1.4 The routine of composition
Valuable insight into the methods of a master is provided by the
scenarios and drafts of plays published in Henrik Ibsen’s “Efterladte
Skrifter”, some of which now have been translated under the title of “From Ibsen’s Workshop” (Scribner), and well worth studying.
The great lesson to be learnt from Ibsen’s practice is that the play should be kept fluid or plastic as long as possible, and not allowed to become fixed, either in the author’s mind or on paper, before it has
had time to grow and ripen. Many of Ibsen’s greatest individual inspirations came to him as afterthoughts, after the play had
reached a point of development at which many authors would have considered the work of art ripe for birth.
A good work method for the playwright is to the draw up a tentative scenario - a detailed scheme. In a dramatic structure of any considerable length, proportion, balance, and the interconnection of parts are so essential that a scenario is almost as indispensable to a dramatist as a set of plans to an architect. Bernard Shaw is thought to have sometimes worked without any definite scenario, and inventing as he goes along - to the detriment of plays like “Getting Married” or “Misalliance”.
Composition-as–you-go may only be possible for the novelist or perhaps even for the writer of a one-act play, but hardly wise.
Sardou wrote careful and detailed scenarios, Dumas felt it is a waste of time to do so. Pailleron wrote “enormous” scenarios, Meilhac very brief ones, or none at all. Galsworthy thought that a theme becomes lifeless when you put down its skeleton on paper. Alfred Sutro says: “Before I start writing the dialogue of a play, I make sure that I shall have an absolutely free hand over the entrances and exits: in other words, that there is ample and legitimate reason for each character appearing in any particular scene, and ample motive for his leaving it.” Granville Barker says: “I plan the general scheme, and particularly the balance of the play, in my head”. Henry Arthur Jones says: “I know the leading scenes, and the general course of action in each act, before I write a line. When I have got the whole story clear, and divided into acts, I very carefully construct the first act, as a series of scenes between such and such of the characters. When the first act is written I carefully construct the second act in the same way…. I sometimes draw up twenty scenarios for an act before I can get it to go straight.”
In the transition from extempore acting regulated by a written scenario only the formal learning of parts falls within the historical period of the German stage. It seems probable that the romantic playwrights of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, both in England and in Spain, may have adopted a method not unlike that of the drama of improvisation. They may have drawn out a scheme of entrances and exits, and then let their characters discourse (on paper) as their fancy prompted. Typical modern plays are much more close-knit, in which every word has to be weighed far more carefully than it was by playwrights during the days of improvisation. Until a play has been thought out very clearly in great detail, any scheme of entrances and exits is merely provisional and may be indefinitely modified. A close interdependence exists between action, character and dialogue, which forbids a playwright to tie his hands at an early stage with a fixed and unalterable outline. It may be a powerful, logical, well-knit piece of work, but may miss flexibility, vibrancy and life. Room should be left as long as possible for unexpected developments of character.
M. François de Curel, an accomplished psychologist, mentions that during the first few days of work at a play he is “clearly conscious of creating,” but that gradually he gets “into the skin” of his characters, and appears to work by instinct. No doubt some artists are actually subject to a sort of hallucination, during which they seem rather to record than to invent the doings of their characters. Fitch was often astonished at the way in which his characters developed. He tried to make them do certain things: they did others. Sir Arthur Pinero says: “The beginning of a play to me is a little world of people. I live with them, get familiar with them, and “they” tell me the story.” He meant that the story came to him as the characters took on life in his imagination.