Off the page and on the stage

Since Simon Callow’s opening keynote for MWF last week, ‘Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World’, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between writing, the performing arts and society more generally.

In Alison Croggon‘s discussion of Patrick White as playwright on Sunday, she made note of many of the peculiarities of writing for the stage. It’s a great talk and you should read it in full, but these passages in particular really got me thinking:

Playwrights differ from other writers because the demands of their form are different. Writing a play requires another kind of imagination to that of a novel: a precise sense of the spatial dynamics of a stage, a musical intuition for the rhythms of spoken language, a certain fondness for the necessary vulgarities and strict limitations of theatre.

Above all, a playwright is a writer who collaborates: she profoundly understands that writing is only one aspect of the complex process of making and receiving a work of art. This is true of all writing, of course: publication is a long process of negotiation, from contracts to editing, from writing to book design. But in the theatre these processes are naked, and challenge the illusion that the writer is a solitary figure making a solitary work of art. The successful realisation of a play depends as much on the other artists who collaborate in a production as it does on a writer: the production crew, the lighting and set designers, the director, the actors. This is, as many playwrights have said in different ways, both the misery and the joy of theatre.

It’s one of the essential contradictions of the practice of writing books, I think, that so much solitude is required to create a work of art that, while similarly received in solitude, is actually about forging connections between people. There are so many stages of production between author and reader, and yet what we are engaging in when we read a book is a process of protracted communication. The theatre, by contrast, is essentially and immediately a collaborative art. As Callow noted last Thursday, the construction and production of a show demands that all sections of a company are in synch, are in constant communication with each other, and working towards a collective goal. If one part should slip, if one department should fall behind or omit a crucial detail, the whole structure collapses.

Furthermore, this process is constantly in dialogue with the needs and expectations of an audience, and the success or failure of that endeavour is sealed in that crucial moment when the audience and artists share space. The ‘healing’ (Callow’s word) that happens between actor and audience is not actually merely a product of great performance on the part of one and receptiveness on the other: it’s a product of the cumulative and collaborative process of shaping physical space and narrative which reaches its zenith in that moment.

Callow’s talk last Thursday was as much a meditation on the demands of that form, its challenges and its capacity for creating truly extraordinary experiences, as it was an investigation into the life of Charles Dickens. I did not realise that so much of Dickens’ work involved the stage. In the later years of his life he toured around the country performing – not his plays but his novels – a common enough practice at book launches these days but rarely ever an art. It eventually led to his death, but in his practice he did something wonderful: he managed to reduce that distance between the author and audience to the smallest conceivable space; a writer performing his writing (and by all accounts, performing it astonishingly well) for an audience who was, in that moment, profoundly moved.

Callow argued that Dickens saw theatre as an entity which represented a capacity for social unification. The idea that society can work together for a collective goal, and that every corner of that society may be not merely crucial to its machinations but also have a stake in the outcome, is as simple as it is profound. That these collective goals may have the capacity to transcend our experiences of the everyday is more important still.