Cutting Plays for Performance

A Practical and Accessible Guide

Toby Malone, Aili Huber

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000488517
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Theatre Playwriting

Cutting Plays for Performance offers a practical guide for cutting a wide variety of classical and modern plays. This essential text offers insight into the various reasons for cutting, methods to serve different purposes (time, audience, story), and suggests ways of communicating cuts to a production team.

Dealing with every aspect of the editing process, it covers structural issues, such as plot beats, rhetorical concepts, and legal considerations, why and when to cut, how to cut with a particular goal in mind such as time constraints, audience and storytelling, and ways of communicating cuts to a production team. A set of practical worksheets to assist with the planning and execution of cuts, as well as step-by-step examples of the process from beginning to end in particular plays help to round out the full range of skills and techniques that are required when approaching this key theatre-making task.

This is the first systematic guide for those who need to cut play texts. Directors, dramaturgs, and teachers at every level from students to seasoned professionals will find this an indispensable tool throughout their careers.

1 The Text is a Lie Textual History and Why It Matters

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160076-2

When we first tell people outside of the classical theatre bubble we’re writing a book on play cuts, they are often mildly scandalized. “Are you allowed to cut a play?” they ask. “Won’t people be upset if they don’t see the whole thing?” Most spectators are unaware that nearly all productions of classical plays are cut or adapted. Our shocked interlocutors have likely never seen a complete production of any classical play. We would argue, for many play texts, no such thing currently exists—or, in many cases, ever did.

Let’s look at the history of how the texts from as far back as ancient Greece have come down to us and how performers through time have edited them to suit their circumstances.

We begin with playtexts in an abstract sense. Imagine a theatre company, anywhere in the world, prior to easy and inexpensive print technology. This is the era of hand-copied text, or maybe meticulously typeset blocks for the printing press. This company is located in a capital city, where it can expect high-ranking government officials to be both financial patrons and audience members. A king or emperor may invite them to perform at court. In seasons when the wealthy leave the city, the company may go on the road and tour to remote regions. They have a few actors who always get the big roles, a few journeymen learning the craft, and occasional ringers when they need someone to carry a spear and say a line or two. They work with a few playwrights regularly. The playwrights grow so familiar with the actors they sometimes write parts just for them. To readers who know the history of Shakespeare’s company, this may sound familiar. It will also ring a bell for readers who have studied the theatre of the medieval Mongol Yuan dynasty. The conditions by which professionals created plays before the invention of the typewriter followed a convergent evolution, where similar circumstances, separated by oceans and centuries, yielded similar adaptations.

In this theatre, the playwright creates a version of the play which communicates what needs to happen. This version, however, may not constitute what we think of as a completed text. The specific words of a speech might all be present, but so will notes to the actors like, “At this point, he explains the plot,” without the exact explanation written out. Scribes copy out the play—at least one complete copy to be sent to the government censors (a factor in nearly all art, for nearly all of recorded history) for review, and possibly another for the theatre management to hold.

James Shapiro:

I no longer think anyone can stand a three-hour Shakespeare production. I’m increasingly a believer in two-hour Shakespeare: one thing I say when I come into a room is “I know the lengths of all these plays, from a four-hour Hamlet down to Macbeth or The Comedy of Errors at the other end.” Shakespeare wrote plays—and I’m stealing from David Kastan, the Yale Professor here—Shakespeare wrote texts that were too long to be staged. He knew when he wrote Hamlet that it could not be staged in the spring or fall when daylight ended around 5:00pm and the plays began around 2:00pm, so Burbage would have been killed in a swordfight in the dark had it been run in full length. So he wrote “maximal texts” because he knew he had to pay the Master of the Revels to approve a text. You could cut but you couldn’t add, so you write long. And the argument I make is Shakespeare’s always been cut going back to original productions. So the argument that there’s this imaginary purist who’s trying to protect the text from cutting would have run into a buzzsaw of opposition from Burbage and the other Chamberlain’s Men 400 years ago. That’s just a fantasy.

1.1 Excerpt from interview with James Shapiro, 8 February 2021.

Each actor would receive only their own part, plus a few cue lines here and there. Very few copies of the complete play document exist at this point. As changes happen, either in rehearsal or in response to government intervention, some play documents have notes scribbled in their margins and lines marked out, but not every emendation makes it into every copy. Once the play is in performance, if it does well, documents begin to circulate publicly, sometimes in unauthorized forms hastily collated by unscrupulous text pirates. For some plays, several variants might circulate at the same time. To avoid financial losses in book sales, the theatre company might be forced to release updated “authorized editions,” which now have the stubbed-in bits completed. Either the playwright or some functionary of the theatre company replaces “He explains the plot,” with content to detail the explanation.

Meanwhile, the company receives an invitation to perform the play at court. They decide they’ll remove the politically sensitive allusions the censor somehow missed. They don’t want to upset their royal patron and land in jail. A few months later, disease shuts down the theatres, and the company packs their costumes and props into wagons and takes to the road. Within a couple of performances, they decide to axe the topical jokes about court gossip which padded a costume change in the third act and replace it with physical humor. They cross a border and find themselves among people with whom they don’t share a language, so they cut out long speeches and use more visual storytelling. A couple years later, they revive the play. If they are fairly certain it will be a hit, they take the financial risk of adding references to current events, swallowing the cost of paying the playwright and additional review by government censors. They liberally cut bits out of sync with current fashion. Now we have many versions of the play, any or all of which may exist as printed documents: a bootleg of the first performance, an “official” version as performed before their majesties, a marked-up prompt book from the tour, and the version of the later revival the censor held. Which, then, is the “complete” version of the play?

Peter Oswald:

It’s nice that there’s instability: it leaves some leeway for interpretation.

1.2 Excerpt from interview with Peter Oswald, 11 February 2021.

We will now take a specific deeper dive into Shakespeare, simply because we assume our readers are generally more familiar with Hamlet (1601) than with The Orphan of the House of Zhao (c.13th century). The transmission of Shakespeare’s texts is also a thoroughly examined and documented field of study. However, please understand we use Shakespeare purely as an example. Due to the volatile print culture of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, every idea we illustrate with the textual history of Shakespeare’s plays is true of his contemporaries across Europe and has close parallels in other times and places. For example, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus was published in two distinct editions, in 1604 (today colloquially known as the ‘A-Text’) and 1616 (the ‘B-Text’). Marlowe himself died in 1593, so the earliest published edition of this play post-dates him by more than a decade, while the 1616 version featured revisions more than 20 years after his grisly end. While the question of the A- and B-Texts of Dr. Faustus has yielded generations of spirited debate (see, in particular, Eric Rasmussen’s A Textual Companion to ‘Dr Faustus’), it is clear that when we talk about Dr. Faustus, we have to clarify which one we mean.

As a brief sidebar: textual studies have yielded specific and useful terminology which can be instructive in defining the differences in often incorrectly interchangeably used references. As Sarah Neville notes:

Works are the composition of artists, and different materials produce different forms of art. The constituent element of the literary works produced by authors is language, a medium that, though it can be represented in writing, is fundamentally intangible. […] A literary text is an arrangement or sequence of words that can be materialized in a document, the actual artifact containing a piece of writing. (28–29)

We will employ Neville’s useful phrasing throughout this volume.

The example of the various Faustus texts demonstrates just how much early modern plays evolved, changed, and extended, even long after their authors’ deaths.

These conditions ultimately apply to theatres across space and time, up to the moment of two crucial inventions: rapid and easy printing, and copyright law.

To Folio or not to Folio

Shakespeare’s First Folio (often designated by scholars as F or F1), published in 1623, is a generally favored origin point for many editions of Shakespeare’s plays (although some do prefer other editions: check their notes). Published seven years after Shakespeare’s death, in an effort organized by his friends and fellow players, the Folio is a tremendous book, designed and intended for use by readers in homes. It’s not a book to carry around in one’s pocket. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, his plays were printed individually in smaller quarto editions. Pericles (1609) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634) appear only in quarto form. At least 18 of the 38 extant plays were printed individually prior to the Folio’s publication, and these early documents often differ considerably from the Folio versions.

These individually published early texts have a great deal of value because they show us a version of the play at a specific point in time. Often, they are shorter than the versions published in the Folio and offer intriguing snapshots into the evolution of early modern plays. Different quartos can show different versions of the play. As noted, the A- and B-Texts of Dr. Faustus demonstrate significant differences: the 1616 quarto lacks 36 of the lines in the 1604 quarto, but features 676 new lines. It, additionally, has some interesting subtle variations, such as a shift from “Never too late, if Faustus can repent” to “Never too late, if Faustus will repent” (1616). A small difference on paper, but a tremendous one on stage.

Most famously, the early publication history of Hamlet offers intriguing insight into the ways Shakespeare and his contemporaries edited their scripts for particular performance situations. Hamlet, besides being Shakespeare’s best-known play, boasts a fascinating textual history and appears in multiple formats. Scholar and director Christine Schmidle has done extensive work on early modern German-language translations and adaptations of English plays. She describes Der Bestrafte Brudermord (Fratricide Punished, printed c.1710) as a shortened, simplified, funnier, translated Hamlet, performed by English actors on the continent during Shakespeare’s lifetime. More than a decade prior to the publication of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we see evidence of a mysterious and now-lost Ur-Hamlet (1587). It is often credited to Thomas Kyd, and sometimes to Shakespeare himself, and was a precursor to the version of the play we are familiar with today… eventually. The first published edition of the play appeared almost unrecognizably in quarto form in 1603, potentially released to cash in on the play’s popularity. This was cruelly dubbed by early scholars as “the Bad Quarto” for its clumsy and unfamiliar phrasing (“To be, or not to be / Ay, there’s the point”). It’s now more commonly known as “the First Quarto,” or Q1. In 1604, this document was almost immediately superseded by an expanded quarto, known now as “the Second Quarto,” or Q2, which notes on its title page is based on the “true and perfect Coppie,” and which is much more familiar to modern audiences. Almost 20 years later, the play appeared again in revised form in the 1623 Folio. Each of these editions are markedly different from one another. Why?

1.3 The A- and B-Texts of Dr. Faustus diverge significantly.

Shakespeare’s company performed their plays in the vast space of the Globe and the intimacy of Blackfriars. They toured to town squares and royal palaces. The textual evidence shows his company adapted their scripts for the venue and audience. What we think of today as Hamlet—the sprawling, (often) four-hour saga—was likely never performed in its entirety by Shakespeare’s own company. The streamlined, unloved Q1 Hamlet clocks in at a compact two hours, and is similar in structure, if not in textual detail, to the play Shakespeare’s early audiences probably experienced.

Familiarity with this history offers the text cutter both practicality and liberation. Don’t feel bound by the text on the page. The authoritative weight of the printed words is, in essence, a lie. We encourage you to free yourself from any concern you may feel of whether this robs your audience of an authentic experience of the play. Cut texts are, in fact, a more authentic experience than the behemoth completist text. Further, this sense of how play documents came to be printed and preserved will help you understand the editions we now have available in published form.

Christine Schmidle:

We have the most different versions of The Spanish Tragedy (1587) [printed in Europe]. They’re all different. We also have Volpone (1605) in Germany really early on. We know that the English comedians brought the plays over and performed them right away. We know that there are different versions. We know for sure that the plays went through transformations, because we know how the plays were described. So, for example, with Romeo and Juliet (1597), we know the play was performed by different companies, and those companies seemed to have created different versions, as w...