Jeffreys Playwriting

Structure, Character, How and What to Write
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78850-162-0
Verlag: Nick Hern Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

For over two decades, Stephen Jeffreys's remarkable series of workshops attracted writers from all over the world and shaped the ideas of many of today's leading playwrights and theatre-makers. Now, with this inspiring, highly practical book, you too can learn from these acclaimed Masterclasses. Playwriting reveals the various invisible frameworks and mechanisms that are at the heart of each and every successful play. Drawing on a huge range of sources, it deconstructs playwriting into its constituent parts, and offers illuminating insights into: - Structure - an in-depth exploration of the fundamental elements of drama, enabling you to choose instinctively the most effective structure for your play - Character - advice on how to generate and write credible characters by exploring their three essential dimensions: story, breadth and depth - How to Write - techniques for writing great dialogue, dynamic scenes and compelling subtext, including how to improve your writing by approaching it from unfamiliar directions - What to Write - how to adopt different approaches to finding your material, how to explore the fundamental 'Nine Stories', and how to evaluate the potential of your ideasWritten by a true master of the craft, this authoritative guide will provide playwrights at every level of experience with a rich array of tools to apply to their own work. This edition, edited by Maeve McKeown, includes a Foreword by April De Angelis. 'What Stephen Jeffreys doesn't know about playwriting isn't worth knowing' Stephen Daldry 'Stephen Jeffreys is as important a teacher as he is brilliant a writer... Without him, I wouldn't have been able to write the plays that I have written' Simon Stephens 'An incredibly useful writing helpmeet. As witty and humane as its author' Emma Thompson 'What Stephen taught me has shaped my mind and I have shared this with countless writers' Kwame Kwei-Armah 'Stephen was a true mentor... I still draw upon much of what he taught me today' Abi Morgan 'Like a bird in the air, Stephen was utterly in his element as a teacher. We sat spellbound' Phyllida Lloyd 'I had the great pleasure of working with Stephen on his play The Libertine. Would that all playwrights had his openness, his talent, his hard-headedness, his experience, his enthusiasm, his audacity, his complexity, and perhaps best of all his talent and interest in eliciting the best in others' John Malkovich 'Stephen's wit was legendary. 'Wit': from the proto-Indo-European word 'weid' meaning 'to see'/'to know'. Stephen 'saw' clearly and 'knew' profoundly; which is why we sought out the clarity of his words and learned deeply from his laughter' Simon McBurney 'Stephen was more than just a great bloke whose easy laugh set a room alight; he was a genuine geek, an obsessive about the craft of writing... As I read, I was reminded again of his deep connection to plays and how they work. There are gems in here, there is guidance, there is the spirit of Stephen Jeffreys' April De Angelis

Stephen Jeffreys (1950-2018) was a British playwright and a key figure at the Royal Court Theatre, London, where he was Literary Associate for eleven years, then a member of its Council. His celebrated playwriting workshops have influenced many writers, and are distilled in his book, Playwriting: Structure, Character, How and What to Write, published posthumously in 2019. Jeffreys' plays include The Libertine and I Just Stopped By to See the Man (Royal Court); Valued Friends and A Going Concern (Hampstead); Bugles at the Gates of Jalalabad (part of the Tricycle Theatre's Great Game season about Afghanistan); The Convicts' Opera (Out of Joint); Lost Land (starring John Malkovich, Steppenwolf, Chicago); The Art of War (Sydney Theatre Company) and A Jovial Crew (RSC). His adaptation of Dickens' Hard Times has been performed all over the world. He wrote the films The Libertine (starring Johnny Depp) and Diana (starring Naomi Watts). He co-authored the Beatles musical Backbeat which opened at the Citizens Theatre and went on to seasons in London's West End, Toronto and Los Angeles. He translated The Magic Flute for English National Opera in Simon McBurney's production. His plays are published by Nick Hern Books.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jeffreys, Stephen

Leseproben

Introduction

My starting point is that nothing that I can say or teach you will turn you into a playwright: you must have something that you want to say. You have to have the urge to say something onstage, and that is something I can’t give you. Most people have learned fascinating things from their life or lived through extraordinary experiences, had brilliant ideas or imagined great things. What I will try to do in this book is to save you years of work by transmitting certain techniques, tools and tricks that can help you to translate your experiences or ideas into your play.

Aristotle’s assessment of playwriting in the remains to this day the greatest attempt to explain this mysterious craft. I have read many later books on playwriting, some going back to the nineteenth century, and most of them are not very helpful to the aspiring playwright. Either they tend to view plays in an overly academic manner or they tend to be too simple. What I think playwrights need is a practical guide to writing plays, including techniques, approaches, and story ideas, providing them with the tools that they can apply to their own work.

The first time I went to a playwriting workshop, I was running it, and so when I became Writer-in-Residence at Paines Plough, a new-writing theatre company, I sought to remedy this lack of teaching. I set up a group of playwrights called ‘The Wild Bunch’ whose intention was to teach each other everything we knew. We took it in turns to teach sessions, and we learned a great deal. I carried on learning about playwriting through working with writers over many years, including spending twelve years at the Royal Court Theatre in London, reading five plays a week, and running playwriting masterclasses. But more than anything else, I have learned about playwriting from working on my own plays. Writing plays is difficult. It’s rather different from writing poetry or novels or songs. It’s a very particular type of writing with its own set of skills. What I’m trying to give you in the following pages are mostly things that I’ve learned myself the hard way. The ideas that you may already be familiar with are in the first section of my chapter on structure, where I talk about traditional story structure in order to provide the starting point for my own theories. The rest is material that I’ve worked out for myself, or have found via actors and directors or from a range of unlikely sources. So I hope that in this book you will find something completely different, which will help and inspire you to write.

Its central idea, which I will keep coming back to, is that writers tend to fall into two groups. There are those who are terribly good at things like structure, organisation, getting the characters on- and offstage, and making sure that the plot is watertight; the tendency of writers like these is that they may be a little unimaginative and possibly lack that sense of poetry, metaphor, and the unexpected. Whereas the other type of writer tends to be brilliant at coming up with great visual images, understanding the psychology of the characters, or finding beautifully poetic moments or metaphors, but they seem incapable of getting the actors on and off the stage in the right order, or finding an overall shape for the play. I rather crudely refer to this as and writing: the left-brain being responsible for our organisational, rational and cognitive capabilities, and the right-brain being more poetic and spontaneous. There’s been some recent work on the theory that the left-brain and right-brain are fundamentally different, which of course concludes that it’s a bit more complicated than that, so I enter a disclaimer here that I’m using those terms in inverted commas. When I say ‘left-brain’ and ‘right-brain’, I don’t mean that I have any real grasp of neuroscience, but rather as a convenient way of labelling and thinking about these different types of approach to writing plays.

The aim of this book is to help you to recognise and improve upon the part of playwriting that you’re good at. While reading the last paragraph, you may already have instinctively identified with one of the approaches to playwriting; if so, that’s a good start! Because the key to playwriting, in contrast to other forms of writing, is that you do need to develop both these sets of skills. You can just about get away with being a novelist who doesn’t have a great grasp of structure, for instance, but it’s very hard to do that in theatre; conversely, a play that is beautifully organised but has no driving metaphor, no inner life, will be received by audiences as being very efficient but very dead. Another way of looking at it is to think of the difference between a ‘bird’s-eye view’ of playwriting, where you look down and see the whole map of a play spread out before you, and a ‘worm’s-eye view’ of playwriting, where you’re peering up from a muddy field, you have no idea what’s going on, but you are richly in the moment – which I imagine worms to be. The central theme, which I’ll come back to in each chapter, is to try to look into yourself, and to woo those skills that you feel you don’t have.

The shape of this book is a necessary fiction. I describe character, structure, dialogue, and theme as if they are separate entities. In practice, they merge in unpredictable ways: a structural idea pushes a character further; a suddenly conjured line of dialogue opens a window onto a theme, and so on. Writing plays is a holistic process, but writing about writing plays requires compartmentalisation. I must therefore stress that there is no correct order of doing the work: it is unlikely that you will ever proceed along the path Structure– Character–Dialogue–Subtext, etc., without ever checking back or marching forward.

In my view, the area most playwrights need to work on is structure. In playwriting, the overall structure generally yields the individual unit of the play, which is why a grasp of structure is fundamental. But the process can work the other way round, too. When he began writing (1960), for example, Harold Pinter believed that one of the three characters would be murdered by one of the others. As he journeyed down the road, however, the characters developed differently, and such a climax no longer seemed appropriate. In other words, his moment-by-moment experience of creating the play led him to redefine his master plan.

My advice here is paradoxical: on the one hand, I suggest that playwrights respect their working processes; most likely they are self-discovered (and therefore valuable) and have been road-tested and found to be trustworthy. On the other hand, however, I would counsel playwrights to seek to branch out from those familiar processes; we must battle all the time against our own clichés and the common tendency to write the same play over and over again. Throughout this book I will show you different ways of approaching the same problem, and I encourage you to try those methods that don’t come naturally to you.

A playwright is an artist who plans four-dimensional events. These events begin in the playwright’s imagination and, over a period of time, get set down on paper. Then a group of fellow artists (a director, and lighting, sound, and costume designers, etc.) apply their imaginations to create the physical conditions to realise the dramatist’s vision. Finally, the written text will be performed by actors in a three-dimensional space to a live audience. The play has made a journey from a hidden place to a place where nothing can be concealed. The resulting transaction between actors and audience is the fourth-dimensional point of the process.

This bare description of the act of writing plays illustrates two important principles, which define the kind of work playwrights do and which sets us apart from other kinds of writers, such as novelists, poets, and screenwriters:

1. The playwright’s work is performed to a live audience in a real space in real time.

2. Playwrights are part of a creative team. We are the primary creators, arguably the most important creators, but we do not stand alone in the way that the novelist or poet stands alone.

For the playwright, these conditions are simultaneously confining and liberating. Certain effects lie outside the natural range of theatre: we are hard put to render the inner turmoil of Dostoevsky’s protagonists or the sheer pyrotechnics of Coppola’s recreation of the Vietnam War. But by capitalising on the immediacy of our medium, and by providing opportunities for our collaborators, we can open up a huge range of possibilities. This process begins in the mind of the playwright and this, we shall see, needs to be an unusual instrument – or at least an instrument that has been trained to operate in an unusual way.

If you think about the way an audience receives a play, it’s very different from other art forms. If you are reading a novel, maybe you’ll read forty pages on the first day; the next day you have a domestic crisis so you won’t read anything; the day after that you may read a hundred pages; the day after that you read about five pages before falling asleep; and the next day you’ll get completely...