a page.

Perhaps having a play published is slightly different, as the reader knows it is really just the blue print. I’d like to be able to give my plays to other people to play with. But still, the play text becomes final. A final word, I don’t want to have a final word on anything.

In conversation, in performance, we constantly adjust, to other performers, to space, to audience, even when it’s a quiet one. We adjust our bodies, faces, voices, intonation…it’s a constant search for communication. Even when the audience isn’t asked to respond verbally, it’s never a one sided conversation.

During the last few performances of The Disappearance of Sadie Jones at the Bike Shed Theatre, and during discussions afterwards, I felt the work being taken by an audience, taken into their imagination, their bodies…and what they translated was often more beautiful than anything we worked out the play was about.

The work is given a new life by the viewer, it is born, something of it is taken away and it might transform, and grow and become something else. A performance is a gift that is given in different shaped pieces to anyone who wants to take it home with them.

The audience member is an artist (yup, I’ve no problem with that word), the audience member is the most interesting artist at this stage in the process, because they are new, they are questioning, taking in, helping a birth, assembling and assimilating the work within themselves. The audience brings the final stage of the creative process to the work. In the end they are the best dramaturgs. Audience members help us to see the work fresh, to see it from many perspectives, to witness that it is continuing to be written, every night. The writing is never finished. 

 Stephanie Greer playing Sadie Jones. Photos by Eileen and Chris Long

Playwriting course at the Bike Shed Theatre with David Lane

I highly recommend this course. I’ve been working with David on ‘Hunger’. He is the only dramaturg/person I have come across with the ability to look at a play and understand/critique it on its own terms. One of the most intelligent people I know. But not in a scary way. & I’m one of the guest speakers

Memorabilia

A week-long playwriting course at the Bike Shed Theatre

As part of the Extreme Imagination Festival of Children’s Literature, the Bike Shed Theatre is holding a week-long course where writers will create new plays inspired by childhood.

Memorabilia is led by playwright and dramaturg David Lane and takes the objects, sounds, music, people and places of childhood as the starting point for writing a play. This five-day course offers:

• A full week of playwriting exploration including practical exercises and discussion
• Five professional visiting speakers
• Attendance at two shows (ticket prices included) and pre/post-show Q+A
• One-to-one dramaturgy on request
• A chance for focused and supported writing time on developing a new play

Suitable for beginners or playwrights with some previous experience, the course will run from 10.30am – 6.00pm from the 18th-22nd February, with two evening visits to live performances. The course is limited to ten participants and places are £120 / £100 (concessions): fantastic value for a course offering professional support, contacts, feedback, encouragement and engagement with live theatre.

Course places are available via e-mail. Writers should send:

·         a 10-page sample of previous writing for the stage

·         a covering letter explaining their interest in the course

At its discretion the Bike Shed Theatre will also be offering bursaries to three writers to cover the course fee; please let us know in your application if you would like to be considered. Click here to read about the course on the Bike Shed website.

Comments from participants on previous workshops by course tutor:

‘Met and exceeded my expectations. It was intensive and challenging, far more was demanded of us than any other writers’ workshop I’ve been to…I found I was using parts of my brain that have lain dormant for years.’

‘The tutor knows his stuff, is approachable and honest. I enjoyed the morning sessions and the flow of subjects covered, which seemed to logically aid the building of a new piece of work. By the end of the week, I felt able to share work and receive comments without worrying about getting things ‘right’.’

‘A very good “how to” course with masses of helpful information / tips, lots of one to one time if needed and the chance to put ideas into action. An excellent teacher – very clear, very patient, very encouraging. I was terrified at the beginning but was put at my ease immediately.’

The Kingdom – Three men, digging

The Kingdom

Talking to playwright Colin Teevan about The Kingdom 

The Challenge (set by director, Lucy Pitman-Wallace):

‘A version of Oedipus at Colonos, as written by Beckett in Krapp’s Last Tape’

The rule of three

Sophocles

Beckett

Teevan

Identity, exile and emigration

Writing a play is like watching theatre. When we go to the theatre, we go with as many levels as the writer goes to the page (or stage) with. We go to the theatre with all of the baggage of our history, our thoughts, our mood, the books we’ve been reading, and the people we’ve been talking to. The same happens when we write; all these influences combine with the life of the writer, and this becomes the heartbeat of the play.

Teevan talked about the influences on The Kingdom:

– The life story of John Murphy who claimed to have walked barefoot from a small Kerry farm to London in the thirties (via the Dublin boat); he then went from working in Heathrow as a runway cleaner to building RAF bases during the war and died a multi millionaire with his name on the side of London’s ubiquitous green vans.

– Exile, and repeated exile – Oedipus was cast out from Corinth then Thebes, in Oedipus at Colonos he is a wanderer, he has no home.

CT: “When I was at school plays were taught as literature, but we translated Greek drama line by line. I learned how to write drama from the Greeks. In any story, I ask ‘what is this the myth of?’ There’s always a classical underpinning.”

– Krapp’s Last Tape – and the question of our identity across a lifetime… Am I the same person I was twenty years ago?

CT: “Beckett’s characters exist in the remnants of an epic world. Greek tragedy is often about man’s relationships with the gods. Like the Greeks, Beckett cuts out the middleman. One addresses an existing god, the other an absent god.”

– An Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile:  Written in Irish, this book tells the story of a character who refused to speak English in Britain where he spent twenty years digging tunnels.

This soup of material is woven into the veins of The Kingdom alongside Teevan’s experience of his own identity.

CT “Ireland has a certain attitude, once you’ve gone you’ve gone. It’s how the country has dealt with the trauma of emigration over the centuries. It’s like a loss in the family.”

The Kingdom sounds like a personal play, a play that asks a question about identity, particularly an Irish-British, or Irish-London identity. It’s also told through stories, and storytelling tends to be associated with the Irish.

Will it be seen as a very Irish play?

CT: “There is something that is perceived to be Irish theatre. However, this play is produced in Britain by a British company for a British audience. I am wary of being put back into that ‘Irish playwright’ box and hope that having done so many other things this won’t happen. It’s a way of patronising a play, a way of dismissing it ‘we understand that it’s an Irish play’. For instance it might be put in the same category as Conor McPherson’s The Weir, just because it contains Irish men telling stories. It’s interesting how some playwrights in this country are simply known as ‘playwrights’ and others are given particular identities. Labeling is a way of not thinking, of short cutting actually thinking through the work. The categories are meaningless.”

How is the storytelling within the play dramatic rather than… telling?

CT “It’s the interplay of the characters on stage. They are not only speaking, but listening. The subtext of who they are develops towards a realisation. There is a dynamic on stage that is beyond storytelling, that is their relationships with the other and their selves….a dawning…which ultimately leads us to question where we are and what is actually happening. When each character has a stake in the story they are telling, the act of telling the story is dramatic.”

“A principle of storytelling I was aware of is the rule of three. I have three speakers, and each speech has three parts, although the timescales of the stories are very different. Motifs like tossing a coin, and the boots [a character steals the boots from men he kills when he is ambushed on his way to London] appear three times.”

I recently spoke to Teevan about the composition of  text, and his experience of working with Harrison Birtwistle on The Bacchai at the National.

What role do musical ideas of composition play in the construction of these stories?

CT: “One reason I often write in verse is to create a tighter frame, a more musical structure. Verse helps to put a rhythm in a piece and to lend stress where you want it, not where actor emotes it. Lucy [Pitman-Wallace] was very good in impressing upon the actors the principles I learned from The Bacchai – that they needed to learn the work as if it were a piece of music. Rather than imposing external thoughts and emotions on the text they first needed to learn the rhythm and the timings. Then they can find their truth within it.”

“In one sense I saw the men as instruments…In this piece we’ve got a strong rhythm through the digging and the effort involved, the breathing. The action establishes a rhythmical framework from the word go. Each character has motifs that are played with – they come together and move away. There is a heartbeat throughout the work, and this is important for the meaning. We establish a rhythm and then play over and under it. We should hear the rhythm even in the silences.”

The level of Borges

Jorge Luis Borges, by Paola Agosti

CT “So much of British theatre functions on narrative and sociological levels but nothing more.”

Teevan talks about the ‘four levels of meaning in Medieval Literature’: Narrative, Sociological, Metaphorical, Metaphysical.

CT:  “On the narrative and sociological levels The Kingdom is about emigration and exile…there’s enough of that in London for it to be a contemporary issue, but on the metaphorical and metaphysical levels it’s about identity and the nature of the self…and the inescapability of history. The literal action of three men digging accrues meaning as it goes on.”

My partner remembers listening to Eugenio Barba speaking at the Odin Theatre.  Barba also talked about levels of meaning in theatre: The concrete level, the interpersonal level, and the level of Borges…(Borges used for the benefit of a Latin American audience as a shortcut for metaphor and metaphysics).

Theatre needs to function on all four (or three) levels.

The Kingdom is being presented upstairs at the Soho Theatre

It’s a small space for a new play by an established writer. But perhaps it’s fitting that rather than happening with one of the more obvious collaborators, The Kingdom found a home in the same theatre where Teevan’s great collaborative work The Bee was shown –

The Bee, by Hideki Noda & Colin Teevan

Theatre in exile, made by exiles

I think we go to the theatre to find out about being human, to question who we are on a metaphorical and metaphysical level as well the concrete (narrative) and interpersonal (sociological) – afterall, we are complex beings. If this is the case then theatregoers and theatremakers have a lot in common. Teevan wrote The Kingdom with the same intentions with which many of us go to the theatre.

The action is simple. It’s just three men, digging. In the beginning this is a concrete action, but as the play goes on, we reach the level of Borges. At least, that’s the idea.

THREE LEGGED THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS THE KINGDOM 
BY COLIN TEEVAN, DIRECTED BY LUCY PITMAN-WALLACE
Wed 24 Oct – Sat 17 Nov, 7.45pm, Sat matinees 4pm: Soho Upstairs

 

Also recommended: THEBES, LONDON, HOLLYWOOD: WHERE THE THREE ROADS MEET. Writing workshop with Colin Teevan. 

Related Articles [Exeunt Magazine]:

The Five Obstructions of the Librettist
Crisis of Naturalism

Interview with Joanna Laurens

 On Writing and Not Writing

Joanna Laurens 

I’ve just written a column for Exeunt Magazine. One of the playwrights I mention is Joanna Laurens. Her first play, The Three Birds was on at The Gate in 2000 and won her the Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for most promising playwright, the Time Out award for most outstanding new talent and a special commendation from the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Her next two plays Five Gold Rings (The Almeida, 2003) and Poor Beck (RSC, 2004) were ripped apart by the critics. Charles Spencer wrote in the Telegraph ‘could she now do us all a favour by taking a prolonged vow of silence’ which is precisely what happened next. Her fourth play, Queen of Hearts is published but un-produced.

I was introduced to Laurens’ writing a couple of years ago during a writing course with David Lane. I immediately loved the way she uses language in The Three Birds and have been curious about her work ever since. I’ve discovered a few connections between us. We both started out as trained musicians. We’ve both been mentored/supported by playwright Colin Teevan. And we both play with language and form and find it hard to write to order.

After a lot of searching and wrong turns, I eventually found contact details and I thought I’d publish a section of our correspondence here, in case there are others who want to know what happened next.

You stayed in bed.
A mirror by the window
brought the outside in:
A refracted, fractured olive tree.
A single shoe left on cobbles.
A child’s music box;
in reflection, smashed.
The street in pieces on the floor.

And what did I say? What did I say, do you remember?

FATHER continues counting. (Joanna Laurens Queen of Hearts)

JL: It is hard to say anything about this subject, from the position I am now in. Anything I might say runs the risk of sounding embittered; resentful; hard-done-by. I’m not saying that I won’t speak out, just that it is hard to speak out in a way that people will hear…

The critical reception to my second play (Five Gold Rings) killed my career – ten years ago, when I was 25 – after my first play had won many awards, had been translated into many languages and had been produced in many countries. I’d already signed a contract with the RSC for the third play (Poor Beck), before Five Gold Rings opened – so that didn’t happen after Five Gold Rings: After Five Gold Rings, no one wanted to produce anything I wrote.

After Poor Beck, I went on to write two more plays – The Postman and The Queen of Hearts. We sent these out to many theatres. Sometimes, someone wanted to produce them – or co-produce them – but then, when it came to move forwards on it, some other person stopped it all – almost always because they didn’t believe the language would work, or because they thought the language made the play a ‘risky’ financial venture.

From the perspective of ten years on, I do think that Five Gold Rings was flawed. The plot was problematic and far too complicated. Not all the language worked. Some of it was naive. I also think: Like it or loathe it, it was not like anything else. I was stamped right through it and fully invested in the writing. I took a risk. I did something different. I learnt a lot. I wish I could have had a chance to use what I learnt – because it made me a better writer – but no one would give me that chance. I also think that Michael Attenborough was brave to produce it, and that it was a small miracle for it to be on a stage with the profile of the Almeida.

I am angry about the vicious quality of many of the reviews, which were decimating for a young writer. They mocked the language, belittled, and shamed me, publicly. Some of the reviews were bordering on slander. At the time, I read them alongside the reviews for The Three Birds and it was hard to believe they could be referring to the same writer. I mean, how can I be [quoting a selection of reviews] an ‘audacious, rigorous, talent’; a ‘distinctive new voice’; a ‘writer to treasure’; ‘an extraordinary voice that deserves nurture’; someone who writes with ‘murderous beauty’; with ‘depth and maturity’, in ‘an extraordinary new language’ – AND ALSO be a writer who produces ‘freshly squeezed bullshit’; a ‘piss poor’ writer, ‘immature’ – who produces work the same standard as ‘a bright sixth former’ – someone who should now do them all a favour and take a ‘prolonged vow of silence’…and so on?? I was only 25.

I struggled to integrate all of that and to make any sense of it. Everyone gets bad reviews – but there is a bad review, and then there is a review whose agenda is your annihilation. The latter is not common, not from multiple critics at once. (According to Damian Lewis, Helen McRory said it was the worst reviewed production she had ever been in.)

I was unprepared for it, especially after the raves for The Three Birds. I read the reviews standing in the newsagents at Gatwick, waiting for a flight. I was so ashamed, I buried my face in the paper to hide from other shoppers. In the coming weeks, I had several other writers contact me to express concern and support. But it was very hard for anyone to say anything to me which I didn’t experience as evidence of the publicity of my humiliation: If unknown people from across the UK were writing to me, everyone in the world of theatre had read these reviews. It felt like a public shaming – I was in the stocks, for the whole world to see.

I tell this in such detail because, if I had written a play using naturalistic language that had not been a success, I can’t imagine that the response would have been so extreme. And this is part of the story which doesn’t often get heard: We see the plays, we read the reviews – but then what? And what is the role of a critic? Can we say that they should have a duty of care? Do they play a part in shaping the direction in which theatre goes? Do they exercise their power responsibly? I am glad to hear that Helen thinks it is the worst-reviewed production she has been in – because it helps me to know that this was not me, distorting the reviews and experiencing them as harsher than they were. They really were that harsh.

I didn’t read the play for a long time after. I took on the perspective of the critics towards it. There were many of them – how could they all be wrong? I was ashamed to have written it, this awful, embarrassing and immature thing. Even worse: Not only had I written it, but I had then displayed it for approval, believing it to be good.

Then, after a few years, I picked the play up and dared to read it again. And, yes, some of it was naive and didn’t work. But, I made allowances for that – because I’d been so young and just been trying things out. The writing surprised me; I surprised myself. I thought it was interesting, curious and often beautiful. I thought ‘who wrote this?’ for a split second – before I realised that I had.

Strangely, this whole experience happened ‘in miniature’, when I wrote The Three Birds: I wrote it whilst I was a student at university. I brought it along to the (fantastic) Queen’s Writers’ Group which I was a member of at the time. Luckily the group was run by a playwright – Daragh Carville – and he suggested I do a reading of it, so we could hear it. So: I got together some actor friends and rehearsed a reading – as best I could.

But not everyone I wanted to invite could make it to the reading – some people I looked up to, and whose opinions I respected, couldn’t make it. So we decided to do two readings – one a small, private reading for these few people who couldn’t make the ‘real’ one. This private reading was first.

One of the people I’d invited said it was ‘too wordy’ and I got my first experience of that ‘pretentious’ ‘affected’ ‘conceited’ response which I was to encounter again – although, being kind, they didn’t use those words. I came close to cancelling the remaining reading and giving up on it. It was only because the actors had spent so long rehearsing it, and it seemed unfair to cancel at the last minute, that I went ahead. That audience responded very differently to the play. It reached them. And that was the reading where Colin [Teevan] saw it, and passed it onto Mick Gordon, at the Gate.

So, you know, perhaps I should have foreseen these extreme responses… they have been there from the start.

HS: It’s astonishing that with the success of The Three Birds the critical reaction to Five Gold Rings was enough to stop theatres commissioning you.

JL: Many critics sent to review The Three Birds were not the ‘number one’ critics of the various papers, but were probably ‘number two’ critics: I was an unknown playwright, the Gate does not have the same status as the Almeida, we did not have any stars in the cast… And I seem to remember there was another press night on that evening, where the top critics would have been. Whereas the Almeida was a much higher profile, with the all-star cast – and so the top critics were sent. They then had no experience of The Three Birds, or where I’d come from, as a writer, and were just viewing Five Gold Rings cold – with no sense of the evolution between the plays.

From my perspective, I’d ‘done’ Three Birds (Greek myth) and I’d intentionally taken a risk and done something more strange, what with the setting of Five Gold Rings being something much more naturalistic and closer to today – to offset the non-naturalistic language further.

It was a bigger ‘ask’ for an audience to swallow, and I don’t think I would have dared to make that ‘ask’, if it hadn’t been off the back of The Three Birds – you kind of bring an audience along with you. At the time, I made the mistake of assuming the critics at least would be vaguely familiar with The Three Birds, and would know where I’d come from – but it turned out afterwards that they weren’t.

I also think that unfortunately everything became about the language and that somehow gets in the way of seeing the plays in and for themselves. This took me by surprise, since, to me, the language was just part of what made the play – it wasn’t the focus. To remain so acutely aware of language itself, is to stand in the way of what it carries, so you can’t be reached.

Even here, we are talking about non-naturalistic language as a thing, in itself. For me, I just write plays. The language they use is part of ‘who’ they are; the flavour of the piece. I don’t intentionally or deliberately try to write something in non-naturalistic language. I wish this aspect had not become such a defining feature – overshadowing everything else. Just like any other aspect of a play, the language has to work to serve the whole.

HS: What happened with Poor Beck? Did it have a shorter run purely on the basis of the criticisms of Five Gold Rings?

JL: At the time, recovering from Five Gold Rings, I was grateful for being overlooked. I don’t think I could have dealt with public character assassination twice in as many years. After Five Gold Rings, I just wanted to crawl away into a dark hole and for everyone to forget about me. Which is close to what happened. I didn’t tell anyone I knew that Poor Beck was being produced; I didn’t want them to come and see it. I didn’t want to go through the shame of Five Gold Rings all over again.

The story of Poor Beck’s production is that it was originally supposed to have a full run, for a full season, at the RSC in Stratford – as new plays did. Then the RSC created a ‘new writing festival’, which meant that instead of being the only new play on at the time, it would be one of many – all the other venues in Stratford would also be running new writing. Then, a few months later, it emerged that the run would only be for a week and at 2pm/3pm in the afternoon. (I think there might have been a couple of evening performances, but most of them were afternoon.) So it kind of got whittled down from this full scale production for an entire season, to a week of being at 2pm.

Of course I was disappointed, especially on the back of Five Gold Rings. When I protested, I was told that I could pull it. But, after Five Gold Rings, I didn’t think anywhere else would want to produce it – so I didn’t really have a choice. It did later transfer to the Soho in London and ran in an evening slot, but by then I’d just emotionally walked away, the goal posts had been moved so many times.

I don’t believe any of this whittling down was due to the response to Five Gold Rings, it was just circumstance. However, I got pretty cynical about the whole business side of writing and I would not trust anyone I could perceive as having any industry-related agenda. I would meet with them and of course be polite to them, but I would watch them very closely.

Being creative involves taking risks. And not all risks work. You can’t know if something will be successful before it is produced. You need to feel safe, to take risks – both the writer and the theatre/producer – and when the funding of a theatre is jeopardised, that undermines that needed basis of safety for the theatre.

Any new play is risky, but there is a widespread belief that something in non-naturalistic language is even more risky, in the Riskiness Stakes. Is it?

HS: Did you ever look into other ways of getting your work performed?

JL: No, I’m not sure why. I think perhaps because I hadn’t struggled starting out, I just had no idea how to do all that. I had no idea who to approach for funding, why anyone would want to give me money for free, who would want to be involved in producing anything I wrote (or why), how it all worked and so on. Everything had fallen into my lap with The Three Birds and I didn’t even know the difference between a director and a producer at the time, so understanding the vagaries of funding was far beyond me. I don’t come from a theatrical background and I hadn’t grown up being involved in amateur theatre. It was just all so foreign to me.

HS: It’s interesting, because in the world I make my work in – with funding, without big audiences….my work doesn’t make anyone any money. Hopefully everyone gets paid, but it’s really not a commercial model.

Another thing I’m doing is writing librettos – with contemporary opera, there is much more space for playing with language and writing non-naturalistically. Is this something you considered?

JL: I would have been very interested in this, yes. Given the way I write, many people suggested writing librettos. However, I wasn’t asked and I had no idea who to approach or with what to approach them. After Five Gold Rings and Poor Beck, and the critical responses to them, coupled with being unable to get the next 2 plays produced, I didn’t have enough optimism to keep trying in the face of so much rejection. I just concluded that there was no market for what I did.

HS: It is genuinely upsetting to read this. I think it’s a fear that many writers/artists have – that if it doesn’t work out, at some point we’ll have to make a decision to try and do something else…

JL: I don’t think that writing hasn’t worked out, so much as it’s very quiet at the moment. I would turn back to it, given the right circumstances. But I am also happy not to turn back to it, if that’s how things pan out.

HS: There are other ways of writing outside of the new writing theatres, for instance I’ve just written a play with Colin Teevan for Radio 3, and I’ve been commissioned to write a play by a girls’ school. Surely with the success of Three Birds there would have been opportunities you could apply for?

JL: Well, in my eyes, writing a play is really tough. It is a slog and it is hard work to nail something of yourself to the page – to invest yourself in a piece of writing. It hurts, to write. And the payoff, for me to do that, needs to be some sort of acknowledgement and to know that enough people are going to hear what I write. I did write a piece for The Verb on Radio 3, a very experimental piece which was a hybrid between music and language. (It was called ‘Exodus’.) And it aired. And that was that. No whisper of it in the press. No one I knew even heard it. I’m sure they have gazillions of listeners, but if I don’t know any of them and if I can’t be alongside them to experience their listening to it – if there can be no personal contact – and if there is then no repercussion or public acknowledgement or (dare I say it) review, then it is as if it never happened. And all that slog feels like it was for nothing. (Since the money is nothing in radio, too – as for writing for the stage – it’s definitely not for that!).

Plus, as I’m sure you know, you have to put something forward to be commissioned for radio. Which means submitting plans and ideas and concepts and all of that. And I can’t do it. I’m really crap at that kind of thing. I can’t sit down with a detailed, sale-able plan before I begin to write. And if I try to do that, what I write will be dead. It will be dead because (for some reason) I won’t be invested in it, at the moment of writing. I’ll be too busy following a pre-decided plan – someone else’s agenda has impinged on what I’m making, too early in the process. I’ve failed to complete commissions, in the past, because I’ve known that what I’m writing is dead and, after repeated attempts to make it come alive, I’ve given up.

The other alternative is to ignore what I’m asked for and to write the play I have inside, anyway. That doesn’t usually please the commissioning theatre, though: My last commission was to write a play with a strong female cast – strong in terms of numbers and in terms of presence – and a ‘big’ play with a large cast, happening on an epic scale. God knows why I accepted this commission, but when you’re a struggling writer and this is what you’re offered… Anyway, I wrote a play with one female character and four men – and a small chorus – of more men. All the action takes place in only a couple of locations. No sense of anything ‘epic’ (however you define that).

I can’t make myself write something my heart isn’t in – I know it won’t be emotionally true, that I won’t be invested in it, that I will be ‘going through the motions’ and that this will show in the result.

Some writers manage to survive and thrive and write-as-a-business. I think you know if you can write-as-a-business or not.

HS: How much of a struggle was it to stop writing?

JL: It was difficult in that I continued to struggle along for far too long, hoping that it would all come together again at some point. After the success of The Three Birds, it was even harder to stop trying than it would have been without any success at all. But when I finally turned elsewhere, it was strangely liberating.

HS: I tend to think, if you’re a writer, you have to write, there’s no choice, and if there is a choice, if there’s something else you can do, then go do it.

JL: Yes – in some ways. When I write, from the right(!) and passionate place, then I am driven: It has to be done and it gives me great pleasure to see the result. Sometimes it feels as if something is writing through me, as if it’s not even me who is doing it or responsible for it. (And so, I shouldn’t be praised or blamed for it.) It can come very quickly and very fast and easily. Things come together and feel right –without me even knowing consciously why they are right. (I might realise it, looking back afterwards. But if I tried to work from this conscious point, I would only make something dead and overly thought-out.) Yes, this is the sort of writing which I have no choice about and I will actually want to stay up all night, producing.

However, that sort of writing doesn’t happen on tap. It is not there when I reach for it, always, on any subject someone gives me to write about. Sometimes I may just have nothing to say. Yet writers have deadlines and they have to produce work….

It is said that you need discipline to be a writer – you need to be able to write, despite not feeling like it. I can’t do that. This is not self-indulgence or some sort of Romantic notion of waiting for inspiration to strike: Will, intent or effort, on my part, make no difference. And I’d rather write nothing than dead writing.

The truth really is that I try to be faithful to the way that part of me feels – the part which wants to make something, the part which gets inspired and wants to put something inside me, outside. I think it is most similar to a child, playing. Try to make a child play, when they don’t want to. Even if they want to please you, and they try really hard, the play will be clunky and self-conscious and artificial. This is what happens if I try to make myself write for the purposes of earning money or meeting the deadline for a commission – I will write crap. It is not laziness on my part, I have no control over it. When a child really is playing, they lose track of time, are fully absorbed in what they are doing – which is putting elements of their inner world, outside themselves. And the child isn’t in control of when they want to play.

HS: Did you ever try writing differently? Did you ever attempt a ‘naturalistic’ play? – Just curious, I’ve tried it, got bored and gave up….

JL: Yes, me too. There was a point when I decided it would be great if I could write a couple of TV episodes a year, and that would pay the bills and then I’d have the money to write what I really wanted to write. However, for the reason mentioned above – I can’t make myself get invested, at will – I couldn’t.

HS: …People sometimes tell me – just write what they want, just write them something naturalistic.

JL: If you can, kudos to you. I don’t think everyone can do this, though. And I think you know very fast if you can. And, even if you can, you may not want to – you may want to earn your living some other way and only write when you have something to say.

I used to believe that I couldn’t be a writer unless I could write to order, get invested at will, and so on – I don’t think that anymore. I accept it is a process I’m not in control of. Like fish stocks, for fisherman. Sometimes you cast your net down, and nothing comes up. Sometimes you look inside yourself, and it’s dead in there. I accept that.

He continues counting.

When I go to sleep
I know that I’ll not know
if you are still counting in the dark:
Weighing each number. Designating its emphasis.
Like the women in the market weigh oranges
to price them.

When I go to sleep
I know that I’ll not know if
one, one. One, one. Has faded to
none.

Or when you’ll talk with me again.
(Joanna Laurens The Queen of Hearts)

New Writing vs New Work: The backing track

(PART ONE)

Thanks to my ranting and raving on this blog, Catherine Edwards of Capital Theatre Festival invited me to be on the panel of a debate at the Capital Theatre festival in Birmingham: ‘New Writing vs New Work’.

With me on the panel were: Fraser Grace, playwright who wrote ‘Breakfast with Mugabe’ and convenes the MPhil playwriting programme in Birmingham; Rebecca Atkinson-Lord, artistic director (with Rachel Briscoe) of the Ovalhouse, and Philip Monks, from the writers’ guild. Philip Monks chaired the debate. (And seemed to think it was just about the process of getting a play on stage, I’ll explain in part two)

So I did my introduction with the help of some other people:

On British theatre (‘crazedmhater’ commenting on a feature on Sarah Ruhl, Guardian blog)

The reason she hasn’t broken the London scene is quite simply because our standard of theatre is so dreadful, in comparison to the USA. We stopped producing truly original dramatists a long time ago.

On being a reader for a ‘new writing’ theatre

Maddy Costa: States of Deliquescence

I read a lot of really bad plays, plays that stolidly constructed a world without curiosity or surprise. I diligently wrote reports that I hoped would be constructive, all the while doubting my own right to do so, and fearing that I would be breaking people’s hearts. When I did hit upon something of promise, I knew it would never reach the stage, least of all untouched, but would get trapped in reading/workshop limbo, which teaches a playwright something, I’m sure, but not as much as an actual production. And then I was sent Jonah and Otto…..My closing paragraph to Soho buried fury in melancholy: “I can see why his work is so rarely staged. Jonah and Otto doesn’t seem very Soho: in fact, it doesn’t seem to be any London theatre in particular. It exists in its own realm, outside of time and politics, concerned with our place in the world on a more metaphysical level.

On ‘New Writing’ vs New Work, Alex Chisholm for Exeunt (and this is what the debate is all about):

The ‘New Writing’ play, like the ‘Well Made Play’ before it, exists as some sort of ideal to which new writers are supposed to aspire. This sense of what makes a good play has crept into the way workshops are run, courses are structured, feedback is given and, most damaging, into the very heart of the relationship between producers and artists. In teaching narrative, characterisation and structure, we are teaching a very particular set of aesthetic values predicated on creating a very particular kind of play. I have more than once seen development processes squeeze the very life out of a play, reducing it to what works on the page. And because most development happens in the abstract, working on a text, or at best in a bare bones rehearsed reading, everything is made explicit in the text. The rhetoric of New Writing is all about ‘serving the text’ and ‘serving the writer’ but can result in under funded, under rehearsed and unimaginative productions where little is gained from seeing the performance that you would not have had from reading the play….

Thinking about teaching playwriting…

I have been to so many (lovely) workshops where a particular approach is taught …an approach where character and conflict and story are key, and those things are taught in a particular way – a way that encourages lots of planning, rational thought, tables and graphs and lists (I’m exaggerating). But can’t we be taught other ways too? Maybe a bit of stream of consciousness writing, a bit of improvisation (Tim Crouch workshop style) a bit of collaborative writing and devising and ‘writing on your feet’. Shouldn’t we also debate all those plays that break all those rules? I hate it when rule breaking writers are treated as the exception, the post script, the blip in the system. It’s over now, it’s been done, it’s not for you. This insistence on it all having been done years ago is what stifles new work.

I understand people’s frustrations with the ‘hype’ (it wasn’t really hype) around Three Kingdoms when they are saying…yes but I saw the Mahabharata etc…. Good, yes, I’ve seen it on video – that doesn’t mean we should stop making and talking about ambitious, non-naturalistic work (of course 3K is nothing like the Mahabharata anyway, but everything non-naturalistic tends to get lumped together). (perhaps I shouldn’t have started that par. with ‘I understand’)

On the particular process of developing ‘New Writing’: Chris Goode in his blog:

That the Royal Court ended up not wanting The Extremists after what felt like a really ecstatically successful public reading in March has inevitably slightly distorted my relationship with it, but I think I mostly feel as I did at the time that the breakdown of that project was more to do with a mismatch of expectations around process than a direct reflection on the script; it didn’t go forward because they felt it didn’t quite work yet, and the frustrating thing is, I agreed that it didn’t — but it seems they wanted me to fix those problems by continuing to work on the piece as a lonely playwright in a little room, while I felt that only a rehearsal process would iron those wrinkles out, while further time alone in my writer’s cell would only produce rewrites of increasingly antisocial weirdness.

So that’s the groundwork, the fodder, the backing track. Next I’m going to try and argue something.

Three Kingdoms: Simon Stephens and Sebastian Nübling

Three Kingdoms at the Lyric Hammersmith

Not considered suitable for under 16s or British mainstream theatre critics

I found Three Kingdoms a bit of a joyride. Sit forward on your seat in the first half, enjoy the laughs, then have a drink in the interval and just go with the second half. I’m not sure if I’ll manage to add to what is already out there in blogs, so I’m mostly going to quote them here in case it makes one more person see the work. There are only three nights left. Get a ticket!

On the work:

On the way this work makes you feel, the reactions it provokes, I identify with this: Matt Trueman, Carousel of Fantasies:

About halfway through the first half of Three Kingdoms on Tuesday night, probably an hour and fifteen minutes in or so, I scrawled the following in my notebook:

“Stop everything. Storm the National Theatre. Tear down the Donmar Warehouse. Torch the Royal Court. Redact the entire history of the RSC and fetch me Trevor Nunn’s head on a plate.”

In retrospect, this was probably an over-reaction born in the heat of the moment. Not because it over-praises, but because it does the great work at those theatres a disservice. Let’s blame the adrenaline flooding my bloodstream. Let’s blame the breathlessness and the dizziness; the disbelief and the sheer fucking thrill. I was putty. I was windswept. I was in love. (Matt Trueman)

On the coming together of theatrical cultures. The collaboration between the writing and the direction, the way the staging adds meaning, depth, humour and detail to the writing:

Dan Rebellato, playwright, Spilled Ink:

First, the play was written for Sebastian Nübling. Simon Stephens has been developing a writing style that leaves space for the director. The published text is large, generous, sprawling; it asks to be intervened in, to be selected from, to be cut. It reminds me of Howard Barker’s The Ecstatic Bible, a play that would probably take 12 hours to perform and has never been performed in its entirety. But even in more conventional theatre, J B Priestley always deliberately overwrote his plays, on the understanding that a particular production would find its own path through the material, its own emphasis, its own interests and could therefore cut it accordingly. Hamlet is enormously long in its fullest textual variant and is almost always cut, without demur.

Second, and following from the previous thought, if Simon’s intention is to offer a text to be cut about, interpreted, selected from and collaborated with, Nübling has been doing to good old-fashioned British thing of respecting the playwright’s intentions.

Third, the production’s imagery is entirely drawn from the text….(Dan Rebellato)

I am extremely interested in this approach to writing that leaves room for collaboration, writing with space for the director. I think it might be the key to bringing theatre and playwriting into a new era.

On the problem of the representation of women….

Three Kingdoms

…I wonder if the reviewers, and viewers who dismiss the work on the grounds that it titillates and doesn’t question degradation of women  are actually trying to find a way of criticising the work that avoids mentioning what really made them uncomfortable – the orgy scene, the naked men…You can buy dildos, strap ons and lubrication on the high street (I think).  A 60yr old man can pick up a 20yr old girl in a London club. And that’s even before getting into the underground scene. But we can’t see it on a stage in our country? Are we so distanced from these things? Perhaps that’s one of the points. The girl trafficked in Estonia is the older British man’s young wife.

But interwoven with this criticism is the only reservation I have about the work –  the lack of strong female characters…. to make theatre richer, to add poetry, to add power, to play against the male voices, to talk back. The muting of the female voice inside the deer mask was perhaps louder than if she were to suddenly speak, perhaps…. Or perhaps, within this non-naturalistic, non-realistic world, there is room for the other voice. But I didn’t find any female nudity gratuitous or any of those scenes titillating, there was little actual showing of female abuse, it was under the surface, perhaps that’s what made it more disturbing.

Chris Goode comenting on this subject on Andrew Haydon’s blog:

I think you’re right that a major problem is that there are too few women in the company and their roles are feebly underdeveloped; the requirements of the production are anyway not easily distinguished from the requirements of the men in the play who (bountifully) hate women. So in the end I guess my problem is that I have nothing left to work with, in extending to Stephens and Nübling some benefit of the doubt, other than whatever degree of cultural proximity permits me to assume that they are not themselves amused and titillated by the emotional and physical abuse of women by men. There is a problem with such assumptions, which is that they are wrong about a lot of people. What ultimately I find ticklish, to say the least, is this: if Three Kingdoms had been made by out-and-out misogynists, in what ways would it look or feel any different? (Chris Goode)

You know, I’m not sure if I can formulate it yet, but I think the work would look and feel very different if it had been made by misogynists. There was something about the porno scenes that were just… playful, irreverent, just a little bit real too. A little like Lars von Trier’s film The Idiots.  But still, the main contribution to the work made by the women was their sparkly dresses doubling up as stage lights. All I can say is that as a woman I didn’t feel at all uncomfortable, the women on stage, while they had weak roles and little voice, they did have intelligent glints in their eyes, they did seem in control of their physicality.  In contrast, I felt very uncomfortable and angry at the way Simon McBurney had his actor playing Margarita running naked, vacant, drunk in emotional ecstasy within a sea of clothed men for an extended section of Complicite’s The Master and the Margarita. That was far more disturbing, and yet Billington described it like this: ‘Sinéad Matthews’s Margarita, bravely naked for much of the second half, also conveys the inherent goodness of the devoted muse’

To reduce this work to its story is to reduce this work – and too often that is what reviews do. Andrew Haydon on meaning and making sense:

When a play takes this sort of jump outside the realms of the possible, it suddenly seems to become much more difficult to talk about. “What does that mean?” suggests itself as a question. Or even simply “What just happened there?” Are we meant to reconstruct our ideas of what happened through this new development? Is this sudden transformation intended as A Big Metaphor that we’re meant to Get? It is disorienting in all these ways. Being willing to allow that disorientation to be a part of the whole experience of the play feels crucial.

I suspect, in part, this might be what other critics have objected to: the fact that, on one level, the play does stop “making sense” altogether – although I would argue that this precise moment actually generates a lot new *senses*. But it’s not immediately pin-downable. And if someone believed their job was to pin down and explain, then this sort of thing is inevitably going to get on their wick.

I think what is most impacting about the work is to do with form, theatrical languages, and ways of making theatre: The colliding and collaboration of three different theatre making cultures, the British naturalism, ‘text-based’ writing and meaty acting, the German approach to directing work, Sebastian Nubling’s direction that pushes Stephen’s writing, plays against it, riffs with it, adds layers to it, the detail and precision in the direction, the craft, the physicality of the Estonian actors, the irreverence towards nudity, sex, pornography. The detail in the delivery of text, the range of acting styles and actors was fantastic, the character Steffen Dresner towering above the others, and the use of different languages on stage, the play with translation, the pop culture references and the humour was exhilarating. It was such a rich experience, the kind of theatre experience that doesn’t require intellectualisation, that it is hard to remember or describe some of the most fantastic moments. But I remember at one point, out of this crazy physicality, out of the chaos, emerged poetry. Not in the sense of poetic visual imagery (there was lots of that too), but literally… spoken, meaningful poetry…words that suddenly got to the heart.

I went to the theatre most nights while I was in Berlin for a few months, and I lived in Amsterdam for a couple of years so I saw a lot there – most of it nowhere near this level of craft, direction and writing. But still, I haven’t seen enough work outside of this country to know whether writing, performance and direction this strong and entertaining has come together before. My sense is that while the elements within this work have been around in the theatre for years, because of its collision of different theatre making and writing cultures, the work truly is ground-breaking.

‘I’ve never thought of myself as avant-garde. If you run around a race-track and are a full circuit behind everyone else, then you are alone and appear to be first. Maybe that is what happened to me…’ Tatsumi Hijikata

It got me thinking about Butoh, a post-war Japanese avant-garde movement. - the character of the ‘Trickster’ particularly reminded me of images like these:

Michio Ito, Dancer, 1916

Tatsumi Hijikata (1950s)

Tatsumi Hijikata

Risto Kübar, who played the ‘Trickster’ is an astonishing actor  who can go from the performance of failure seen in performers from Forced Entertainment as he struggles to sing, embarrassed as he realises he is being watched…to a strange all knowing mystical Shakesperian fool,  travelling between worlds, with the physicality, flexibility, technique and detail of a supreme dancer, morphing into a cross dressing prostitute (with little dress and pull up white socks), evocative of butoh dancers Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno… and finally, at the end of the evening, which, by the way, is not a second too long….he creates one of the most poetic moments I’ve ever seen.

The mainstream theatre critics have put audiences off seeing this work, that is a serious crime against theatre and they should all be hung. (out to dry, I mean, of course)

Product and Furniture designer Ana-Maria Pasescu Stewart has constructed a light source that isn’t so traditional.

Opposition, A political play on words

Opposition

“Radical, Political, Courageous” ***** What’s on Stage
“A one-woman embodiment of a political system in meltdown” **** The Skinny

Ever watched a politician answer a question that left you none the wiser? Have you seen them give the same non-answer over and over to a completely different set of questions? Do you read newspapers and quietly wonder what on earth they are on about?

You’re not alone. Award-winning writer and performer Hannah Silva delivers her own manifesto that satirises the meaningless twaddle and jargon of modern political language.

Blair’s bluster gets busted. Churchill butts in on Obama and Cameron’s Big Society gets sliced and diced with live twitter feeds, weather reports, rant and rhetoric. Expect questions, politics, satire. Don’t expect answers, just a creeping sense we are all being had.

Opposition is a solo theatre show I’ve been working on for the last year. It had a run at the recent Edinburgh Fringe where it received great reviews and was described by What’s on Stage as ‘radical, political, courageous’. I’m performing it on the 3^rd May at Lincoln Drill Hall (while votes are being counted in the main space) and at Pulse festival on the 8^th June.

The need to make Opposition was triggered by a lack of political knowledge and a lack of interest in politics. And anger about the fact that I had nothing to get angry about. Filling in my postal vote this week, I’m still angry that I can’t get excited about putting an X next to any of those names.

I began working on it around the time of the last election. I wanted to be able to vote for someone and something I believed in, but I struggled to decipher the implications of what the party leaders were saying. I wasn’t engaged in politics and listening to politicians wasn’t helping. I didn’t make Opposition out of a need to communicate my political views, I made it out of a need to acquire some political views.

I’d listen to Cameron talk about the ‘Big Society’ but be perplexed by what it really meant – of course I understood the words, the sentences, but I wasn’t sure what the implications of this ‘Big Idea’ would be. The piece started with a re-working of Cameron’s first speech in Liverpool following the election – 19th July 2010. Pulling around the speech, cutting it up and putting it back together slightly differently resulted in funny, absurd things, and it also exposed lines which are there in the original but hidden beneath the rhetoric. Other moments of the speech become just sound:

And yes
Cutting the
And yes
Cutting the nat
And yes
Cutting the
National
And yes

Cutting the cutting the cutting cutting the cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cutting cuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcuttingcctctctctctct ctctcctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctctcYES!

Cutting the national deficit falls into that camp.
We’re happy about that.

In my version the line ‘Help themselves’ goes next to ‘We’re all in this together’. The climax…. ‘together we will build…’ (The Big Society)… to the dismay of ‘Cameron’,  comes out as ‘Er Ih Oh-ay-ih-ee’. ‘Responsibility’ and all words ending with ‘ity’ have a little ‘titty’ twitch on the end of them.

I started looking at how rhetoric has changed over the years; I compared Churchill’s use of language to current politicians, U.S politicians to U.K politicians.  Churchill’s speeches are full of metaphor and a rich vocabulary. In those speeches, vocabulary and rhetoric was constructed in order to convey meaning. Today’s politicians sometimes simplify their language and message to the point that it loses meaning completely:

Beggars Belief / No Holds Barred/ Full and Frank Discussions/ Feel good Factor/ Eye on the Ball / I’m not ruling anything in and I’m not ruling anything out / Knee Jerk Reaction / Elephant in the Room / Hearts and Minds / Lessons must be Learned / I can’t comment on Individual Cases / Doing Nothing is not An Option / Worst Case Scenario / Nightmare Scenario / Doomsday Scenario / No Comment

Before the audience enters the auditorium, they are given a name badges to wear with politicians’ names on them, and an accompanying quote. For instance you might get a name badge for Margaret Thatcher and a quote: ‘six inches of steel beneath the shoulder blades’.

Like a politician at a conference, I shake hands with the audience at the beginning and thank them for coming. At another point in the piece I come into the audience and work with the quotes. There’s a moment when we all chant slogans coming from Blair and Obama: Big/Boldest/Big/Boldest etc.

‘Big’ is a recurring motif in the work.

Blair: At our Best when at our Boldest.
Obama: We Do Big Things.

Cameron: My Big Idea, The Biggest Past Decade, My Big Passion, The Biggest Budget Deficit, A Big Bang Approach, The Big Reality, The Big Society.

In reviews of Opposition the use of repetition was picked up on and Damon Green’s interview with Ed Miliband on the public sector strikes was referenced. One of the physical images I’m working with is that the politician is a puppet, or a clown – a laughing clown. I play with Miliband’s broken record interview in the work:

‘The strikes are wrong at a time when negotiations are still going on. The government has acted in a reckless and provocative manner but it is time for both sides to get around the negotiating table, put aside the rhetoric and stop this from happening again.’

This comes out as vowel and consonant sounds – a bit like beat-boxing. I repeat it at different pitches, layering it up using a loop pedal with the actual words only revealed at the end.

I have a twitter account for the show: @Oppositionsilva. The people I follow from that account are all in Opposition. At the end live Twitter feeds are projected and I improvise with them. Twitter asks ‘What’s Happening?’ – it’s a good question.

Today’s politicians talk in soundbites, they are careful to avoid saying anything, they rarely think on their feet (apart from when insulting each other in the House of Commons). They are incredibly, sometimes disturbingly repetitive. That’s part of what I’m playing with, alongside exploring the language and ripping apart the rhetoric for laughs.

Opposition plays with the language of politics and society, it asks – is there any substance behind the words or is it all a load of claptrap? I investigate that question through slicing and dicing political speeches, inflating gestures, and embodying a strange kind of politician/clown/puppet with a bit of a manic grin.

photo: Eileen Long

“Go to listen, marvel, participate. Go to be amazed. Just go”
***** What’s on Stage

“Yes there will be objections. But you know what? We’re happy about that” David Cameron.

Opposition tour:

3rd May: Lincoln Drill Hall, 8pm
8^th June: New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich, Pulse, 7pm

Further dates tba: http://hannahsilva.wordpress.com

Opposition was originally co-produced with The Barbican Theatre, Plymouth in association with Apples and Snakes. Re-developed in Residence at the Dartington Space with support from the Dartington Hall Trust. Funded by the Arts Council England and the Arts Unit, Plymouth City Council. 

The No Rules Handbook for Writers

(know the rules so you can break them)
by Lisa Goldman

I have designed this book to appeal to a new and hungry kind of writer – the original storyteller, who writes for more than one medium. (Lisa Goldman)

I write for more than one medium, but am I a storyteller? It depends what we mean by telling stories. I’d quite like to be able to see myself as a storyteller, but I need to re-define the idea first. There’s an assumption that all writers (other than poets?) are at their core – storytellers. I hope this rule is one of the ones that the book explores, overturns, and looks at differently.

The book is also designed for teachers of writing, and I do a lot of that. I’ve read a lot of books on how to write screenplays, novels, plays and poetry. Some of them were excellent, some of them were prescriptive and taught writing by numbers – particularly the ones on writing screenplays. I’ve taken quite a few writing workshops and courses, ones with David Lane in Bristol and the Soho Theatre’s Sarah Dickenson have been great. I’ve spent some years understanding the ‘rules’, finding ways of teaching them clearly, producing my own handouts, explanations, tips, examples…now I’m looking for a book that says the opposite.

Does a rule breaking writer need a guide on breaking rules? No. We do it instinctively. But I’d like to read writers talking about their experiences, their writing processes, approaches, and I would like to expand my vocabulary for talking about work that breaks rules.

The book is written in a refreshing no nonsense style:

‘If you write to pander to existing taste…..it is likely to be crap and unlikely to sell’ (Goldman)

and is divided into sections which are broken down into ‘rules’.

It is very British playwriting biased, and within that, biased towards playwrights Lisa Goldman (former artistic director of the Soho Theatre) has worked with, so she’s following one rule herself ‘write what you know’. But that’s OK because she has worked with some brilliant writers. The quotes from Philip Ridley and Anthony Neilson are particularly interesting and inspiring. I’d love to read a book by either of them on their writing processes.

‘You don’t discover anything if you have a map. You’ve got to sail into the night and risk shipwrecks to find an island no one’s seen before.’  (Philip Ridley)

It is very ambitious, not only is it covering a huge number of rules, (the paradox is that the ‘no rules’ handbook has more rules in it than any writing book I’ve read!), it also aims to encompass novel writing, screenplays, and TV drama as well as plays. The non play-based references are very light, and personally I think the book might have been stronger if it wasn’t aiming to apply to novels and screenplays too.

The other tricky thing in the format is that not only is the book looking at breaking the rules, but it also first addresses what the rules really mean, busting myths around them, unpacking them, and discussing how to work with them. Some parts of the book are balanced between ‘Rule’ and ‘Rule Breaker’, other parts get buried in an explanation of the rule itself, leaving no room for a discussion on breaking them – sometimes the rule buster is just a postscript.

I’ve read great non-prescriptive guides to writing. Noel Greig’s Playwriting is a classic, Rib Davis’ book on writing dialogue is brilliant. I don’t need to read another one, even if it’s a good one. I’m looking for something different, and in many places, this book delivers.

For instance the sections focused on the industry are very interesting. There is a discussion of pitching to theatres and how pitch driven commissioning can weed out innovation and go against the writer’s instinctive approach. Philip Ridley therefore rarely writes to commission. As he says ‘the journey your imagination chooses is the way’.

I’ve attempted pitching ideas a few times, and always felt the light going out of me as I tried to make sense of an initial ghost of a feeling about a play out loud….so I found this section useful. There are some suggestions on how to deal with the system. Rather than rules, these are pointers on how to approach the problem and are followed by the statement that sometimes you have to have the courage to say ‘I don’t write like that’ and hope you don’t lose the job.

‘No one can play to order’ (Goldman)

One for my notice board.

& this is possibly my favourite statement in the book:

‘Who needs outlines, when the world is working for you?’ (Goldman)

-  In reference to that magical (but apparently it’s neuroscience) experience that once you’re working on a topic, you start to notice things around you that feed into it. I experienced this in the extreme when working on novels, it’s very odd. In a different section is a note ‘Don’t go mad’. Also useful!

It’s an inspiring, thought provoking and open first section, with nice chunky quotes from writers and really lacking in rules – a few self help style statements: ‘Trust your inner truth and be brave enough to stand up to it’  but hey, sometimes we need clichés: ‘ Taking risks in life can boost your confidence and creativity in writing too.’  (Goldman)

So, am I a storyteller? I’m excited to get to the next section: Principles or Prescriptions? Structure, Character, Dialogue.

But it seems story-narrative-character-structure are just too solidified, too heavy to overturn within the structure of this book. Instead of subverting it, looking at writers who go against these principles the topic is unpacked, explained, bullet-pointed again.

This section mostly deals with how to follow the rules and not how to overturn them, or what they really mean, or how to articulate them when looking at non-story based work. There is only brief comment on how fixed structures can be damaging for a writer. ‘Use the sequences of change that best expresses your story’. Leaving the word ‘story’  to be used in the rest of the book without having been interrogated.

I wish there had been an assumption here that we already knew the traditional definition of ‘story’ – there are plenty of good books on it already. But I suppose defining, ‘knowing’ the rules is part of what the book promises to deliver. The statement on the front ‘know the rules so you can break them’ does point to this. Perhaps I was looking for sometimes more along the lines of: ‘you know the rules, now let’s break them’.

This section also suffers from having fewer quotes from writers in it. I missed discussion here of the big rule breakers of story, narrative and structure – of Padgett Powell’s and the Oulipo’s novels, Kathy Acker’s cut up method, Martin Crimp, Mac Wellman, Sarah Kane – writers throwing traditional concept of story – hero journey – out the window.

I’d have loved an exploration of plays without characters in them, is such a thing possible? What is character? Can you write a novel without one? Where is the character in Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood? How can the protagonist of Crimp’s Attempts on her life have a journey through the play when her very existence is questionable? Can you have a play in which the role of character is fulfilled by the audience’s existence? I didn’t need another list of questions to use when creating character – not that I don’t find this method useful sometimes, particularly when teaching, it’s just Noel Greig and others have already presented this method very effectively.

When it comes to work that breaks these story principles we don’t lack the examples, but we still lack the vocabulary. I was really hoping this book would help me to articulate my experience…

It would have been useful to have a distinction made between story and narrative, and perhaps a discussion of form rather than structure, as I found parts of the definition of structure confusing:

‘I read the way I dream. A sense of time and place is crucial to this’ (Goldman)

My current play is dream-like, so I’d love someone to read it in the way they dream…but there isn’t a fixed sense of time or place…in my dreams the sense of time and place is displaced, unfixed and strange…I’m also unconvinced by the idea that the reader can change the structure of a novel by reading a chapter twice.

The ideas on structure became clearer to me when approached through the idea of metaphor and Ridley’s experience of ‘image architecture’. The discussion of the ways structure in writing is changing with new technologies is also interesting.

The book is clearly written and laid out and has many inspiring moments. As my recent rant on ‘rules’  and script submission processes suggests, it is also much needed. But in spite of the many great statements throughout on rule breaking, those central discussions of story and character left me disappointed – not in a sceptical observer-reviewer sense but as a sincere writer-reader. I was looking for a new approach to the language of writing. There’s a great quote by Hattie Naylor on the use of cliché, I would have loved more of this, more on writers’ playfulness and exploration of language, and a sense of the joy of writing against conventions. I loved the quotes from writers, and the discussions around the industry in the first and final sections of the book are fascinating. But overall this is more a book I will dip into when exploring the ‘rules’ in my teaching– rather than one I will look to for inspiration during darker moments of my own writing.

The No Rules Handbook for Writers felt a little suffocated by its own fixed structure, its own narrative. A book about breaking the rules should break some itself, and in the end I felt that the format of the book was trapping some of the thoughts within it.

The No Rules Handbook for Writers

As a partner piece to my recent rant about the ‘rules’ of playwrighting, this could be interesting… it could also be the rules of how to follow the rules…but if Aleks Sierz says it’s good and it’s got Philip Ridley in it….

* I’ve now read the book, follow this link for my response/subjective kind of review *

From the Oberon website:

Lisa Goldman takes 40 established conventions of creative writing. She explores why these rules persist, how to master them, bend or break them and why the most important rules to overturn are your own. The book weaves together industry experiences, psychological observations and inspirational tips. It also contains practical advice from 40 rule-breaking writers including:

Hassan Abdulrazzak, Oladipo Agboluaje, Ronan Bennett, Sita Bramachari, Trevor Byrne, Anthony Cartwright, Matthew Greenhalgh, Tanika Gupta, Neil Hunter, M.J. Hyland, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, Dennis Kelly, Bryony Lavery, Chris Paling, Stacy Makishi, Neel Mukherjee, Hattie Naylor, Anthony Neilson, Kim Noble, Tom Palmer, Lucy Prebble, Philip Ridley, Paul Sirett, Edmund White, Roy Williams.

The No Rules Handbook for Writers will be a valuable addition to the bookshelves of anyone curious about the craft, context and process of writing.

Listen to Lisa Goldman in conversation with OffWestEnd.com

Press Comment:

‘”Lisa Goldman’s book is like the best of British new writing: it is personal, well-written, clearly thought out and resonant. Its advice is passionately felt but perfectly controlled. And its ideas sing and inspire.” – Aleks Sierz (author of In-Yer-Face Theatre)

Dear Reader,

I want to write the chaos that is inside us, chaos in which a word has no meaning but a meaning has a sound and the layer of sounds is grappling with what it is to be.

I want to write a person that I can’t know by meeting them, that I can’t see on a screen, something that goes deeper than subtext; it doesn’t matter why you are like this. I want to see you, the way we never see each other. I want to watch, I want to listen, imagine. Let me find another way of thinking.

I want to write beyond language, I want to write noise, emotion, the impossibilities of writing any of this.

Show me a world without the answers, let me see the patterns, let me discover something about myself, I don’t care if it wasn’t intended. How could it be? No one is that clever.

Writers don’t know why. Writers don’t know what they are doing. That’s when it’s writing writing writing the writer is lost.

Lost, invisible, busy, we want to disappear in our work.

Risk. Audiences love it. Audiences don’t know the rules. Because there aren’t any. Anyone who needs someone to tell them how to do theatre should be doing something else. A job with a line manager.

Stop censoring writers who play with plays.

I can’t tell you what central question this play is asking its audience, because it hasn’t been made yet. Because the page is only the first breath. And even when it has been made it will ask different things of different people, and they will ask different things of it.

As soon as you think you know how to write, direct, make theatre – as soon as there is a system, it is dead.

Of course I can learn the ‘rules’, I can understand them, I enjoy them embedded in a good novel. Hunger Games used them well in the film (the book gets the rules of plot right but forgot to follow the ‘show don’t tell’ rule with character and dialogue). Of course I know the rules. I’m good at teaching them too. I also don’t think the audience is stupid enough to require them on a plate. Not in the theatre. Not in the theatres with uncomfortable seats, dodgy heating, and no ice cream. I need something more to keep me sitting there.

The funny thing is, everyone knows this, everyone knows that really, there are no rules, but still, people keep quoting the ‘rules’ of playwriting back at me. David Lan’s ‘rules’ come up a lot. But he doesn’t have rules for directors, this is great:

It is not as if once you have done 37 productions, you will walk in next time and know how to do it. Everyone is equal and everyone is struggling all the time. On the first day of rehearsal it can happen that you arrive and you have no idea how to start or what you are going to do. You make it up. We are all equal and everyone is starting afresh each time. David Lan, interview. 

The following was given to me by David Prescott from the Drum Theatre Royal, Plymouth, I will find out where he got it from. It has also been quoted to me verbatim more than once.

David Lan’s Narrative Structure for all of Western Drama:

A character exists in a culture.

Something about that culture is causing the character to suffer.

Something happens that makes the character realise that they have to do something or get something to ease the suffering.

They go on a journey that may or may not be a physical journey in their attempt to do or get this thing.

On this journey they come across obstacles which they either succeed or fail in overcoming.

In their success or their failure they either learn something about themselves or the audience learns something about them.

[I have never met David Lan and he may not intend the above as a manual for today’s playwrights, however, it has been presented to me as such]

I prefer to think of narrative as the perspective that the work is told from, and as something that the audience can weave for themselves, audiences are good at that, we just need to let them.

I struggle to apply Lan’s structure to Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life, Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, Sarah Kane’s Crave, Beckett’s Not I…etc. Perhaps with effort and a bit of twisting it’s possible. But what’s the point? These principles were not extracted from plays in the first place in order to interpret this ‘postdramatic’ generation of writing (which is a joke in itself, this work is hardly new, it’s just marginalised now more than ever –and in fact barely exists in this country thanks to the censorship of the few ‘new writing’ theatres that accept unsolicited scripts). But it seems this vocabulary is all many have. As a reader/director told me, if we don’t use these parameters to discuss a play – then how can we talk about it? If they can’t talk about it the writer’s fucked.

I hope I never know how to write a play.

Give the writer a voice. Let us respond to your reasons for rejecting our plays without fear of ostracism and the reputation for being difficult to work with.

Being able to think as well as being about to write doesn’t mean we are difficult to work with.

Art gallery curators don’t tell artists how to make their work. Stop telling writers how to write. That doesn’t mean we won’t listen or collaborate. That doesn’t mean we will be difficult to work with.

Stop censoring plays you don’t understand. You’re not supposed to. They are not supposed to be read. I thought Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis was a self-indulgent diary the first time I read it. Then I read it again many times and performed in it. All plays are for performance, but some plays in particular don’t work on the page, and certainly one quick reading of them is not enough. It doesn’t follow that they need more than one viewing in order to communicate in performance.

Don’t dismiss a play because it doesn’t look like a play on the page. Don’t dismiss a play because it does look like a play but doesn’t do the other things you expect. I’ve said this before, I’m boring myself.

Come on England, let us write and get rid of the bloody readers. They are not needed because playwrights don’t write for the page. So stop reading our pages and let us write them.

For my part: I’ll stop sending you my pages to read.

‘We hope you will find a home for your play elsewhere’

There is no home for my plays. I need to build one myself.

Inspired by my rejection letters, various blogs including by George Hunka: 

The impulse to storytelling (and to being subsumed within the telling of a story) is constantly undermined by violent fragmentation of the human urge to both telling and listening to a well-rounded narrative — and, in fragmenting and frustrating this desire, to invite the individual audience member to fit these on-stage events into their own matrix of interpretation instead of having this matrix imposed upon the events by the artist: to create one’s own story, rather than having a story eliminate alternative interpretations through the logic of its expected progression through time, in conforming to the “well-made” story, as that “well-making” is ideologically defined by the dramatist and the director. (George Hunka)

and a feature in the recent UK Writer, the Writers’ Guild magazine which quoted Arnold Wesker from ‘Wesker on Theatre’.

Arnold Wesker on the Royal Court in the 50s:

They didn’t like or understand what I wrote, but they took the risk. I’d like to think they trusted the writer, but with experience and hindsight now understand it was the directors – Anderson and Dexter – whom they trusted.

And on new writing now:

All plays must be filtered through those directors and, more likely, literary managers with first-class degrees in Eng. Lit and little ability to lift a play off a page, or whose antenna are tilted to detect what is politically correct or (ephemerally) of the moment.

[...] I have no home, no base, no team with whom to work on that material, and my file of curious, stuttering, contradictory letters of rejection grows. Artistic directors admire my plays for their ‘powerful’ themes, ‘passionate dialogue’, and ‘brilliant’ something or other but, but, but…they do not fit into their artistic policy.