Letter to an Intending Playwright

Irish Jesuit Province

Letter to an Intending PlaywrightReview by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 71, No. 843 (Sep., 1943), pp. 381-388Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515178 .

Accessed: 10/06/2014 11:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Irish Jesuit Province is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Irish Monthly.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.104.110.53 on Tue, 10 Jun 2014 11:37:57 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ijp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515178?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


381

Stting at the IPlay

Letter to an Intending Playwright

MvlY DEAR LIAM,

I a-m very glad to hear that you are proposing to write a plav and inore than glad to learn that you intend to take youLr timiie in the writing of it. Good plays are like Rome in building, and fewv of the really wvorth-while works of theatre were ever

made in the rush that all modern making seems to demand. The late G. K. Chesterton wrote: "' There is no subject about which a modern writer mnay not write a play, especially if it 'is a bad play." Chesterton himself wrote two plavs, both of whieh are still surviving in the theatre as recent London revivals indicate. Writing in 1924 a preface to J. T. Grein's The NewXcu

World of Theatre he declared: "I have only written one play; and I regard it with that sort of panic-stricken agnosticism wvitlh which a mnan often regards his one intervention in a world lhe does not uinderstand."

Set Chesterton's wvords down in your notebook, engrave thein on the forefront of your purpose, and you will have taken the first right step towards entering that fascinating world it will be your business to understand. There is no broad way into the theatre; the gate is low and narrow and your entrance will depend on your inclination of humility and on the impedimenta cast behind as you pass through. A proud head and a pack of preconceived notions have led to many a bitter turning away.

You say that you intend to write a play about somnething about some subject with which you are closely familiar. Be

careful about that something. Plays are written about sone



382 THE IRISH MONTHLY

body rather than abouit somnething. Of course, one can write a verv good play about l,ove, or Hate or Humility or Greed or

Death. One could even write a good play abouit Relativity. But the danger is-particularly in relation to the subject w-ith which he is (or thinks he is) closely familiar-the danger is that the playwright may become obsessed with the " thing ", so to speak, at the expense of' the " body " through whom the "

thing " is made dramatically apparent. Take Love, for instance, and Shakespeare's Romneo and Juliet and compare them with Bernard Shaw" s Ann XVhitfield and Jack Tanner in

Man and Supermnan. Who lives in this comparison of theatre, and who vill go on living? Already, of couirse, the ill-starred cotuple of Verona are sonme hundreds of years old; and their early demise is most unlikely. But Anne and Jack even now fail to convrince us of vitality. As for the " thing ", the familiar subject, which in both plays was Love, you can take your choice, btut I think it will lie with the story of the ill-starred lovers and not with the lectures on the Life Force.

You ask for some short pithy advice to help you on yotur way. Here it is for you in one sentence: " You munst know life and yrotu nmuist know the theatre." And that -multum in parvo is all vou need to know. You must know the theatre; that is you must be broadly, and in places deeplV, familiar with its history, you must study the theatre of the Greeks, the theatre of Shakespeare, the theatre of Moliere, most of the theatre in between these theatres, and all of that theatre of naturalism, the "; old age of the species ", which you see round you to-day. In

moving through that history you must strive to wrest from it what the theatre is. It will profit you nothing if you do not find that philosopher's stone before you reach the end of your journey. You will find, I think, that it consists of nothing

mnore (indeed nothing less) than the co-operation of the three



LETTER TO AN INTENDING PLA YWRIGHT 383

A's. Do not, having found it, throw it lightly &way, for it is a pebble of great price.

You muist know the theatre; and to your knowledge of its history yotu must add a knowledge gleaned from some personal

practical contact with it. Do not despise vyor local amateur group. Somze of our best playwrights gained their first practical knowledge by playing and producing in local amateur societies. One whose reputation as a dramatist is now world-fanmous not onily plaved with an anmateur group of plavers but he wrote his first plavs for them. You must do" likewise. You will learn something froml the actors' problems. It will help you with your character building and your dialogue. You will learn sonPething fronm the produieer's plans which will throw light upon your play s conistruction. You will see a play in pulsating contact with an auidience. And all the whvlile yotu will be living in and learning to understand this strange world of theatre. The

experience will help to save you from the duimb shock of several returned typescripts and will teaclh you some of the many reasons whiclh lie behiind a manager's curt regrets.

You wvill hiave learned fromn your study of history that Aristotle's definition of a play may be sunmmed up in the three words, "characters in action ". And you xvill have observed, to some extent, this definition itself in action in the work of the playwrights with which your amateur experience wvill have given you direct contact. "c Characters " and " action " and in the theatre. Never forget the theatre. The characters, "then, though characters, will be dramatic, as opposed to novelistic for instance ; they could be poetic (and that's another story) but they

must be dramatic; and they must be characters. Action, you will have learned, must be dramatic also, but that is not to say that your play must consist of a series of excursions and alaruims. Even in Tchehov there is dramatic action. " Conflict" would,



384 THE IRISH MONTHL Y

perhaps, be a better word and one closer to Aristotle's meaning. But let us keep our eyes upon the wood lest we miss it by examining the trees too closely'. " Characters in action " into your notebook, and let it stand third to Chesterton's first place and to the second commandment abotut knowledge of life and the theatre.

You ask me what you should read. The answer is plays and plays; good plays and, sometimes, bad ones. Write in your notebook: " It never does to neglect Shakespeare." You wonder if books on the craft of playmiaking wvould help youi and you mention Archer's Playmaking. I give it as my own per sonal opinion that such books will not help. Take one aspect of their teaching. They all presume to, teach construction for instance, the art of building a play. Now the best plays are

not built; they grow. The teachers all mention Ibsen (Archer does not neglect him) as a playwright whose works are ideal examples of construction, of carefully-planned building. They are, most decidedly; that is to say the "; sociological " ones are; the poetic Ibsen seeming, like Topsy, to have " just growed ".

And, as the text-books tell us, the very first thing one notices about these Ibsen plays is construction; in other words, the framework of the play, the skeleton, is immediately apparent to the observer. What would one say, I wonder, about a man

whose framework or skeleton was immediately apparent? One would hardly call him a well-made man. Yet the text-books latud these works as well-made plays instead of condemning them for the walking skeletons which they are. No, there is Ino text book which will teach as much as the good play properly observed will teach. Underline in your notebook: " It never does to neglect Shakespeare."

Let us go back a little. " You must know life." That, of course, simply means that voui muist experience it and love it



LETTER TO AN INVTENDING PLAYWRIGHT 385

and observe it, and is wholly an advice which you must accept and pursue to the best of your ability. And here, believe it or not, it never does to neglect the Christian virtues. The great playwright oxves more to their observance than the great play wright frequently knows. You must know life by experience, of coturse; which is to say that you must never depend on books

(as, indeed, many of our young novelists do) for that knowledge.

However little this book-knowledge of life may help the novlelist it simply cannot help the dramatist. And, remember this, y.ou cannot hope to experience life without suffering.

Stuffering is the crucible in which many great works of drama hav-e been made. There is a line from Whitman which you

miglht put in youir notebook: " Whoever walks a furlong without sy7mathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud." There are mtich better lines, and they are to be found in much better

pliaees, buit that one happened to be at hand and it may help.

We are now getting to a point at wbhich some of our earlier

jottings are going to perform what cinema technicians call a " mix ". This one wvill concern life and characters. As a playwvright you will have a dual function in observing life and in creating it. You will create life in the theatre-that co-operative society of the three A's-through the act of pre senting the creative result of votur observation in the formi of characters in action expressed by your actors to your audience. I said it was a " mix ". I can only hope that it is not a complete " dissolve ".

Nowv a word concerning characters, which must be observed steadily and whole. Most young playwrights (young novelists likewise) do little more than attempt to sling a few traits on the character they are depicting and hope that the personality of the actor (or the imagination of the reader) will hold them there.



386 THE IRISH MONT7-HLY

Rather like this. (I am indebted to the author of Enemies of Promise for the illustration)

You can't miss So-and-so," they explain; he stammers, and now look, here he comes-'W hat's yvouir name?' ' S-s-s-so and S-s-s-s-so!' There, yotu see, whvbat did I tell you."

Now, most of our modern characterisation in the theatre is, I regret to say, built on that principle.

You ask me if it w-ould be better (I assume yotu mean easier ") for you to write your first play about an historical

character. The answer is " No! " Historical plays are of all p-'lays the miost difficult to write for it is practically impossible for the dramatist to serve history and the drama faitlhfully. XVha1t I mean by that is that the dramatist in his calling must invariably look for his character in conflict below the surface level wbhich hiistory presents, and he must frequently distort and rearranlge the chronological sequence of events to do so. Yet if lhe remains true to his calling (as Shakespeare did) the ultim-ate distortion ol history will be almost negligible. The character will remain and matter. There is an important distinction to be made between dramnatised history and an historical play.

A word about dialogue. Some of the text-books, and indeed some of your actors, wvill tell you that your characters will need to be made to speak exactly " as you talk yourself ". I regret to say that I have known actors to mutilate " folk " dialogue simply because " they couldn't say it the way it was written The speaking of poetry in our naturalistic theatre is generally speaking a disgrace. Actors have been known to speak Shakespeare's blank verse as prose (at least they thought they were speaking it as prose) " in order ", as they said, " to mnake the substance of the speeches clear to the audience ". Can one imagine Beethoven writing " as he talked " or El Greco



LETTER TO AN IN TENDING PLAYWRIGHT 387

painting in that fashion? No, even in our present day natural istic theatre, dialogue (even wvith due regard for an actor's speak ing of it) must be moulded dramatically. Most of the modern dialogue which one hears in the theatre suggests that it was drivelled into its script. Even G.B.S. for all his preaching faults knows-sometimes superbly-how dialogue should be

written. In all things, economy. Don't take seven steps if six would

do. Lady Gregory in writing her little tragedy, The Gaol Gate, sketched out its scenario in three lines: " He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged." That may seem so simple as to be silly. Yet Lady Gregory says: " I knew what I was going to do and I was able to keep within those three lines. I wrote that play very quickly." And that reminds me that a

notice called Advice to Playwtiights used to be issued in the old

days by the Abbey Theatre to dramatists whose plays the theatre directors were obliged to return unused. You might be inter ested in the following extracts with which, though they are sound in substance, I do not wholly agree.

A play to be suitable for perfornmance at the Abbey slhoulld contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important fronm its beauty or fronm sonme excellence of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy. . .

"The dramatist should also banish from his miind the thought that there are sonme ingredients, the love-making of the popular stage for instance, especially fitted to give dranmatic pleasure; for any knot of events, where there is passionate emotion and clash

of will, can be made the subject matter of a play, and the less like a play it is at the first sight the better play may come of it

in the end. Young writers should remember that they must



388 THE IRISH MONTHLY

get all their effects from the logical, expression of their subject, and not by the addition of extraneous incidents; and that a work of art can have but one subject. A work of art,-though it must have the effect of nature, is art because it is not nature, as Goethe said: and it must possess a unity unlike the accidental profusion of nature.

"The Abbey Theatre is continually sent plays which show that their writers have not understood that the attainment of this unity by what is usually a long shaping and reshaping of the plot, is the principal labour of the dramatist, and not the Nvriting of the dialogue."

It is as well, perhaps, that you say in your letter that you are determined to go on in spite of any obstacle I may try to throw in your path, for I am convinced on reading over this letter that its own obscurity is perhaps its biggest obstacle. However, as I told you once before, more knowledge could be imparted in a few comfortable chats that in a Nvilderness of complicated cor respondence. Your determination is an assurance that you will assault and perhaps even overcome the obscurity of this letter, and in doing that you will have done something for the theatre. In parting, remember this. Should you be tempted to return to your novel writing or indeed to pursue any of the other branches of literature in which I know you are interested, reflect that literature's greatest names are to be found in one place only and that place-the theatre. Reflect, too, that some of the worst work that writers have ever perpetrated is to be found there. also. And on that note I'll close, with kind regards.

Wishing the good work every success,

GABRIEL FALLON.



Documents

Letter to an Intending Playwright