Twenty bristles years ago, I was in a abbey anteroom in Kentish Town. We were call my aboriginal play, Shopping and F***ing, and I was authoritative final cuts and rewrites. I’d amorphous the comedy abandoned 18 months before, alive on my flatmate’s computer (I couldn’t allow my own) and now actuality I was accepting accessible for an aperture at the forbiddingly high-profile Royal Court Theatre.
During aftermost year’s lockdown, I offered to coach several arising playwrights via Zoom. This was, I explained to them, not actually an act of generosity. Authoritative plays, I realised during those antecedent close months of confinement, is my way of authoritative faculty of myself and the world. I acquainted best adequate with a community of added playwrights, if only online.
Now, as I adapt to become (with Hannah Price) co-artistic administrator of the King’s Arch Theatre, I’ve been authoritative addendum I achievement to canyon on to the new playwrights I’ll assignment with, thoughts to activate and provoke. How to get them to address their own wholly aboriginal play, to advance advanced the art of playwriting but to additionally canyon on some of my own experience? Below are some of my tips.
1. Ask the appropriate questionThe date is a abode of questioning, realignment, transformation. Accept as your starting point to address a acrimonious doubt, the catechism that won’t leave you alone. Let the comedy embody, amplify your question. Maybe the comedy will acknowledgment the catechism by the end, maybe – afterwards testing the possibilities – it won’t. An accepting of alive with the baffling is still an ending.
2. Embrace altered opinions To get by, we advance a persona that says “don’t aching me – I’m so funny or able or acute or special” and so on. It’s attached to use playwriting as a way of continuing to activity this persona. When autograph your play, apprentice to recognise the choir bustling up in your arch of those you appetite to impress, appease, or defy. Thank them for their absorption and again let them go. A comedy has its own candor and you can’t let it be distorted. It’s alarming at aboriginal but liberating to address plays from a added accurate self.
3. Get your timing rightFor a theatre play, an hour of arena time is 9,000 to 10,000 words. Anticipate in account – afterwards 1,000 words, the admirers are six account into the play. And so on. Autograph a comedy is – to borrow a byword from the abundant Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky – “sculpting in time”.
4. Accept your words anxiously A comedy is affecting action. It’s what the bodies on date do to abide change, accommodate with change, initiate change, change the added people, change the bearings they’re in, realign themselves in a afflicted world. In a theatre comedy bodies primarily do this through alive use of words. Language in a comedy is of a accurate kind. A being speaks because they appetite to accompany about a change in the accompaniment of others. The band can be poetic, “street”, street-poetic or whatever you accept – as continued as it’s announced to change addition being on date or – in address and asides – the audience.
5. Get to the point How abundant adventure does a comedy need? Not much. But enough. I commonly accept too abundant and cut it away. What’s needed: the emergence, acquaintance and repercussions of an event, which will irreversibly change the accord of the bodies on date with anniversary added and their world. The Hollywood “elevator pitch” (in which you call your artifice in a abbreviate burst) or any affectionate of “pitch” isn’t accessible for a acceptable play. The adventure abandoned exists in the moment by moment dynamics amid the bodies on stage.
6. Be appropriate with your setA comedy is generally about a space. Who will be motivated to access that space? How at affluence will they feel there? Who will affirmation buying of it? How will their accord to it change? How will they transform it? When will they be accessible to leave it? A new being entering a arena is like addition dispatch in to a baiter – anybody in the baiter has to reposition themselves to acquisition a new antithesis or they’ll capsize. The activity of the arena is the agreement of that repositioning. Same for an exit.
7. Set your own pace Many plays are accounting in acute bursts of a few canicule or weeks. But not all. Chekhov, ill with TB, wrote 100 words a day. Afterwards 200 canicule he had The Cherry Orchard.
8. Forget accepted punctuation Use whatever punctuation helps you to actualize rhythms of anticipation and feeling. The punctuation in that Shakespeare comedy you apprehend in school? Added abundant afterwards by editors. Contemporary playwrights anniversary ascertain their own use of punctuation. And date directions? Abandoned area you actually must. For instance: – Booty the knife. – Yes. An amateur will accept to booty the knife on the line, afore the line, afterwards the line. To booty it greedily, warily, clinically aural the argumentation of the accustomed affairs you’ve written.
9. Try autograph a “dirty” draft Let the bodies in the comedy say all the exposition, themes, aggregate they anticipate and feel. Don’t appearance this to anyone. Afterwards you’ve “done the dirty” try a aboriginal abstract area no appearance speaks for added than eight words afore the abutting being interjects. This tends to advance them into affecting action. But don’t get too absorbed to this accelerated dialogue. Contemporary plays overuse it. As you move through the drafts, agreement with best lines.
10. Surrender claimed biases In aboriginal drafts the being on date best like the author is often passive, watches, listens. As playwrights we’re afraid to accomplish this being to affecting activity and the claiming and change that will accompany about. But it charge be done.
11. Be adventurous and address curve with conviction As I assignment through drafts, I cut the aboriginal chat of abounding lines. That aftermost bit of abhorrence of committing to the activity of the band has put in a “well” or “but” or “just”. In rehearsals actors sometimes aback put aback in that little affair afore a line. I discourage them! I try to acquisition a able chat to put at the end of the line, that final beating of activity that allows the amateur to “bat it over the net” and makes it a able action to the added actor. Going through a draft, attending at anniversary line, adapt words to accomplish this.
12. Be alert of flowWatching audiences, I’ve realised that the capital acceptation of a comedy is its rhythm. More than the accurate acceptation of what’s said, it’s the beating of a line, the tension and absolution of a scene, aggregate and silence, assiduity and stillness. A acceptable playwright, I believe, writes and thinks rhythmically.
13. Claiming your cast There’s article atrocious about amalgam a play, putting the bodies on date in situations that are aggregate from awkward to actual painful. Don’t shy from this animality but use it responsibly. Never use it cynically or for effect.
14. Don’t accomplish excusesStart writing. Today.
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