Writing 'Master Class'

David Pownall

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781849434942
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Narración

Writing 'Master Class' is a biography of David Pownall's play, Master Class (1983), from conception to coming of age. Threaded through the account of the inception and development of the piece are twists of authorial life-story necessary for the telling. Whereas a novel or poem can be kept a secret until it is properly finished, a play has to go out to meet the people early. On the day the script is put into the hands of actors, the soul of the thing passes out of the author's control. It can be bent, battered, warped – or improved within its being far beyond expectations. As a drama of dictatorship in art and the cleverness needed to evade its worst manifestations, Master Class has been at large for thirty years, produced in twenty countries, in some several times. What has been done to it, how it has fared, is touched upon but the main story in this book is the making of the piece. A fascinating insight into the playwright's craft.

CHAPTER ONE

This is the biography of my play, Master Class, from conception to coming of age. Once I finished reading the book from which it originated there was never any doubt it would be born, but the gestation was elephantine. Threaded through the account of the inception and development of the piece are twists of authorial life-story necessary for the telling. Master Class came out of a crowded time. Keeping a sharp eye on the personal truth behind what was going on is the sworn intention. Not to weaken in this resolve is the hope.

Authors often write from positions in which they oppose themselves. Master Class is a drama of dictatorship in art and the cleverness needed to evade its worst manifestations. If there is any wandering into the quicksands of pretentiousness it has to be put down to the factitious nature of writing plays and not the messy human record of living.

Whereas a novel or poem can be kept a secret until it is properly finished, a play has to go out to meet the people early. On the day the script is put into the hands of actors, the soul of the thing passes out of the author’s control. It can be bent, battered, warped – or improved within its being far beyond expectations. Master Class has been at large for thirty years, produced in twenty countries, in some several times. What has been done to it, how it has fared, will be touched upon but the main story is the making of the piece.

*

Writers value those moments in the advanced life of a play when a new profile appears breathing fresh power – when the question: ‘How did I come to write this?’ is a healthy shock to self-knowledge. A new play in the rehearsal room is a wad of language on paper, maltreated, torn, bent, scribbled over, walked on, used as a saucer, tossed aside when the lines are learnt. It only achieves its dignity when published as a book. By then most of the creative excitement is over.

*

In 1987 I was standing in a doorway in the main square of Tallin old town in Estonia, a stranger, an outsider, not a fellow-sufferer in the country’s political upheaval, which was intense and laid out before me. Master Class, was already four years old by that time, produced within diverse political structures and systems where audiences took what they wanted from it.

In the satellite nations of the USSR where independence could be anticipated soon, Master Class was on the thin end of the wedge being driven between Moscow and subject peoples. For the whole of the Seventies the British subsidised theatre had debated whether plays ever changed anything. There were voices saying any play without a strong social or political contribution to make did not deserve to live.

In the middle of the old square stood hundreds of Russian soldiers without weapons, watching the consumers of Tallin tramp silently in and out of empty shops. I joined in and went round the whole circuit with them, past the acres of bare shelves, shop after shop after shop. The people had money but nothing to spend it on.

The Russian soldiers watched the protest with sombre indifference. All they wanted to do was go home. I wondered if they were under orders to hang around and be a presence, a relic of erstwhile authority to offset any chance of crowd trouble. Had any of these young men learnt Estonian while posted here? If they had, they might go to my play and encounter Stalin, hear him speak, follow his thoughts. How would they react? Could they laugh at him yet, or was he even now a hero of sorts? But the citizens wouldn’t want Russians in their theatre. In deciding to produce Master Class they had taken a big risk, pushing their luck in advance of actual political change.

Today, twenty-five years on, those empty shops in the old square are full of goods, and the country has the highest GDP per capita in the EEC.

I knew some of these people in the protest might make up the audience for Master Class that evening. They could spend their useless money on a state-subsidised theatre ticket. This bizarre scene in the square, was held in a twilight time between regimes, almost a power-vacuum. It was tragi-comedy. The impact of the original story on which Master Class is built had the same nature. I asked my Estonian companion how long the stand-off could go on for.

‘It may be years before the Russians withdraw,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘To people who have not been free since the early thirteenth-century, waiting is not a problem.’

The scene in the square probably affected me the way it did because I had spent the last decade in British theatre following the general aim, one sincerely felt in the subsidised sector, of working to attract new audiences – particularly the young and the working-class into the theatre.

New stages had been built, new arts centres opened in remote places. We toured throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland convinced everyone had a right to our form of entertainment. Sometimes there were more people on the stage than in the audience. Mostly we ended up drawing the educated middle-class out of their fastnesses wherever we went, but it didn’t matter. Somehow they were already part of us and didn’t need to be thought about. Theatre, our kind of theatre, would bind a new audience together crossing all the old barriers.

Now, here in Estonia, I was with people to whom freedom of all kinds, including imagined political liberty, was precious. The shelves in the shops were empty, but there was something they yearned for up for sale at the theatre. I had already met Estonian playwrights with armfuls of unperformed scripts for me to take back to England to see if I could find a production for them. That my play was usurping their right of protest didn’t occur to me in all the very complicated excitement.

On arrival in Tallin, I had been told by the theatre management, who were very serious men who never cracked a smile, that they were sticking their necks out a long way in doing my play. They were glad to have me around so I could take some of the blame if things turned nasty. At first I thought this was Estonian deadpan humour but I was wrong. Any trouble I might get into would be mild, probably involving the Soviet media tearing me to shreds, at worst deporting me. I was reminded that Kruschev’s speech knocking Stalin off his pedestal was in 1966, twenty years ago. The time was right to take that as encouragement, which was why they had made five applications to produce Master Class to the culture ministry in Moscow and never received acknowledgement or reply. This inertia was not limited to the culture ministry but affected all aspects of Soviet government. No one was making decisions. Eventually they decided to go ahead and schedule the play for production, being careful to inform the authorities, who, once again, remained silent. It was in this strange atmosphere where everyone seemed to believe nothing repressive would ever happen again, that the play, which is about coercion as comedy, was rehearsed.

That night the actor who played Stalin wore his Soviet medals at the reception before the performance. He was keeping a foot in both camps, making everything political about himself contemptible and unpopular, except his obvious and deeply respected talent. Nevertheless, as I was told, when the time came he would be ostracised as a collaborator and never work in Estonian theatre again. But now he was useful, a bridge across the great Soviet silence.

However, for now, his fame transcended his predicament, as did his performance, which was extraordinarily lively and powerful. At the party afterwards he did not wear his medals. This was the new convention. I was told the man was torn between the two halves of himself, was sometimes suicidal and lived off vodka, but never missed or even mistimed a cue. I asked if he was an Estonian born and was told people had learnt to keep that kind of information to themselves.

In other satellite states with collapsed economies, trapped in the bureaucratic paralysis, but edging towards independence, the play – which features Stalin, his culture supremo Zhdanov, and the composers Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and concerns music as propaganda and/or art – was produced, including Russia itself. Neighbouring states that had always kept a close eye on the USSR – Finland, Sweden and Denmark – and all the other nations affected by the Cold War, used the play as a lever to reposition attitudes to the slow changes introduced by perestroika. The satire and comedy in the play made it a vehicle to express both resentment and relief that the Iron Curtain was not only being inched up but stood a good chance of finally being ripped to shreds. The ten years of this process saw Master Class produced in countries with wildly different agendas, determined by their attitude to the illness and death of Soviet-style socialism.

American laughter was not the same as Estonian laughter. South African laughter, Israeli laughter, French laughter, German laughter, all had a note of their own. As I travelled round invited to some of these productions, the fact that the play worked behind the scenes of global politics with an independent reading of the issues, provided every journey with surprises. In the Eighties and Nineties a massive empire was crumbling, taking with it the precious essence of a great humanist philosophy that had ended up wedded to oppression. The thought came too often for comfort – will you ever be lucky enough to write this kind of work again?

Following this inquiry through as I write in 2012 I cannot help but be aware that the question has been answered. Apart from the ups and downs of my own career there is the quandary we live in. The debate has altered, there is no towering figure like Stalin to satirise but Communism still has its powerful place in the argument, thanks to China’s success, and may still provide the eventual answer. The surge of confidence in free market capitalism that followed the dismantling of the USSR has evaporated: western thought is left unguided and confused. Comedy needs certainties to strike off.

*

The origin of plays is a rewarding subject, both in why they are written and how. If it is not part of the syllabus of creative writing courses, it should be. If every adult in the United Kingdom was forced to write a play it is likely ninety-nine per cent would set it at a funeral, a common drama in which we are compelled to see ourselves as another, the deceased who has gone through the gate, and we wonder.

Often enough, choosing the subject on which to write is the result of a shock, or amazement life can be the way it is. When we ask why things have to be like this, death is the first case for examination, then cruelty, then failure. Further down the list are hope, happiness and ambition.

Long, dispassionate study does not push a writer onto the stage. A blow struck on the mind is more likely to produce a lively play than a prevailing condition that refuses to go away. Other reasons plays come into being are straightforward – to satisfy a known market, say something that needs saying, communicate a vision, share a joke or get other people to join your mental club.

*

Four decades on it is possible to believe there was not much intrinsic difference between the West End well-made play and agitprop during the Sixties and Seventies, though the audiences were incompatible.

We have to assume that Shakespeare wrote history play after history play because he knew the mixed audience of lower-class groundlings and gentry loved that form, kicking off with the bloodbath of Titus Andronicus. Having got that under his belt, he backed it up with Henry VI, Part 1, to consolidate his popularity, then dived straight into what he really wanted to write, the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost, which has no source of plot, no chronicle or Italian novella feeding him the idea.

The play is for nature and common sense against all that is artificial and affected – the Stratford countryman’s protest against London. Of all his plays, it is this early piece that is closest to a recognisable personal statement.

*

It is surprising how the small scale and the big scale interact when one is tracking back through memory. Delving back as deeply and honestly as I could, I had to accommodate the discovery that Master Class had some of its origins in experiences to do with subsidy for regional theatre in the United Kingdom during the Seventies. Writing plays for the new Duke’s Playhouse in Lancaster plotted on local issues and stories was supported by a general goodwill towards a theatre that strived to bring people (preferably young and not middle class) away from their television sets into the auditorium. To this purpose, relevance, a new sense of public service, peace, love, protest and wit – were married to the pursuit of excellence, as defined by arts administrators and advisory panels of established artists. To study the workings of the Arts Council at that time is a good introduction to the global canvas – the arts and subsidy, the individual and the state, freedom and responsibility, all of which have a very comic side. In truth, being part of it taught the lesson of how to look for liberty inside a room with too many doors.

If a play is written for a place, the place asserts its hold. People will for a while go along with a theatre that is the questioning child of its audience if there is outspoken government support. Take away the support, change the policy without telling anyone, declare a new era has arrived, identify the theatre with welfare, and the new audience will melt away, leaving the loyal middle class in possession of the theatre again.

Anyone who cares to think about it knows the politics enmeshed in a play do not have to be doctrinaire. Essentially, what matters is the scope, focus and mirror-imaging of the piece. Playwrights of the left can find themselves creating right-wing characters that walk off with the play. For the rest, the theatre is always open. Those prepared to wrestle with the iron laws of the stage for the sake of the ultimate communication in dramatic art – the play that transcends its skimpy, creaking environment – find reward.

*

For soothing awkward consciences, playwrights can feel thankful to Shakespeare. Because of his reputation, his borrowings and cavalier twisting of facts, the right of stage authors to use anything to hand to make a play is enshrined in the ethic of the profession. However, no writer today would go as far as the Bard did without dying of shame.

He filled the grubby old bran-tub stage authors feel around in. Plays can start from nowhere, however, with no background, no derivations, but it shows. The void surrounding the absurd and surreal is evidence of this lack of roots. A theatre audience understands historical framework well enough, also how writers pull down pillars and replace them with their own supports. Dramatic sense wrested from the distortion of plain fact, the dogma of what actually happened kicked away, could create authorial guilt if we weren’t such a light-hearted, light-headed, light-fingered lot. However, the arts correspondent’s stock-in-trade questions: ‘Is this authentic?’ ‘Did any of this really happen?’ become irrelevant in direct proportion to the success of the production. If the play works, history is lifted out of its bed, dressed in new clothes and sent out into the world.

*

To many people Shakespeare’s history plays provide all the history a citizen needs. Whatever is put on the stage has the chance of exalted life. Theatre is truly a world of its own, but the playwright is no puppet-master pulling strings. Inside the play might be the elevating magic that cannot be designed – fearsome emotional energies that can create unforgettable beauty. For most of us, these theatre-going experiences can be counted on one...