Insider’s Guide to Dramatic Play and Screenplay Writing

Secondary suspense or surprise is experienced in empathy with the characters, by a spectator who knows perfectly what is to follow. The dramatist should focus his main appeal on secondary suspense, for the longer his play endures, the larger will be the proportion of any given audience knowing it beforehand - in outline, if not in detail. A good example to extract the maximum effect from what might else have been an anti-climax, would be the death of Othello - no easy problem for Shakespeare. Desdemona was dead, Emilia dead, Iago wounded and doomed to torture. How was Othello’s death to be made the culminating moment of the tragedy, and not a foregone conclusion or a mere conventional suicide? Shakespeare’s dramatic genius shines unmistakably from Othello’s address, as he is being led away:

“Soft you; a word or two, before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know ‘t;
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice, then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him–thus!”

Here Shakespeare has thrown his audience off guard, just as Othello has done to his captors, and replaced the expected with a sudden shock of surprise. He re-invented the incident to be crisp instead of flaccid, thus giving it specific dramatic accent, a sudden thrill of novelty and unexpectedness. He succeeded in portraying “a given thing” in absolutely the most dramatic method conceivable.

The tendency of recent theory and practice, has been to widen the meaning of the word “dramatic”, until it bursts the bonds of all definition. A movement developed in reaction against the traditional “dramatic”, correcting conventional “theatricalism” in a valuable way. It has, at some points, positively enlarged the domain of dramatic art. It helped to free art from rigid rules and definitions. A very valid definition of the dramatic is: Any representation of imaginary personages which is capable of interesting an average audience assembled in a theatre. It is expected of original genius to override the dictates of experience, and it should be encouraged. In a certain type of play - the broad picture of a social phenomenon or environment - it is preferable that no attempt should be made to depict a marked crisis. There should be just enough story to afford a plausible excuse for raising and for lowering the curtain. On the other hand, theatrical conditions often encourage a violent exaggeration of the characteristically dramatic elements in life.

If the essence of drama is crisis, it follows that nothing can be more dramatic than a momentous choice which may make or break the character as well as the fortune of the chooser and of others. There is an element of choice in all action which seems to be the product of free will; but there is a peculiar crispness of effect when two alternatives are clearly formulated, and the choice is made after a mental struggle, accentuated, perhaps, by impassioned advocacy of the conflicting interests. Those who have mastered the extremely delicate and difficult art of creating drama without the characteristically dramatic ingredients should do so by all means. Hopefully they fairly allow freedom to others for the judicious and dramatic use of these ingredients as they present themselves in life.

The symbolical game of chess is also a well-worn dramatic tool.