1.1 Introduction Continued
Isn’t it better to write plays instead of writing about them? A person may have a great love for an art, and have some insight into its principles and methods, but lack the innate ability required to create an original piece of art. On the other hand, some gifted and excellent playwrights often lack the ability or patience to guide and mentor novices. An accomplished dramatist may often not be the best guide for novice dramatists. He can’t analyze his own performance, and through that discriminate between that in his performance which is of universal validity, and that which may be good for him, but would be bad for any one else.
If he happened to be a great man, he would inevitably, even if unconsciously, seek to expose those he mentors to his individual attitude towards life. If he were a lesser man, he would teach them only his tricks. But dramatists do not tend to take pupils or write handbooks. When they expound their principles of art, it is generally in answer to, or in anticipation of criticism. Their goal is not to help others, but to defend themselves. Beginners are therefore mostly dependent on critics, and not dramatists, to find any systematic guidance.
It is important to understand that if any part of the dramatist’s art can be taught, it is only a comparatively mechanical and formal part: the art of structure. One may learn how to tell a story in good dramatic form, how to develop and direct it in such a way as best seize and retain the interest of a theatrical audience. But no teaching or study can enable a man to choose or invent a good story, and much less to do that which alone lends dignity to dramatic story-telling – to observe and portray human character, which is the aim and end of all serious drama.
Even the greatest genius needs competent craftsmanship to enable his creations to live and breathe upon the stage. The profoundest insight into human nature and destiny can’t be validly expressed through the medium of the theatre without some understanding of the peculiar art of dramatic construction. Some people are born with such an instinct for this art, and master it with little practice.
To tell a story with impact to a theatre audience is an art and is necessarily relative to the audience to whom the story is to be told. One must assume an audience with certain characteristics before one can rationally discuss the best methods of appealing to its intelligence and its sympathies.
Theatrical art owes much to voluntary organizations of playgoers, who have combined to provide themselves with forms of drama which specially interest them, and do not necessarily attract the great public. Molière was popular with the ordinary people of his day, and his plays have endured for over two centuries, and are still doing very well.
A playwright should be able to “disburden his soul” within the three hours’ limit, which is imposed simply by the physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded of human beings assembled in a theatre. There is a large class of playgoers which is capable of appreciating work of a high intellectual order, if only the fundamental conditions of theatrical presentation are not ignored, as doing so will be to the detriment, not only of his popularity and profits, but of the artistic quality of his work. Why should the dramatist concern himself about his audience, if he is a true artist? If he declares his goal to be mere self-expression and he writes to please himself, without thinking to take into account the audience – intellectual or not – he may stultify himself in that very phrase. It is by obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest intellectual level which he himself can attain. The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself, but drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism devised to bring it home in an immediate way to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. The public constitutes the theatre. The real difference between the dramatist and other artists, is that they can be their own audience, in a sense in which he can’t.
This guide is aimed at students of play writing who sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of course, that they ought always to be studying “what the public wants”. The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants, but in such form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.