How Plays Work (revised and updated edition)

David Edgar

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788504799
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

In How Plays Work, distinguished playwright David Edgar examines the mechanisms and techniques which dramatists throughout the ages have employed to structure their plays and to express their meaning.

Written for playwrights and playgoers alike, Edgar's analysis starts with the building blocks of whole plays – plot, character-creation, genre and structure – and moves on to scenes and devices. He shows how plays share a common architecture without which the uniqueness of their authors' vision would be invisible.

How Plays Work is both a masterclass for playwrights and playmakers and a fascinating guide to the anatomy of drama. In this revised edition, Edgar brings the book right up to date with analyses of many recent plays, as well as explorations of emerging genres and new innovations in playwriting practice.

'A brilliantly illuminating, bang-up-to-date, unmissable read' April De Angelis

'A book of real theoretical heft written by a major working playwright' Steve Waters

'An essential accompaniment for anyone fascinated by the craft of dramatic storytelling' John Yorke

'Every theatremaker should read this book' Pippa Hill, Literary Manager, Royal Shakespeare Company

'Even if you've read the book before, it demands to be reread' Simon Callow

'Combines theoretical acumen with the assured know-how of a working dramatist' Terry Eagleton, Times Literary Supplement

1

Audiences

Audiences

What am I describing?

1) A town is threatened by a malevolent force of nature. A leading citizen seeks to take the necessary action to protect the town from this danger, but finds that the economic interests of the town are ranged against him and he ends up in battle alone.

2) Two sisters are unjustly preferred over a third sister. Despite their efforts, the younger sister marries into royalty and her wicked sisters are confounded.

3) A young woman is pledged to a young man, but finds that a parent has plans for her to marry someone else. Calling on the assistance of a priest and a nurse, the young couple plot to evade the fate in store for them.

4) A married couple is at war. A younger influence enters their lives, providing a sexual temptation which threatens the marriage. But ultimately, the couple finds that although they find it hard to live together, they cannot live apart.

5) A man who has scaled many heights senses that his powers have deserted him. A woman from his past re-enters his life, and provokes him to take one last, fatal climb.

6) With her father’s encouragement, a young woman allows herself to be wooed by a prince. Her brother moves a long way away. The prince behaves increasingly peculiarly and abusively, and, shortly after the death of the woman’s father, leaves on board a ship. The woman goes mad, alarms the Royal Family, gives everybody flowers, escapes from her minders, and dies in a suspicious accident. The brother returns, angry, at the head of a popular army. There is a contest over the funeral arrangements between family, church and state. The prince returns and he and the woman’s brother end up fighting over the coffin.

Regular theatre and cinema audiences will recognise some of these summaries, and people who enjoy parlour games might have spotted that all of them describe more than one play, film, or story. The first is the story of Jaws, but also Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (and The Pied Piper of Hamelin). The second outlines the situation at the beginning of both King Lear and Cinderella. The first sentence of the third summary is the action of most comedies written between the fifth century BC and the end of the nineteenth century; with the second sentence, it describes Romeo and Juliet, and the subplot of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, both Jack and Algernon seek to fulfil their romantic ambitions with the aid of a priest and a governess.

The fourth description applies to a host of nineteenth-and twentieth-century marriage plays: obviously to August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; but also to Noël Coward’s Private Lives, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Peter Nichols’ Passion Play. The fifth outlines the common action of three of Ibsen’s last four plays (The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken), in all of which old men are confronted by women from their past, and end up climbing towers or mountains, to their doom.

On the last one, I’m not the first to spot the parallels between the tragedy of Hamlet and that of Diana, Princess of Wales.

There is a danger of taking this idea too far. In the mid-1950s, London audiences probably didn’t notice that two groundbreaking new plays both had five characters and one set, and included long speeches, a crucial offstage character, music-hall turns, people taking off their trousers, elements of the first half being echoed in the second, nothing much happening, and the two protagonists spending the play trying to leave and ending up agreeing to stay. The reason why playgoers are unlikely to have spotted these similiarities between Waiting for Godot and Look Back in Anger is because they employ completely opposite strategies to dramatise the conditions of their time.

Nonetheless, audiences do recognise that plays, which are on the surface as different as can be, can share an underlying architecture. I’m aware how unpopular this idea is for playwrights beginning their careers. Properly, playwrights insist that their voice is unique, and they don’t want to start a new project with an audit of how many other people have been here before. But without the kind of common architecture which I’ve identified, the uniqueness of their vision will be invisible. In that sense, plays are like the human body. What’s distinctive and unique about us is on the surface, the skin, including the most particular thing of all, the human face. Although they differ a bit, in shape and proportion, our skeletons are much less distinctive. But without our skeletons holding them up, what’s unique about us would consist of indistinguishable heaps of blubber on the floor. So plays that no one else could possibly write (as no one else could look exactly like us) can nonetheless share an underlying structure. You could argue that one of the least interesting things about King Lear is that it shares a basic action with a fairy tale. But without that fundamental geometry in place (there’s two nasty sisters and one nice one, and their father judges them wrongly), the whole thing collapses.

Like all other artists, playwrights choose, arrange, and above all concentrate events and behaviours they observe in the real world in such a way that gives them meaning. George Bernard Shaw argues that ‘It is only through fiction that facts can be made instructive or even intelligible’, because the writer ‘rescues them from the unintelligible chaos of their actual occurrence and arranges them into works of art’.¹ How playwrights do that is the subject of this book.

Do plays have rules?

The idea of plays having shared structures is also suspect because it implies that there are rules. I touched on some of the cultural reasons for this anathema in the Preface. Many people – including many playwrights – remain attached to the romantic ideal of the uniquely expressive artist. The idea of playwriting as a craft with rules that apply over time is resisted theoretically by postmodern literary critics who believe that nothing cultural applies over time. Those playwrights who read historical criticism are understandably put off by the iron determinism of the French neoclassicist critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with their iron laws about how many characters can be on the stage at any one time (in Vauquelin’s L’Art Poétique it’s no more than three), how long a dramatic action may be permitted to last without flouting Aristotle’s unity of time (generally held to be no more than twenty-four hours), and how far distant from another a location might be without flouting Aristotle’s unity of place (another room in the same house occasionally permitted, another house in the same town frowned upon, another house in another town beyond the pale).

Similarly, playwrights are alarmed by the contemporary equivalent of the French rules, those prescriptions handed out by American screenwriting experts. The founder of this school is Syd Field, who famously divided film screenplays into three acts of thirty, sixty and thirty pages, with a significant propelling plot point occurring between pages twenty-five and twenty-seven² (this may sound absurd, but I am assured that here of I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder’s script for Some Like It Hot includes Marilyn Monroe’s character undulating unforgettably along the station platform).

More liberal – and critical of Field over such matters as the admissibility of flashbacks – is Robert McKee, whose weekend courses did so much to homogenise the vocabulary of BBC script editors in the 1980s (he then committed the cardinal error of writing it all down³). But while McKee accepts what he calls open and closed endings, multiple protagonists, nonlinear time and even inconsistent realities, his definitions of ‘protagonist’, ‘inciting incident’ and ‘act design’ still seem schematic. And the idea that screenwriting gurus might have become less prescriptive in the new millennium is countered by Blake Snyder’s 2005 how-to movie-writing guide Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, with its six things that always need fixing, its nine immutable laws of movie physics, its ten genres of any movie ever made and its fifteen essential beats: from the ‘Opening Image’ and ‘Theme Stated’ via ‘Fun and Games’, ‘Bad Guys Close In’ and ‘All Is Lost’ to the ‘Finale’ and ‘Final Image’.⁴

And writers who’ve read any twentieth-century literary theory are understandably irked by the arithmetical reductionism of so much thinking in this field, with its mechanical lists, symbols, charts and graphs.

I share some of these prejudices. But I think that the neoclassicists, Hollywood gurus and structuralist thinkers all remind us of a basic reality of playwriting, which is that, however much playwrights may choose to ignore them, audiences have certain expectations of what they’re going to see in the theatre and they cannot be required to check those expectations in with their coats.

In this sense, the ‘rules’ are a sedimentation of all of the expectations of all the plays (and, to an extent, all the stories) which we have ever encountered. This is why the argument that one should know the rules in order to break them is only half the story. Playwrights should know the rules because they are the possession of the audience, their essential partner in the endeavour. They won’t be thanked for sticking so closely to the rules that the play is predictable from start to finish. But nor will audiences readily accept their expectations being wilfully ignored.

What audiences do

The playwright Steve Gooch uses the metaphor of an arena to describe the space where plays actually happen: ‘outside writer, actor and audience, and yet being the site of a common experience’.⁵ The playwright David Hare sees theatre as essentially meteorological – like the weather, it happens when two fronts meet: what the actors are doing and what the audience is thinking. The literary critic J.L. Styan insists that ‘the play is not on the stage but in the mind’.⁶

All I’d add to that is: not just thinking, and not only in the mind. Most writers on theatre agree that several things are happening inside us when we watch a play.

Certainly, we are empathising, identifying with and rooting for particular characters, suspending disbelief, simulating the same emotions we experience in the day-to-day: desiring, fearing, crying, shaking with laughter and shivering with fear. With the immediacy of real life (when it works), empathy invites audiences to expect: to wish or to dread. Then audiences respond – in disappointment, relief, horror or delight – to the fulfilment or denial of those expectations.

But at the same time – and it is at the same time – our brains are calling what we’re watching into question. Dr Johnson’s dictionary defines a play as: ‘A poem in which the action is not related, but represented; and in which therefore such rules are to be observed as make the representation probable’; we apply that test to the story even as we engage with its course. As J.L. Styan puts it, ‘The audience is continuously busy, whether consciously or not, making personal comparisons with what it sees and hears on the stage.’⁷

But we do more than testing what we see against personal experience. The probability that the playgoer demands is of three kinds.

The first is simple, factual plausibility. Does the play fit in with our knowledge of the subject or our experience of life? Do we think – or know – that policemen or hairdressers or teenagers do or don’t behave like that? Are the actions of the characters reasonably justified by their circumstances? Under those circumstances, do we believe that such-and-such an outcome is feasible?

Second, we test a play for coherence. We ask ourselves whether the plot hangs together internally, whether its bits add up to a whole: whether the promise is fulfilled, the commission completed, the posed question answered. It’s the impulse for coherence which explains Chekhov’s rule that if you point out the gun on the wall in the first act, the audience will expect it to go off in the third.

Third, we judge a play conventionally, how it relates to other stage plays and indeed other fictions which we have internalised in our minds throughout our reading, listening, watching and playgoing lives. At its most basic, this is the probability which inclines us to expect that a tragedy will end in death and a comedy in marriage. It also leads us to suspect – and, in a way, demand – that hopes will be dashed, true love will face obstacles, rituals will be disrupted, and victory will come at a price. It’s not just our expectation of internal coherence but our playgoing experience which activates the Chekhov gun rule. The audience internalises an accretion of conventions which add up to a pattern of structural expectation which can be fulfilled or broken but not ignored.

Concentration and patterns

But as our emotions empathise with the fate of the characters and our minds judge whether the matter is probable, our senses are doing something else. What we see and hear conditions our compositional response, allowing ...