The play's the thing...

The purpose of this blog was to record all the theatre-related things that I find myself involved in. So the reason I haven’t posted for almost a fortnight is slightly ironic: actually doing a play.

But that’s also been a reminder of the fact that trying to be a writer means much more than just ‘the work’. And perhaps theatre, more than any other literary form, is about process rather than product. Not only because a play script is on some levels a blueprint for performance; that it doesn’t become ‘theatre’ until rehearsals with actors and a director bring it to life. But also because it’s an intense and emotional social experience. Rather than being a means to an end, writing sometimes just feels like a way to live.

It’s exhausting though. The play (‘Through the Night’) went well. It was, as always, a learning experience. There’s nothing more exposing that putting your words into the mouths of actors – they won’t let you get away with a single inconsistency. And then you have to accept that the audience reaction is completely out of your hands. It’s nerve-racking, and a bit of me is glad to be back to some kind of normality today. But I’ve never been able to resist the addictive qualities of the theatre, and in no time I’ll be itching to get involved in the next project. Ultimately, I know that it’s only when I’m standing in a rehearsal room that I’m in my right space...

But there has been some other activity in the last few weeks, not least the end of my first MA playwriting course. That has been an incredibly enriching experience, and together we’ve interrogated some fascinating questions about the internal dramaturgy of plays, and how that can reflect or resist content. Our discussions about ‘London Road’ and ‘Jerusalem’ have been particularly interesting. The former explores the nature of community, marginalising, almost to the point of eradication, the ‘outsider’ figures – the prostitutes whose lives have been threatened, or taken, by the murderer Steve Wright. And ‘Jersualem’s two productions (in the West End and in the Occupy London encampments) have raised compelling questions about the radical (or otherwise) impulses in the storytelling.  In the last class of the semester, I also revisited a paper I wrote at the beginning of the year about presentations of ‘the apocalypse’ in modern drama. There, I argued that it is only the plays that break form with the aid of lyricism, metaphor and poetry that can hope to provide a truthful glimpse of such a catastrophic rupture.

I’ll also give a quick mention to another play which deals with a different sort of breakdown. ‘Haunted Child’ at The Royal Court is about a husband who announces one day that he’s found a new spiritual path, in the form of a bizarre, quasi-scientific cult. It’s a strange play, which seems to have left a lot of reviewers puzzled. Personally, I thought it was quite beautiful and moving. The way it presents a kind of mania as endlessly self-fulfilling was frightening, and the play addresses the nature of fundamentalist philosophies without losing the sense of a deeply personal tragedy for the family…