Blood and Bones Part 5: The Art of Engagement
The simple ideas around engagement as a writer are to observe and then to record. Above all it is to share with somebody. But if it doesn’t get written down in the first place, a chunk of human experience goes missing.
When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?
Thomas Hardy – Afterwards
What I noticed today was the sudden waft of resin as I walked under the pines. Not the gluey chemical yuck of washing up liquid or bathroom cleaner. bigger, more complex, resonant with meaning. It conjured up two quite different memories. The first, sitting at a small table in the almost pitch black night of Corfu drinking a flask of piney retsina, the heady taste mingled with the smokey smell of charring sardines. Distant lights of fishing boats pinpricking the dark. At the same time, I recall trudging through silent echo-less northern pine forests quite alone and with a heavy yellow sky overhead pregnant with snow. A complex collage of images. I hope you find something to notice today.
I can almost hear my cynical friend Skidmore tutting at that sort of poetic intervention. Skidmore has a sharp eye if only he would take those bloody earphones off and turn his baseball cap round the right way.
I said in part 1 of this excursion that I felt cut off from the really big events. That’s true but I do like to pick up bits and bobs I notice in the world around and squirrel them away until I can make something of them. Like Thomas Hardy I walk slow and try to listen and look.
. Art, history, politics, psychology, pine trees, poetry, the sea, my relationships, motorbikes, books and family they're all one thing I need to know what that museum of rubbish rattling about in my skull amounts to; and whatever I write, comedy, drama, pantomime, murder mystery, they all go to reveal who I am in some small way. Writing this series has made me realise how much the playwright needs to be able to create an authentic, visceral narrative, and consequently how much he or she needs to discover and adopt an authentic personal voice and stance.
As a very clever man once said “Be a lamp unto yourself. Seek no other refuge.”
We all know that if we hide under the bedclothes with our head under a pillow it will go away. Whatever it is. And sometimes it does. More often than not, like a bill or a bank statement or a bad smell it won’t. I’m of the school that says “If you can do something about it, then do it. Otherwise there’s no point in worrying about it.” And if the thing is too big for any sort of personal action, say it’s a terrorist attack or a long illness, then I might as well join the majority of good hearted people in laughing at it. Or writing about it. It’s the least I can do.
It's impossible to be divorced from your work and, however you try to hide yourself, your work is a transparent window into your inner self. So my advice to writers would be: be prepared to be open about what goes on inside and how it drives you. And the wilder your imaginative leaps and far flung projections, the closer they will become to you. You may want to hide behind your words but by the very act of writing, there you are, like it or not, exposed for all the world to see, trousers round your metaphorical ankles.
To write a play or compose a piece of music is to appear naked on the stage.
At the same time I know I must engage with my subject matter in a way that will allow my characters to speak with their own truth. It is not me but my characters that the audience see up there on the stage.
That doesn’t mean that we have to be in any way even handed dealing with our characters. That is for journalists. (Mind you whoever heard of an unbiased journalist these days?) It is not for me to pontificate, proselytise or propagandise but Playwrights are not journalists. We need to challenge our audiences to watch and listen to our characters and let them judge their actions and form their own narrative. As in cricket and football, the best part of the game is the arguments in the bar at the end of the match.
Having said which we need to be engaged, passionate about our subject. Whether we admire our characters or despise them is irrelevant, we need to be engaged with them as they take this journey through our imaginations while being detached enough to follow their doings without hindrance. Those characters must be given the right to roam freely. We must love our creations and listen to what they are saying. We must find out every single thing that it is possible to know. Drawing from the ragbag of our imaginations, conversations we have overheard, journeys we have taken. Fact or fiction, however much we despise our characters we must believe their every word and report it faithfully.
When I was commissioned to write about Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma by AsOne Theatre Company I thought that I would be dealing with someone silly and vapid and very neurotic. That’s what the biographies led me to believe, anyway. But by the end She was no longer a figure of fun rolling down the High Street in Dorchester on her bicycle, her bloomers flapping in the wind like a barrage balloon. I came to admire and respect her and by following her character through my play I came to see a reality that was far more than the historical biographers allowed. Once I had seen her in situations that I had invented for her and which may well have happened and once I had heard her voice speaking, I knew more about her than any academic. Putting her in a garden with her mother-in-law and hearing the ensuing arguments I understood. Her silliness became an understandable frustration and a logical result of her age and as a result of being hemmed in by being married to a celebrity and by her own upbringing. Her in laws, so closely associated with the small town where Thomas and Emma lived were able to manage local opinion of her. And that opinion informed later biographies None of this would have stood up in a proper biography. After all, I had nothing to support this view but my imagining. But I think I was able to reconstruct her character so much so that this was more than guess work and certainly not untruthful. I hope I was able to give Emma some sort of redemption through my words. But her redemption was of her own doing, demonstrated through the character that grew as the play grew. All I had to do was to observe and transcribe her progress.
Sometimes there is a need for anger. The playwright does well to restrain his or her anger. But when it is a character speaking their voice ought to be given full rein. Dig deep into the mines of frustration and rage that the character feels. Keep your temper but let loose your anger. Write with shaking hands on the keyboard. Howl with anguish as you work. But do it on behalf of your character. Let them give vent to every buried emotion. You are like the hunter dipping his hands in the blood of the creature he has just killed and smearing that blood over his own face and those of his audience standing round. The playwright should dip their hands in the anger and display it proudly on their cheeks.
To be engaged doesn’t mean the playwright has to be Serious with a capital S. I have written comedies, pantomimes, murder mysteries and biographical pieces. I hope they are all entertaining in their own way but I also hope that each one contains a few nuggets of truth about being human mined from observation of the way the world works and how people work within it. Writing plays, creating characters and situations is one of the best ways I know for understanding people, their inner lives and the world as it is. And whether you create serious dramas or pantomimes every word you write is a mirror held up for you to peer into. I hope I am engaged enough with my subject matter for characters and situations to leap out at audiences and remain with them and bother them until they are in the bar after the show at least.
We need to work closely with directors, actors and producers urging them to be bold and to give writers the encouragement and resources to be as brave as they can be. If a writer is prepared to appear naked on stage and to engage with their characters on stage in a bizarre ritual of cruel truth-telling, thereby show up their own foibles and weaknesses then they need to be supported by an arts establishment and given the means to attract a whole new engaged audience.
So I’m going to cling to my bit of galloping cognitive bias for the time being and, agree with me or not, I hope you will trust me enough to stay with me for the ride because the next chapter develops the real reason why I’m banging on about cognitive bias and conspiracy so much.
“Why does Homer give us descriptions so much more vivid than all the poets? Because he sees so much more around him. We speak about poetry so abstractly because we all tend to be poor poets. The aesthetic phenomenon is fundamentally simple: if someone simply possesses the capacity to see a living game going on continually and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then the man is a poet; if someone simply feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
