What's the Contract?

'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us...full of grace and truth’ 1)

These words from St John’s Gospel have always held a fascination for me as a playwright; not that I suffer from a ‘God’ complex, but there is something uncanny, almost other-worldly about dragging the lives and words of characters out of the ether and watching them take their first breath on stage, voiced by actors,  in front of an audience. 

But in these thoughts lies a fundamental conundrum about the art of theatre making: Who, ultimately, is responsible for what happens out there on the bare boards of Brook’s ‘Empty Space’ - the actor or the playwright? 

In the world of serious music a Beethoven Symphony is always just that - a Beethoven symphony. Of course we are always interested to hear that it is to be performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, for instance, under the direction of a master conductor such as Herbert Von Karajan perhaps, yet whilst these great artists are feted as interpreters of the great man’s music, there is never any sense that they take ownership of the work; it always remains a Beethoven Symphony.

In the theatre, however, the same case does not always pertain. How used we have become to talking about “Brook’s Dream” or “Schofield’s Lear”. Somewhere in such nomenclature, Shakespeare takes a back seat to the work of the interpretative artist; the play is still his, but the work of the actor and director somehow supersede the playwright in importance in the imposition of such titles. So what is the contract between the actor and the playwright in the art of theatre-making? And does such a situation only pertain to ‘dead playwrights’? Is it, in fact, any different for a living playwright?

My reflection in 2024 is that the ‘director/auteur’ is very much a concept rife in the 1980s/90s but that now, in 2024,  the actor is in the ascendancy. Accordingly, this examination of the relationship between the role of the playwright and the actor seems ever more pertinent in looking at the theatre we want to share with our audiences in 2024. 

In his terrific screen-play for ‘Riot at the Rite’: a film made by the BBC, and broadcast in March 2006, Kevin Elyot tells the story surrounding the premiere of ‘The Rite of Spring’ at the Theatre de Champs-Elysees, in Paris in May 1913.  The event drew the likes of Picasso, Cocteau, Proust, Ravel and Debussy to witness the first, sensational performance of this ballet written by Stravinsky and choreographed by the celebrated dancer, Nijinsky. In the dramatic build up to this first performance, there is a scene in the film where Stravinsky has just distributed the score to the musicians in the pit. They look askance at the music he has written; their sense of insecurity almost palpable until the leader of the orchestra breaks the silence and expresses the concerns they are all feeling. The scene explodes into life at this moment with Elyot conjuring the lines ...“I write! You play!” as the maestro berates his musicians for what he regards as their impudence.

Now I am not advocating such a dictatorial approach to the making of theatre, but the question still remains, ‘At what point does the sense of ownership in any performance pass from the playwright to the actor?’ To extend the biblical metaphor still further, we might categorise Stravinsky’s standpoint as representing that of the ‘Creationist’, where the playwright is ‘King/Queen’ and where he/she maintains total control over the meaning of the play in performance. 

So, in 2024, I still see this notion as being important, but, it begs the question,…. What is being passed from the playwright to the actor?’. Indeed,  should we hold a concept more of ‘partnership’ between these two important players in the theatre-making process.

However, present-day thinking in the theatre perhaps has more in common with ‘Darwinist’ evolutionary thinking where the meaning in performance evolves out of a hybrid between the input of playwright, director and actor.

But, the application of such a metaphor to current practice and thinking in the theatre throws up more questions than it answers if one considers the principle of ‘natural selection’ in the making of a play. 

If the  ‘survival of the fittest’ is the principle at play in the drama process, the question arises, ‘Fittest for what; and for whom?’ And who makes the decisions? Who exerts control at different stages in the process? Do such questions relate only to form or do they challenge the content too? And with these two aspects of theatre-making so inextricably linked, inherent in such a proposition is the concept of 'change' during the process of rehearsal and performance; and that involves the possibility of a shift in meaning, and hence ‘authorship’.

Where does the playwright stand in relation to this?  Has such a shift in meaning wrestled the ownership away from the playwright in favour of the interpretive artist? In fact, what do we mean when we talk of artistic ownership in this situation? And to what are we referring when we talk about the ‘meaning’ of a play? Is it what the playwright intends when s/he writes the script, or is it about what is perceived by the actors and director who work on the piece in rehearsal or is it in fact what the audience, themselves, perceive when they view the ensuing performance? 

These are all fundamental questions that are embedded in this enquiry and therefore must be addressed in the course of this examination of the theatre-making process if the title of this dissertation is to be fully explored.

But to begin, and faced with so many questions at this point in my argument, it would seem helpful to better define what I mean when I refer to the act of making theatre; for the term ‘theatre’ can be a ‘moveable feast’ when considering the views of key contemporary practitioners...

For Declan Donnellan in his influential book, ‘The Actor and the Target’...

‘Acting is a mystery, and so is theatre... A theatre is not only a literal space, but also a place where we dream together...theatre cannot die before the last dream has been dreamt.’ 2)

Imagination and dreaming are clearly pre-requisites, I believe, for the work of the playwright, but in Donnellan’s thesis they also form the core of the actor’s craft. In ‘Donnellan’s world’, out of the actor’s relationship with the text emerges ‘action’, and it is this sense of ‘action’; the manifestation of experience in the space, that becomes the central tenet of his argument and, therefore, the actor’s most important tool in the process of acting. And it is one that will demand our special attention moving forward.

However, I would argue that the same considerations are part of the playwright’s world too; for the language defined by the playwright in the script must evolve out of the imagined purpose of the characters, as they are realised in the writer's conception of the play. 

This sense of ‘purpose’, I believe, must always be realised by the playwright through the ‘virtual action’ that underpins the lives of the characters in his/her imagination; for it is through imagining what happens in the unfolding lives of the characters that the fiction unfolds in the mind of the playwright, and it is through this that the characters emerge from out of the void.

Whilst the outcome of the playwright’s work, is ‘marks on a page’, such words, I believe, always emerge from the emotional encounters between imagined characters. However, these emotional encounters must always be concomitant with the ‘virtual action’ that emerges as the characters live out their lives in the mind of the playwright.

Therefore, the connecting principle between the work of the playwright and the actor I would argue, is ‘action’. “What we do, is who we are!” This concept, I believe, is as relevant to the imaginative and creative process of the playwright realising characters in a play as it is to the actor seeking to portray one particular character in a performance.

But as neat as this notion might seem, what it fails to address so far is the provenance of such a concept, and in order to investigate this further I think, at this point in my enquiry, I need to interrogate the processes of the actor and the playwright in theatre making still further.

The actress, Kelly Reilly, in an interview I conducted with her for this study, in response to a question I asked about her first contact with a script, gave the following answer...

“Whenever I’m reading for a part I’m always reading it with an ‘imaginative eye of feeling’. In that situation, for me, the character exists as a first raindrop, and it is that first dip into the character that is the cleanest, the most telling of what I’m feeling and how I feel about the play as a whole.” 3)

For me the key word in this section of the interview is the word ‘feeling.’ Here we have an actress who is approaching a text as an ‘organic entity’; where the script has a life of its own that conjures up an emotional context and response in her as an actress and hence for the character she is to play.  It is an examination of this notion that leads me to a connection with the work of the American aesthetician and philosopher, Susanne Langer.

Langer in her book, ‘Philosophy in a New Key’, a text that has influenced artists and arts educators alike since its first publication in 1942, articulates the concept of the ‘symbolic transformation of experience.’ This concept seems to me to be extremely important in an analysis of the relationship between the work of the playwright and the actor when she writes... 

“Speech is..., the readiest active termination of that basic process in the human brain which may be called the symbolic transformation of experiences.” 4)

Speech and language are clearly of great importance when considering the art of the playwright and actor but, for Langer, the real importance of language within this context is that it emerges out of something much more central to our understanding of what it is to be human: ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’. 

For the playwright, such a sense of ‘Langerian’ speech, I would argue, emerges from writing dialogue for the characters; for the actor it manifests itself through the playing of the character, and hence the speaking of the lines.

In the playwright’s world this dialogue articulates the feelings that arise out of the virtual tensions that develop between the characters realised in the imaginary world of the play. But, in as much as the language of the play articulates these feelings, it also forms a means by which the original ‘virtual’ experiences can be encountered and then manifested by the actor through action in performance. 

In short, they become the building blocks of the actor’s ‘as if’ experience. And hence the experience for the audience too. For with their necessary 'suspension of disbelief', all action takes place in a 'perpetual present', 'as if' it were really happening in front of them. Audiences then read the playwright's virtual world 'as if' it were real and unfolding in front of them.

This seems to me to be an important moment in the developing thinking in this study. For the convergence of the worlds of the actor and the playwright clearly revolve around significant moments of symbolic transformation. Now, for the playwright these moments are realised through the writing of the dialogue; an ‘encoding’ of the characters' imagined experience, and hence, within the developing fiction.  If such a proposition correctly defines the process of the playwright then the principle task for the actor must therefore be to ‘decode’ these feelings and experiences and manifest them through action in performance.

At the start of this chapter I described the transference of ownership of a play from the playwright to the interpretive artist almost as though it were the passing of a baton in a relay race; a definition that seems to have become common-currency in contemporary theatre. 

However, if the theory I have tried to articulate here holds water then, I believe, it defines a model that better describes the ‘real’ relationship between the actor and the playwright in theatre today; one where the good actor is able to ‘connect’ with the ‘virtual action’ that originally arose within the mind of the playwright.  And the importance of such a model for me is that the ownership of the play remains with the playwright without ever seeking to diminish the contribution of the actor as the key interpreter of the work. 

If we concur with this view that the playwright is involved in the ‘encoding’ of experience, and the actor with the ‘decoding’ of the symbols created by the playwright, then it might be helpful to redefine this relationship as one similar to that articulated in Physics as the relationship between ‘potential’ and ‘kinetic’ energy. The ‘potential’ energy, within such an analogy, is clearly that of the meaning encoded by the playwright in the language of the text, and the ‘kinetic’ energy, for the actor, is the realisation of this meaning through action in performance. 

Indeed, in 2024, I think it’s important to recognise that this is the same energy in different forms - creating a sense of  the process/event that is manifested in performance at the interface between the ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ events described here.

But how does such a process explain the transference of meaning to an audience? And how does this pass the final test about artistic ownership, in which ultimately, there must be some congruence between the understanding of the ‘meaning’ of the play in the minds of the audience who see the play performed, and the conception of the play conceived in the mind of the playwright?

In this first chapter I have sought to articulate a model for the relationship between the actor and the playwright that expresses something of the ‘modus operandi’ that seems to exist between these two, key, creative participants in the theatre-making process. 

However, in order to substantiate such claims and to complete an explanation of how such a model might result in the transference of meaning to an audience I think it is necessary to further examine current thinking about the performance process and indeed the theory and practice of actor training in order to validate this first step in my argument about the true nature of artistic ownership in theatre making.