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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.
The Age Book of the Year Awards
The Age Book of the Year awards were announced last night at the Melbourne Writers Festival 2012 opening event, prior to Simon Callow’s enthusiastic, informative Keynote speech on Charles Dickens.
The awards, now in their 38th year and highly regarded, were presented by Age literary editor Jason Steger. They went to…
Fiction
Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears (Allen & Unwin)
Poetry
The Brokenness Sonnets I-III and Other Poems by Mal McKimmie (Five Islands Press)
Nonfiction
1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia by James Boyce (Black Inc.)
Overall winner / Age Book of the Year
1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia by James Boyce (Black Inc.)
Boyce was very humble about his win, he commended the Age for continuing to support literature and authors, and he very gratefully acknowledged author and historian Inga Clendinnen, who has been a supporter of his work.
This afternoon the winning authors will be reading from their work in The Age Book of the Year Reading. It’s a free event at 2:30pm at BMW Edge. Do come along.
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Just in case I/we don’t get a chance to write about Simon Callow’s Keynote, his Lateline interview with Tony Jones is online, and of course, you can check out his writing. I can personally recommend (though not on the subject of Dickens) his essay in the latest Sight and Sound (UK) magazine on Orson Welles (another figure he’s passionate about, he’s currently working on the third volume of his biography). See also my Q&A with Callow on writing and playing Dickens.
Writing & playing Dickens: Q&A with Simon Callow
Simon Callow is an actor, writer and this year’s festival keynote speaker. At the festival he’ll be talking about the great storyteller Charles Dickens, the subject of his latest book Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World (Australian title: Dickens). I asked him a few questions about his work…
You’ve not only played Dickens’ characters, but you’ve played Dickens himself. Was this part of the reason you became interested in writing about him?
The whole reason. I felt very close to him. I wanted to tell the world about this wonderful person that I had come to know. It was as if he was my best friend, or my brother.
You’re well known as an actor, but you’re also a musician, theatre director, and have written several books, including Being an Actor, Love is Where it Falls, and biographies of Orson Welles and Charles Laughton. Can you tell us a bit about your writing process and how it fits into your busy creative life?
In a way, the work on the biographies is not unlike the work one does in preparing a role. I try to figure out what it was like to be him, and what it was like to be around him. In addition, I have to account for his life—why did he and it turn out the way it did? Which is also true of playing a character.
What is your favourite Dickens’ work? Has that changed since you began writing the book?
My first, which was also his first, The Pickwick Papers. I love its freewheeling, 18th century quality, the vastness of the canvas, the profusion of sublime comic characters, and above all, Samuel Pickwick, Esq., one of the few utterly credible decent human beings in literature. And, no, much as I love Bleak House, Drood and Dombey, my loyalty to Pickwick has remained constant.
Many people encounter Dickens today via the screen. I’m interested to know if you think (as an actor and director) that anything is lost if the works are only in adaptation (or intertextually). Or can a good adaptation be as good—or even better—than reading the novel?
Never. But it can be a good thing in its own right. The problem with most Dickens adaptations is that they treat him as an essentially realistic writer, ignoring the fantastical, surreal element. This applies not simply to the physical productions (film or stage) or the adaptations themselves, but to the acting. Dickens requires a kind of comic-expressionist style. Many—most—of his characters are grotesques, gargoyles. Something pre-Shakespearean—Chaucerian, in fact—about them. Dickens is a carnival writer. It’s worth remembering, too, that one of the most profound influences on his writing was The Arabian Nights. The sense of Fairy Tale is never far from his work, and that should inform and inspire the acting of his characters.
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Click here to find out more about Simon Callow’s MWF events.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 