WRITING PLAYS
I
There is an idea abroad, assiduously fostered as a rule by critics who
happen to have written neither novels nor plays, that it is more
difficult to write a play than a novel. I do not think so. I have
written or collaborated in about twenty novels and about twenty plays,
and I am convinced that it is easier to write a play than a novel.
Personally, I would sooner _write_ two plays than one novel; less
expenditure of nervous force and mere brains would be required for two
plays than for one novel. (I emphasise the word "write," because if the
whole weariness between the first conception and the first performance
of a play is compared with the whole weariness between the first
conception and the first publication of a novel, then the play has it. I
would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels produced than one play. But my
immediate object is to compare only writing with writing.) It seems to
me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the comparative difficulty
of writing plays and writing novels are those authors who have succeeded
or failed equally well in both departments. And in this limited band I
imagine that the differences of opinion on the point could not be
marked. I would like to note in passing, for the support of my
proposition, that whereas established novelists not infrequently venture
into the theatre with audacity, established dramatists are very cautious
indeed about quitting the theatre. An established dramatist usually
takes good care to write plays and naught else; he will not affront the
risks of coming out into the open; and therein his instinct is quite
properly that of self-preservation. Of many established dramatists all
over the world it may be affirmed that if they were so indiscreet as to
publish a novel, the result would be a great shattering and a great
awakening.
II
An enormous amount of vague reverential nonsense is talked about the
technique of the stage, the assumption being that in difficulty it far
surpasses any other literary technique, and that until it is acquired a
respectable play cannot be written. One hears also that it can only be
acquired behind the scenes. A famous actor-manager once kindly gave me
the benefit of his experience, and what he said was that a dramatist who
wished to learn his business must live behind the scenes--and study the
works of Dion Boucicault! The truth is that no technique is so crude and
so simple as the technique of the stage, and that the proper place to
learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit. Managers, being the
most conservative people on earth, except compositors, will honestly try
to convince the naïve dramatist that effects can only be obtained in
the precise way in which effects have always been obtained, and that
this and that rule must not be broken on pain of outraging the public.
And indeed it is natural that managers should talk thus, seeing the low
state of the drama, because in any art rules and reaction always
flourish when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have ever said and
will ever say that a technique which does not correspond with their own
is no technique, but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain at least one
of those situations in each act will be condemned as "undramatic," or
"thin," or as being "all talk." It may contain half a hundred other
situations, but for the mandarin a situation which is not one of the
seven is not a situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
types in the customary drama, and all original--that is,
truthful--characterisation will be dismissed as a total absence of
characterisation because it does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted for bad
technique. The author is bound to be told that what he has written may
be marvellously clever, but that it is not a play. I remember the
day--and it is not long ago--when even so experienced and sincere a
critic as William Archer used to argue that if the "intellectual" drama
did not succeed with the general public, it was because its technique
was not up to the level of the technique of the commercial drama!
Perhaps he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven knows that the
so-called "intellectual" drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all
literary art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama could
hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the most successful
commercial plays of modern times. I tremble to think what the mandarins
and William Archer would say to the technique of _Hamlet_, could it by
some miracle be brought forward as a new piece by a Mr Shakspere. They
would probably recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise. Most positively they
would assert that _Hamlet_ was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
press would point out--what surely Mr Shakspere ought to have perceived
for himself--that the second, third, or fourth act might be cut
wholesale without the slightest loss to the piece.
In the sense in which mandarins understand the word technique, there is
no technique special to the stage except that which concerns the moving
of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations of the human
senses. The dramatist must not expect his audience to be able to see or
hear two things at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he must not
expect his interpreters to stroll round or come on or go off in a
satisfactory manner unless he provides them with satisfactory reasons
for strolling round, coming on, or going off. Lastly, he must not expect
his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities. The dramatist who
sends a pretty woman off in street attire and seeks to bring her on
again in thirty seconds fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage
technique, but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously
difficult; he has proved something quite else.
III
One reason why a play is easier to write than a novel is that a play is
shorter than a novel. On the average, one may say that it takes six
plays to make the matter of a novel. Other things being equal, a short
work of art presents fewer difficulties than a longer one. The contrary
is held true by the majority, but then the majority, having never
attempted to produce a long work of art, are unqualified to offer an
opinion. It is said that the most difficult form of poetry is the
sonnet. But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic. The proof
that the sonnet is the most difficult form is alleged to be in the
fewness of perfect sonnets. There are, however, far more perfect sonnets
than perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly accident. But
such accidents can never happen to writers of epics. Some years ago we
had an enormous palaver about the "art of the short story," which
numerous persons who had omitted to write novels pronounced to be more
difficult than the novel. But the fact remains that there are scores of
perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful whether anybody but
Turgenev ever did write a perfect novel. A short form is easier to
manipulate than a long form, because its construction is less
complicated, because the balance of its proportions can be more easily
corrected by means of a rapid survey, because it is lawful and even
necessary in it to leave undone many things which are very hard to do,
and because the emotional strain is less prolonged. The most difficult
thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative tension unslackened
throughout a considerable period.
Then, not only does a play contain less matter than a novel--it is
further simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds of matter,
and less subtle kinds of matter. There are numerous delicate and
difficult affairs of craft that the dramatist need not think about at
all. If he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree of subtlety,
he is merely wasting his time. What passes for subtle on the stage would
have a very obvious air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily
discovered. Thus whole continents of danger may be shunned by the
dramatist, and instead of being scorned for his cowardice he will be
very rightly applauded for his artistic discretion. Fortunate
predicament! Again, he need not--indeed, he must not--save in a
primitive and hinting manner, concern himself with "atmosphere." He may
roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the feat of "creating" an
atmosphere (as it is called), the last suburban train will have departed
before he has reached the crisis of the play. The last suburban train is
the best friend of the dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense
to see it. Further, he is saved all descriptive work. See a novelist
harassing himself into his grave over the description of a landscape, a
room, a gesture--while the dramatist grins. The dramatist may have to
imagine a landscape, a room, or a gesture; but he has not got to write
it--and it is the writing which hastens death. If a dramatist and a
novelist set out to portray a clever woman, they are almost equally
matched, because each has to make the creature say things and do things.
But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the dramatist can
recline in an easy chair and smoke while the novelist is ruining temper,
digestion and eyesight, and spreading terror in his household by his
moodiness and unapproachability. The electric light burns in the
novelist's study at three a.m.,--the novelist is still endeavouring to
convey by means of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine
could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking into a room; and
he never has really succeeded and never will. The dramatist writes
curtly, "Enter Millicent." All are anxious to do the dramatist's job for
him. Is the play being read at home--the reader eagerly and with
brilliant success puts his imagination to work and completes a charming
Millicent after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly decline
to add one touch to Millicent were she the heroine of a novel.) Is the
play being performed on the stage--an experienced, conscientious, and
perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest to prove that the
dramatist was right about Millicent's astounding fascination. And if she
fails, nobody will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive
naught but sympathy.
And there is still another region of superlative difficulty which is
narrowly circumscribed for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the whole
business of persuading the public that the improbable is probable. Every
work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities and artifice;
and the greater portion of the artifice is employed in just this
trickery of persuasion. Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less
persuading than the public of the novelist. The novelist announces that
Millicent accepted the hand of the wrong man, and in spite of all the
novelist's corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident as
unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent must accept the hand
of the wrong man, and there she is on the stage in flesh and blood,
veritably doing it! Not easy for even the critical beholder to maintain
that Millicent could not and did not do such a silly thing when he has
actually with his eyes seen her in the very act! The dramatist, as
usual, having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.
Of course it will be argued, as it has always been argued, by those who
have not written novels, that it is precisely the "doing less"--the
leaving out--that constitutes the unique and fearful difficulty of
dramatic art. "The skill to leave out"--lo! the master faculty of the
dramatist! But, in the first place, I do not believe that, having regard
to the relative scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other. The adjective
"photographic" is as absurd applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
the second place, other factors being equal, it is less exhausting, and
it requires less skill, to refrain from doing than to do. To know when
to refrain from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even harder.
Sometimes, listening to partisans of the drama, I have been moved to
suggest that, if the art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a
dramatist who practised the habit of omitting to write anything whatever
ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.
IV
The more closely one examines the subject, the more clear and certain
becomes the fact that there is only one fundamental artistic difference
between the novel and the play, and that difference (to which I shall
come later) is not the difference which would be generally named as
distinguishing the play from the novel. The apparent differences are
superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations of convenience.
Whether in a play or in a novel the creative artist has to tell a
story--using the word story in a very wide sense. Just as a novel is
divided into chapters, and for a similar reason, a play is divided into
acts. But neither chapters nor acts are necessary. Some of Balzac's
chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has been proved that a
theatre audience can and will listen for two hours to "talk," and even
recitative singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed, audiences,
under the compulsion of an artist strong and imperious enough, could, I
am sure, be trained to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity.
However, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve the same
constructional processes on the part of the artist. The entire play or
novel must tell a complete story--that is, arouse a curiosity and
reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and then settle it. And
each act or other chief division must tell a definite portion of the
story, satisfy part of the curiosity, settle part of the question. And
each scene or other minor division must do the same according to its
scale. Everything basic that applies to the technique of the novel
applies equally to the technique of the play.
In particular, I would urge that a play, any more than a novel, need not
be dramatic, employing the term as it is usually employed. In so far as
it suspends the listener's interest, every tale, however told, may be
said to be dramatic. In this sense _The Golden Bowl_ is dramatic; so are
_Dominique_ and _Persuasion_. A play need not be more dramatic than
that. Very emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage sense.
It need never induce interest to the degree of excitement. It need have
nothing that resembles what would be recognisable in the theatre as a
situation. It may amble on--and it will still be a play, and it may
succeed in pleasing either the fastidious hundreds or the unfastidious
hundreds of thousands, according to the talent of the author. Without
doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet to excommunicate
certain plays from the category of plays. But nobody will be any the
worse. And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else divides a
play from a book, "dramatic quality" does not. Some arch-Mandarin may
launch at me one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which are
supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart. "Do you seriously mean
to argue, sir, that drama need not be dramatic?" I do, if the word
dramatic is to be used in the mandarinic signification. I mean to state
that some of the finest plays of the modern age differ from a
psychological novel in nothing but the superficial form of telling.
Example, Henri Becque's _La Parisienne_, than which there is no better.
If I am asked to give my own definition of the adjective "dramatic," I
would say that that story is dramatic which is told in dialogue imagined
to be spoken by actors and actresses on the stage, and that any narrower
definition is bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted
as such--even by mandarins. For be it noted that the mandarin is never
consistent.
My definition brings me to the sole technical difference between a play
and a novel--in the play the story is told by means of a dialogue. It is
a difference less important than it seems, and not invariably even a
sure point of distinction between the two kinds of narrative. For a
novel may consist exclusively of dialogue. And plays may contain other
matter than dialogue. The classic chorus is not dialogue. But nowadays
we should consider the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays,
it indeed would be. We have grown very ingenious and clever at the
trickery of making characters talk to the audience and explain
themselves and their past history while seemingly innocent of any such
intention. And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty
special to himself, which the novelist can avoid. I believe it to be the
sole difficulty which is peculiar to the drama, and that it is not acute
is proved by the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally
vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to assert that the dramatist is also
handicapped by the necessity for rigid economy in the use of material.
This is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material is equally
advisable in every form of art. If it is a necessity, it is a necessity
which all artists flout from time to time, and occasionally with
gorgeous results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto not been
less guilty of flouting it than the novelist or any other artist.
V
And now, having shown that some alleged differences between the play and
the novel are illusory, and that a certain technical difference, though
possibly real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
difference between them--a difference which the laity does not suspect,
which is seldom insisted upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody
who is well versed in the making of both plays and novels can fail to
feel profoundly. The emotional strain of writing a play is not merely
less prolonged than that of writing a novel, it is less severe even
while it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative character.
And herein is the chief of all the reasons why a play is easier to write
than a novel. The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
because its effect depends on something more than the composition of
words. The dramatist is the sole author of a play, but he is not the
sole creator of it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the other
hand, he cannot do everything himself. He begins the work of creation,
which is finished either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
the creative imagination of the reader in the study. It is as if he
carried an immense weight to the landing at the turn of a flight of
stairs, and that thence upward the lifting had to be done by other
people. Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the dramatist
is the base--but he is not the apex. A play is a collaboration of
creative faculties. The egotism of the dramatist resents this
uncomfortable fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
("producer") and the actors--the audience itself is unconsciously part
of the collaboration.
Hence a dramatist who attempts to do the whole work of creation before
the acting begins is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end. The dramatist must
deliberately, in performing his share of the work, leave scope for a
multitude of alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
foresee nor completely control. The point is not that in the writing of
a play there are various sorts of matters--as we have already
seen---which the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in the
region proper to him he must not push the creative act to its final
limit. He must ever remember those who are to come after him. For
instance, though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he should
not visualise it completely, as a novelist should. The novelist may
perceive vividly the faces of his personages, but if the playwright
insists on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real actors and
hamper himself by moulding the scene to suit such real actors, or he
will perceive imaginary faces, and the ultimate interpretation will
perforce falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This aspect of the
subject might well be much amplified, but only for a public of
practising dramatists.
VI
When the play is "finished," the processes of collaboration have yet to
begin. The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most
desolating part of his toil awaits him. I do not refer to the business
of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.
For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also
partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that
theatrical managers are--no doubt inevitably--theatrical. Nevertheless,
even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in
anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some
degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a
play is not a play till it is performed. The manager reads the play,
and, to the dramatist's astonishment, reads quite a different play from
that which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular the manager
reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed--indeed, a play against
whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a
manuscript, and very seldom success. The manager's profoundest
instinct--self-preservation again!--is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
it is against the grain, against his judgment--and out of a mad spirit
of adventure. Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed
in an atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally feels an
immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager,
and he is therein justified. The manager's vocation is not to write
plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of
them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has
often proved to be pitiably delusive. The manager's true and only
vocation is to refrain from producing plays. Despite all this, however,
the manager has already collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it
differently now. All sorts of new considerations have been presented to
him. Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play.
Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains
to be done has been more accurately envisaged. This strange experience
could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is
finished.
And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and
this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation
with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new
shapes--contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment.
And even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals,
similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer
is a different fellow from the author as author. The producer is up
against realities. He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually
condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element.... He suggests the
casting. "What do you think of X. for the old man?" asks the producer.
The author is staggered. Is it conceivable that so renowned a producer
can have so misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be preposterous
as the old man. But the producer goes on talking. And suddenly the
author sees possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a different
play from what he wrote. And quite probably he sees a more glorious
play. Quite probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist he
is.... Before the first rehearsal is called, the play, still without a
word altered, has gone through astounding creative transmutations; the
author recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child, but it is
the likeness of a first cousin.
At the first rehearsal, and for many rehearsals, to an extent perhaps
increasing, perhaps decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an
apologetic and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something between
that of a criminal who has committed a horrid offence and that of a
father over the crude body of a new-born child. Now in truth he deeply
realises that the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases he may be
brought to see that he himself is one of the less important factors in
the collaboration. The first preoccupation of the interpreters is not
with his play at all, but--quite rightly--with their own careers; if
they were not honestly convinced that their own careers were the chief
genuine excuse for the existence of the theatre and the play they would
not act very well. But, more than that, they do not regard his play as a
sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their careers. At the most
favourable, what they secretly think is that if they are permitted to
exercise their talents on his play there is a chance that they may be
able to turn it into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their
careers. The attitude of every actor towards his part is: "My part is
not much of a part as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to
get into free contact with it, I may make something brilliant out of
it." Which attitude is a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion
justified by the facts of the case. The actor's phrase is that he
_creates_ a part, and he is right. He completes the labour of creation
begun by the author and continued by the producer, and if reasonable
liberty is not accorded to him--if either the author or the producer
attempts to do too much of the creative work--the result cannot be
satisfactory.
As the rehearsals proceed the play changes from day to day. However
autocratic the producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play will
vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in a gentle wind. It is never
the same play for two days together. Nor is this surprising, seeing
that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two dozen, human beings
endowed with the creative gift are creatively working on it. Every
dramatist who is candid with himself--I do not suggest that he should be
candid to the theatrical world--well knows that though his play is often
worsened by his collaborators it is also often improved,--and improved
in the most mysterious and dazzling manner--without a word being
altered. Producer and actors do not merely suggest possibilities, they
execute them. And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena for
which lawfully he may not claim credit. On the other hand, he may be
confronted by inartistic phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is
blameless, but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a
battle,--certain persons are theoretically in control, but in fact the
thing principally fights itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop. And the
dramatist lying awake in the night reflects, stoically, fatalistically:
"Well, that is the play that they have made of _my_ play!" And he may be
pleased or he may be disgusted. But if he attends the first performance
he cannot fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it, that he was
quite mistaken, and that what the actors are performing is still another
play. The audience is collaborating.