Choose to be Challenged - part 5 of my ideas on writing for the theatre
Sir Ian McKellen will tell you quite readily that acting is just pretending. Who’s going to argue with anyone with his magic powers?
but I do think it is a bit more than that – Pretending to the Max, if you like. In playing “let’s Pretend” Sir Ian is exploring one of the basic human abilities - that of empathy. Humans are not the only creatures to feel empathy but it does have a special function for us. Empathy means “to identify with” and as we have seen in countless David Attenborough programmes, it enables us to know with a degree of certainty what another human or creature is thinking. This magical gift was especially important for our hunting ancestors who needed to know what was going on in the mind of a prey animal so that they could stalk them and outwit them. The hunter knows the prey so well that they think like them and, as it were, become them until, at the end of the chase, they feel the distress and pain of the death. The prey becomes their brother and they feel the tragedy of having killed them. And this is where it applies to our narrative here, when explaining the hunt to others or teaching younger hunters, the hunter will again become the prey and will act out the actions and emotions of the victim.
“I lie under the bush, breathing hard, regaining a little strength. I spring up and away but I am thirsty. I have no time to stop and drink. The sun beats down. My legs buckle. I taste the dust. The hunter puts his arms round my neck. He says: ‘I am sorry, Little Brother’ and I see he is weeping as he raises the knife made of sharpened stone.”
I did a whole topic on Child Development at College and, if I remember, it goes something like this: (Adapted from Wikipaedia)
By the age of two, children have an emotional response that corresponds with another person's emotional state. Even earlier, at one year of age, infants have some rudiments of empathy; they understand that, as with their own actions, other people's actions have goals. Toddlers will attempt to calm a crying baby by eighteen months. During their second year, they play games of falsehood or pretend in an effort to fool others. Such actions require that the child knows what others believe in order that the child can manipulate those beliefs.
Although children are capable of showing some signs of empathy, most do not demonstrate a full theory of mind until around the age of four. Theory of mind involves the ability to understand that other people may have beliefs that are different from one's own, and is thought to involve the cognitive component of empathy. Children usually can pass false-belief tasks (a test for a theory of mind) around the age of four. It is theorised that people with autism find using a theory of mind to be very difficult, but there is quite a bit of controversy on this subject.
Children between the ages of seven and twelve, when seeing others being injured, experience brain activity similar to that which would occur if the child themself had been injured. Their findings are consistent with previous MRI studies of pain empathy with adults, and previous findings that vicarious experiencing, particularly of others' distress, is hardwired and present early in life.
Empathy, memory, visualisation are bound together in “Let’s Pretend”.
“let’s Pretend” and “Suspension of Disbelief” that I talked about in my previous essay’, give us the total package required for conveying ideas and emotions through drama.
So, knowing all that, what difference does that make for a writer? When you create a character, you draw on your knowledge, observation and memory of individuals you have known. Those characteristics may be of one person or they are welded together from several different individuals. Whatever the source, you have created something new. And your words speak on behalf of the character you have created. But then the actor reads your script and draws on his or her own knowledge and memories to draw their version of that character. Their memory cannot possibly be the same as yours. They have constructed a character using your words but manifested from their memories and experience. Finally, the audience hear your words spoken by the character created by the actor and they hear echoes of voices from their own lives. The character you have created becomes fleshed out again and again. And, at every performance - at every different rendering of your words - the characterisations will be added to so that, eventually, it will contain an infinite number of layers of meaning and nuance. The wise and experienced writer knows this and, indeed, welcomes it. The writer creates characters using their own knowledge and memories but will allow room for the actor and audience member to contribute from their own experience. If you ever hear yourself saying “No, that is not as I imagined that character.” You should applaud yourself for writing something that has allowed the actor to create something new using your words. The drama must be new and surprising every time it emerges.
And, as the characters in the drama interact with dialogue, the range of possibilities grows to reveal truths that can be understood as general as well as particular. Through the drama of our characters we have created something that can speak on behalf of anyone watching. To achieve this, the writer needs to look outwards, to extend the boundaries of what they thought they knew. Our creation is always looking outwards.
Time
As I have said before, the drama is akin to a meditation on what it is to be human. And that takes time. The audience needs time to absorb and process this exchange they have been involved in. The real drama must include time for those interactions to play out. To be fully satisfying we must take a journey beyond ourselves that can explore the full depth of emotional range.
The one crucial think we need to remember is that the dramatist is writing for actors. Whilst the characters you create exist in a world of imagination, Actors themselves exist in the real world. They have human dimensions. They are human sized and take human amounts of time to cross and recross the stage. Our audiences can have empathy for all sorts of non-human attributes and respond to masks and puppets in the same way that they do to real-life characters, but there must always be triggers back to human experience. A mask is a way for an actor to portray all sorts of grotesqueries but in essence, they contain the humanity of the actor. A puppet retains the humanity of the pupeteer.
In a drama we can condense time in the narrative but an actor exists in real time in the same way they exist in the three dimensions of space. Give the actor time to develop the character and give the narrative time to develop the interactions of the drama.
Writing within a company
The aspiring playwright cannot reach their full potential unless they know the company and the actors they are writing for. And they need the challenge of writing at a length that explores ideas fully.
Entering competitions for ten minute plays might be an amusing past time for a new writer but is not going to teach much about the necessary skills for writing dramas. The same applies with sending plays blindly off to companies who the writer has no real knowledge of. What is worse, is the deplorable practice of requiring the aspiring writer to pay for the privilege of submitting a play. Who is the play for anyway?
When I was artistic Director of Arts Council funded theatre companies I would receive a pile of unsolicited scripts which I felt was part of my job to read. I hope I read them thoroughly and gave them the due attention they deserved. The purpose, though, was not to find actual scripts but to discover writers who might work with the company and produce work that would fit our style and budget. No point in writing a play with a cast of seven if you’re going to tour schools with a company of two. Once or twice, I recruited an established writer but even then, I was able to make sure that they spent time with the company absorbing our way of working.
The sad thing is, that play writing competitions achieve none of this.
I would strongly urge you to save your entrance fee and time and use it for your bus fare to visit the company in question and ask them what they are looking for in their upcoming projects. Begin a conversation and offer to shadow them so that you can put yourself forward for a particular project.
Theatre is essentially a collaborative enterprise. In my early days as a writer I was lucky enough to find companies and directors who were willing to take me on board. I learned my trade through observing, listening and just being thrown in to produce something at a moments notice. I learned about collaborating with a team and establishing long term goals and ideas.
Get involved.
In following blogs I’ll try to explain how I think how Choosing challenging drama might encourage a new audience to consider something different from the expensive musicals and film adaptations that we’re offered today.
