Writing in Coffee Shops

Confessions of a Playwright

Ryan Craig

• Éditeur: Methuen Drama
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350190870
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Sous-sujet: Schreiben von Theaterstücken

What makes someone a playwright? How do their identities and ideas interweave and co-exist? What permanent truths can we discern from examining existing texts? How can we write theatre that encapsulates the contemporary moment? How do we develop an idea from the embryonic impulse to a full and robust piece of theatre? In this fresh, lively and often very funny book, playwright Ryan Craig makes a case for the vitality of playwriting in our contemporary world and offers a way into writing those plays. From the very first moment of the process, as you sit in a coffee shop, staring at your 'laptop yawning open like some big, gormless mouth, the screen a flickering blank', to seeing your play staged and reviewed, the author takes you through the complete journey. Drawing on his own experience of writing for theatres such as the National, Hampstead and Tricycle and Menier Chocolate Factory, TV drama scripts for BBC, ITV and Channel Four, radio plays and adaptation, as well as commercial theatre, the author explores what practical tools the dramatist can use to write plays that build bridges between us. Full of practical advice for the aspiring - and practising - playwright, this book is also an important call-to-arms for playwrights everywhere, arguing for its necessity in the context of an increasingly fractured, distracted, disconnected world.

1Idea

Here’s the secret about writing drama. Everything you need to know, you already know. Not only that, you’ve known it for years. When you were five you knew how to tell a story, you knew how to make it dramatically active. You’d start by saying ‘the most amazing thing happened today’, because you already knew how to hook the listener’s interest, how to create anticipation, how to create suspense. You’d say ‘I saw the biggest, angriest dog in the world’, because, instinctively, you knew how to characterise, how to embellish, how to manipulate that mental image, how to make it extraordinary and not ordinary. You’d say ‘then’, because you unconsciously understood progression, ‘then’, you’d repeat, sensitive to the concept of driving tension, of rhythm, ‘then, I saw this little boy went right up to the dog … and … and he put his hand right in his mouth’, because you knew, even at this formative age, how to grip the listener, how to hold their attention by dragging the story into the present tense, by raising the stakes, by introducing the possibility of something called consequence: the possibility of something happening, something that would affect the life of the individual involved. And this interior, inbuilt sense of suspense and embellishment, of rhythm and consequence, allowed you to build a natural structure to your story, a beginning, middle and end. ‘And then’, you say, reaching your climax and going for the jugular, approaching the killer moment, the moment the audience will lean forward, will hold their breath in expectation, ‘then, the dog bit down’. And you pause, sensing the anticipation you created within that suspended silence will make the listener lean forward even more, before bringing the tale to its breathless conclusion with ‘And right at the last minute, the boy pulled his hand away’. And there we have the denouement and the resolution and all of this you knew without having been specifically taught, without reading any books, without going on any courses or even studying any plays. You knew then and you know now because we are all engineered to tell dramatic narratives.

‘The creative writer’, said Freud in his 1907 lecture The Creative Writer and Daydreaming, ‘acts no differently from the child at play, he creates a fantasy world, which he takes very seriously’. Equally, ‘every child at play behaves like a writer … by imposing a new and more pleasing order on the things that make up his world’.

Simply put, we’re made this way. We take the events we experience and reorganise them around a specific pulse and meter, we use the appropriate rhythms and tempos, naturally rising and falling like music. It’s how we connect and communicate, how we inform or entertain or warn or console, how we make sense of the absurdities and contradictions of life, of death, of sex, of politics. It’s a vital skill necessary to assert and maintain our place in society. Until only a few thousand years ago keeping that place in the tribe was crucial to our survival, for it was the tribe that sustained and protected us – and that innate capacity to connect to others, to illicit their attention and sympathy by weaving a dramatic narrative out of lived experience is still hard-wired into us today.

But if that’s true, why am I stuck? Why am I sitting in this coffee shop, laptop yawning open like some big, gormless mouth, the screen a flickering blank? Why am I staring into space, wondering where I go from here? I only have a few hours this morning to write. Later I’m meant to be to dropping in on ‘tech’ rehearsals for my latest play, Games For Lovers, which opens at ‘The Vaults’ in less than a week. My stomach’s churning with a mixture of dread and excitement: the thought of all those capable people building a working theatre in a vast black tubular cavity underneath Waterloo Station: the thought of the actors limbering up their bodies and climbing on top of their lines: the thought of that charged hush as the lights dim and the audience collectively encounters a new story, a new set of characters for the very first time. I’ve had around fifteen new plays produced, several revivals, but the emotions are just as raw as they were the very first time.

Techs are notoriously tense occasions: the director is effectively implanting a set of technical markers, lighting cues, sound cues, props settings and stage management choreography, as a framework for the performance. Naturally the actors and the crew are highly focused on this exercise, as it gets them through the show night after night, and the writer is absolutely the last person anyone needs hanging about. I’ll slip in to the back like the ghost at the feast and watch director Anthony Banks and sound designer Ben Ringham in some power huddle like a shorts-and-black-t-shirt-clad Nixon and Kissinger plotting their high-stakes geopolitical manoeuvres. There’ll be scaffolding and flats and props and boxes and people clambering up rigging, and painting walls and floors, and spotting lights. There’ll be actors shuttling about half-costumed, panicked, excited, joking, intense, front-of-house staff setting up, producers dealing with some broken ego or a last-minute marketing crisis, the atmosphere will be electric, everyone pulsating with activity and purpose. But the writer? An appendage. My work long over, I’m now relegated to a dangling bystander, little more than a useless, hunk of scenery long since struck from the final blueprints and now getting under everyone’s feet and wondering what the hell I’d started.

First, though, I need to get going on this book. The one you’re reading right now. The kind of book I wished someone would’ve written before I had, in fact, ‘started’. I once met the eminent playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker and her very first words to me have lingered ever since. ‘If you knew’, she asked, ‘at the beginning of your career, what you know now, would you ever have started?’ The question might sound like a test of loyalty or seriousness or even sanity, but it gets right to the core of the business of being a playwright. What the seasoned playwright knew was that it’s impossible to separate your inner character from the work. As I’ve said, the job is a hazardous juggling act, an occupation of stark opposites. The intense isolation when writing is blown to smithereens by the joyous mucking together of rehearsal and the acutely public and often very bruising exposure of performance. It’s this paradoxical existence I’m going to explore in this book, while at the same time living it in reality. Before that can happen though I need to get some words down: I need to do my job. Before that can happen, I need another coffee.

At the counter of the coffee shop I bump into another dad from my children’s school. I don’t know this person well and we have, what has become, a common interchange with those outside the theatre. Civilians.

‘So what do you do exactly?’

‘I’m a playwright’.

‘Oh. That’s…’

‘Yeah’.

‘Yeah’.

Awkward silence.

‘So where do you get your ideas from?’

I used to scoff at this question, but it’s not as inane as it sounds. When it comes to writing plays having ideas and knowing what to do with them is, as our American cousins might say, ‘the whole ballgame’. What precisely is ‘an idea’? Where, in fact, do you get them from and how do you know when one arrives? Can you fit your brain with an alarm system that’ll go off when one appears? I’m sure I’m not the first person to imagine the existence of An Ideas Shop. Some shambling, musty, Dickensian outlet tucked away down a concealed side-street in Clapham Junction or Camden or Clerkenwell or Camberwell with its cluttered shelves oozing with hoards of ‘ideas’, and we could just pop along whenever we’re stuck and we’ve got a new play to write and pick one up for a song. Sadly such a place does not exist. But even if it did, there’s the more pressing question of how we would nurture and cultivate an idea from a mere concept into a concrete and unique work of art, of how we would impose our distinctive imprimatur on a subject. Because how we do this is what defines us as writers.

We humans are developmental creatures: our bodies and minds are constantly in flux. Look in the mirror and watch the tiny, daily changes happening to your face: the additional creases and cracks every time you laugh or frown, the battering your skin gets in the wind and rain, or a blast of UV from the sun. Why should it be any different for your imagination, with the cumulative experiences and emotions your brain processes every second? Even the way we think and use language is an organic and evolving thing.

The American philosopher Jerry Fodor believes our thoughts develop the same way language does. In his book The Language of Thought he says ideas have an intrinsic linguistic syntax. Simple concepts combine in systematic ways like grammatical rules, and then evolve into complex structures.

Think again about that five-year-old ‘you’. Your dramatic instincts are raw and true, yes, but they need honing. Your five-year-old brain was a sponge and you were learning language at a rate of knots and through a combination of mimicry and guesswork. You heard the people around you speak and you began to construct a system, developing your language skills over time, so that each time you learned a new word you’d apply that system. So one day you’ll say ‘those two men fight-ed yesterday’. Only later do you learn to apply the exception to the rule so that you replace fight-ed with fought as the past participle. We realise fast how slippery and treacherous our language can be, how plastic and flexible, so our minds move like quicksilver to grasp it, to gain control of its complexities, because it’s how we make ourselves understood. How we assert ourselves in the world. How we survive in it. We do the same with ideas. One thought graduates to another more layered one as it collects new information over time: as it connects to some separate thought or memory, mutating into a more dynamic structure. And that dynamic, multi-layered, complex thought is what we need in order to start our play.

Here’s what happens when you have an idea. A neuron sends a signal across your brain: a vibration, like a slinky toy being twanged and sending a shock wave into the stem on the left side of the brain where the buried memories swirl. A fragment from some memory or understanding or image makes contact with some other image or memory and forms a structure with multiple dimensions. This thought impulse happens unconsciously. You never actually think ‘I must begin to have a thought’, rather you find yourself having it. A thought isn’t consciously harvested, but emerges into your consciousness before you realise it, like a character materialising on stage in front of your eyes.

Indeed, the thought may arrive as a character. They pop into your head and demand to be heard. They have a story to tell that could be dramatic, moving, funny, disturbing. We’ll need to ascertain certain things. Who are they? What do they want? How do they speak and what do they have to say? Where have they come from? Stoppard famously said, ‘every exit is an entrance somewhere else’, and if that’s the case every entrance is an exit from somewhere else. So their arrival suggests the existence of a concrete place. Great. Setting and character seem to be developing simultaneously, the two rubbing up against each other creating friction. An idea is beginning to take shape.

Clearing out my study recently I stumbled across a scrap of paper I’d been using as a bookmark. On it, scribbled in red ink, was a list of titles.

Game Theory

The Game

Fourteen Games About Love

Fourteen Games/Sixteen Games

Sixteen Games About Fucking

Games For Lovers and Non Lovers

Sweet Vitriol

Some Games

Sweet Liars

Live Games

The Game Play

Some Games Are Brutal

Some of these are a little embarrassing yes, but you can see the theme I’m going for.

In 2012, after my play The Holy Rosenbergs was produced in the National’s Cottesloe space (now called the Dorfman), I was invited to become the Writer-in-Residence at the National Theatre Studio. The Studio is a 1950s building just up the road from the South Bank that was used as a set-painting and dressing workshop for Old Vic productions next door. It was subsequently converted in the 1960s into a rehearsal and office space for the nascent National Theatre. It’s now a rarefied place. A hub for theatre practitioners of all stripes to try things out, to think, to experiment, to put stuff on its feet, to share ideas, it’s a sort of theatre laboratory. It’s had some snazzy refurbishments in recent years but when I was starting out it was pretty rough and ready. As a writer in my late twenties I was dumped in a cramped and oddly fragranced room on the second floor next to the gents’ loos called ‘the kitchen’ where, I was assured, a number of extremely celebrated authors had penned their modern masterworks. My own effort, What We Did To Weinstein, was written on loose sheets of blank, unlined paper in about ten days and essentially kicked off my career.

Through the Studio I’ve made life-long friends and colleagues, developed my work and my voice with the help of the some of the best directors and actors on the planet, co-founded a fairly influential writers movement (more of which later), watched some extraordinary work in its formative stages and met some fascinating people. In a single day I remember encountering Richard Griffiths, Barbara Windsor and the Krankies. Ex-Labour leader Neil Kinnock even came in to read a few small roles in the workshop for a play about the NHS and at lunch told a hilarious yarn about when he got sun-burned on a tuna trawler after drinking too much (I think it was tequila and it was in Cuba but I couldn’t swear to it), stumbled back to his hotel room to drench himself in soothing after-sun, only to be awoken by Glenys shrieking at the sight of him. He’d used bronzing cream instead of after-sun and his head was now glowing in the dark. In 2010, I spent a few extremely happy and productive weeks there finishing the final draft of The Holy Rosenbergs in a small room looking out on the comings and goings of the social housing estate on The Cut, while in the room abutting mine Tori Amos was composing songs for The Light Princess on the piano and singing as she went. That’s the NT Studio.

While I was Writer-In-Residence, the Studio’s then-head, Laura Collier, challenged me to use the time to do something I wouldn’t ordinarily think of doing: write a romantic comedy for the stage. She organised workshops with actors, a director and musicians and we discussed and then improvised various different scenarios: bad dates, meet-ups, breaks-ups and make-ups. Eventually I had a notebook full of stories, characters and incidents. What I didn’t have was an idea for a play. The crucial breakthrough came a few weeks later when, inspired by the director Ria Parry’s drama exercises during the workshops, I returned to Augusto Boal’s Games For Actors and Non Actors. In that book he talks about his experiments with Forum Theatre. The performers in Boal’s shows interact with their audiences and employ drama techniques to discuss issues relevant to their lives. Reading this it occurred to me that the games we play in love might relate to the theatre games we use in workshops and rehearsals. Perhaps this could be the connecting thread around which the characters and stories could coalesce.

An ‘idea’, then, is a complex, evolving organism rather than a light-bulb moment, or a divine thunderclap of inspiration. It’s not a single perfect concept that lands, fully formed, in your head, but a series of developing connections that progress over time to form a coherent structure. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes ideas as networks of neurons firing in synch with each other inside your brain: A new idea is a new configuration that has never been formed before, the component parts evolving and developing as they connect and expand. He calls this the ‘Slow Hunch’ and suggests a good idea often has a lengthy incubation period. He uses the example of Charles Darwin who was unknowingly sketching out early iterations of his Theory of Evolution years before he actually formed the whole idea consciously.

In late middle age Mark Rothko, who’d begun his artistic life as a figurative painter, created those famous vast canvasses of deep red for the Seagram Building. A wag journalist at the time, unimpressed on seeing these simplistic, almost child-like blobs of colour asked him how long it had taken him to paint. Rothko’s answer? ‘Fifty four years’.

The means by which we make art are never wholly conscious. You’re going on intuition: you’re reaching into your unconscious, contacting stored or repressed memories. When we were casting my play The Holy Rosenbergs, the actor Philip Arditti, a talented performer with great instincts himself, came in to meet the director Laurie Sansom and me for the part of Simon, the Rabbi. On my way in to auditions that morning I ran into him at the coffee place in the National’s foyer and found him studying the play. I sat down briefly to thank him for coming in and he said something that startled me. He pointed out that he had initially found the first line of the play, a line belonging to the Rabbi, curiously mundane. The line is this:

Rabbi Are those pillars new?

My first instinct was to panic. ‘What have I done?’ I thought. ‘He’s right, of course he’s right, it’s a ridiculous line. Why did I do that? I’m a total fraud. The play is absurd. What on earth was Nick Hytner thinking programming it, had he completely taken leave of his senses?!’

Philip went on, though, to say that, as he began to understand what was going on, he realised the purpose of the line. ‘Oh’, I bluffed, ‘yes, good. Thank you for noticing’. Probably sensing my confusion, he patiently explained that the existence of the pillars indicates something very disturbing. The story of the play begins the day before North London kosher caterers Dav...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Idea
• 2 Story
• 3 Voice
• 4 What Next? The Consequences of Resistance
• Copyright