Insider’s Guide to Dramatic Play and Screenplay Writing

Aristotle said that in drama, “the probable impossible is to be preferred to the improbable possible”. Plausibility is more important on the stage than probability. If a thing seems plausible an audience will accept it, but if it seems incredible at face value, it may be impossible to overcome the prejudice against it. Therefore an improbable or unacceptable incident can’t be validly defended on the plea that it actually happened or was published in the newspapers. The playwright can never recreate a situation on the stage as it actually happened. It may be historically factual and accurate, but the dramatist cannot restore the incident to its place of cause and effect, which is the essence and meaning of reality. He can only give his interpretation of the fact.

Probability or verisimilitude is the goal, since the stage is the realm of make-believe and appearance, not of reality or truth or literal faithfulness to recorded fact. As long as it is convincing in relation to human nature in general, it may be agreeable and entertaining without being conspicuously false to human nature and will do no harm, since it makes no pretence to be historic truth. The artist must respect the conditions and limitations of the medium in which he works and try to keep out of his dialogue expressions that are too peculiar to a specific circle, and to use only what may be called the current “everybody’s language”.

Plausibility can be achieved on three different planes:

· the purely external plane: plausibility of costume, of manners, of dialect, of general environment.
· Plausibility of uncharacteristic circumstance: independent of the will or psychology of the characters, chance and accident, coincidence, and all “circumstances over which we have no control”. Coincidence is a special and complex form of chance. Both terms come from the Latin “cadere,”- to fall. Chance is a falling-out, like dice, and coincidence is if all are sixes, (unless the dice were cogged). The playwright may let chance play its probable part in the affairs of his characters, but as soon as it gets too good to be true, the audience swallow the proceedings under protest. That the catastrophe of “Romeo and Juliet” should depend upon a series of chances, and especially on the miscarriage of the Friar’s letter to Romeo, is criticized, but it’s validity is debatable. In ”Oedipus Rex”, an astonishing series of amazing coincidences mixed with fate happen. “Character is destiny,” but if too many coincidences are invented to
serve an artist’s purposes, we feel that he is taking advantage and plunging into the improbable, and coincidence may have been abused. Most of the most outrageous coincidences occur in forgotten plays, some of which may have survived if the element of coincidence was limited to a more acceptable level, although they were intended to be realistic and aimed at a literal and sober representation of life, such as Arthur Pinero’s “The Profligate” and Walter Frith’s “The Man of Forty”.

· psychological plausibility, the plausibility of events dependent on character and truth.

Sarcey states that audiences would generally “swallow a camel, in the past, though they will strain at a gnat in the present”. Events that were logical, plausible, and entertaining and supposed to have occurred before the rise of the curtain are easily accepted by the public, who are less apt to scrutinize things merely narrated to them than events which take place in front of their eyes.

Several classes of charming plays exist that are delightfully ingenious and improbable: romances, farces, some light comedies and semi-comic melodramas. Examples are Sir Arthur Pinero’s farces, Carton’s
light comedies, “Lord and Lady Algy”, “Wheels within Wheels”, “Lady
Huntworth’s Experiment”. Their charm lies in a subtle improbability and a delicate infusion of fantasy and humor so that the total effect is far more entertaining than that of any probable sequence of events in real life. The tendency to abuse coincidence was inherited by modern drama from the Latin comedy, which was founded on the Greek New Comedy.