Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2019 by Bloomsbury Publishing

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Writing for the theatre

From the perspective of a playwright, David Eldridge describes the process of writing a play, its production, through to a run at a theatre.

Writing the play

Ideas for plays can come from anywhere. Political anger, a riff of dialogue, an image, some experience in your life, a newspaper article, a dream or fantasy, or from a particular actor you admire. As Caryl Churchill says, ‘What’s the difference between an idea for a play [sic]? I think the only difference is that you want to make [it] into a play, the point at which [it] become[s] an idea for a play is when you get some sort of technical or physical way of turning it into a play’. Wherever your ideas for plays come from, the key thing is that you are fired up by your idea.

So you have your idea – a biting political satire or a fantastical farce fuelled by a lost dog – and you’ve decided whether it’s going to be a stichomythic two-hander or a surreally big cast piece. It could be that your story will be told in a form with which an audience is familiar and that inspires you – Chekhovian four-act movement or a fragmented narrative inspired by the plays of Martin Crimp. But what next? Some writers are planners by nature and have everything mapped out on A4 or in notebooks, and spend weeks structuring the drama before any physical action or dialogue is written. Stephen Jeffreys and Simon Stephens are good examples of playwrights who work in this way. But for others, like Robert Holman or David Storey, often even thinking of the possible shape of a play is an anathema, and structuring is a block to them. They like to start with an image or a line, or even a blank page, and find out what ‘it’ is as they go along. I’m somewhere in the middle; I need to do a little bit of planning to get me going and to avoid false starts, but if there’s too much plotting in advance it becomes drained of life. It’s true, too, that each play I’ve written has been made in a different way. So it seems there’s not only as many ways to write a play as there are playwrights.

In the absence of a right way to do it, the best thing is just to get on and do your own thing, what feels right for you – anything really, as long as you write. ‘Don’t get it right, get it written’, is how it goes. I always remind myself that I’m under no obligation to show anyone what I’ve written, so I try not to fear anything. If what I write is rubbish, I can just chuck it away. If what I write is promising but not perfect, I can come back to it later and improve it. The main thing is to write and get to the end. And when you’ve got to the end, you go back to the beginning again and work on it until you can do no more.

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