Revels in the Craft of Storytelling
Here is a interesting snippet from an interview with playwright and screenwriter Tom Stoppard in which he answers a question about why comedy seems to work better than drama at communicating important ideas.
Let me know what you think about it. I find intriguing his golf analogy, and his description of a joke as an invitation for an audience to do a little work and meet the ideas of a play “halfway.”
You can access the entire interview here.
“The mystery in drama is time.” –David Mamet
A plot is an arrangement of action and episode held together by the causal glue that Aristotle calls “probability and necessity.” Once it is decided that only a nuclear warhead will serve to destroy Godzilla and the other creatures he is fighting with, then whatever is required to fire such a warhead at the monsters “necessarily” follows. It doesn’t follow by strict necessity. After all, these are actions of human beings, which can always take a willful diversion. But given the end desired, the actions taken to obtain it follow by a kind of “necessity” that Aristotle tries to capture with the made-up phrase, “probability and necessity.”
A plot pictures movement through time, but in doing so it paradoxically seeks to wrest the characters out of time. In the final essay in his book, Theatre, David Mamet writes that “the rejection of this intolerable burden [i.., time], our human specialty, is the goal of the religious mystic, the yogi, the lover, and the drug addict–to live in a world without time, to achieve unbeing.”
To seek a world beyond time is also the goal of the dramatist. Aristotle famously says that tragedy is more philosophical than history because it seeks the universal in the particular. In the preface to 3 Plays Thornton Wilder echoes Aristotle when he contends that the theater’s special ability is to tell the truth both of the particular individual and of the general truth:
“It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to evoke our belief.”
Accordingly, Wilder disdains the tendency of 19th-century theater to “load the stage with specific objects,” objects meant to ground the action in the particularities of time and place. “So it was by a jugglery with time that the middle classes devitalized the theater. When you emphasize place in the theater, you drag down and limit and harness time to it. You thrust the action back into past time, whereas it is precisely the glory of the stage that it is always “now” there. Under such production methods the characters are all dead before the action starts. You don’t have to pay deeply from your heart’s participation.”
So a piece of drama meant for the stage shows us human beings in action, and thus movement through time, but at the same time it aspires to place that action against the backdrop of that which exists outside of time. The past and future of action is illuminated by the always “now.” For this reason the theater audience is better able to contemplate the eternal truth in the particular.
Mamet concludes his essay by saying, “The examination of this urge [to transcend time] and its avowal and the confession of its tragic impossibility is the subject of all drama.”
Tragic action, surely enough, reveals all that is humble and time-bound in the human condition. But Mamet is incorrect to say that such action is the subject of all drama. For the human mind also has its comic mode, which seeks that which transcends time–and finds it.
I’ve long been enamored of the programming on BBC Radio 4: 15 Minute Drama, Afternoon Drama, Book at Bedtime, Classic Serial, comedy serials of all kinds… And with my BBC Radio app all of this is as close as a push of the button on my iPhone (though as I write this on a Saturday morning I’m listening to the “football” on Talk Sport).
On U.S. radio I’m not sure where you can find any fiction. There’s all kinds of non-fiction storytelling on the radio, and on iTunes there are scads of comedy podcasts, but the rich radio tradition of fictional storytelling of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s is long gone.
The audio podcast, however, makes possible a revival of audio storytelling. Some basic recording and editing equipment, a quick gargle and fluttering of the tonsils, and you’re in business. I’m currently at work on a short play for audio that I’m aiming to introduce here on the site later in March. I plan to continue with more plays for audio as the year goes along. The audio play I’m working on, a cheery comedy I’m calling The Death Symposium, is a stand-alone work, but we all love serials, and I want to follow-up this first effort with an audio serial of some kind.
My influences? Tom Stoppard’s radio plays top the list. I have his Plays for Radio 1964-1983, but I just came upon this collection of actual performances of his radio plays from 1967-1991. Stoppard still works now and again in this genre, his most recent effort being 2013’s “Darkside,” a philosophical comedy celebrating the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album, The Dark Side of the Moon.
My favorites of Stoppard’s radio plays? “Where Are They Now?,” “Albert’s Bridge,” “Artist Descending a Staircase,” “The Dog It Was That Died.”
Who will perform my plays? Last fall I played the title role in the Castaways Repertory Theater’s production of Macbeth, and I also recorded the unabridged version of the first book in my Kingdom of Patria series, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits, a “full-cast solo recording,” and so with this experience in my pocket I plan on performing “The Death Symposium” myself.
Anyone else enjoy plays for radio/audio?
The featured image is reproduced courtesy of James Cridland at Flickr Creative Commons under the following license.
Today I’d like to take up Robert McCrum’s suggestion and celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, not by indulging in silly conspiracy theories, but by considering his work. Here I turn over some thoughts found in Northrop Frye’s essay, “The Argument of Comedy.”
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not the old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam;
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
“This is no flattery”; these are counselors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
When Shakespeare began to write there were several traditions of comedy permeating the literature of Elizabethan England. The dominant form was the so-called “New Comedy” which had its origins in Menander, flourished in the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, and achieved new forms in the English vernacular in Ben Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist. Though Shakespeare was undoubtedly influenced by New Comedy, the main theme of which, as critic Northrop Frye observes, “is the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice,” another and older pattern of comedic argument had an even more profound influence upon him. This was a tradition “established by Peele and developed by Lyly, Greene, and the masque writers, which uses themes from romance and folk-lore and avoids the comedy of manners.”
The themes of this older comic pattern, Frye continues,
“are largely medieval in origin, and derive, not from the Mysteries or the Moralities or the interludes, but from a fourth dramatic tradition. This is the drama of folk ritual, of the St. George play and the mummers’ play, of the feast of the ass and the Boy Bishop, and of all the dramatic activity that punctuated the Christian calendar with the rituals of the immemorial paganism. We may call this the drama of the green world, and its theme is once again the triumph of life over the waste land, the death and revival of the year impersonated by figures still human and once divine as well.”
G.K. Chesterton once remarked that Shakespeare would have been much better understood by Dante than he was by Goethe, meaning that Shakespeare was in his sensibilities closer to the medieval mind than to the modern. And nowhere do we find the truth of this opinion more evident than in Shakespeare’s development of the dramatic logic of the green world.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, to take one of Frye’s examples, is an orthodox New Comedy except for one thing: “The hero Valentine becomes captain of a band of outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters are gathered into this forest and become converted.” The green world of this forest serves as a place of metamorphosis, the natural laboratory of moral transformation in which the comic resolution of the play is concocted.
Similar green worlds are found in “the fairy world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the pastoral world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale.” Frye’s point is that in all these plays we see a pattern of movement out of the normal world, an adventure in a green world, and a return, finally, to the normal world.
Yet the characters return from the green world much changed. The green world enables the characters to “play” without the hindrance of social constrictions, and thus to discover new possibilities of being in the world. The result of which is that a new order is established both in the marital union of the lovers and the political reorganization this union effects.
But the green world is not restricted to those plays that literally involve a forest. “In The Merchant of Venice,” Frye argues, “the two worlds are a little harder to see, yet Venice is clearly not the same world as Portia’s mysterious house in Belmont, where there are caskets teaching that gold and silver are corruptible goods, and from whence proceed the wonderful cosmological harmonies of the fifth act. In The Tempest the entire action takes place in the second world, and the same may be said of Twelfth Night, which, as its title implies, presents a carnival society [Twelfth Night being the Eve of Epiphany and the conclusion of the twelve days of Christmas], not so much a green world as an evergreen one.”
The medieval symbolism of the green world, rooted in the even more ancient pagan ritual pattern of summer’s victory over winter, addresses the death and revival of human beings, which has its paradigm in the Death and Resurrection of Christ.
Do you think our comedies today, whether in books or movies, reflect this tradition of the green world?
If so, then what examples can you give?
If not, then why do you think not?
The following photographs were taken at the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.
Daniel McInerny, novelist, children's author, playwright, screenwriter. Read More…