People and playwrights make up rules about the theatre, drama and plays as they go along, learn and master new things, find the groove and/or style that works for them and so on. There are no formulas and rules really to hold as the ‘ideal’. It is what it is! Do not get so caught up in the nitty-gritty or mechanics of play-writing that it loses some of it fun, enjoyment and true core.

Drama-writers have lots to learn and discover, each separately and collectively, to unearth the beauty and art, refined craftsmanship that is play-writing! Good luck on your learning, journey of self-discovery into the wonderful arenas and universe that is theater and drama.

YOU TOO CAN MAKE THE MOST OF PLAY-WRITING, in its truest form, an art-form based and practices, on the interpretation of dramatic literature combining, playwriting, acting, directing, and stagecraft. Welcome to the world of riches that are plays or other dramatic performances!

There is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness. It is most destructive for a dramatist to pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of convention to another.

A drama with “soliloquies” and “asides” is like a picture with inscribed labels hanging from the mouths of the figures. The challenge of the playwright is to make his characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world. In serious modern drama the “aside” is now practically obsolete, such that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and audiences what to make of it. To read a letter aloud have validity, but a soliloquy has no real right of existence. It is a purely artificial unraveling of motive or emotion.

As absurd is the “one room one door” rule - the stage scene should provide a probable locality for whatever action is to take place in it, and doors in practical places where they are deemed functional. The prejudice that exists in some fields against the use of any form of written document on stage is as absurd. Letters play a gigantic part in the economy of modern life. Why banish them from the stage? Bernard Shaw, in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote, “Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else’s glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering.” The playwright’s sole and sufficient safeguard is to use his good intellect and common sense, and not to be intimidated with absurd ideas, and use whatever tools are needed on stage to deliver a good job.

Goldsmith, Farquhar and Steele, realized the superiority of humor to wit. With Byron it degenerated into mere punning and verbal horse play. In the early plays of Sir Arthur Pinero there was a great deal of extrinsic ornament, especially metaphor-hunting. Some of the later Elizabethans, notably Webster and Ford, cultivated a way of abrupt utterance, whereby an immensity of spiritual significance, generally tragic, was supposed to be concentrated into a few brief words. This did not last – and the plays also not. No play of which the dialogue places a constant strain on the intellectual abilities of the audience ever has held a place in living dramatic literature. It remains a constant challenge to the dramatist to keep his dialogue necessarily concentrated, but also plausibly near to the everyday language of life, and to achieve style in the process. Style, in prose drama, is the sifting of common speech to achieve a beauty of cadence and phrasing.
To be really dramatic, every speech must have some bearing, direct or indirect, upon individual human destinies in future, the present or the past. Where the audience doesn’t perceive this connection, the play, scene or speech may be experienced as dull.

To use blank verse as a medium rather than prose can be problematic, difficult and dangerous. Shakespeare “chose” verse as his medium, in the same sense in which Ibsen chose prose. They accepted it just as they accepted the other traditions of the theatre of their time. The history of the blank verse play proves that this medium is thoroughly dead and so incompatible to modern life and living language. If verse has any function on the stage, it is that of imparting lyric beauty to passionate speech. For the mere rhetorical “elevation” of blank verse we have no use whatever. It consists of saying simple things with pomposity. The idea that the poetry of drama should be sought specifically in verse has long ago been exploded by Ibsen and Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio and Synge.

Should we always aim to develop character? Character, for the practical purposes of the dramatist, may be defined as a complex of intellectual, emotional, and nervous habits, of which some are innate and temperamental. If we complain that a certain character does not develop (remains the same throughout the play), we imply that he ought, within the limits of the play, to have altered the mental habits underlying his speech and actions - more of an unveiling or disclosure than change, since the time in drama is very limited. A dramatic crisis should disclose latent qualities in the persons concerned in it, and involve a thorough manifestation of character that may cause positive change. How does the character react to a series of crucial experiences? At the end of a play the audience should know more of the protagonist’s character than he himself, or his most intimate friend, could know at the start, for the action should have exposed and put him to some searching and revealing tests. To study and paint a character can happen by placing him in a number of situations, to show how his principal motive force reacts, and what makes him tick. A character should be primarily seen as an individual, and only incidentally (if at all) classified under this type or that.

Is “psychology” the same as “character-drawing” or is there a distinction to be made? Character-drawing is to present human nature in its commonly recognized, understood and accepted aspects. Psychology is the exploration of character while bringing uncharted territory within the circle of our knowledge and comprehension. In other words, character-drawing is synthetic, psychology is analytic.

The dramatist Granville Barker excels in psychology. It is his instinct to venture into uncharted fields of character, or to probe deeply into phenomena that others have noted only superficially, if at all. So does William Vaughn Moody in “The Faith Healer”.

Questions to raise are: “Are we getting beneath the surface of this character’s nature? Are we plucking the heart out of his or her mystery? Can’t we make the specific processes of a murderer’s mind clearer to ourselves and to our audiences?” Every serious dramatist should not all the time be aiming at psychological exploration. The character-drawer’s appeal to common knowledge and intuitive recognition is very valuable and often sufficient. There are also occasions when the dramatist misses opportunities if he does not at least attempt to bring unrecorded phases of character within the scope of our understanding and our sympathies.

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.

A huge percentage of any subsequent audience will be certain to know all about it in advance. Surely, the more striking and successful the first-night effect of surprise is, the more rapidly the report of it will circulate through all strata of the theatrical public. A mystery play might make a great first-night success, but the more the playwright relies upon the mystery for effect, the more fatally would that effect be discounted at each successive repetition.

To actually keep a secret and appeal to the primary curiosity of actual ignorance may be ruled out as practically impossible, and not really worthy of serious art. But there is also the secondary curiosity of the audience that, knowing the facts more or less, judges the development of the play from an instinctive point of view of ignorance.

A play should be self-sufficient and not rely on previous knowledge of the audience, acquired from outside sources. The playwright must formally “assume” ignorance in his audience, though he must not practically “rely upon” it. It is really important to determine how long a secret may be kept from an audience, assumed to have no prior knowledge, and at what point it should be revealed. It is useless to keep a secret which, when revealed, is certain to disappoint the audience, and to make it feel underestimated.

In Bernard Shaw’s “The Devil’s Disciple”, in the second act, an example of inartistic secrecy is found - an injudicious, purposeless and foolish, keeping of a secret. It may be argued that Bernard Shaw was forced to make Judith misunderstand her husband’s motives in order to develop her character as he had conceived it. He was so bent on letting Judith continue to conduct herself idiotically, that he made her sensible husband act as idiotically, in order to throw dust in her eyes, and in the eyes of the audience as well, even using phrases carefully calculated to deceive both her and the audience.

In “Whitewashing Julia”, Henry Arthur Jones’s light comedy, it is proved that it is safely possible to keep a secret throughout a play, and never reveal it at all. He pretends that there is some explanation of Mrs. Julia Wren’s relations with the Duke of Savona, and keep the audience waiting for this “whitewashing” disclosure, while it was not really his plan. Julia says that “an explanation will be forthcoming at the right moment”, which never arrives. Julia thinks that there was never anything degrading in her conduct and the audience is asked to accept this as sufficient. The play’s success shows that in light comedy, keeping a secret can work well.

Keeping of a secret may diminish tension, and deprive the audience of that superior knowledge in which the irony of drama lies. In Walter Frith’s play, “Her Advocate” the question to be considered is whether the author did right in reserving the revelation of the secret to the last possible moment. Would he have done better to have given the audience an earlier clue of the true state of affairs - that the client loves another man and not the attorney? To keep the secret placed the audience as well as the advocate on a goose chase, and deprived it of the sense of superiority it would have felt in seeing him marching confidently towards an illusory happiness.

It may be dangerous and even foolish for an author to keep a secret from the audience, but the dramatist should not just reveal his secrets at random. The art lies in knowing just how long to keep silent and when is just the right time to share it. In Arthur Pinero’s “Letty” he gains a significant effect and proves that he knew perfectly well what he was doing by keeping a secret just long and carefully enough. He allowed the truth to slip out just in time to let the audience feel the whole force of irony during the last scene of the act and the greater part of the second act where the tension is delicately graded.

When a reasonable expectation is aroused, it should be fulfilled by the author. If a riddle is put forward, its answer must be pleasing and smart. If a secret is to be kept at all, it must be worth keeping or the audience will resent it. A good balance should be kept between effort and effect, and between promise and performance. The playwright should never shy away from some objective he set out to do. The art is to arouse just the right measure of anticipation, and fulfill it at just the right time. A correct insight into the mind of the audience is a good indication of the skill of the dramatist.