The challenge is to provide the audience’s interest with a clearly-foreseen point in the next act towards which it can reach onwards, or with a definite enigma, the solution of which can be looked forward to with impatient excitement. Intromissions of the supernatural provided a convenient method for the playwright to point the audience to where he wants the play to: “foreshadowing without forestalling.”

However well known a play may be, the playwright must assume that in every audience there will be a number of persons who know practically nothing about it, and whose enjoyment will depend, like that of the first-night audience, on the skill with which he develops his
story. On the other hand, he can never rely on taking an audience by
surprise at any particular point.

The dramatist has little option but to assume complete ignorance in his audience, but only the first-night audience will be entirely in this condition, since the more successful the play is, the more extensively subsequent audiences will tend to have prior knowledge about it.

Experience shows that dramatic “interest” is entirely distinct from mere “curiosity”, and survives when curiosity is dead. Though a skillfully told story is not of itself enough to secure long life for a play, it enhances the attractiveness of a play which has other and higher claims to longevity. The arousing and sustaining of curiosity should be a primary concern, but it is only a means to the more abiding forms of interest. With too to little foresee in the road ahead, the audience’s particular interest may fade.

However well we may know a play beforehand, we seldom know it by heart or nearly by heart – so that, though we may anticipate a development in general outline, we do not clearly foresee the ordering of its details, which may give us almost the same sort of pleasure that it gave us when the story was new to us. A great play is like a great piece of music: we can hear it repeatedly and every time discover new subtle beauties and complex harmonies, enjoying the better and lesser merits of each time it is performed. In truly great drama, the foreknowledge possessed by the audience is not a disadvantage, but is the source of the highest pleasure that the theatre is capable of affording. “Curiosity “ is the accidental enjoyment of a single night’s performance, whereas the essential and abiding pleasure of the theatre lies in foreknowledge.

It is not about how much or how little is conveyed to the audience in the first act, but whether their interest is aroused, and skillfully carried forward. When the curtain is down the action on the stage remains in suspense and the audience is quite willing to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed since the previous act ended. Some playwrights, like Sir Arthur Pinero in “Iris”, drop the curtain once or twice in the middle of an act, to indicate a time interval.

The first act should show us clearly who the characters are, what their relations and relationships are, and what the nature of the gathering crisis is. It is very important to keep the relationships simple, since intricacies will often prove to be mere useless encumbrances.

The good plays are those of which the story can be clearly summarized in ten lines, while it may take a column to give even a confused idea of the plot of a lesser play. A useful guideline is whether the core of the subject can be formulated in about a hundred words.

The first act should be placing the situation clearly before us, pointing and carrying the story line distinctly towards the heart of the play and the developing crisis, especially in three-act plays, to sustain the interest of the audience. Too much should not be told, so that the remaining acts be weakened, nor should any one scene be so intense so it outshines all subsequent scenes and leave the rest of the play with an effect of an anti-climax. The point at which the drama enfolds – the germination of the crisis where the drama sets in, can be very functional if appearing in the first act. The playwright would be wise not to assume previous knowledge of plot or character on the part of the public.

Bernard Shaw did write some plays in one continuous gush of dialogue, in unity of time and place, a continuous mass or mash, e.g. “Getting Married” where he relies upon his virtuosity of dialogue to enable him to dispense with form. He claimed that he is thereby reviving the practice of the Greeks, a claim that can be shown to be unfounded. A typical example of Greek tragedy, “Oedipus”, shows the unity of carefully calculated proportion, order, interrelation of parts … the unity of a fine piece of architecture, or of a living organism.
Note the difference between the formless continuity of “Getting
Married”, and the precise ordering and balancing of clearly differentiated parts in the structure of a Greek tragedy. The division into acts remains a valuable means of marking the rhythm of the story. When there is no story to tell, the division into acts is probably superfluous.

A play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is of a higher artistic order than a play with no act-structure. The dramatist analyze the crises with which he deals, and present them to the audience in their rhythm of growth, culmination and solution. The division into acts helps to mark that rhythm. Aristotle had the necessity for marking this rhythm in mind when he said that a dramatic action must have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Taken in its simplicity, this principle would indicate the three-act division as the ideal scheme for a play. Many of the best modern plays in all languages fall into three acts. The three-act division shouldn’t be more made into an absolute rule than the five-act division. Many modern serious plays are in four acts. A play ought to consist of a great crisis, worked out through a series of minor crises. An act ought to consist either of a minor crisis carried to its temporary solution, or of a random number of such crises grouped together in the development of a given theme. Five acts may be regarded as the maximum because of the time-limit imposed by social custom on a performance.

It’s difficult to produce a play of very complex psychological, moral, or
emotional substance, in which the whole crisis comes within the frame of the picture. The method of attacking the crisis in the middle or towards the end is really a device for the relaxing, to some extent, the narrow bounds of theatrical representation, and enabling the playwright to deal with a larger segment of human experience. Shakespeare had really far more elbow room than the playwright of today with respect to the length of the play, but plays like Othello and King Lear are not very complex character studies, although projected with huge energy. Shakespeare had room as was allowed by the copious expression permitted by the rhetorical Elizabethian form. Today’s playwright is hampered by often having to work in indirect suggestion than in direct expression.

One of the keenest forms of theatrical enjoyment is that of seeing the curtain go up on a picture of perfect tranquility, wondering from what quarter the drama is going to arise, and then watching the storm gather on the horizon, as in “An enemy of the people”. Sometimes the atmosphere is already charged with electricity when the play opens, like in “The Case of Rebellious Susan” by Henry Arthur Jones.
When an exposition can’t be dramatized enough through the action from the characters primarily concerned, it is better to dismiss it in any natural and probable way. If all of a given subject cannot be covered within the limits of presentation, is there any means of determining how much should be left for retrospect? The curtain should be raised at the point where the crisis begins to move towards its solution, more or less rapidly and continually. Interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not be fragmented away on subsidiary or preliminary personages.

When the attention of the audience is required for an exposition of any
length, some attempt ought to be made to awaken in advance their general interest in the theme and characters. It is dangerous to plunge straight into narrative, or unemotional discussion, without having first made the audience actively desire the information to be conveyed to them. It essential that the audience should know clearly who are the subjects of the discussion or narrative – that they should not be mere names to them. Keen expectancy is the most desirable frame of mind in which an audience can be placed, so long as the expectancy does not ultimately disappoint.

Where it is desired to give to one character a special prominence and predominance, it should be the first figure on which the eye of the audience falls. Let the first ten minutes be crisp, arresting, stimulating, but don’t cover any absolutely vital matter, which would leave the spectator in the dark as to the general design and purpose of the play.

The playwright deals with short, sharp crises, not with protracted sequences of events. The question for him, is: At what moment of the crisis, or of its preceding development, would be the best place to begin? The answer depends on many things, but chiefly on the nature of the crisis and what impression the dramatist desires to make upon his audience. In a comedy, if his object is to gently and quietly interest and entertain, he may begin by showing us his personages in their normal state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our eyes. If he wants to seize the spectator’s attention firmly from the start, he will probably go straight at the crisis, to the very middle of it, and afterwards go back in order to explain to the audience the preceding circumstances.

In some plays of Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which is soon found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, maybe for many years.

Considering Shakespeare’s openings – at what points does he attack his various themes? Most of his comedies begin with a simple, quiet conversation, with latent but rapid crisis development – but no plunging into it. In his fictitious plays it was Shakespeare’s constant practice to bring the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be conveyed in a few casual words. Two notable exceptions are “The Tempest” and “Hamlet”, where he plunged
into the middle of the crisis because his object was to concentrate his
effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
highest potency.

In the tragedies, Shakespeare mostly began with a picturesque, crisp and stirring episode of vehement action, calculated to arrest the spectator’s attention and spark the interest, while conveying little or no information, but appealing to the nerves and arousing anticipation in just the right measure. It is very import to discover just the right point at which to raise the curtain.

The dramatic effect of incidents is incalculably heightened when the emotions of the characters are peaked. The dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety and intensity of the emotions involved in it.

In Ibsen’s work we find an extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past as to make the gradual revelation an integral part of the drama of the present. The secret of the depth and richness of texture so characteristic of Ibsen’s work, lay in his art of closely interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic interest to the unveiling of the past in “Ghosts”.

There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect. One method is not better than the other.