Before attempting to write a tragedy, the playwright should make sure that the theme lends itself to real tragedy, with all the dynamic angles you can place your hero in relation to life and death. The study of character must be profound before the author can justify any death sentences on his personages. We all need to die some day, but the hero must be large enough in life and studied in depth before death could be considered a proportionate close. Aristotle thought that a tragic hero must be too good, or too bad, and death on the stage brings an inherent distinction that demands a sufficient cause. Today we look at the bigger picture of drama objectively and don’t calculate to what degree a man has “deserved” an honorable death. To be able to believe in the character, we need to know him intimately and share his feelings – feel “with” him, and believe that he “dies because he can not live”.

Ibsen never used death as a mere way to escape from problems. In five of thirteen plays, no one dies at all. Playwrights should guard against the temptation to use suicide as a way of untangling or cutting the knotted rope of life. Death by fatal accident is frowned upon in serious drama, and murder is more popular in melodrama. Suicide gets to be used, over used and sometimes abused. It ought to be the
playwright’s, as it is the man’s, last resort. In most countries, suicide is greatly on the increase, and the motives driving people to it would be of a dramatic nature. But it remains a crude and insensitive departure from the entanglement of life and not to be used lightly by the dramatist. The characters need to be large enough, true enough, living enough and the play should probe deep enough into human experience to make the intervention of death seem less incongruous.

Sometimes the end is imposed upon the dramatist by the whole drift and direction of his action. Chance plays a large part in the way events enfold, for instance, if Leonard Ferris had not happened to live at the top of a very high building, Zoe would not have encountered the sudden temptation to jump, to which she yields in Sir Arthur Pinero’s play. Zoe experiences her life to be miserable and a hopeless muddle. She has a good heart, but no interests and no ideals, apart from the personal satisfactions which have now been poisoned at their source. She has messed up other peoples’ lives and intervened disastrously in their destinies. She is ill, her nerves are all on edge and she is desperate enough to use this rapid, but not easy exit.

Another “justified” use of suicide may be found in Galsworthy’s “Justice”. The play is about all the forces of society hounding a luckless youth to his end, having gotten on the wrong side of the law.

Sometimes playwrights come across a theme for which there is no conceivable ending but suicide. If a theme does not force upon him a specific kind of last act, but enables him to sustain and increase the tension up to the very close without having to resort to death to help carry the tension, a playwright can feel happy. Such themes are not too common, but they do occur, like Dumas found in “Denise” and “Francillon”, Shaw’s “Candida” and “The Devil’s Disciple” and Galsworthy’s “Strife”. In plays which do not end in death, it will generally be found that the culminating scene occurs in the penultimate act, and that, if anticlimax is avoided, it is by its skilful renewal and reinforcement in the last act and not by the maintenance of an unbroken tension. Of the most successful plays have been those in which the last act came as a pleasant surprise. An anticlimax had seemed inevitable, but the playwright had found a way out of it, like in “An Enemy of the People”. In some modern plays a full close is achieved by altogether omitting the last act, or last scene, and leaving the end of the play to the imagination.

The end of a play should satisfy us inside – like our experience of truth, justice, humor, vanity of aspiration, etc. If it does not, it leaves one unfulfilled and without closure – and dissatisfied.

Two famous plays employ blind-alley themes – “Measure for Measure” (Shakespeare) and “Monna Vanna” (Maeterlinck). Shakespeare,
confesses the problem insoluble in the fact that he leaves it
unsolved – evading it by means of a mediaeval trick. Isabella is forced to choose between what can only be described as two detestable evils. What is the use of presenting it? What is the artistic profit of letting the imagination play around a problem which merely baffles and repels it? Though the play contains some wonderful poetry, and has been revived from time to time, it has never taken any real hold upon popular esteem – since it does not ultimately satisfy.

The challenge of these two themes is not merely that they are “unpleasant.” It is that there is no possible way out of them that is not worse than unpleasant: humiliating and distressing. The playwright should make sure that he has some sort of satisfaction to offer the audience at the end, before he chooses to embark on a blind-alley theme.

Examples of themes that are better to avoid:
· Marriage – over used and too conventional
· Revenge – an outworn passion of vindictiveness
· Heroic self-sacrifice – an outworn passion
· oath or promise of secrecy

The higher the form of drama, the more truth and the dramatic effects may seem to clash. In melodrama, the curtain falls when the hero is rescued and the handcuffs are transferred to the villain’s wrists. In an adventure play, farcical or romantic, the play is done when the adventure is over. In the higher order plays, the challenge is often inherent in the theme to be brought to a natural ending, to get the crisis to resolve decisively with dramatic crispness and avoiding mechanically forced endings.

The relaxed approach to Aristotle’s form of “beginning, middle and end” may suggest a new intimate relation to life and sincerity of artistic experience. It is a natural development and doesn’t imply a decline in craftsmanship. Themes should be judged in accordance with their inherent quality, and authors and critics alike should learn to distinguish the themes that do call for a definite solution from the themes which do not. Endings should not be indecisive, careless, huddled up or makeshift. An “unemphatic” ending can be in the form of a deliberate anti-climax following a much elevated tension line in the penultimate act and it can be that the consequences of a great emotional or spiritual crisis cannot always be worked out within a short time of it’s culmination.

A good example of an unemphatic ending is the last act of Arthur
Pinero’s “Letty”. This justified anticlimax is not an artistic blemish or mistake. The play could have ended with Letty’s awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere’s rooms. There is no indecisiveness here. But the author wanted to draw a character, and it was essential to our full appreciation of Letty’s character that we should know what she made of her life.

An act of anticlimax should be treated as unpretentiously and with the least emphasis as possible. To make major scene changes is to emphasize the anticlimax by throwing it into unnecessary relief.

Some modern dramatists have gone to the other extreme in moving away from the conventional patterns, to that extreme of always dropping their curtain when the audience least expects it, and may experience it as very disconcerting. This is not a practice to be commended and the fall of the curtain should not take an audience entirely by surprise. The audience should feel the moment to be rightly chosen too. To let a play, or an act, drag on when the audience feels in its heart that it is really over, is very dangerous. A remarkable play, “The Madras House”, was ruined on its first night by a too long final anticlimax, and disinterest in the final dialogue and the choice of leading characters for the last scene.