tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/dramaturgy-12517/articlesDramaturgy – The Conversation2023-04-02T20:03:15Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1959392023-04-02T20:03:15Z2023-04-02T20:03:15ZEver feel like your life is a performance? Everyone does – and this 1959 book explains roles, scripts and hiding backstage<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/516550/original/file-20230321-14-d8qd03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3000%2C1994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Our cultural touchstones series looks at books that have made an impact.</em></p>
<p>Shakespeare’s adage — “All the world’s a stage” — suggests human beings are conditioned to perform, and to possess an acute social awareness of how they appear in front of others. </p>
<p>It resonates in the age of social media, where we’re all performing ourselves on our screens and watching each other’s performances play out. Increasingly, those screen performances are how we meet people, and how we form relationships: from online dating, to remote work, to staying in touch with family.</p>
<p>While the idea of performance as central to social life has been around for centuries, <a href="https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780199756384/obo-9780199756384-0228.xml">Erving Goffman</a> was the first to attempt a comprehensive account of society and everyday life using theatre as an analogy. </p>
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<span class="caption">In the social media age, we’re all performing ourselves on our screens and watching each other’s performances play out.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Milton/Pexels</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>His influential 1959 book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> is something of a “bible” for scholars interested in questions of how we operate in everyday life. It became a surprise US bestseller on publication, crossing over to a general readership.</p>
<p>Goffman wrote about how we perform different versions of ourselves in different social environments, while keeping our “backstage” essential selves private. He called his idea <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-3/dramaturgy-charles-edgley?context=ubx&refId=6e9b71d0-973c-4ebe-b90b-41a372d12623">dramaturgy</a>.</p>
<p>Playwright Alan Bennett <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v03/n19/alan-bennett/cold-sweat">wrote admiringly</a> of him, “Individuals knew they behaved in this way, but Goffman knew <em>everybody</em> behaved like this and so did I.”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-shifting-identities-performing-sexual-selves-on-social-media-145322">Friday essay: shifting identities - performing sexual selves on social media</a>
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<h2>Goffman as influencer (and suspected spy)</h2>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.isa-sociology.org/en/about-isa/history-of-isa/books-of-the-xx-century">poll of professional sociologists</a>, Goffman’s book ranked in the top ten publications of the 20th century. </p>
<p>It influenced playwrights such as <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019027250907200402">Tom Stoppard</a> and, of course, Bennett, who <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Alan-Bennett-A-Critical-Introduction/OMealy/p/book/9780815335405">was interested in</a> depicting and analysing the role-playing of everyday life that Goffman identified. </p>
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<p>Goffman was <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781444396621.ch24">born in Mannville</a>, Alberta in 1922 to Ukrainian Jewish parents who migrated to Canada. The sister of the man who would become famous for his theatre analogies was an actor, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0062844/">Frances Bay</a>: late in life, she would play quirky, recognisable roles such as the “marble rye” lady on <a href="https://theconversation.com/science-of-seinfeld-131606">Seinfeld</a> and a recurring part on <a href="https://theconversation.com/ill-see-you-again-in-25-years-the-return-to-twin-peaks-32624">Twin Peaks</a> (as Mrs Tremond/Chalfant).</p>
<p>The path to Goffman’s book was an unusual one. It didn’t come from directly studying the theatre, or even from asking questions about theatregoers.</p>
<p>While completing postgraduate studies at the the University of Chicago, Goffman was given the opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the Shetland Islands, an isolated part of northern Scotland, for his <a href="https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/ns-ccic/release/4">PhD dissertation</a>.</p>
<p>Goffman pretended to be there to <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470999912.ch3">study agricultural techniques</a>. But his actual reason was to examine the everyday life of the Shetland Islanders. As he observed the everyday practices and rituals of the remote island community, he had to negotiate suspicions he may <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Social-Organization-Sociological-Routledge/dp/0415112044?">have been a spy</a>. </p>
<p>In Goffman’s published book, the ethnography of the Shetland Islands takes a back seat to his dramaturgical theory.</p>
<h2>More than a popular how-to manual</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-9780241547991">The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life</a> quickly became <a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Sociological-Bent-InsideMetro-Culture/dp/0170120015">a national bestseller</a>. It was picked up by general readers “as a guide to social manners and on how to be clever and calculating in social intercourse without being obvious”.</p>
<p>This fascinating and complex academic work could indeed be read as a “how-to” manual on how to impress others and mitigate negative impressions. But Goffman <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Erving-Goffman/Smith/p/book/9780415355919">didn’t mean</a> “performance” literally. Reading the book as a guide to middle-class etiquette misses some of its nuances.</p>
<p>One is the sophisticated understanding of how reality and contrivance relate to each other. A good performance is one that appears “unselfconscious”; a “contrived” performance is one where the fact the social actor is performing a role is “painstakingly evident”. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A ‘contrived’ performance is when the actor playing a social role is ‘painstakingly evident’, or trying too hard.</span></figcaption>
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<p>In everyday language, we tend to describe the latter as trying too hard. But Goffman is making a more general point, about the way we all perform ourselves, all the time – whether the effort is visible or not.</p>
<p>If “All the world is not, of course, a stage”, then “the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-emotional-labour-and-how-do-we-get-it-wrong-185773">What is emotional labour - and how do we get it wrong?</a>
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<h2>Playing roles and being in character</h2>
<p>Today, we regularly use theatrical terms like “role”, “script”, “props”, “audience” and being “in and out of character” to describe how people behave in their everyday social life. But Goffman is the one who introduced these concepts, which have become part of our shared language.</p>
<p>Together, they highlight how social life depends on what Goffman terms a shared definition of particular situations. </p>
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<span class="caption">Goffman introduced theatrical terms like ‘role’, ‘script’ and being ‘in and out of character’ as ways of talking about social performance.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Monica Silvestre/Pexels</span></span>
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<p>Whether we are performing our work roles, having dinner with someone for whom we have romantic affections, or dealing with strangers in a public setting, we need to produce and maintain the appropriate definition of that reality. </p>
<p>These activities are “performances”, according to Goffman, because they involve mutual awareness or attentiveness to the information others emit. This mutual awareness, or attention to others, means humans are constantly performing for audiences in their everyday lives.</p>
<h2>Being in and out of character</h2>
<p>It matters who the audience is – and what type of audience we have for our performances. When thinking about how people adapt their behaviour for others, Goffman differentiates between “front regions” and “back regions”. </p>
<p>Front regions are where we must present what is often referred to as the “best version of ourselves”. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to look busy if their supervisor is about. So, in the front region, they need to look engaged, industrious and generally perform the role of being a worker. In an open-plan office, a worker needs to be constantly “in character”, as Goffman puts it.</p>
<p>Back regions are where a social actor can “let their guard down”. In the context of a workplace, the back regions might refer to the bathroom, the lunchroom or anywhere else where the worker can relax their performance and potentially resort to “out of character” behaviour. </p>
<p>If the worker takes a diversionary break to gossip with a colleague when their supervisor is no longer in earshot, they could be said to be engaging in back region conduct.</p>
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<span class="caption">In an open-plan office, a worker needs to be constantly ‘in character’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Israel Andrade/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>Front and back regions are not defined by physical locations. A back region is any situation in which the individual can relax and drop their performance. (Of course, this means regions overlap with physical locations to some extent – people are more likely to be able to relax when they’re in more private settings.)</p>
<p>Thus, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/opinion/open-plan-office-awful.html">open-plan offices</a> are often unpopular because workers feel they are constantly under surveillance. Conversely, the work-from-home arrangements that have become more common since the era of COVID lockdowns are popular because they allow people to relax their work personae.</p>
<p>Renowned writer Jenny Diski <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n05/jenny-diski/think-of-mrs-darling">reflected</a> in 2004:</p>
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<p>Reading Goffman now is alarmingly claustrophobic. He presents a world where there is nowhere to run; a perpetual dinner party of status seeking, jockeying for position and saving face. Any idea of an authentic self becomes a nonsense. You may or may not believe in what you are performing; either type of performance is believed in or it is not. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-moscow-stage-to-monroe-and-de-niro-how-the-method-defined-20th-century-acting-179088">From the Moscow stage to Monroe and De Niro: how the Method defined 20th-century acting</a>
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<h2>21st-century Goffman</h2>
<p>Dramaturgy has survived the onset of our new media environment, where the presentation of the self has migrated to platforms as diverse as <a href="https://theconversation.com/instagram-and-facebook-are-stalking-you-on-websites-accessed-through-their-apps-what-can-you-do-about-it-188645">Facebook</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-corn-how-the-online-viral-corn-kid-is-on-a-well-worn-path-to-fame-in-the-child-influencer-industry-189974">TikTok</a>. In some ways, it’s more relevant than ever. </p>
<p>Goffman’s approach has been applied to <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-sense-of-place-9780195042313?cc=au&lang=en&">electronic media</a>, radio and <a href="https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Media_and_Modernity/asB7QgAACAAJ?hl=en">television</a> <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003160861-19/reception-goffman-work-media-studies-peter-lunt">studies</a>, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262515047/new-tech-new-ties/">mobile phones</a> – and, more recently, <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565211036797">social media</a> and even <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0263276419829541">AI studies</a>.</p>
<p>The “successful staging” (as Goffman terms it) of our social roles has only become more complex. This is perfectly illustrated by “BBC Dad” Robert Kelly, whose 2017 <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">live television interview</a> from his home study was interrupted when his children wandered into the room. This was before COVID lockdowns, when our home and work lives (and personae) increasingly merged. </p>
<p>“Everyone understands that now,” <a href="https://junkee.com/bbc-dad-pictures-kids-now-marion-james/324165">wrote Reena Gupta</a> in 2022. “You or someone in your family or circle of friends has been BBC Dad.”</p>
<p>Maintaining and maximising performances still matters. And so does Goffman.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a ‘bible’ for scholars, voted a top 10 book of the 20th century. It also fascinated general readers, as a guide to social manners.Michael James Walsh, Associate Professor in Social Sciences, University of CanberraEduardo de la Fuente, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Justice and Society, UniSA, University of South AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/401612015-05-11T20:06:43Z2015-05-11T20:06:43ZAustralian plays: how to persuade a nation to question its own soul?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79919/original/image-20150430-30705-mmuqxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Onstage at the JC Williamson Theatre Royal in Sydney in 1935. Are we treating our playwrights any better than we did then?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is a long-read essay, the fourth in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a>, Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>, and Part three <a href="https://theconversation.com/playwriting-doesnt-get-better-or-worse-but-it-does-evolve-40162">here</a>.</em></p>
<p>Telling the story of playwriting in four articles is like trying to fit an elephant into a bodystocking. Go to any library and browse the drama shelf. The variety of plays in even a modest collection is mind-blowing. Add film and TV scripts into the mix and the range expands further. </p>
<p>So making generalisations about playwriting invites “what-about-ism”. </p>
<p>Say “Australian drama has done poorly since Federation”, for example, and you’ll get a barrage of counter-examples. What about Katharine Susan Pritchard’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C263358">Brumby Innes</a> (1927)? Or Sumner Locke-Elliot’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C399004">Rusty Bugles</a> (1948)? Or Ray Lawler’s <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C204052">Summer of the Seventeenth Doll</a> (1955)? </p>
<p>What about the plays of Patrick White, Dorothy Hewett, David Williamson, John Romeril, Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Joanna Murray-Smith, Patricia Cornelius and so on?</p>
<p>There is no doubt that Australia has produced, and continues to produce, exceptional playwrights. But in judging a nation’s drama it is not the exceptions that count.</p>
<p>It is the quality of its next-best plays that is the crucial indicator, for three reasons. First, because exceptional drama is rare, even for exceptional playwrights. Second, because exceptional drama cannot be routinely manufactured, only allowed for. Third, because exceptional drama comes from the general culture and it is the health of this that determines how many exceptional plays there will be.</p>
<p>Buying a better car won’t buy you better traffic. What matters is not the commanding heights of playwriting but the state of the sector overall.</p>
<h2>What we know about Australian drama</h2>
<p>Perhaps the first thing to say about the history of Australian drama is how thin it is. </p>
<p>After Gough Whitlam doubled the federal arts budget in 1973, the number of Australian plays produced increased, but sporadically, and with ongoing debate about their place and value. What other country of comparable wealth and education has looked on its own drama in the same contingent way as Australia? As if it were an optional extra – like a second national anthem or free kerbside parking?</p>
<p>The second thing to observe is how fuddled the understanding of playwriting remains in our over-connected, under-reflective country; how it is too often framed as a quill-pen skill in comparison with visual, digi-media and choreographic technologies. </p>
<p>Not everyone thinks like this. But it is undoubtedly true that in recent years playwriting has been defined <em>outside</em> notions of art-form innovation. This was signalled by the decision of the Australia Council in 2009 to provide Theatre Board assessors with just a five-page extract of all submitted scripts in grant applications. </p>
<p>When a country stops reading its plays, it stops relating to its playwrights. And while the Council’s decision was motivated by important strategic concerns – to give equal weight to hybrid art projects that mainstream companies were unlikely to support – it has had fateful consequences. </p>
<p>It also echoes a past pattern of chronic mismanagement. This has been well-chronicled by historians such as Leslie Rees, Peter Fitzpatrick, Peter Holloway, Michelle Arrow, and John McCallum. Their accounts vary in particulars but not in general thrust. <a href="http://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/A17165">Fitzpatrick</a> calls Australian drama “a history of beginnings”, so often has it been cast back into a pool of primal neglect.</p>
<h2>The fragility of our drama</h2>
<p>What makes the position of Australian playwriting so fragile? </p>
<p>Partly, economics. Australia has a sizeable population, but it is geographically dispersed, making it difficult for plays to reach a national audience. Touring circuits exist, but costs are high, and drama that goes on the road has to have broad appeal, or a small cast, or both.</p>
<p>To boot, there is a lack of national thinking around playwright development, the fact that states’ interests determine the style and level of support in different parts of the country. The level of cooperation between Australian theatre companies on a production level is good, and has been since 1988, the year the last English director of a state theatre, Alan Edwards of the Queensland Theatre Company, retired. The level of cooperation in respect of playwright development is virtually nil.</p>
<p>But economics and industry structure are not the whole story. The history of Australian playwriting is punctuated by instances of savage rejection that raise questions about whether the country understands the role of drama <em>per se</em>. </p>
<h2>The case of Patrick White</h2>
<p>The best example – and there are many to choose from – is <a href="http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/white-patrick-victor-14925">Patrick White</a>. His first four plays – The Ham Funeral, Season at Sarsaparilla, A Cheery Soul and Night on Bald Mountain – were produced in the early 1960s. </p>
<p>Each was a bitter struggle. Two were rejected by the Adelaide Festival, one nearly sent the Melbourne Theatre Company broke. Examining White’s correspondence last year I was blown away by the general ill-will towards his “modern” plays with their multiple storylines and changing locations.</p>
<p>A published letter in Theatregoer (3/1, March 1963:7) from a “Mrs Queensland” about The Ham Funeral – now regarded as one the great works in the Australian drama canon – gives the typical adverse reaction: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>One scene forced several women to leave the theatre. It made me queasy in the stomach, and utterly disgusted. The rest of the play was long-winded, unintelligible and boring […] </p>
<p>One must like this rubbish, it seems, to be deemed “cultured”. Nor has this play been the only one thrust, during the past few years, on a long-suffering public. Most Australian plays we have had to endure professionally […] have been of the same calibre. Usually incomprehensible […] with sex in its crudest form, and violence predominating. </p>
<p>Despite statements otherwise, such plays have been a failure from an audience point of view, and also financially. Yet they continued to be produced. Why? One can only conclude that some power behind all this wants Australian theatregoers to dislike their own drama, and so demand overseas imports. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>What caused this hostility, which also reflects a lack of understanding about how drama “works”? </p>
<p>A major reason was the dominance of <a href="https://www.nla.gov.au/prompt/jc-williamson-theatres">JC Williamson</a>, one of the most successful theatre businesses in entertainment history. At one point, after its merger with the Tait brothers in 1920, “the Firm” owned most of the theatres, cinemas and music halls in Australia, as well as controlling what went into them. </p>
<p>For more than a hundred years it programmed largely commercial fare, lightweight and crowd-pleasing. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=448&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/79869/original/image-20150430-6233-1g0mbzz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=563&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">JC Williamson Theatre production, 1936.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ASLNSW_35427_JC_Williamson_Ltd.jpg">Sam Hood/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is no Australian equivalent to Ireland’s Abbey Theatre or the UK’s Royal Court (the nearest thing are the doomed Pioneer Players). No foundational playwrights comparable to Henrik Ibsen, WB Yeats or George Bernard Shaw. While overseas, playwriting was progressing in form and function, in Australia it remained an anodyne tinsel-wrapped import, valued for spectacle, profit, and cultural cachet. </p>
<p>Playwriting occupies a weak position in Australian culture because its historical role is not to be good, but to be acceptable. The commercial theatre ethos that went unchallenged for so long bequeathed it a legacy of timidity, superficiality and bosh. </p>
<p>And this legacy dies very, very, hard. </p>
<p>When I came to Australian in 1987 I saw three shows in my first month: Michael Gow’s Europe, Louis Nowra’s The Golden Age and a performance piece by Wollongong’s Swamp Art. </p>
<p>I had lived in the UK, Germany and the US – three diverse theatre cultures. Yet I had seen nothing like this work, which reflected a unique sensibility. I had no word to describe what that was, so I thought it simply “Australian”.</p>
<p>I started talking about what I had seen, what had got me so excited. But I soon discovered there was no common understanding of these plays’ value, no agreement about where they fitted in, what an “Australian” sensibility meant, or how it expressed itself in drama. </p>
<p>I could fill a book with my experiences since then of Australia’s mishandling of playwrights, its overweening under-confidence in respect of its own drama. It has repeatedly struck me that our playwrights are hobbled at the deepest level by a collective expectation their work should reflect what most people already think, that they should create a drama of confirmation. </p>
<p>Australia may be a country capable of dealing with challenge, criticism and conflict. But it does not particularly want these qualities in its plays.</p>
<p>What is lost by this self-defeating attitude? How to persuade a nation to accept the questioning of its own soul? For this is the source and substance of all true drama, the reason for the public attention it elicits. </p>
<p>In these four articles, I have tried to show the intellectual and emotional depth of playwriting. It is a technology as elegant as any mathematical formula, as insightful as any social theory, as mysterious as any philosophical conundrum.</p>
<p>Because drama surrounds us from the day we become aware of the world to day we depart it, we forget what a miracle it is, what an unmatched vehicle for the transmission of complex human experience. </p>
<p>Shakespeare was a great playwright because he discerned the greatness of the art form at his disposal, and exploited it to the full. When such a process of discovery is entrained, a society is not simply consuming drama as an entertainment product. It is relating to it as a means of self-understanding. </p>
<p>How often have we witnessed on stage, TV or in the cinema, moments when we think “that is just so”, when the truth of the world is given to us in profound, accessible miniature? There are things that can <em>only</em> be found in drama. There are stories, characters, images, problems, ideas, feelings, that <em>only</em> drama can “transluminate”, in the peculiar term of Polish director <a href="http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/siryan/academy/theatres/grotowski,%20jerzy.htm">Jerzy Grotowski</a>. </p>
<p>Now that Australia has lost its monocular cultural views, it must renovate its crabbed attitude to drama – an attitude that keeps it in wilful ignorance of playwriting as a technology – and let its dramatists speak their mind, so it can know its mind. It must let go of the view that playscripts are akin to Biedermeier furniture and recognise that dramatic writing is integral to innovation in the three keys mediums of theatre, film and television.</p>
<p>It must recognise that now it is a modern country it needs a modern attitude to drama. And central to the health of this is the role of the playwright.</p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>This is a long-read essay, the fourth in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a>, Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>, and Part three <a href="https://theconversation.com/playwriting-doesnt-get-better-or-worse-but-it-does-evolve-40162">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40161/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Playwriting occupies a weak position in Australian culture because its historical role is not to be “good”, but to be socially acceptable. We need now to take a modern attitude to drama.Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/401622015-05-01T01:28:17Z2015-05-01T01:28:17ZPlaywriting doesn’t get better or worse – but it does evolve<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78876/original/image-20150422-23601-1l8g7zb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Duncan Graham's 2010 play Cut does not reveal itself as a traditional play does – but it's a powerful demonstration of the evolution of theatrical storytelling.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Garry Cockburn</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is a long-read essay, the third in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a> and Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>.</em></p>
<p><br>
In <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html">Book X of Republic</a> – the one where he kicks all playwrights out of an imagined utopia – Plato puts forward his strange Theory of Forms. His unfortunate example is beds. </p>
<p>There are the beds that bed-makers make, he says, which are the realisation of a concept, the ideal bed. And there are the beds represented in art, from a chosen angle, for a chosen end. Where is the ideal bed here? Two steps removed. The art bed is a copy of a real bed, which is a copy of the ideal bed. A “copy of a copy” and hopelessly corrupt. Playwrights vamoose. </p>
<p>Since then Aristotle, Hume, Kant and Nietzsche have supplanted Plato in their understanding of art, if not beds. Yet if he had chosen a different example his approach might receive more attention. </p>
<p>Think about the film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020072/">Selma</a> (2014), which makes use of real events to inform a dramatic representation of them. There is an understanding of the past that historians might aspire to, the “truth” about Lyndon Johnson, say. Then there are the source materials we can access now – newspaper articles, diaries, speeches, TV footage and the like. The first is only imaginable through the second, but we recognise a clear difference between them. </p>
<p>Likewise, we recognise in Tom Wilkinson, the actor playing the US President in Selma, an interpretation of this material, and in deciding whether the results “work” engage in a complex triangulation between what we know we can never know (“the truth”), what we know we can know (the source materials), and what we sit through at the movies. </p>
<h2>Drama and reality</h2>
<p>So Plato was right about drama. It does involve an altered representation of reality. But it isn’t a corrupt one. It does not deal, as the sciences do, with demonstrable proof. It is concerned with super-factual phenomenon: experiences that involve reality but entrain it for different ends. </p>
<p>For entertainment, if that doesn’t sound too flip. </p>
<p>For beauty, escape, connection, transcendence: all the things we associate with art at its best. Plays, like dreams, provide conceptual compressions, distilled images, evocative cadences. </p>
<p>The relationship between drama and reality is not simple, therefore, as the on-going controversy around Selma illustrates. It takes the world and, by rearranging its structural properties, shows us the world anew. But then reality is not simple either. Drama is one of the means we have to assay it.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78877/original/image-20150422-23619-1qxsczo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Duncan Graham’s Cut onstage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Garry Cockburn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cut is a play by Duncan Graham, one of a younger cohort of Australian playwrights – others would include Lally Katz, Tom Holloway, Kate Mulvaney, Robert Reid, Declan Greene, Lachlan Philpott, Finegan Kruckemeyer, Nicki Bloom and Angela Betzien – appearing in our theatre seasons over the last ten years. Developed by the independent company <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/floogle/18778366199">floogle</a> in 2010, the play premiered at Sydney’s Belvoir Street Theatre in 2011, and was revived at the recent Adelaide Fringe in 2015. </p>
<p>Cut was acclaimed both times it was staged and there is no doubt that it is a talented work. From a dramaturgical perspective, however, it is of interest for its exemplary qualities rather than its exceptional ones. </p>
<h2>The evolution of playwriting</h2>
<p>It provides a good contrast to Mourning Becomes Electra, the play <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">I examined</a> in the previous essay in this series. If playwriting is a technology, then that technology is constantly evolving. </p>
<p>Cut shows the concerns and techniques of stage writing today, the distance it has travelled from its historical origins, the distance it continues to travel. </p>
<p>Cut is neither a “better” play than Mourning Becomes Electra, nor a “worse” one – literary judgements of little use to the dramaturge. But it is certainly different, because audiences now are different from those in 1931.</p>
<p>In my analysis of Mourning Becomes Electra I referred to Aristotle’s six features of drama, the main ones being narrative, character and language. Cut provides a good illustration of the remaining three: spectacle, melody and thought. </p>
<p>Graham’s play is shorter than O’Neill’s, running about an hour, with few stage directions, and far fewer words. There is no clear storyline or unified conception of character. Instead, there are a number of fluid narrative strands between which the solo performer flits like a moving spotlight. </p>
<p>The information gaps this intermittent approach creates are the “negative space” wherein audience understanding accrues. <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">Recall</a> Mourning Becomes Electra’s detailed description of the Mannon family mansion at the start of Homecoming. Now compare it to beginning of Cut:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Blackout. This blackout should be about 2 minutes. Lights fade up very slowly.</strong></p>
<p>WOMAN: “Before dawn. 5am. The cars hum. The trains hum. A plane above hums. The distant cry of an anguished animal.</p>
<p>The workward are about. Sound of their feet faltering on the pavement. Half awake. Tangled in their traceless thoughts.</p>
<p>Window by window the city lights up in a grotesque smile.</p>
<p>In one window there’s a woman. Standing before a mirror. Trying to make herself out. She is putting on a face. Face over face. She seeks herself in every reflection. Each one the fingerprint of a stranger – one over the other – smudged over glass. A blur.</p>
<p>This woman is hunted. A man has sniffed her out. He pursues her. She has let him get closer. Perhaps she’ll find something – something in him that will reveal her face, her final face.</p>
<p><strong>Blackout</strong></p>
<p>WOMAN: Pull back the hair. Darken the eyes with mascara. Rinse the mouth. Spit. Lips. A sip of coffee. She leaves for work.</p>
<p><strong>Blackout</strong></p>
<p>WOMAN: Having your seatbelt done up low and tight is absolutely essential during take-off and landing. And whenever the seatbelt sign is on. It is a requirement that you keep your seatbelt on at all other times while seated. Fasten your seatbelt by inserting the clasp into the buckle and tighten by pulling the strap. Undo your seat belt by lifting the clasp.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Two minutes sitting in the dark in a theatre is a <em>long</em> time (try it). It is a statement about how the playwright intends to engage public attention, as well as the setting of a mood. A level of discomfort is manufactured, but also a level of excitement, of expectation. </p>
<p>This is fed by the disconnected storylines that, like blinds snapping up on distant windows, make a sudden, vivid sense before disappearing into darkness once again. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78879/original/image-20150422-23594-jcb6zm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Duncan Graham’s Cut onstage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Garry Cockburn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Building a story</h2>
<p>While the style of Cut is Graham’s own, the techniques he uses can be found in other modern plays. The most important – the most important in 20th- and 21st-century drama generally – is the replacement of exposition with complex image. </p>
<p>Where Mourning Becomes Electra relies on the release of explicit information to create its effects, Cut uses metaphor and suggestion, prompting the audience to work hard to "volumise” the experience it is putting on stage. </p>
<p>And we do work hard. We can’t help it. The construction of narrative through-line is a ubiquitous cognitive strategy that allows our brains to connect disparate data points via the trope “cause and effect”. </p>
<p>It is incredibly useful – but also limiting. You hear one story, you don’t hear another. If story is abandoned altogether, you don’t hear any story at all.</p>
<p>So contemporary playwrights build into their dramas apposite images, visual and verbal, whereby they can achieve a multi-dimensional effect, similar to a Cubist painting. Just as a person’s life-story is more than a story, but an index of their life, so modern plays craft images that go beyond the immediate story they happen to be telling.</p>
<p>This is the “negative space” today’s playwrights draw on to such good effect, and it works in exactly the same way as the “negative space” in architecture. Once, buildings required marble plinths and columns to keep them upright. Now the lightest of materials structures habitable space. </p>
<p>Likewise, the quality of what is <em>not</em> said shapes contemporary drama from August Strindberg to Simon Stephens. Drama is less about what gets said and seen, than what gets understood. Observe the following sequence in Cut:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Blackout</strong></p>
<p>WOMAN: I come upon a house. It seems like the house I grew up in. Though it doesn’t look like that house. I go inside. It smells the same … but none of the objects are mine. I don’t notice at first, but there’s another woman. A tiny woman holding a pair of scissors.</p>
<p>What are you doing with those scissors?</p>
<p>At first I thought she was young, but now she looks old, ancient. I look closer. She hasn’t got a mouth.</p>
<p>I know her. I know her face …</p>
<p>Are you my Mother? But I thought you were …</p>
<p>The woman is young again. Dark hair hanging on her shoulders. She flashes her scissors like fangs.</p>
<p>I know. I have to choose one object in the house. The tiny woman nods.</p>
<p>I know this test.</p>
<p>I have to choose carefully.</p>
<p><strong>Blackout</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78880/original/image-20150422-23611-ds7ipt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Duncan Graham’s Cut onstage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Garry Cockburn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Stay focused!</h2>
<p>What keeps public attention disciplined in plays like Cut? What stops it splintering into a hundred personal interpretations? </p>
<p>Partly the same turns that define Mourning Becomes Electra, only ones less likely to deploy new information and more likely to use recurrence and refrain. The man with eyes of ash is a repeated image in Graham’s play, as is the tiny woman with scissors. </p>
<p>Where O’Neill draws on the Oresteia to construct an echo-chamber of meaningful symbols, Cut invokes the myth of the three Greek fates: Clotho, “the spinner”, Lachesis, “the measurer”, and Atropos, “the cutter” of the thread of life – hence the title of the play.</p>
<p>How to bring an audience to appreciate these layers of meaning? There are few clues in the text about how to stage it. But there don’t have to be, since Graham worked closely with a director, dramaturge and performer in developing the play, and produced it himself on the second occasion. </p>
<p>That’s not always the case with contemporary theatre. What is common, however, is that modern plays are written for known production circumstances. </p>
<p>The playwrights Jack Hibberd and John Romeril were part of the Australian Performing Group. Caryl Churchill was a collaborator with Joint Stock and Monstrous Regiment. David Mamet was a co-founder of the Atlantic Theatre Company. Tracy Letts is a member of Steppenwolf. </p>
<p>Such close relations between playwrights and theatre companies means the staging context is a shared one. Plays do not need to carry elaborate directions because the playwright is in the loop, involved in casting and design. And in the case of Graham, also writing the programme note:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The word “text” comes from “texere”, meaning “to weave”. Weave what? We make narrative out of the fragments of our experiences and ideas. This happens in our minds – the weaving of the fabric, the text-ile of our lives. It’s no mistake then that the study of text is Tropology. But all texts must end. </p>
<p>They must be cut, tied off. Cut – in form and symbolism – appropriates an ancient poetic to explore how the modern mind responds to a perceived emergency of “end-times”, a culture courting catastrophe, in the throes of its own spectacle of violence and atrocity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Cut’s central concern is similar to Mourning Becomes Electra, even though the stories it tells are different in form and content. Similar too is the desire to create a sense of foreboding, to entrain an almost visceral atmosphere of doom and decline. </p>
<p>The means for this in O’Neill’s play is the Mannon family history, its corrupt and corrupting ways. As revelation piles on revelation, we finally see, through a process of exhaustive recounting, that there is no way out for the couple at the heart of the tragedy, Orin and Livinia.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/78881/original/image-20150422-23630-18hnr6w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Duncan Graham’s Cut onstage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Garry Cockburn</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Cut, blackouts, disjunction and staging do the job. Narrative is replaced by melody and spectacle – music, lighting, a set design of carpet and glad-wrap – assailing spectators with their own enchantments. But Cut is not a performance piece. </p>
<p>It relies on an array of stage technologies to achieve its impact, but keeps these tightly braced to a word-led shaping of audience expectation. If, as Kin Hubbard quipped, classical music is the kind you keep thinking will turn into a tune, then modern drama is the sort you keep sensing will turn into a story. </p>
<p>And sometimes it does! At the heart of Cut’s miasmatic weaving of tone, image and intimation, is a sequence of clear action. Fragmented story lines – a woman running from a man? An airhostess on a plane? Us on a plane, with a man and an airhostess? – suddenly cohere. The woman is violently attacked by a man with eyes of ash who forces him off. Then:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>WOMAN: He’s weeping … yes I think he’s weeping.</p>
<p>Curled up into a little ball. He weeps like an infant. I hover over him. He apologises.</p>
<p>I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I am such a normal person. I’m so normal. Please. Please forgive me.</p>
<p>He keeps crying, this man.
I see the mark of finger nails across his chest. Down his face. </p>
<p>It repulses me. </p>
<p>I know what I have to do.</p>
<p>Shhh. It’ll be fine. Just lie there. Shhh. Just lie there. I stroke his neck. I stroke his hair. I stroke his face. And just as he wept like a baby, he sleeps like one too.</p>
<p>I leave him there and I walk around the corner to the petrol station.</p>
<p>She buys one litre – comes back to the flat. She goes to the cupboard, opens it. What do I need? She pulls out a large cast iron pot. He’s still asleep on the floor. She pours the petrol over him and without hesitation throws a match – onto the bleeding mass of flesh and tears.</p>
<p>It takes a while before the flames wake him. But when he does, in agony, she smashes him over the head three times with the pot.</p>
<p>He falls asleep again, unconscious. I watch.</p>
<p>He burns to death on her living room floor. I watch him.</p>
<p>She opens the windows to let the smoke out.</p>
<p>It doesn’t smell as much as she thought it would.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Where are Plato’s beds in all this? It is clear how reality corresponds to events in a film like Selma. Where does it reside in fragmented, allusive post-dramatic drama? Again, this is a question that could be asked of playwrights as varied as Harold Pinter, Heiner Muller, Martin Crimp, Roland Schimmelpfennig, Sarah Ruhl, David Grieg, and Sarah Kane, as well as our own Andrew Bovell, Lally Katz, and Declan Greene. Are their plays simply castles-in-the-mind, the dramatic equivalent of free-floating soap bubbles?</p>
<p>Reality can reside in facts. It can also reside in feelings. What makes Cut compelling is the way it lays hold of a specific emotional terrain and assays it with unerring verbal accuracy. “Terrifying” was the adjective Time Out used to describe it. </p>
<p>A feeling of apprehension rolls from the playtext like chlorine gas. With its long blackouts, disturbing images and threshold action, Cut lays hold of our collective but unacknowledged fear of catastrophe and brings it to the fore as a public experience.</p>
<p>Between the play, the performer and the feeling of imminent disaster – “the truth” of our perception of the world today – the Platonic triangulation of Cut takes place. The “real beds” are the events happening outside the theatre. </p>
<p>The “art beds” are the ones happening inside it. The “ideal bed” is the fear we recognise as uniting the two. In drama, there are two ways for playwrights to talk about something. They can talk about something. </p>
<p>Or they can talk about something <em>else,</em> achieving a metaphorical transparency that allows an audience to look <em>through</em> the play and lay hold of the deeper reality beyond. Here’s Graham again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Clue” comes from the word for thread. A “clew” was a thread one could use the find your way out of a labyrinth. In essence, a playtext is a series of clues woven together, something an audience can use to find their way through. Anything woven, no matter how tightly, will have negative space. We take fragments and threads, that have been cut or frayed and weave them together. </p>
<p>Now this is related to our Fate. The way we weave our story, our history, determines the outcome of our life. The fragmented text of Cut invites audiences to superimpose. We must try and keep the negative space of history alive too, to be sceptical of exhaustive histories, as much as plays that tell you everything.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is a good description not only of the way Cut “works” but of the creative approach behind a great deal of contemporary drama. It is possible to situate Duncan Graham’s play within a craft tradition while still acknowledging the original contribution he has made.</p>
<p>This is the double relationship that drives playwrights forward to new discoveries, that makes the playtext a still-developing technology. It has a past but is not beholden to the past. </p>
<p>Instead, it is in dialogue with the past, and it is this conversation, one that has been going for two and a half thousand years, that gives playwriting its profound strength and innovative power. </p>
<p><br></p>
<p><em>This is the third in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Read Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">here</a> and Part two <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-cant-get-those-two-hours-back-drama-works-as-time-unfolds-39687">here</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/40162/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Drama involves an altered representation of reality – and the way we understand both the representations and the reality evolve. Duncan Graham’s recent play Cut shows how significantly those understandings change.Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/396872015-04-14T20:24:09Z2015-04-14T20:24:09ZWe can’t get those two hours back – drama works as time unfolds<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77875/original/image-20150414-24654-1s1500v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Drama is less about what gets said than what gets understood.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hernán Piñera</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is a long-read essay, the second in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Part one <a href="https://theconversation.com/need-a-stage-coach-why-some-plays-work-and-others-dont-39363">is here</a>.</em></p>
<p>Asked whether his films had a beginning, middle and end, the director Jean-Luc Godard famously replied “yes, but not necessarily in that order”.</p>
<p>He was wrong. That is <em>exactly</em> the order of his films. Or any other film. Time is the condition of drama, and this proceeds in linear fashion regardless of the content in it. Writers can re-arrange or explode the formal surfaces of their plays. This makes no difference to the fact of time on which they rely for their real-world existence. </p>
<p>If we see a play that is two hours long we emerge from it two hours older. Time passes in successive increments, out of the impenetrable future, into the fading past. It reflects, and can only reflect, this pattern: now this/now this/now this /now this/now this/now this/ etc. </p>
<p>Drama’s existence is fugue on the temporal dimension of life. We don’t get those two hours back. Which is why we are so pissed off when we see a play that doesn’t “work”. </p>
<h2>What gets understood onstage?</h2>
<p>Given the centrality of time to drama’s unfolding, it is odd that it receives so little attention in academic scholarship. Instead, a play’s literary merit is often the thing discussed, its nature spread flat out, like a musical score, as if it could be comprehended all at once. </p>
<p>But this is not how drama “works”. Drama involves a time-reliant combination of information and expectation, such that a certain kind of attention is elicited. To put it simply, drama is less about what gets said, than what gets understood. </p>
<p>A dramaturge focuses not on the literary merit of a play, but on the accrual of understanding. It may happen that it is both a literary masterpiece <em>and</em> “works”. But the two do not necessarily go together, as high viewing figures for sub-average TV drama frequently attest.</p>
<p>From a dramaturgical perspective many of the scholarly observations made about plays – who wrote them, when and why, their history, their canonical status, or not – are irrelevant. Audiences do not need to know such things to watch a drama. </p>
<p>Plays provide their own map legend, allowing sense-making from within. Likewise they rarely assume specialist knowledge or use purely private imagery. Instead, they present in a publicly-accessible manner, “for the many and the wise”. Their communicative shape is outward, participative. </p>
<p>They actively seek connection with audiences. Of all the art forms, drama is the most <em>forward.</em> </p>
<h2>New mourning</h2>
<p><a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400141h.html">Mourning Becomes Electra </a> is a trilogy of plays written by the American playwright Eugene O’Neill in 1931. How do they “work”? Under what conditions could they “work”?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nCEWW9URXg4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Mourning Becomes Electra as an opera, composed by Martin David Levy, for Florida Grand Opera in 2014.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In his <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html">Poetics</a>, Aristotle identifies six structural features of drama, the main ones being narrative, character and language. He allots primacy to the first because: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>all human happiness or misery takes the form of action. The end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality … In a play [people] do not act in order to portray the characters. They include the characters for the sake of the plot. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Aristotle wasn’t right even in 4th Century BCE. But he did pose a key question: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What counts in a play when it is actually performed? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mourning Becomes Electra is a transposition of Aeschylus’s <a href="https://archive.org/details/oresteiaofaeschy00aesciala">Oresteia</a>, the earliest complete play in existence. Aeschylus set his story at the end of the Trojan War, thereby raising issues related to Ancient Greece’s recent conflict with Persia. </p>
<p>Having said the scholarly context of a play is irrelevant to its performance, the social context of the audience clearly isn’t. Plays make assumptions about spectators’ general knowledge. If they did not, no dramatic understanding could accrue in the short time available. </p>
<p>O’Neill sets the different parts of his trilogy – Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted – at the close of the American Civil War. For US audiences, this was a time of both history and myth, similar to the Mycenaean era for Aeschylus. The recent conflict was the first world war. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77580/original/image-20150410-15216-9r5wwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Eugene O'Neill plaque, New York City.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/openplaques/7939080120/in/photolist-d6xRVJ-S78Zn-aBxkXV-pdAP6a-pbQHe9-pbQHzQ-mpobBz-NyNp7-dnZi78-dnZdFW-dnZdTw-qGy6Q-aR85LV-qH8vR-9GCwgM-aBFKkA-qH8xe-qH8yT-9tR7E1-62QMbw-ceKyxU-ceKxBm-qH8ub-6NA4g9-egCZsm-jds8VB-b6Uqnp-qFMHcv-77uZVV-f5LGn1-jdsa9P-6iA1sv-9UyBK-pCDL7G-cwzGW3-9GCAvn-oEaYsh-egD1z3-egxfhB-egD1v7-egD1pS-bN7G4V-egxfna-bNqp8t-bzvHSu-bzvQBb-dsAx2z-dsAFpL-dsAFe9-dsAFWA">Open Plaques/Flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the action unfolds, there are six layers of meaning available to O’Neill writing in 1931, looking through 1918 to 1865, echoing a play from 458 BCE, looking through 490 BCE to the 12th century BCE. </p>
<p>An audience doesn’t have to grasp these layers intellectually. But they may be brought to appreciate them emotionally through allusion, suggestion and inference. In this way plays are “volumised”. </p>
<p>What we hear and see is only the most visible part of our dramatic experience which, like an iceberg, lies largely beneath the surface of portrayed events.</p>
<p>At the heart of Mourning Becomes Electra are the Mannons, a New England family of vast wealth and good repute, whose secret past is one of avarice, lust and betrayal. </p>
<p>In Homecoming, Ezra Mannon, a Union general, returns from the war to be murdered by Christine, his beautiful wife, in concert with her young lover, Adam Brant. But the causes of this killing go back further. </p>
<p>Brant is the son of Ezra’s uncle David, cast off by his brother, Abe, Ezra’s father, in a jealous rage at his marriage to a woman they both loved. Brant takes up with Christine to revenge himself on the family. </p>
<p>In The Hunted, Brant is then murdered in turn by Orin, Ezra’s son, a Union captain suffering from war trauma. Most of Homecoming is taken up by with feud between Christine and her daughter Livinia, who sees her father poisoned, and in The Hunted persuades Orin to shoot Brant. When Orin confronts his mother with what he’s done, she commits suicide. </p>
<p>The Haunted is set a year later, after Orin and Livinia have returned from a trip abroad. It focuses on their attempt to escape the sucking bog of the Mannon family evil. They fail. </p>
<p>Mad with guilt, Orin shoots himself while Livinia, all chance of happiness gone, her entire family dead, locks herself up in the Mannon mansion to spend the rest of her life in self-reproach.</p>
<h2>What makes it work?</h2>
<p>Based on the first tragedy ever written, Mourning Becomes Electra is itself self-consciously a tragedy. How does it achieve its effects? Mainly through the lines that are spoken and the deeds that are shown. </p>
<p>This may seem an obvious point, yet it is not. As we will see when next looking at Graham Duncan’s <a href="http://belvoir.com.au/productions/cut/">Cut</a> (2011) in the next article in this series, plays are not written in words but in words <em>and silence.</em> </p>
<p>It is around the “negative space” carved out by “positive action” that dramatic understanding accrues. In O’Neill’s play this space is at a premium, as it is filled to the gunnels with characters arguing, explaining, accusing, articulating their feelings in high language. </p>
<p>And when the characters aren’t talking, the playwright is. Take the <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400141h.html">stage direction </a> describing the forbidding Mannon mansion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Exterior of the Mannon house on a late afternoon in April, 1865. At front is the driveway which leads up to the house from the two entrances on the street. Behind the driveway the white Grecian temple portico with its six tall columns extends across the stage. A big pine tree is on the lawn at the edge of the drive before the right corner of the house. Its trunk is a black column in striking contrast to the white columns of the portico. By the edge of the drive, left front, is a thick clump of lilacs and syringas. A bench is placed on the lawn at front of this shrubbery which partly screens anyone sitting on it from the front of the house. It is shortly before sunset and the soft light of the declining sun shines directly on the front of the house, shimmering in a luminous mist on the white portico and the gray stone wall behind, intensifying the whiteness of the columns, the somber grayness of the wall, the green of the open shutters, the green of the lawn and shrubbery, the black and green of the pine tree. The white columns cast black bars of shadow on the gray wall behind them. The windows of the lower floor reflect the sun’s rays in a resentful glare. The temple portico is like an incongruous white mask fixed on the house to hide its somber gray ugliness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The directions in Mourning Becomes Electra would grace a Steinbeck novel in their physical exactness. And this extends to the characters as well. Christine Mannon, for example, is described as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A tall striking-looking woman of forty but she appears younger. She has a fine, voluptuous figure and she moves with a flowing animal grace. She wears a green satin dress, smartly cut and expensive, which brings out the peculiar color of her thick curly hair, partly a copper brown, partly a bronze gold, each shade distinct and yet blending with the other. Her face is unusual, handsome rather than beautiful. One is struck at once by the strange impression it gives in repose of being not living flesh but a wonderfully life-like pale mask, in which only the deep-set eyes, of a dark violet blue, are alive. Her black eyebrows meet in a pronounced straight line above her strong nose. Her chin is heavy, her mouth large and sensual, the lower lip full, the upper a thin bow, shadowed by a line of hair.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The play is full of such details – of characters who look a certain way, or like other characters, or suddenly whither or bloom. How is a director or cast to make sense of these? What is the playwright trying to do?</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=870&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/77581/original/image-20150410-15228-1ylla50.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1093&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dress rehearsal of Eugene O'Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, directed by Peter Marroney, at the University of Arizona’s Drama Department, 1970.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidleeguss/4134209573/in/photolist-7ijUtp-cv16y9-cv2ivW-cuZMWC-62QMbw-cuYoGW-cuYsEG-9GCwgM-fb7FCV-9GCAvn-QPPDD-rbekDe-cv3tgC-cv3GjN-7iqenb-6jUcvF-agksJ8-cuYrHG-cuYnfb-cuYmJ9-cuYq8C-6GQvf7-8dUn1c-hxKmE-oEaYsh-mT9pK-7Uwhc8-7Uwhjg-aE8bvM-D7amD-5VaEdn-2PVofb-oeJVDW-5TQDwm-66tkxz-qcH9u5-68ZS8p-qTgNwJ-KzZjQ-7EiyoB-7xYLZu-3a32vM-9dZhYd-zoXXS-3hJ1qu-zoWpY-dbQjfT-4wLqJu-9cjBP1-ehQ9Mp">David Lee Guss/Flickr</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Plays differ radically in the instructions they provide in respect of their production. Shakespeare’s originally had no stage directions at all. Why would they? They were written for a company of actors well-known to the playwright, who himself was a member of that company. </p>
<p>They were unlikely to be performed by anyone else since before the award of author’s royalties the aim was to stop people performing your play, not facilitate it.</p>
<p>O’Neill’s position was different. His plays were designed to be reproduced in situations where he was not physically present, and the stage directions offer a guide to the author’s intentions. Necessarily, they are loose-fit. </p>
<p>Some productions will follow them carefully, some not. But that may not have bothered O’Neill. His aim was probably less to control every presentation of his plays, than to ensure his views were part of the staging conversation. And in this respect, the directions in Mourning Becomes Electra are gems of the genre.</p>
<h2>Turning points</h2>
<p>As the trilogy unfolds the action speeds up. By varying the pulse of explicit information, playwrights can build a sense of intellectual and emotional momentum, sweeping along the audience physically and psychologically. </p>
<p>A classic means of doing this – again, identified by Aristotle – are “the reveal” and “the reversal”. They often go together. </p>
<p>When Brant <em>reveals</em> his true motives for courting Livinia – to hide his relationship with Christine – her position <em>reverses.</em> She goes from being a lover to being an instrument of revenge. The reveals and reversals accumulate and become the wherewithal for audience inference about what is going on subtextually, or what might happen next. </p>
<p>In this way, what a play shows shapes expectations about what will be shown. Or what can never be shown (but is nevertheless understood to be the case). </p>
<p>When expectations shift radically during the course of the action, a drama can be said to “turn”. Audiences go from passively receiving information to actively applying it, prompted by a passage of action that radically stimulates their understanding. </p>
<p>In The Hunted, Livinia manipulates Orin into killing Brant by playing on his possessiveness of Christine – the same possessiveness that caused Abe to reject his brother, David. At this point, it is possible to see a whole web of psycho-sexual relationships running through the play, reaching a climax in the suggestion of incest between Orin and Livinia in The Haunted.</p>
<h2>Beyond the plot</h2>
<p>Does all this make plot the primary feature of Mourning Becomes Electra?</p>
<p>It is certainly important. And it is important for other 20th-century playwrights too: GB Shaw, Noel Coward, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Terrence Rattigan, and Australian writers such as Ray Lawler and Richard Beynon. </p>
<p>But the plot is borrowed, just as many of Shakespeare’s plots are borrowed, and the reveals and reversals are largely of interest because of the characters’ response to them. At the heart of O’Neill’s play is a round-trip of consummate spiritual destruction: that of Livinia’s. </p>
<p>Over the course of three plays (six hours?) this figure – Aeschylus’s Electra – goes from vengeful harridan, to loving woman, to broken criminal. Mercilessly punishing her mother for crimes she later also commits, she then mercilessly punishes herself. </p>
<p>It is a terrifying fall, and it happens on the level of character, not plot. For Mourning Becomes Electra to “work” good actors are needed for all roles, but especially for Livinia. </p>
<h2>But … what’s it about?</h2>
<p>What is O'Neill getting at more broadly? The men in it are all damaged – by greed, by conformity, but above all damaged by war. It is, at heart, an anti-war play, and breathes with a horror of violent conflict, the men who engage in it, the women who encourage it. When Lavinia lauds Orin for his bravery in the Civil War, he responds:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ORIN: I’ll tell you the joke about that heroic deed. It really began the night before when I sneaked through their lines. I was always volunteering for extra danger. I was so scared anyone would guess I was afraid. There was a thick mist and it was so still you could hear the fog seeping into the ground. I met a Reb crawling toward our lines. His face drifted out of the mist toward mine. I shortened my sword and let him have the point under the ear. He stared at me with an idiotic look as if he’d sat on a tack – and his eyes dimmed and went out. (His voice has sunk lower and lower, as if he were talking to himself.) Before I’d gotten back I had to kill another in the same way. It was like murdering the same man twice. I had a queer feeling that war meant murdering the same man over and over, and that in the end I would discover the man was myself. Their faces keep coming back in dreams - and they change to Father’s face - or to mine.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Does Mourning Becomes Electra “work” as a play? It certainly has high literary status, but would it now elicit the kind of attention the playwright created it for? </p>
<p>Justice, said American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, is what the courts will enforce. Likewise whether a play “works” can only be discovered by putting it front of an audience. </p>
<p>No other test matters, none other exists. And the test is a public one. A lone response to a drama is not significant unless it can prompt others to respond in the same way (though this has been famously done on a number of occasions).</p>
<p>Under what conditions would O’Neill’s play “work”? Almost certainly a contemporary cast given the script would find the dialogue a challenge. There is a lot of it, and the sentence constructions, the phrasings, the individual words would seem “old-fashioned”. </p>
<p>In drama, however, everything is relational. The play is not the thing. It is the understanding <em>in</em> the play that is the thing. </p>
<p>We do not say that Shakespeare is “old-fashioned”, although no doubt he seemed so to the prose playwrights of the Restoration era. Instead, we have found a way into his plays by close attention to their formal surface (that we may better understand them) while pursuing our own concerns (that they may serve our current needs). </p>
<p>The division often cited between doing a play faithfully or freely adapting it isn’t an absolute one. A faithful production of a play betrays if it fails to capture the energy within. A radical one serves it well if it does so.</p>
<p>Finding a way to make a non-contemporary play “work” is tough in either case, however. </p>
<p>Different acting skills must be acquired, different writing conventions taken into account. But the process of exploring a play’s original meaning is important if it isn’t to be reduced to what can be easily grasped, the tyranny of the now. </p>
<p>If drama is about understanding, its significance as an art form lies in the fact that we are asked to understand something other than ourselves. This responsibility also falls on the playwright, of course, gifted with a few precious hours of our attention. </p>
<p>The greatness of Mourning Becomes Electra, the reason why it “works” in the right circumstances, lies in its inter-subjective transcendence. For O’Neill does not use Aeschylus’s Oresteia in a crude way. </p>
<p>He evokes it such that multiple layers of meaning are opened up, allowing us to witness moments that are both startlingly new and immeasurably old: to open a channel of human communication across the ages. </p>
<p>You can get a sense of this in O'Neill’s last stage direction, at the end of The Haunted. Livinia has rejected her suitor, Peter, and the Mannon’s gardener, Seth, is boarding up the mansion in which she will be incarcerated:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She ascends to the portico - and then turns and stands for a while, stiff and square-shouldered, staring into the sunlight with frozen eyes. Seth leans out of the window at the right of the door and pulls the shutters closed with a decisive bang. As if this were a word of command, Lavinia pivots sharply on her heel and marches woodenly into the house, closing the door behind her.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39687/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many of the scholarly observations made about plays – who wrote them, when and why, their history, their canonical status, or not – are irrelevant. Audiences do not need to know such things.Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/321062014-09-29T19:13:35Z2014-09-29T19:13:35ZTerrorism, truth and trust – how dramaturgy informs real life<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60279/original/hp3w7764-1411973733.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Photographs sometimes mean what they can be shown to mean.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Julian Smith </span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out. </p>
<p>Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit of their greater meaning and impact: if drama is the substance of those events, dramaturgy is about wrestling them into temporal shape, of ensuring they are dramatic. It doesn’t stand outside the drama – but is part of it, invisible most of the time. Still, it plays a pivotal role. </p>
<p>It is important to acknowledge, for example, the Islamic State’s beheading videos were art-directed and choreographed. These choices fed the construction of a larger cognitive pattern audiences recognise as a “story”, the result of a particular dramaturgical strategy. The soft lighting. The English-language voice-over. The discrete portrayal of violence so that what we imagine is so much more shocking than what we actually see. </p>
<p>Dramaturgy is not confined to theatre and its ideas are often employed to organise the action of real life. The essence of these ideas is the creation of what animators call a “world”, a frame of reference in which events are interpreted in a certain way by spectators who take this to be a “natural” point of view. </p>
<p>One of the tricky things to grasp about dramaturgy is that while it is neither true nor false in itself, it is the indispensable handmaiden of truth and falsehood. Its evidentiary implications aren’t apparent at the start, though, when a “world” is being created. </p>
<p>Only with the drama underway is it possible to gauge the veracity of the apparently spontaneous acts it un-spontaneously brings into existence. </p>
<p>By then it is often too late to do anything about them, of course. You’ve bought your ticket and are trapped in your seat as the show proceeds to its dramaturgically-propelled conclusion.</p>
<h2>All the world’s a stage</h2>
<p>The greatest theorist of dramaturgy, the deepest realiser of its fecund, disturbing possibilities, is undoubtedly the sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Presentation-Self-Everyday-Life/dp/0385094027">The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life</a> is an inspired analysis of social interaction using dramaturgical concepts: “role”, “frame”, “front”, “backstage”, “team” – and the crucial one, “performance”. </p>
<p>Goffman applied this perspective to many areas of contemporary life: mental health (in Asylums – 1961), disability (in Stigma – 1963) and gender identity (in Gender Advertisements – 1979). What makes his writing so compelling is that he draws our attention to a type of communication that is at once complex, embarrassing and ubiquitous. </p>
<p>There is no life without dramaturgy. If you don’t choose a “world” you’ll get given one by someone else. We are all involved, from pan-handlers to presidents, in the dramaturgical task of constructing the story we want the world to believe we are telling. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60277/original/hk9z4yw6-1411972980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Muslims rallied against overnight counter-terrorism raids across western Sydney earlier this month.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts </span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One of Goffman’s insights is that dramaturgy is not a matter of belief but of trust. When the Australian police force conducts large-scale, coordinated raids in a classic dramaturgical ploy, a “show” of force, it is not only a matter of making judgements about truthfulness. Dramaturgy structures our expectations. </p>
<p>Two of its common tools are tableaux of vivid action and exposition – symbolic deeds resonating beyond their ostensible purpose, and explanations that tease out those resonances for the benefit of the attending audience. </p>
<p>As a world gets underway, spectators move from action to exposition and back again trying to work out what’s going on, “what the story is”. And how it’s going to end. Dramaturgical ideas are time-binding ones, and the organisation of action at the start of a drama is crucial in determining both the sense and the trustworthiness of the world being virtually woven around the information – inevitably more minimal – that is actually known.</p>
<h2>Too many old stories</h2>
<p>Dramaturgy also has some persistent problems it can call its own. </p>
<p>One relates to “characters”, the human beings who inhabit a drama or are dragged into it willy-nilly. In drama, character is a doubled concept: there is the individual, the person who breaks the law; and then there is “the law breaker”, the general category they supposedly represent. </p>
<p>Stereotyping is not an unfortunate side-effect of the dramaturgy of everyday behaviour: it is a central part of its use. Individuals who share the same traits as the central character get caught in the same interpretative rubric. A photograph of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-19/jacqui-lambie-calls-for-ban-on-burkas-in-public/5756136">a woman wearing a burka and holding a gun</a> becomes an image of the “villain of the piece”. </p>
<p>There is little point arguing about what the photograph <em>really</em> means. It really means what it can be shown to mean, what dramaturgy can get it to mean in its quest for narrative shape.</p>
<p>Dramaturgical strategies can also fall apart at crucial times in a drama’s unfolding. “Second act problems” as they are sometimes called assert themselves when audiences are familiar with a world and better able to ascertain the status of the action presented within it. </p>
<p>Trust can evaporate. When weapons of mass destruction were not discovered in the aftermath of the second Iraq War it was more than another news story: it was the end of a shared belief system – the failure of a dramaturgy which, to be sustainable, needed those weapons to be discovered.</p>
<h2>Chief dramaturge</h2>
<p>In one of those real-life coincidences that playwrights don’t have the nerve to dream up, George Brandis is both Australia’s Attorney General and our Minster for the Arts.</p>
<p>Marrying those roles he is ghosted by a third: Chief Dramaturge. New laws can be made but they must also be “sold”. They must be rolled out, explained, demonstrated <em>in situ</em>, further explained, in a process designed both to embed them and show that they will be effective. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60275/original/z4tqz5mr-1411972621.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1133&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Attorney General George Brandis … Chief Dramaturge?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Lukas Coch</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Whether they are effective or not depends on public trust being extended so the world they legislate for comes into interpretive existence. If it is extended then the laws may be effective – perhaps so effective they rarely have to be used. </p>
<p>But it can work the other way too. Dramaturgical strategies can loop back on themselves and become self-reinforcing, escalating the very behaviour they are designed to excise. Under the new laws a man who wasn’t a suspect is named a suspect and interviewed by police. This event strengthens the impression that he is indeed a suspect and he reacts negatively – a response which is, of course, viewed suspiciously. </p>
<p>Right now the Minister needs to be as wary of bad dramaturgy as bad law-making. He needs to be conscious that Australians will be using the crap dramas of the past to determine the trustworthiness of the one being inaugurated. </p>
<p>Another important thing about dramaturgy: it is easy to stuff up. It looks simple but the skills it demands are delicate ones. What the dramaturge manages is nothing less than collective, ethical understanding. </p>
<p>“The more the individual is concerned with a reality that is not available to perception, the more must he concentrate on appearances,” notes Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is here that communicative acts are translated into moral ones. The impressions that the [individual] gives tend to be treated as claims and promises they have implicitly made, and claims and promises tend to have a moral character.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Indeed they do. As the minister, the government and the country decide which world best represents the truth of the emergent reality, dramaturgy sounds a warning note. We need to be as careful <em>how</em> we do things as <em>what</em> we do. </p>
<p>Impressions matter when the truth is hard to discern, and the future looms like a dark cloud, and you are supposed to trust those who ask for your trust – and hope to hell they are worthy of it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/32106/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out. Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit…Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.