Writing for Theatre - Arnold Wesker

1. The difference between art as therapy and art as experience

It's the first lesson to be learned. All art provides a degree of therapeutic benefit for the artist. But it must never be only that. A work of art has to end up as an experience, an extraordinary event on the stage. If it's only therapy you're interested in, then there are groups where people get together to share their poetry or stories or plays, the things they simply want to get off their chest, places where everyone's telling a bit of their life history that's been nagging at them. And it's a good thing that such groups exist, it gives the ordinary person an outlet. Everyone has the need to "express" themselves. After "expressing themselves they feel better. It may even have a certain quality, a mood, a "something".

How do you know when one is not the other, therapy rather than art? Because its final impact is greater upon the person who has put it together than upon the recipient. Therapy is of more value to the person writing than the person listening. Experience, the raw material of both art and therapy, remains therapy because it wasn't shaped, infused with perceptions, it wasn't metamorphosed into that extraordinary theatrical experience which sends people away moved, disturbed, thoughtful, agitated, exhilarated...dozens of words exist to describe the emotions art stirs in us.

The biggest trap is to be seduced into thinking that what had amused or engaged us in reality is automatically engaging and amusing on stage. Remember how often we've tried to recapture something for a friend that had happened to us. We couldn't quite convey the event as we'd experienced it. Either it wasn't worth trying to recreate - it was sufficient just to have experienced it, or we'd recreated it badly. And that's the next important lesson:

2: To distinguish between material that is the stuff of literature and material that is anecdote

The anecdote is slight, merely good for conversation. Trying to transform it into literature is like trying to make a wooden doll stand in the square instead of a statue. Yes, something can develop from a dinner-table anecdote, but it's important to distinguish between what is heard and what it can become.

An important attribute of the writer is the ability to select. Life offers an enormous amount of material; add to it the riches of the imagination and what one confronts can be overwhelming. By what they chose shall you know them could be inscribed at the head of any writing course.

Distinguishing what will be powerful, what you can make powerful on the on the stage is essential. Distinctions: between meanings, between intentions, between material; sorting out what's to be used, what's to be dispensed with.

Example: I had a spinster aunt. She had to look after her mother, who died; then a sister, who died. She was hurt by the experience, but seemed content to live alone and busy herself with visits to the family. There is nothing remarkable in such an experience. Sitting round a dinner table, most guests could probably relate such a family story. My aunt's history of lonely spinsterhood leaps ringing with resonance when it is revealed that she used to make crocheted bed coverings for members of the family, and one day, having made hundreds of squares for a grand-nephew and sewn up all of them except 30, she stopped. The last 20 remained unattached. She also stopped watering her plants, taking buses to visit us, washing herself. One day, her spirit wound down to a halt. Because in all of us there is a spirit waiting to give up, she enters, on that day, into the stuff of literature.

1: The difference between art as therapy and art as experience
2: To distinguish between material that is the stuff of literature and material that is anecdote
3: Responsibility to the craft
4: The artist as guardian of truths as they see them
5: The craft of theatre involves...
6: They will not love you forever