The British Theatre Guide: Creating Your Own Show

School & Youth Theatre

Creating Your Own Show - Plotting and Structure

Compilation shows are fine but I find that soon the hunger to write your own show comes over you. Or else you might have always had a hankering to try your hand as a playwright and just find compilations frustrating. Whatever the reason, sooner or late many directors - and not a few actors! - find themselves wanting to write for themselves.

Time to be honest with yourself!

Have you any experience of writing? By that I mean creative writing, not simple college essays. If you really are going to be a writer, you are probably already writing - if not plays, then possibly novels, or journalism, or something! I've been writing for as long as I can remember. When I was in first year at Grammar School, way back in 1954, I used to write stories, some in comic strip form and some as continuous prose, and compile them into little magazines which I rented out at a penny (old money!) a read. These comics even carried advertising. In the days before the biro we all used fountain pens (this was even before the invention of the cartridge fountain pen!) and many of us used to forget to bring bottles of ink to school with us. Of course, when we ran out of ink in the middle of a lesson, it was disaster. For many teachers it was a caning offence! So some budding entrepreneurs used to offer an ink refill service. For a small weekly subsciption you could forget your ink bottle with impunity, for you were then entitled to use their ink. My comics carried (paid-for, of course) advertisements for these ink refill services. And they say the eighties was the decade of the entrepreneur!

But this is not relevant! Back to the subject!

If you have been writing since the year dot, then you have some experience of the craft of writing, if not its art. If you haven't, you're going to have a much harder job. It is not, however, an impossible task to learn: it's just harder!

What you really do need is a good ear for dialogue and the ability to reproduce it in written form. It helps if you've been an actor: at least you'll be able to recognise if your dialogue is speakable. And that's vital. No matter what you may think of, for instance, Harold Pinter as a playwright (and opinions do differ sharply), no one can deny that he has a superb ear for dialogue and his plays are eminently speakable.

Do examine yourself and your abilities closely. And then read lots of plays, not thinking of them in terms of production but from the point of view of the writing. See how the playwright constructs his plot, structures his dialogue, conveys ideas of character, creates tension, and so on. Set yourself little exercises. Imagine, for instance, an argument between husband and wife about some everyday matter. Script it. Now change the character of one of them: does the change make you alter the way (s)he speaks? does it make a difference to the response of the other? It should! Change the setting: instead of having the row in the privacy of their home, set it in a supermarket. Do the necessary changes spring to mind? Add interested spectators. How does the row affect them? Does everyone react in the same way? If they do, then you need to rethink, because everyone is different.

Don't begin writing your play until you're sure you can produce differentiated characters who are real and not cardboard cut-outs, who have character and individuality, people you could expect to bump into the next time you do your shopping.

Ask someone else, whose judgement you trust and who can be relied on to be honest with you (most important, that!), to read what you have written and give you an honest critique. Only when you are perfectly happy that your writing technique is up to scratch should you start on writing your play. The reason for this is simple: every writer knows how hard it is to throw away something you've written and so, if you start your play before you've got the basics of the craft under your belt, you'll be very tempted to keep things that really should be got rid of, and you'll weaken, keep them - and your play will be the weaker for it.

Once you're happy that you are actually capable of reaching the basic standard, then you can start on your own play.

My first play was not, actually, mine. It was a version of the medieval Mystery plays, culled from all the cycles: York, Wakefield and Townley primarily. This was a good thing, for I was able to concentrate on dramatic structure, revealing character and writing effectively, without having to worry about plot development. That made life considerable easier!

Give that a try. Do a translation from another language, if you have that ability, or dramatise a story. My second attempt was my version of the Wife of Bath's Prologue from the Canturbury Tales. That was a monologue and it enabled me to concentrate on the actual words and how they worked to create character and dramatic tension.

But let's suppose that you're now ready to begin your first real, wholly-created-by-you play. How do you start?

Everyone, they say, has one novel in them. It's probable, therefore, that everyone has a play waiting to come out. How do we get inside our heads sufficiently to bring it out into the cold light of day?

It may be that you already have an idea for a play in your mind: that idea may be a fully-fledged plot line, or just simply an idea for a theme or subject. If it's a plot, then you might just want to go to the next article which deas with the actual job of writing, developing dialogue, characterisation, and so on. For what we are going to do now is consider how to turn a theme into a plot. On the other hand, of course, you could find yourself halfway through your already-visualised plot and you suddenly realise that it's not going to work out the way you planned and you want some assistance on re-developing that plot. Then you'll kick yourself that you didn't read this!

So, how do you turn a theme into a plot?

Let's look at an actual theme. (I've chosen the following theme because there are plenty of resources available to help you.) Let's say you are moved by the suffering of those who experience human rights abuses, possibly abroad, possibly in the UK. You need something to start you off. In this case, there is an easy starting point. Go to http://www.ncl.ac.uk/~nsr/ HRW, which is the URL for a very useful drama workshop on the subject, the Human Rights Workshop. You could then work your way through the workshop with your group and - hopefully! - gradually ideas will begin to form in your mind about how the work the kids produce can be formed into a plotline for your play. You'll see what works dramatically - and what doesn't - and you may well have ready-made dialogue which you can sharpen and refine until you have it in a performable form.

(At the moment - mid-2003 - this is off-line. Simon promises that it will be back when he has the time, so keep looking!)

This is a short-cut which I suggest because I was very impressed with the workshop when I visited its site and talked to Simon, its deviser. I suggest that you look at it, anyway, because, even though you might not be interested in this particular topic, you can use this methodology to explore the topic which does interest you. If you want a good example of what can be achieved by a group researching, improvising and then having someone script the final version, just look at O What a Lovely War, which was devised by Theatre Workshop under the guidance of Joan Littlewood, and then scripted by Charles Chilton (who, incidentally, wrote that wonderful radio serial of my youth, Journey into Space. Ah times gone by! Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, you know.).

Sorry about that!

I've used this approach myself on a number of occasions, and it does work. I must admit, however, that I usually find that the kids' improvisation merely provides the starting point: very rarely indeed can I lift something directly from them. Generally their approach is rather too superficial to stand up to anything more than a brief improvisation. But it is a beginning - and sometimes, I must confess, finding a beginning was defeating me totally!

Way back in the early seventies - at the time of the Radcliffe-Maud reorganisation of UK local government (an unhappy memory which still rankles with some of us), the town in which I was working disappeared as a political entity, to become part of a larger conurbation. That town was Jarrow and the conurbation of which it became a part was South Tyneside. To celebrate (mourn?) the passing of Jarrow as a Borough, I wrote a show called And Now At Last It's the Amazing Jarrow Show! - a history of the town going back to the Romans. There was plenty of subject matter: what I needed to find was a structure to hold the whole thing together. Briefly I toyed with the idea of a narrator, possibly a learned historian, possibly a kind of mythical character like the Wandering Jew (or the Highlander!), but I rejected them as being, frankly, a bit boring. I decided that I would leave the structure to last and set out to research the piece first.

It took me about six months. I read every history of the town I could lay my hands on and talked to local historians who were able to provide me with copies of original documents. During this time I amassed a considerable amount of material, so I then spent a couple of months simply rejecting those things which were, I felt, either hugely uninteresting or peripheral to the main thrust of the town's history.

At the end of this period I realised that, without something to tie the whole thing together, all I had was a sprawling mass of disparate material, linked only by the common factor of the town itself. I went back to the idea of a narrator and realised that one person talking to the audience was just not on: what we needed was some way of making the narration entertaining. Eventually I hit on the idea of a superhero as the narrator!

Sounds silly? Yes, it was, and that's why I liked it. The show was going to be performed by both staff and kids from my school, and one of the volunteer staff was a member of the History department, so I hit on the idea of making him ordinary, boring Frank X who had a secret identity - Super Historian. We had a silly visual joke about him hunting for a telephone box in which to change, which involved the Stage Manager being shouted at because he'd forgotten to bring it on-stage. Anyway, he eventually emerged (underpants over his tights!) to be met by an adoring sixth form girl, Lizzie Lonnen (a multi-level joke there: the two women in the life of Superman (as Superman and Superboy) both had the initials L.L., the main love of his life was Lois Lane, and lonnen is a Geordie word for a lane. That's my sense of humour!), to whom he explained the history of Jarrow.

To keep the entertainment going, I kept changing the style of the piece: comic songs, pantomime, silent film, high drama, even (God save us!) Country and Western music - everything was dragged in to provide a sense of constant movement .

It worked!, but it took 21 months to create, only three of which were spent on the actual script.

My Dracula piece, however (I was the Son of the Brides of Dracula (Part III), the Musical), was devised in a totally different way. I began simply with the idea that I wanted to do a piece in which Drac won. I heard someone describe local councillors as bloodsuckers and that gave me the idea of making Dracula a councillor! I decided then that it made much more dramatic sense to have the play take place in the town in which it was being performed, and, to tie it down even more to the locality, I decided to use kids from the school, using their own names, as the apparent heroes.

From there the plot developed under its own steam, fuelled mainly by the characters who came into my mind. I can, with justice, say that the whole play was character-driven in that I created incidents to fit the characters. The vague plot outline was already there, of course, that the heroes should be taken by Dracula and become vampires themselves, but the detail emerged from the characters, who seemed to take on a life of their own.

There you are: three possible approaches to developing your play. I'm working on another at the moment. I want to write something about the 1839 St Hilda pit disaster in South Shields. I've got the main characters; I've got the story; I've even got some of the dialogue and the songs (for it is to be a musical). What I haven't yet is a structure, a way of tying the whole thing together into a dramatic unity. What I am toying with at the moment is something which has, I think, great possibilities, but which is also providing me with great problems. Many of the miners killed were deeply committed Christians, members of the Primitive Methodist Circuit of South Shields, so I am trying to structure the play in the form of a Methodist chapel service, with, possibly, audience participation in the form of community hymn singing. We'll see!

This idea of using something from popular culture as the form of the play is not unique to me, obviously. O What a Lovely War was cast in the form of an end-of-the-pier Pierrot show and The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, one of the most successful pieces of work by the 7:84 Theatre Company in the 70s was structured around the ceilidh. Finding this kind of structure metaphor, if you like - is the first step to being able to start writing your play.