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.

3: Responsibility to the craft

Be jealous of it, as for a child from whom you want perfection. Perfection is an impossible state, but that should not prevent the writer from aspiring to it. The writer has chosen his/her craft, no one else. And with such a choice comes responsibility, as with an adopted child, But it's not a one-way process. Respect your art and it will feed back with self-respect.

You must know everything your craft is capable of achieving. The stage can tell the story of an hour or a hundred years. You can sail seas, go down a mine, fly a plane, ride a train. You can also, if you've found the right words, move audiences on a bare stage. You cannot be careless or indifferent. If you merely toss off any old thing, then you too, in turn, will be tossed aside.

4: The artist as guardian of truths as they see them

Even unpleasant truths. Even unpleasant truths about those you love or who are "on your side". Even unpleasant truths which attract hostility from friends, colleagues, sisters, brothers. Even uncomfortable truths which briefly place you in the "enemy's camp". The artist's voice must be an individual's voice, not the mouthpiece of a group or of a dogma. This is especially true in the age of "political correctness".

Example: If you are a black, a Jewish, an Irish, a German writer, and your experience of human relationships is that it sometimes breaks down for reasons rooted in inherited cultural characteristics - explore them. The same applies to gender. There are dreadful men who are dreadful in a way that is identifiably masculine, and there are dreadful women who are dreadful in a way that is identifiably feminine - tell it.

Which brings us to a paradox: people need to know that is at least one kind of person they can trust to say what they really feel an think, rather than what is expected of them, or what is most comfortable or opportune or them to say. When this happens, then it is often discovered that what had begun as an individual's voice turns out to be, unexpectedly, the voice of the many.

Artist's must never be opportunists, but fiercely independent. Their talent is a unique gift given to them for safe-keeping, cherishing, nurturing, for handing on in a dependable condition to the next generation of artists. The individual vision is singular, the only hope for the future. The group may be needed for protection, co-operative physical endeavour, a sense of security to give the individual a sense of belonging. But - no group should ever be given the right to stifle the individual voice or the group itself will be doomed. Group decisions involve compromise. The group often finds it less trouble, less demanding to bless and support mediocrity. It has a tendency to become satisfied with the status quo and thus atrophy. For this reason it needs the voice of the independent artist. Such a voice is refreshing, often proving to be not the feared destroyer but the reviver of tradition, adding to it, even creating new ones.

To be an artist, then, requires patience to develop, enrich, hone your craft, and the courage to stand alone for what you've perceived and think about human beings and their condition.

An artist must not set out to intimidate, though that consequence may result from their work, not should they allow themselves to be intimidated.

5: The craft of theatre involves...

... a great deal more than people talking on a stage. It requires:

an understanding of the power of metaphor

an understanding of structure

a sense of rhythms of lines of speech; rhythms between lines, between sections, between scenes, between acts

a sense of place - settings

a sense of choreography - movements and actions

a clear understanding to characters: their complexity, their contradictions, their perceptions of others, and of how you perceive them.

Your craft requires an understanding of the distinction to be made between journalism and poetry, i.e the tangible and the intangible.

Example: the making of a cup of tea on stage is journalism, tangible; the busting into song, a leap in the air, a sudden smile all for not apparent reason is (or could be) poetry, intangible, like the "twang" of wire in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. Both are qualities needed in any work of art; but the greatest works of art have more poetry than journalism.

6: They will not love you forever

...neither critics nor those in the theatre.

Therefore:

You must develop

Never repeat yourself

Keep inventing

Keep your mind and imagination well-oiled by exposing yourself to all sorts of other artistic experiences. The best artists usually have the effect of reviving our batteries, revealing to ourselves what more we've got within ourselves - books, theatre, film, music; expose yourself to all sorts of people and experiences. You must know those you want to attack better than themselves.

Listen not only to what people say but the way they say it. Keep notes about those who interest you most, record dialogue whose vigour strikes you. Do not pursue what is absurd if what you've experienced does not call for the absurd. When it does call for it, use it. Nor engage irony when tenderness is called for, or lyricism if the mood requires harsh naturalism.

Life comes too multifaceted to make a fetish of only one aspect of it. Reality is too complex to re-create it in a singular style which then becomes a beloved "personal signature". I worry about writers who straitjacket their material into personal mannerisms which are mistaken for their "voice", or their "style". Let your material dictate its own inherent style.

Build up a body of work impressive enough to make it difficult for them to dismiss you.

New generations of writers are being born today who will inevitably challenge your place, and whom fickle critics and directors will want to champion because they're new. That's as it should be, but by that time you must have moved to another place; you must have created enough momentum to enable you to continue steadily and evade the demoralising feeling of being threatened.

Nothing nothing nothing stands still.

Nor must you!