Playwriting

Structure, Character, How and What to Write

Stephen Jeffreys

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788501620
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

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 ideas

Written 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

I

STRUCTURE

Structure usually inspires one of two emotions: fear or loathing. The fearful know there are rules, but they don’t know what those rules are, and they definitely don’t want to talk about it. The loathers think that structure is for nerds. It’s boring and uncreative. They see playwrights as artists, not technicians. They also don’t want to talk about it.

In response, I want to clarify three things about dramatic structure. The first is that dramatic structure is simple. It is the tying together of three elements – story, time and place – each of which we will look at in detail in the following chapter. With practice, the process of structuring becomes instinctive, helping you to build plays with greater insight and confidence.

The second is that structure is potentially the most creative area of playwriting. Structure is not necessarily mechanical or formulaic. The building blocks are easy to grasp and infinitely adaptable, and once you understand conventional dramatic structure, it’s much easier to write unconventional and experimental plays. By the time you have reached the end of the section on ‘Experimental Structures’ below, you will have a whole new palette of colours to play with.

The third is that by working with structure, you will save an enormous amount of time that would otherwise have been spent in that most unrewarding form of pseudo-work: rewriting dialogue.

The important thing with a play is to make sure you have the right structure. I’ve read and seen many plays where the author had a great idea and then structured it in the wrong way. For example: an emotional piece, which would have made a perfect ‘pressure-cooker’ play (see here), instead written like a cool television screenplay with too many scenes. You may have experienced when writing a play, that at some point it takes charge; you have lost certain options and you’re being pushed into choices that you don’t want to make. These problems usually occur because the structure is wrong.

After some time learning the basics of dramatic structure, you should be able to choose instinctively the correct structure for a play. An exercise I often set myself is, whenever I’m sitting on a bus and I see a newspaper, I pick it up and choose a story. By the end of the bus ride, I will have worked out the structure of the play that would best tell that story. Ask yourself questions such as, ‘How would I do that story in the theatre?’, ‘What kind of play is it?’ Eventually, by habit of thought, and by using structure creatively, you can work out the shape of the play. You might not have the play perfectly worked out in ten minutes, but you will probably get ninety per cent of the story right by using the simple tools conveyed in this chapter.

There is, of course, a danger of using dramatic structure in a formulaic and uncreative way. And so in the following pages, I will not only look at conventional dramatic structure, but also at experimental structures. My theory is that quite conservative-looking and old-fashioned structures can be radicalised; you can take any dramatic structure and do something exciting with it. But in order to do that, you have to know what the structure is doing in the first place.

Theatre Events Structure

A play is an event. So before analysing dramatic structure, it is worth discussing the shape of an evening in the theatre, as this affects the structure you choose. Of course, theatre events differ from society to society, but I want to think briefly about writing full-length plays in the theatre culture of early twenty-first-century Britain, and the changes that have occurred even in my lifetime.

In this era, people mostly receive drama from television. But the way in which an audience experiences TV drama is different to the theatre. When you watch something on TV, you can easily change channels or switch off; there is no reason to stick with it. But when you go to the theatre, you have paid to see a play. You have committed time and made complex social arrangements involving a date or a babysitter. You have come to a particular theatre to see a particular play. Therefore, theatre audiences have expended time, money and thought on a play before it has even begun, and this has a big effect on the beginnings of plays.

I remember once at the Royal Court, a couple beside me were discussing at what point they would leave if the play wasn’t very good. They decided on twenty minutes. I’ve met many young, inexperienced screenwriters working in TV, and they are obsessed with the first ten seconds of the script – someone’s got to be killed or someone’s got to take their clothes off. The audience must be hooked from the outset because they are always on the verge of switching off. But the same isn’t true for theatre. The playwright has twenty minutes to gain the audience’s interest. The beginnings of theatre plays are different from those on television: you don’t actually have to do much.

In terms of pace, the first half of a play should be longer than the second half. If the first half is an hour, and the second half is an hour and fifteen minutes, audiences perceive it as slow. As you go along, the audience wants more. Think of it this way: if your first half is a car journey at 40 m.p.h., the second half needs to start at 50 or 60 m.p.h., and by the end it needs to be pushing 90. There must be more in the second half: not more words but more action.

The interval is one of the things people most fear when they have their first play produced. It’s a worrying moment for a playwright: you’re probably in the bar, and you are hyper; your hearing is heightened, and any even slightly discouraging remark you hear tends to hit home, straight to the heart. The worst possible conversation to overhear is when someone says, ‘Well it’s… hmm… yeah,’ and someone else says, ‘There’s a very good Italian restaurant around the corner – can’t we go there?’

If you are going to have an interval, plan for it. There are two important components to consider. The first is the ‘first-half closer’. This is the playwright’s defence mechanism against the exodus to the Italian restaurant: the fascinating incident that is so exciting that the audience needs to come back to find out what happens next. This is achieved beautifully in a play by David Pownall called Master Class (1983), which is set in the Kremlin in 1948 at a musicians’ conference. For the first fifteen minutes, we don’t see Stalin, but people are saying things like, ‘Oh God, what if Stalin comes in?’ Then Stalin, one of the most horrible people ever to have lived, comes in – and what’s he like? He’s marvellous! What a lovely chap, nice-as-pie Uncle Joe. Then we have fifteen minutes of Stalin cracking jokes and tinkering with the piano. All of a sudden, he picks on Prokofiev, who has been seriously ill. ‘We have all of your work here,’ Stalin says, and his lackey, Kirov, pulls back a cupboard revealing Prokofiev’s work on vinyl records. ‘Let’s hear one,’ Stalin says. Kirov picks up a record, hands it to Stalin, who smashes it. ‘Let’s hear another one.’ And he does the same thing, repeatedly. We understand that not only has Stalin got Prokofiev where he wants him, but he can destroy his entire life’s work if he wants to. The playwright has created a powerful visual image. And at that point we have the interval. So the audience spends the interval thinking, ‘What’s going to happen when we come back?’ Such a big effect is not compulsory before the interval, but it’s valuable if you can do it.

The second thing to consider is what happens during the interval. People have a limited time to do a lot of things – go to the loo (which can take forever in the West End, especially if you’re female), get your drug of choice – a drink at the bar, a cigarette, or whatever will get you through the second half – and talk to your friends. It’s a big agenda, so generally the audience spends the interval rushing around. The result is that, after the interval, the audience are rather like schoolchildren after a windy breaktime; at this point, almost anything will be funny. This is a trick that is well worth knowing: after the interval is what I call the ‘comedy zone’. You can put this to the test next time you go to the theatre.

The comedy zone has different implications depending on the type of play you are writing. If you’re writing a funny play, you need to put some good material here. Don’t waste anything that’s too good; use something that’s quite good and then build from there. If you’re writing a serious play, schedule a sequence after the interval, say five to ten minutes long, in which you indulge this and then suddenly turn it on its head. One of the most exciting things you can do as a playwright is to have an audience laughing, and then cut the laughter and hit them with something serious. The moment of turning something funny into something tragic is magical; after that, audiences want more.

In the UK, until the late fifties and early sixties, two intervals were the norm, even with classics such as Chekhov; in contrast to nineteenth-century Russian productions, where there was an interval after each act, and the author was required to go on stage to receive their applause (or not, as the case may be). Laurence Olivier famously quipped that by the time the audience had had their third gin and tonic, they didn’t care whether the three sisters get to Moscow. That argument carried the day in the end; his 1967 production of Three Sisters had one interval, which then became the norm. Over the past few years, the trend is to have plays without intervals. This started with Conor McPherson’s The Weir (1997), which ran for an hour and forty-five minutes with no interval, which, incidentally, is the amount of time scientists have calculated that an audience can tolerate without needing to go to the loo; any more than that and you are pushing it. Allegedly, audiences are becoming cash-rich and time-poor and don’t particularly like intervals. Then again, Jez Butterworth’s smash-hit Jerusalem (2009) had two intervals, so feel free to play with it.

Now we’ve considered what an evening in the theatre looks like, it’s time for the three elements of structure: story, time and place.

I

Story Structure

The great thing about story is that it answers the question as to why we in the audience are interested in a play. We are interested because the story slowly unravels, and we are gradually (or in certain types of play, quickly) presented with something that we must follow, second by second. The reason why plays and films still tend to be story-based, whereas novels are less welded to sequential narrative, is that narrative is still the best way to keep people engaged.

The Three Elements of Story

There are two questions to bear in mind when thinking about story: ‘What happens next?’ and ‘Why do we care?’ The answers to these questions are determined by the three elements of story, which I’ll demonstrate with the following examples.

Story One

A beautiful young man meets a beautiful young woman, and they go out, and start to fall in love. Then they do fall in love. They decide to meet the prospective families. The prospective families meet the boy and girl, and think they’re marvellous. And eventually the couple decide it would be good to get married, and there’s no problem. They get married and they are immensely happy, and they also have hugely fulfilling careers. Then they decide to have children, and they do, and the children are absolutely beautiful and talented and fulfilled in every possible way.

What’s wrong with this story?

The problem with this story is that there is no conflict. It is therefore fantastically boring. It doesn’t matter if conflict is people shooting each other or arguing about who gets the last chocolate. The content of the conflict is not important, but conflict there has to be. Conflict is one of the crucial three elements of story because it reveals character (which we will talk about more in Chapter 2). Also, conflict leads to more conflict, and through these series of conflicts, the audience makes discoveries about the play’s characters and themes, and – hopefully – gains some insight.

Story Two

It is World War Three. A group of twenty survivors have banded together in a ruined theatre. They have a large supply of tinned food and all the Rocky movies and that’s it. They decide that they will make the best of the situation, but things go badly. There is a series of rows and killings, and eventually only two people, a couple, are left. In the wake of the chaos, they have some food left and some of the Rocky movies. However, things deteriorate. They get on each other’s nerves and have a huge argument and eventually one of them leaves. The last survivor is left alone with a dwindling supply of food and movies and eventually decides to commit suicide.

What’s wrong with this story?

In this story there is plenty of conflict, so that can’t be the problem. You might have observed that the first story went like this:

Story Two went like this:

What Story Two is lacking is any reversal. It becomes predictable because we understand that the writer’s worldview is a pessimistic one and this view is pushed relentlessly. There is no change or contrast, nothing to challenge the views of the writer. Even the most potentially depressing plays, like King Lear (1605), have moments of hope, such as the reconciliation between Lear and Cordelia.

We have established, then, that a story needs conflict and reversal. We do not want a play that looks either like Story One or Story Two. Perhaps, then, we want something that looks more like this:

Let’s look at Story Three:

Story Three

A handsome, debonair and enlightened theatre critic accepts an invitation to review a drama festival in Australia. He gets on his flight but, unfortunately, halfway there the plane blows up and everybody except him is killed. But because of his extraordinary buoyancy, he floats in the ocean for several days and survives. He finds himself washed up on a small island, which is inhabited by a tribe that lives off fishing. The critic knows nothing about fishing, but he’s been to Oxford and applies all the knowledge he’s gained from the plays he’s seen of real people doing real work. He looks at the set-up of the community and says, ‘I think you can improve the way you fish.’ And, indeed, they put his plan into action and catch many more fish. Suddenly the tribe is more prosperous. He is accepted, shoots up the hierarchy and is offered the chance to marry the daughter of the head of the tribe. Forgetting that he has a family in London, he embraces the marriage and this culture, and eventually becomes chief. But one day they’re on a boat and a shark attacks and smashes the boat; everybody is killed, apart from the critic. He is washed ashore and finds himself in an industrial community and realises that he will have to work. He finds a job in a ball-bearings factory and, again, he has seen lots of political plays so he knows the thing to do is to organise the union. He becomes the key figure in the ball-bearings factory union. Unfortunately this annoys his supervisors, so on the way back to his hovel one night they fire several shots at him, but he escapes, leaps aboard a motorboat and heads to the ocean again. He arrives at a rock and decides he’s had enough of this excitement and wants a contemplative life. So he sits on the rock and meditates for the next two years. Slowly people passing by in boats notice him and he becomes a cult figure. A small band of followers flock to the rock, then they build a temple, and he becomes a major religious figure. However, at that point (possibly divine intervention), the church is struck by lightning and everybody except him is killed. And that’s the end of the first half.

What’s the problem with this story? Why is it possibly worse than the other two?

What this story doesn’t have is delimitation. Very simply, there is no beginning, middle or end. If the story stopped when he starts working in the ball-bearings factory, for example, you would have a shape you could work with.

If you are painting a landscape, where do you stop? You could always try to paint the whole visible world, but it is a painter’s job to choose something to put in the frame. Part of what we decide when we’re writing a play or a film is where we put the frame around the action. The frame can be large. In Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1956), for example, we look at one family over twenty years; the action starts during the Spanish Civil War and it ends during the Hungarian uprising. Yet this play works because our attention is focused on six carefully chosen scenes over the twenty-year period. But in my story about the theatre critic, there is far too much material. So as well as requiring conflict and reversal, we also need to ask, ‘When does it stop?’

And there we have the three elements of story: conflict, reversal,...