Writing and Theatre

By Gill Othen

Reading, writing and theatre have been my three passions all my life. The connection between the first two is obvious, but I have found many ways in which my love of drama and theatre has also contributed to my writing skills.

Firstly, going to the theatre is a very practical way of experiencing words in action, of watching how the language a character uses allows the performer to shape that character, and also how the text can be extended by subtext and interpretation. The nature of live theatre, as opposed to TV or film, is that you can actually see the actor making choices and responding to the audience – the communication is two-way.

Performing and directing have even more to do with the process of creating, inevitably, and there are many tools which can be transferred from one medium to another. Even the theory of the stage can offer interesting alternative ways of approaching the creative process. This is because the primary task of an actor or director, like that of a writer, is to decide what response is wanted, or needed, from the audience or reader. Everything that goes into a production is, and must be, subservient to that end.

If you want your reader or audience to feel powerful emotions, for example, or empathise deeply with the emotions felt by the character, then Stanislavski is your man. He may have been dead for eighty-plus years, but this Russian director nailed the way in which a character can be constructed. He trained his actors intensively in ways that allowed them, as far as possible, to “become” their role, and did so by enabling them to approach from outside – how does this person dress, move, express feelings, interact with others – and from inside – what memories does this person have, what makes this person behave in this way, what is this person trying to achieve by speaking in this way to that other character? Any writer working on a character can use some of those techniques to help make it from a collection of words into a real individual.

Stanislavski introduced techniques later developed into the “Method” school of acting – yes, the school that produced Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, James Dean and many others. Method acting involves exploring “What if?” situations – take a set of circumstances which you may never use directly and explore how your character would react to them. In a studio actors might improvise the circumstances, but the characters can do that in your head too. Or the classic rehearsal technique, “hot-seating”, in which an actor tries to become the character as fully as possible, then respond to probing questions launched by colleagues, “finding” the answer from within, spontaneously during the questioning period. The discoveries can be filed mentally for future use or incorporated directly – but Stanislavski’s belief that the performer should know everything there is to know about the character is just as true of the writer.

Suppose, however, that you want to do something different. Perhaps you want your readers to rage against the machine, develop a political awareness, change the way they think or vote. You may want to look at the great German playwright and theorist Berthold Brecht for some ideas. He felt you should never let your audience forget they are watching a performance, or become emotionally bound up in the fate of the central character. Either of those allows them off the hook – the need to change their own ideas and behaviour, to work for change in the world at large. He used techniques like breaking the scenes up with songs which commented on or explained what had just been seen, or using captions to explain the point of what was about to be shown. He would give attractive characters flaws or make them behave atrociously, and make unattractive characters show understanding or decency. Scenes might vary in length or introduce sudden direct addresses to the audience, broad comedy or visual horror. All of these have writer-ly equivalents.

I could go on, but not this time. I have been lucky enough to have been able to read a lot of plays and about a lot of theatrical ideas. And, as a writer, I profoundly believe that no reading is ever truly wasted.