o, dramaturgy!

o, dramaturgy!
by Phil Smith, playwright

Be careful when you open your mouth between rehearsals - you may end up writing articles on the end of your rhetoric. Suspect all motives, all opinions.

Expressing such things can be fatal to your economics – you never know who’s listening and people can go off you. It’s not personal. It’s business. But this is about craft. An anachronism, I know.

What follows is an ill-advised gloss on a few premeditated comments about being a dramaturg, which occasionally I am – more an activity than an identity.

I didn’t set out to be a dramaturg. I answered a phone call, not an advertisement. A friend, Paul Stebbings, from college; co-founder with me of Bristol Gate – a short-lived and over-populated company. He’d split from a humourless physical theatre company and needed an outside eye on his next project.

The piece was already very theatrical, but my role was to increase that theatricality. I suggested very little change to the script – indeed by then the text and the action would have been hard to divide – but on the next show I was editing the second draft and adding ideas and dialogue.

Written in 1980 and 1981 these two shows ran for many years and one was still being performed last year, 23 years on. Something must have been right about that process. The company was TNT, now based in Munich. Where my stomach was born. I was always described as the company “dramaturg” – a role which has been an elastic one. Sometimes I’ve been co-writer, sometimes almost the director. But never literary manager – I’ve never had any voice in the choice of subject matter or text (except “is it feasible?”) That’s fine with me. I’m a literary foot soldier.

Sometimes I’ve written the first draft, sometimes made minor amendments to Paul’s first draft – it’s always different – sometimes my work is to prepare with Paul the conceptual framework for the production of an existing text, but always the focus is on theatricalising the material. (Theatre mimics more than enough other forms; surely, the point is to be itself.)

There is nothing demeaning or uncreative about such preparation, it is an adventure, an exploration: in Macbeth, grasping that the ‘familiars’ called the weird sisters and not the other way round affected the whole world of the play, finding the goddess in King Lear, foregrounding the anti-semitism in Oliver Twist, and beginning A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream with 4 minutes of gender-violence (Athenians versus Amazons) showed just what was at stake in this comedy. (None of this is addition or invention, but part of the work of reclaiming texts from ideology, in particular from the naturalist distortions of the work of Miller, Kesey, Golding.)

This anti-realism is often a reclaiming of performative and theatrical elements in original works, and this return to or drawing out (even foregrounding) of theatricality that I, for a reason hopefully grounded in historical practice, believe (or more probably have been told and remember as my own opinion) to be a role not dissimilar to that of European nineteenth century dramaturgs working on the texts of poets writing for the stage. (The kind of work that might be required to fit Ibsen’s early work - Brand or Peer Gynt - to the limitations of the nineteenth century stage.) For my personal practice as a dramaturg this is a relationship not only with the dead but also with the distant licence of Paul Auster and Alan Sillitoe.

I wish that there was more of such theatricalising dramaturgy today; allowing dramatists to be less ‘realistic’, to be more speculative, symbolist and intellectual. And let alchemical dramaturgs find the hybrid practicality.

As a writer I have also experienced the close up and nothing personal of dramaturgy from the other side of the sheet of paper. Working with dramaturg Katalin Trencsényi on ‘Sprout’ (directed by Deborah Wilding at Proteus) has been a model experience. Not just that Katalin liked the script, but that from the start that did not stop her making a series of practical and useful detailed suggestions for changes and then, when we hit a structural problem, (two endings!) she operated with exactly the same blend of discretion and frankness – we pruned the sub-plot and regained the focus. Crucially this change came late on and was theatrically driven. I was immediately convinced of the need for change because I knew it came from an understanding, not from any other drive.

Where I have had problems with dramaturgs (in name or not) in the past has often been due to cutting the text too hastily for literary, rational or ‘practical’ reasons, rather than on account of theatrical considerations.

I have come to see the role of a dramaturg rather at odds with that of the decision-maker, at odds with the collapsing of the roles of literary manager with dramaturg. (I was once recommended to write poetical plays – as opposed to ‘in-yer-face’ – by a literary manager/dramaturg and the advice killed any desire for what I longed to write. We don’t all respond to time.)

The one really spectacularly (in the sense of Debord) dreadful experience (that’s fine in about 120 shows, can’t complain) was with a panicking (with some reason) director, interpreting absurdity as silliness and (no doubt for the common good) dropped the crucial scenes that might have explained the obscenities of authoritarianism. Interestingly the scenes chopped were the strongest – it WAS an odd script but if the director had hung on, trusted, maybe with the help of a dramaturg intermediary, it might have worked as a play (rather than the strange portmanteau piece that emerged for the road).

Maybe I’m just biased by and towards the nature of my own dramaturgical practice, but I do think that dramaturgs (and directors when they take on that role for themselves) should take their cue from theatrical considerations and results on the rehearsal floor – a good decision taken late is a logistical problem to be overcome, a bad decision taken early is a deadly disease not easily cured.

Posted by Hanna at 03:54 PM in Articles | Email this entry

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