Insider’s Guide to Dramatic Play and Screenplay Writing

Aristotle required that a play should have a beginning, middle and end. A tendency exists to rebel against this requirement - as many plays do not end, but simply “leave off”, for example Ibsen’s “Ghosts”.

The playwright deals with short, sharp crises, not with protracted sequences of events. The question for him, is: At what moment of the crisis, or of its preceding development, would be the best place to begin? The answer depends on many things, but chiefly on the nature of the crisis and what impression the dramatist desires to make upon his audience. In a comedy, if his object is to gently and quietly interest and entertain, he may begin by showing us his personages in their normal state, concisely indicates their characters, circumstances and relations, and then lets the crisis develop from the outset before our eyes. If he wants to seize the spectator’s attention firmly from the start, he will probably go straight at the crisis, to the very middle of it, and afterwards go back in order to explain to the audience the preceding circumstances.

In some plays of Ibsen, the curtain rises on a surface aspect of profound peace, which is soon found to be but a thin crust over an absolutely volcanic condition of affairs, the origin of which has to be traced backwards, maybe for many years.

Considering Shakespeare’s openings - at what points does he attack his various themes? Most of his comedies begin with a simple, quiet conversation, with latent but rapid crisis development – but no plunging into it. In his fictitious plays it was Shakespeare’s constant practice to bring the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be conveyed in a few casual words. Two notable exceptions are “The Tempest” and “Hamlet”, where he plunged
into the middle of the crisis because his object was to concentrate his
effects and present the dramatic elements of his theme at their
highest potency.

In the tragedies, Shakespeare mostly began with a picturesque, crisp and stirring episode of vehement action, calculated to arrest the spectator’s attention and spark the interest, while conveying little or no information, but appealing to the nerves and arousing anticipation in just the right measure. It is very import to discover just the right point at which to raise the curtain.

The dramatic effect of incidents is incalculably heightened when the emotions of the characters are peaked. The dramatic quality of an incident is proportionate to the variety and intensity of the emotions involved in it.

In Ibsen’s work we find an extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past as to make the gradual revelation an integral part of the drama of the present. The secret of the depth and richness of texture so characteristic of Ibsen’s work, lay in his art of closely interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic interest to the unveiling of the past in “Ghosts”.

There are masterpieces in which the whole crisis falls within the frame of the picture, and masterpieces in which the greater part of the crisis has to be conveyed to us in retrospect. One method is not better than the other.