Wesker on Theatre

Arnold Wesker

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781840029864
• eBook ISBN: 9781849433761
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

Wesker On Theatre is a collection of essays by one of Britain's most well-known, prolific and controversial writers, which explores his thoughts on drama and the theatre gained from a writing career that spans fifty years. Wesker brings together for the first time an assortment of theatre pieces exploring such subjects as The DNA of a Play; The Nature of Dialogue; The Nature of Development; Can Playwrights be Taught to Write Plays; Interpretation - To Explain or Impose, and many others that attempt to elucidate the shifts of thought he has negotiated throughout his long career. Often controversial, Wesker On Theatre is a challenging and thought-provoking volume.

 

1. To Cheat, to Pretend

PERHAPS THE FIRST thing that should be observed of the theatre is that it is endowed with an enormous power to cheat. To cheat is not the same as to pretend.

Actors are called upon to ‘pretend’ – to be who they are not. The set-designer is called upon to pretend that one stage-flat is an entire room. The writer is called upon to pretend that two hours can represent a character’s-life time, or that light-changes are the passing of days. The director is the only one who is not called upon to pretend. His/hers is another function: to prevent the actor, designer, and writer from cheating.

All three can call upon resources, that will enable them to cheat. Cheating is using the powerfully emotive elements of sound, lighting, voice, music, colour, and shape to persuade an audience that something significant or substantial is taking place on stage when in fact it isn’t. Paradoxically, although the director’s function is to prevent his team cheating – rather like the police inspector’s job is to prevent crime, yet the director is in the key position to cheat more than the others, just as the police inspector, because of his authority, is in a key position to commit crime without detection.

To be specific: the director can encourage the set designer to create a vast impressive set which can communicate an importance about the events unfolding even though those events are anecdotal, without importance; he can call from the lighting designer a sequence of lights which create an atmosphere the text doesn’t really substantiate; he can direct the actor to pause, look, and dramatically poise his body to make it seem that something profound is taking place when in fact nothing has happened or been said that earns that moment of apparent profundity. And of course the director can use that most potent of all the art forms, music, to help make it seem that something ominous or tragic is taking place when in fact nothing is.

To do all these things is to cheat.

To have lived with a child on stage for many scenes and then for it to die has earned the actress playing the mother the right to mourn in silence at the bedside. Then the pauses and the body poised in anguish are actions belonging to substance. The pause and the anguish may be pretend-pauses and pretend-anguish, but they are honourable pretences, acceptable within the profession of acting for having been earned.

To cheat, to pretend; earned or unearned. It’s important to distinguish between the two.

Stockholm, 6 November 1996

 

2. The DNA of a play – lasting through time and crossing frontiers

THE QUESTION IS often asked: what makes a play last through time and able to cross frontiers? To answer this question we need to break down the structure of a dramatic work into its DNA. If we can identify the DNA structure of a play we might then be able to identify which part of the structure makes it last through time. To do this I would like briefly to look at my own work, which, it is supposed, I know most about.

The first observation to be made is that we are not talking about categories. All writers hope that the texture of their work is too rich and varied to be reduced to the simple categories frequently applied by journalists who are too rushed to reflect at any serious level, and by some academics who should know better. If you’ve heard of me at all it will probably be under the nonsense category of ‘social realist’ – a term which means little and blinds a public to the many other aspects of my work which I’ve struggled to cultivate: the lyrical, the paradoxical, the absurd, the ironic, the musical, the farcical and so on.

To begin – a confession: my power for invention is slight. I can invent nothing more extraordinary than what happens around me, or what I’m told happens to others. I mostly write about what I experience. The plays do not pursue what is absurd if what I’ve experienced does not call for the absurd. When it does call for it, I use it! Nor is irony employed when tenderness is called for; nor is the mood pervaded with lyricism if the mood requires harsh naturalism. Life comes at me too multifaceted to make a fetish of only one aspect of it; reality is too complex to be recreated in only one mould which then becomes a mannerism. I worry about writers who strait-jacket their material into personal mannerisms which are then described mistakenly as their ‘voice’, or their ‘style’. I try to allow my material to dictate its own inherent style.

No doubt you will find critics and academics who do not share a view of my work as rich and varied. They may be right. After all they are wise men and women who are honoured for their wisdom by being appointed academics and critics. But no one is surprised to find a writer who believes his work is rich and varied. Rich and varied in what, though?

Let us try to imagine the thought process applied by academics and literary commentators to the categorizing of works of drama. You might find one who had lumped together my first five plays – The Kitchen, The Wesker Trilogy, Chips With Everything – in order to show how they were mainly autobiographical. Those academics might then go on to describe the next two – Their Very Own and Golden City and The Four Seasons – as being works of a metaphorical nature because the plays use strong images to represent something else: the cycle of the four seasons as a metaphor for the cycle of love coming and fading away; the failure to build the cities of our dreams as a metaphor for the compromises life forces upon us. They might then put The Wedding Feast, Shylock, and Caritas together and show how these plays had their roots in other people’s stories – one based on a story by Dostoevsky called ‘A Nasty Incident’; one based on the same medieval stories Shakespeare used for ‘The Merchant of Venice’; the last, based on a true story about an Anchoress of the 13th Century. Or they’d put Shylock and Caritas together with Blood Libel and talk about them as historical plays – Blood Libel being about the first ever calumny of blood libel levelled at the tiny Jewish community of Norwich in 1144. They might, if they had a sense of humour, then go on to talk about ‘Wesker’s blue and bawdy period’ citing One More Ride on The Merry-Go Round and Lady Othello – both very Rabelaisian love stories. And so on.

All that would be a possible way of looking at the work: neat groupings, tidy and orderly, packaged for study in university. But I don’t think such packaging would be rewarding. Far more rewarding would be to explore the DNA of the plays; and I would propose these headings, or parts: ‘Elements, subjects, themes, qualities, narrative and perceptions’. Such a breakdown might discover the work to be richer and more varied than was previously thought.

Let’s look at the first of the parts – element. What do we mean by ‘element’? I offer four examples of what I mean by ‘element’. The first is ‘relationship’. The basic element in all literature is relationships – lovers, friends, parent/child; oppressor/oppressed; employer/employee; brother/sister ... you can add to the list. Relationships – the first example of an ‘element’.

‘Nature’ in literature is another example of an ‘element’. Just as historians have come to recognise that geographical situation and climate affect the evolution of a people – those who live in the mountains are different from those who live by the sea, those in the cold north are different from those who live nearer the equator – so nature can affect the course of events in the unfolding of a drama. Nature – the second example of an ‘element’.

I would name ‘femininity’ as another element in art. (‘Masculinity’, too, but I seem to have written more about women.) The feminine nature is a strong and determining factor in the telling of a tale. When discussing the feminine nature passions seethe but it can’t be denied that from that first of all myths to have shaped Western civilisation – the story of Eve (the woman who knew a good thing when she saw it and courageously bit the apple of knowledge, unlike Adam who wanted to remain a good boy stuck forever in boring old paradise) – since the story of Eve the nature of femininity has been an animating element in all art.

‘Food’ is a fourth example of another element. It is said that ‘we are what we eat’.

And within element is found subject, theme, and qualities.

Let’s look at subject and theme together. I can give a simple example of what I mean by ‘subject’. If a writer uses in drama the ‘element’ of ‘femininity’ then they have many choices of subject through which to explore this element. ‘Mother’ for example, or ‘mistress’, ‘daughter’, or ‘wife’. The nature of femininity is the element; wife, mother, mistress or daughter is the subject through which femininity can be explored.

If the nature of femininity was the element and mother was the subject then we could surf through literature or drama and discover an author who has chosen to write about the mother in order to explore the theme of ‘possessiveness’, or ‘jealousy’, or ‘love’, or ‘sacrifice’ and so on.

Femininity is the element, mother is the subject, and sacrifice is the theme.

We come to qualities.

Qualities are to do with the method writers use to explore their elements, subjects and themes. But unfortunately, to complicate matters, there are two categories of quality: personal quality, and quality of technique.

Quality of technique is to do with the way a work is visualised, its construction, rhythm, the quality of its dialogue. The visual setting, for example, is an intrinsic part of a story, often a metaphor for the theme. I wrote a play called Caritas in which the devotional cell, where a young woman had asked to be walled up so that she could live as pure a life as possible away from the chaos of everyday life, becomes a metaphor for the prisons we all create for ourselves whether of religious belief, political ideology or marriage. Our metaphors as dramatists are part of our technique.

So, too, is the play’s construction. The play needs to be constructed dynamically. The scenes or episodes within the play need to be rhythmically placed alongside each other. The dialogue demands its own kind of musicality. The way we assemble our moments, string out a character’s lines – all this is to do with the quality of technique.

Personal quality is to do with the feelings with which a writer handles material. Qualities like humour, irony, gaiety, malice, pity. How sensitive is the writer? What personal quality of feeling does the writer have for their characters and their character’s predicament?

Embracing, or colouring, or perhaps ‘informing’ is a more accurate word to use – informing all these first four aspects of playwriting is the fifth: perception.

Perception is to do with the emotional and intellectual power a writer brings to bear on the understanding of his or her material. A playwright may select an important theme, handle it with a skilful quality of technique, and paint it with an attractive personal quality of humour but if the writer’s capacity to perceive a deep truth about their theme is weak, then the work is weak.

A writer’s ‘voice’ is identified not by an instantly recognizable trick of dialogue but by the way their intelligence and sensitivity perceives their experience of life. We may admire technical skills but they are not what make a work of drama great enough to last through time. We may say of a writer: ‘Oh, they handle dialogue so expertly, you can hear it comes out of the mouths of real people’, but dialogue is not what carries a play across frontiers – we all know what can be lost or changed in translation. Something more is needed. Technical skills are pre-requisites; they are the least we expect from a playwright. It is like saying the carpenter handles his tools expertly. Yes! But is the chair beautiful to look at? And the joints may fit together with great precision but has the carpenter understood the shape and needs of the body so that the chair is comfortable to sit on?

So with the play: vibrant dialogue, effortless structure, recognizable characters, a noble theme, but how powerful is the intelligence, how sharp is the sensitivity that has informed the writer’s perceptions? At what depth has human motivation been perceived? What perceptive insight has illuminated the human condition? Skills invite our admiration but perceptions touch hearts and stimulate intellect, and in such a way that they may even change our lives.

Surrounding all these aspects of writing is the last part of this DNA structure – narrative. The story – the framework within which we come to know the elements, subjects, themes, qualities and perceptions of the writer. Sometimes it is just simply the story that carries the power of the writer’s perceptions.

There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.

And God said to Satan ‘look what a splendid man is my servant, Job’. To which Satan replied ‘yes, but that’s because you’ve made things easy for him. Of course he’ll praise you and follow in your laws – you’ve blessed him with so much. But’, Satan said to God:

put forth thine hand now and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

And God said to Satan ‘OK. Do it! I give you permission to give Job hell and see what he’ll say.’ And so Satan gave Job hell. But Job remained firm and faithful and God gave him back the cattle he lost and the sons and daughters Satan had caused to die.

A powerful story. Not one about an eternal truth – for we know that sometimes no matter how righteous we are, no matter how much we may please God yet we still often lose what is dear to us. But it’s a marvellous biblical story about the truth of human aspirations. We all desire to be firm and faithful to something or other. Few of us succeed but the story of Job echoes a vivid human dream that remains on and on, a dream of the ideal person we’d all like to be.

This is a brief exploration of the question: what makes a work of art travel through time and across frontiers? Much more can be said. You can disagree with my ‘DNA structure’ and substitute your own parts. I’ve not touched on the role of language for example, that texture of prose, which can be a continuous source of delight making the work last through the centuries. But prose, as with dialogue, comes up against the problem of translation. Balzac’s novels or the novels of Dostoevsky don’t speak to us over the years because of the French or Russian language. Few of us speak those languages well enough. If the prose is a contributing quality making Flaubert’s ‘Madam Bovary’ last in France it is not one to which we can lay claim in English-speaking countries or in Egypt, Turkey, China … If the novel lasts for us then we must look to identify something else, some other parts. If it is the strength of Chekhov’s dialogue that make his plays constantly performed in Russia, that is not a quality we can claim in English. If Chekhov lasts for us through time then we must look for other explanations than the strength of his dialogue. And I put it to you, I suggest to you, that of all the DNA parts of a work of drama it is the writer’s power of perception that carries his or her work over the centuries and across national frontiers.

4 September 1995. Reworked 1995, 1996.

3. Can playwrights be taught to write plays?

WHEN PLAYWRIGHT, DAVID Edgar, was setting up one of his seminars as head of the excellent degree course in playwriting at Birmingham University, he invited – among others, including me – fellow playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker to participate. She accepted but expressed reservations that merit thinking about. She felt strongly that writers can best learn by just doing it. Playwrights, she thought, might do better to train as actors or stage managers so that they get to feel theatre in their bones rather than in their mind.

There is no doubt that one learns a great deal from just doing it, but having done it can ‘it’ be usefully commented upon? Tough I’ve declined invitations to teach full time I have conducted short courses, and inevitably have been at the receiving end of unsolicited manuscripts. There was one instantly recognisable fault among aspiring writers that I saw could be addressed: layout. A technical feature.

I am amazed by the indifference to clarity revealed by some young writers who type huge blocks of verbose stage directions, often in CAPS so that one confronts an ugly, airless page and is almost put off going further than page three. I have on occasions re-typed a few of their pages in order to demonstrate to the aspirant how his or her play can breathe better if fewer words described character and setting. Some write dialogue with single-line spacing between the characters so that the page looks like one long speech. A clear layout is not only easier to read, it also contributes to atmosphere, mood, the rhythm of scenes. Layout can be taught. Can much more be taught?

I have given lectures ‘On the Nature of Theatre Dialogue’, ‘On the Nature of Development.’ On ‘Interpretation – to explain or impose.’ I have even attempted to break down ‘The DNA of a play’. And when a young writer asks for advice I give them my ‘Notes to Young Writers’. But do the observations handed on through those notes and lectures help to make a playwright? No one handed them on to me before I wrote my first play The Kitchen. Had they done so I might not have written the play because it was set in a huge restaurant kitchen for thirty-one characters. No playwriting tutor would have encouraged a young writer to write a play with such a large cast. No one in the profession thought it could work, and it was only permitted a Sunday night ‘Performance Without Décor’ at The Royal Court after the success of my third play Roots.

But I had spent some years as an amateur actor and had even harboured ambitions for the professional stage. The ambitions never took to sea. I twice passed the entrance examinations for RADA and twice failed to obtain a grant. I had almost fulfilled one of Wertenbaker’s requirements. Acting was in my bones. Even now I’m in my element giving public readings.

In June of 2004 I agreed to share the tutoring of a five day ‘Advanced Playwriting Course’ with Peter Rowe, artistic director of The Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich. It was organised by The Arvon Foundation, an organisation that owns three large houses around the country in which weeks are devoted to courses in writing novels, poetry, journalism, theatre, and TV drama. Students pay for board and lodging. Some – who can’t afford it – obtains grants. The first house was in Devon; when the poet, Ted Hughes, died he left his Yorkshire house, Lumb Bank, to the Foundation. The late John ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 To Cheat, to Pretend – November 1996
• 2 The DNA of a Play – 1995
• 3 Can playwrights be taught to write plays? – April 2005
• 4 Interpretation - to explain or impose – 1988
• 5 From stage to page – thoughts on the difference between writing plays and novels – 2005
• 6 The Nature of Development – May 1979
• 7 Notes to Young Playwrights – 1992
• 8 The Playwright as Director – February 1974
• 9 Individual Opinions Magnified Out Of Proportion By Print – 25 August 1983
• 10 On The Nature of Theatre Dialogue – 1985
• 11 What Are We Writers Worth? – 2000
• 12 The Myth of ‘a Writer’s Theatre’– 2009