Playwriting 101

I've spent the past week down in Shepton Mallet at New Wine's London and South East Summer Conference. Part of the reason I was there was to deliver a seminar on Playwriting within the church context. This is the first time that I have ever delivered a seminar, and while I am used to workshopping, facilitating and teaching, this felt much more formal and a bit more scary! But in planning what I was going to say and how I was going to approach it, I found that I had a pretty big revelation about drama within the church.

I found as I set out in my planning that I was reluctant to put too much weight on the aesthetic nature of creating pieces of drama for church. I felt that referring to these scenes or dramas or plays as pieces of theatre or pieces of art would probably sit uncomfortably for a lot of people because we all have certain conceptions of what constitutes a piece of art and who makes art and also who can access it, and the thought of part of a church service being a piece of theatre also seems quite controversial. But what I realised is that if we fail to recognise what we are writing and presenting as pieces of art or pieces of theatre then we are actually negating their purpose and losing the potential that they have to communicate with our congregation (or audience) on a different level to a typical sermon. So, I think it is important to recognise that drama in a church context is in a sense a piece of educational theatre. And theatre is art.

Anthony Jackson has written a book called Theatre, Education and the Making of Meanings and in it he says:

“A genuine work of art, it is often said, cannot be didactic. The novel, play or poem that sets out to convey information or to preach a message risks surrendering those qualities we usually value in art – complexity, ambiguity, multi-layered meanings, richness of imagination.”

Wow! What does that say about the kind of drama we see in church?

He goes on to say:

“The process of watching a play is ideally one of creative engagement, not of passive response. If educational theatre becomes didactic, if what it offers is reducible to the one-way conveyance of a message, then arguably it will have failed aesthetically and educationally, and for identical reasons.”

If we don’t recognise that what we are creating is a piece of art/theatre then actually we are missing the point in using it at all and if we try to force our message into the mouths of the characters we make them less truthful and believable – and so they become nothing more than a mouthpiece for our sermon... and for me that begs the question, why use drama at all? Why not just preach a sermon? We must embrace it for what it is - an art form - because in denying it we lose it's power to communicate.

It made me realise that I desperately want to see the church move away from pieces of drama that are solely for preaching a message, because what do they really achieve that can’t be achieved with more integrity by someone delivering a sermon?

I’m convinced that drama can bring something fresh and different to a church service and I think it is a mode of communication that is absolutely in keeping with the example Jesus gave us. Brian McLaren says the following in his book More Ready than you Realise:

“If you know anything about Jesus at all, you probably know that he was an amazing conversationalist. Unlike the typical evangelist-caricature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstractions and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself”

It seems that Jesus, too, is in favour of steering away from storytelling that merely preaches a message. In our pieces of drama, we don’t have to tie everything up neatly and answer every question – Jesus answered questions with more questions! The bible tells us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made – we are complex beings, full of contradictions – when we go down the route of storytelling that preaches a message we water human beings down to one-dimensional characters in order to put our message into their mouths – that doesn’t make compelling drama and I would argue that it doesn’t challenge our audience/congregation to think for themselves. Instead, if we create fully-rounded characters that open up conversation and lead us to ask questions rather than merely inform us of a message we are following Jesus example more closely

We were given freewill and the ability to make choices and decisions. More and more in our education system it is being recognised that the most effective methods of teaching are those that allow the students to be “active learners” by exploring and questioning and encouraging them to think for themselves. The church has to grab on to this too. 

As a writer of the drama in a church setting, you will most likely be given the topic or theme or premise of what it should be about – This will most likely be a thread that is running right the way through the service. It is our job then to find, to create, a story that illustrates that premise. Taking Jesus example with his parables – we should use a situation and characters that are culturally relevant so that the story is anchored in the reality of the people we are telling it to. We need to come up with a plot that paints a picture for the congregation.

When we think of the drama in this way, as one part of the whole service it helps us to clarify the task in hand. We can avoid the pitfall of feeling that we need to make every single point explicit in the drama, resting in the knowledge that the drama will be followed (or in some cases preceded) by a sermon that will open up the conversation and highlight the points that we want the congregation to consider. It comes back to the church being a body – we are all different parts with different functions and we work best together when we fulfil our own function and recognise the function of others.

When we are not writing for a church service and won't have a sermon to anchor our piece, the question we must consider is whether we are willing to take the risk that some people might leave without having received what we want them to receive. I would have to concede that it feels somehow easier to make sure that the audience definitely get the point that we want to make by stating it plainly (didactically) and making it obvious, however, I have begun to ask whether doing so takes the theatricality out of the work and whether such an approach just, at best, engages the intellect and misses the heart.

In the work that I write, direct and devise I want to be telling stories that convict the heart, stories with fully-rounded characters. The difficulty here is that I then relinquish all control and must lay down my agenda in order to allow the characters’ own voices freedom from censorship. The moment we lay down the opportunity to preach a point we open a door to the possibility that some members of the audience will leave without having received the message that we might have intended. But we also open a door to a much more credible, real and moving piece of storytelling.

The Product of a Year's Process

I'm coming to the end of my year studying an MA in Theatre Directing at East 15 Acting School. It's been an interesting year and I've been on a huge journey. I applied for the course because I felt like I needed to top up my toolbox for my work in Community Theatre and because I was frustrated with the low production standards in a lot of the work that I was seeing, and creating.

When I was studying for my BA in Community Arts we would talk a lot about the tension between process and product but I found I had got to a place, where I was constantly disappointed with the product. It was this discontentment that had led me to apply for the course, aiming to come out the other end better-equipped for work in the community sector and striving to raise the bar on the "product" of the projects I would work on.

So, I have spent a year in class with 25 emerging directors learning about Contemporary British Theatre, Comedy and Farce, Music Theatre and techniques for directing and was given the incredible opportunity to undertake an independent module assisting Matthew Dunster on his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre. Somewhere along the way I decided to allow myself to consider aiming to work as a director in the professional industry. It didn't ever quite sit comfortably with me, and I was never entirely sure why - was it a lack of belief in myself and my abilities? Or was it something else?

Somewhere during the rehearsals for The Dream it struck me why I felt so uneasy about working in the professional industry. I realised that for the actors this is work and so in their professionalism they leave their lives outside the rehearsal room door. In a community setting the actors are under no such obligation, they bring their lives and all that is going on in their world into the rehearsal room with them and we experience the collision of people's lives with the shared task of making a play or exploring a story together which creates a huge chaotic mess from which something beautiful emerges. The beauty we find in the community rehearsal room is a very different kind of beauty from that which emerges in the professional rehearsal room. The theatre we create in the community sector is raw and oftentimes with rough edges, but the theatre is not the only product that we create here. So perhaps all these years I have been asking the wrong question, perhaps instead of asking process or product, the question should be what is the product?

In the community rehearsal room there is more than one product. We are not just focussed on creating a clear telling of the story for our audience, but also on the impact that exploring that story (and exploring it together as a group) has on those who are telling it. It is the combination of both of these products and the huge chaotic mess I mention above that I get most excited about.

"Drama engages both the head and the heart. Learning through drama relies on the active involvement of our mind, body, feelings and spirit. In the realm of imagined experience, we take on roles of other characters and experience different situations, so that our understanding of ourselves, of others and of the world we live in grows. Drama provides an opportunity to address moral dilemmas, to express our feelings, to be creative and to explore new ideas and ways of being. Drama demands interaction between people - it is a social process."

Sara Clifford and Anna Herrmann

"Making a Leap: Theatre of Empowerment" (1999)

And so, as I come to the end of my year of study, I find I have come full circle and have arrived back on the path of Community Theatre, but this time around I know it is the path I am actively choosing and I know more clearly why I want to take it. I seek to make community theatre that gives equal weighting to both products, believing that creating a piece of theatre that's of a high standard will be a more empowering experience for all involved.