1.2 To choose a theme Continued
Whatever maybe the seed that started a play - whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or personal experience, a newspaper headline, an emotional adventure or an incident in the street - the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into its development. Mr. Henry Arthur Jones writes: “Sometimes I start with a scene only, sometimes with a complete idea. Sometimes a play splits into two plays, sometimes two or three ideas combine into a concrete whole. Always the final play is altered out of all knowledge from its first idea.” “My experience is,” another dramatist wrote, “that you never deliberately choose a theme. You lie awake, or you go walking, and suddenly there flashes into your mind a contrast, a piece of spiritual irony, an old incident carrying some general significance. Round this your mind broods, and there is the germ of your play.” He writes: “It is not advisable for a playwright to start out at all unless he has so felt or seen something, that he feels, as it matures in his mind, that he must express it, and in dramatic form.”
The difference between a “live” play and a “dead” one is that in the former the characters control the plot, while in the latter the plot controls the characters. Which is not to say, of course, that there may not be clever and entertaining plays which are “dead” in this sense, and dull and unattractive plays which are “live.”
Aristotle remarked that the action or “muthos”, not the character or “ethos”, is the essential element in drama. He views action to be the essential element in tragedy and not merely the necessary vehicle of character. “In a play,”he says, “they do not act in order to portray the characters, they include the characters for the sake of the action. A play can exist without anything that can be called character, but not without some sort of action. A tragedy is impossible without action, but there may be one without character. This is implied in the very word “drama,” which means a doing, not a mere saying or existing. Deeds, not words, are the demonstration and test of character - therefore, historically it has been the recognized business of the theatre to exhibit character in action or the portrayal of an action … some exploit or some calamity in the career of some demigod or hero. Story or plot is thus by definition, tradition, and practical reason, the fundamental element in drama. But action ought to exist for the sake of character.
Sometimes the impulse to write a play exists in the abstract, unassociated with any particular subject, and the would-be playwright proceeds, as he thinks, to set his imagination to work, and invent a story. Care needs to be taken here, since when we think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very prone to be ransacking the store-house of memory and it may not be as original as we thought. The plot “which chooses us” is much more dependable to be original … the idea which comes when we least expect it, perhaps from the most unlikely quarter.
Whatever principles of conception and construction apply to the modern prose drama, apply with equal cogency to the poetic drama. For instance, we may find reason to think the soliloquy more excusable in verse than in prose. But fundamentally, the two forms are ruled by the same set of conditions, which the verse-poet, no less than the prose-poet, can’t ignore. If, in the course of his legendary, romantic, or historical reading, some character should catch his imagination and demand to be interpreted, or some episode should startle him by putting on vivid dramatic form before his mind’s eye, then let him by all means yield to the inspiration, and try to mould the theme into a drama. The real labor of creation will still lie before him, but he may face it with the hope of producing a live play.