Letters To Will Shakespeare

Letter Four: August and Everything After

2009-01-01T16:20:00.002Z

Dear Will,

Somewhere at the beginning of term it was suggested that we keep notes on all the productions we see during the year - both for our dramaturgy class (roll those eyes) and for our own benefit. I guess I've intermittently kept notes on the theatre I've seen for as long as I've been going to the theatre - it can't help but crop up in either diary or blog form, I spend far too much of my life in darkened rooms with a group of strangers, listening to the words of others. But it's not something I've particularly kept to after the suggestion was made. So - New Year and all that, I thought here might be the place to do so. And, anyway, I'm off to see Hamlet (again) in a week's time and I'm sure I'll want to talk to you about that.

First up - August: Osage County. Now, this came with some baggage. Namely that it won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. So, no high expectations there then. Telling the story of the dysfunctional Weston family, reunited when their poet-teacher-alcoholic father goes missing, it comes in at over three hours long and has two intervals. I'm sure you'd approve, Will.

Now, maybe because of all the superlatives I'd heard aimed in the play's direction, by the time of the first interval I was somewhat underwhelmed. Oh, yes I was enjoying the play - and the rather fabulous (Tony Award Winning) Deanna Dunagan as the horrific matriarch at the centre of the family - but I hadn't been blown away. Here, a play about a family, set in a single house, with lovely interplay between characters, and speeches that were longer than the length of a line of A4 paper that had subtext and allusions and such like, which made me laugh - it just all felt a little like it had been done before. And it pained me to think it, but I did. Why here? Why now? Why should I watch this when I could watch A Streetcar Named Desire, or A Long Day's Journey into Night, or Three Sisters, or Ghosts?

Then the Second Act happened, all those threads came together around a spectacularly written, hilariously terrible, outstandingly acted (though a little bit ineptly staged) dinner and I felt actual love bubbling in my stomach. And suddenly all those factors that I'd held against it gathered together in support of it. I loved that this was a play in which I could see its heritage. I loved that here was a quite brilliant play which, most likely, would not have been produced in subsidised British theatre because of its form and cast of thirteen (where every part had backstory and form and arc and narrative and all the things that make me giddy living, as I do, in the Era of the Six Actor Maximum One Act Play). Where is the 21st century British equivalent I wondered, and, you know what, I can't think of one. And that upsets me a little.

The final act didn't quite manage the heights of the one before it - the necessary concluding of the various storylines caused a little bit of sagging. But I loved that it didn't make concessions to neat or easy endings and left quite a lot up in the air. And the final image - with the ghost of T S Eliot coming through (ha! how excited did that make me?) was utterly - a little heartbreakingly - beautiful.

There was much, much that was right about August: Osage County. But my instinct remains that it is a very good play - with an outstanding Second Act - that maybe has been mistaken for a 'Great' play. Truth told - whilst it is lovely in retrospective and poetical terms that it begins where it does, in terms of where the story should be when the play begins it starts too early. It is, and I hate to say it, a little bit too indulgent with its form at several points. Someone with a red pen scratching through the script might actually have done it some favours. That said, however, I'd list it as one of my favourite afternoons I've spent in a theatre in the last year. And it filled me with a little bit of hope that a play such as this can still be made...

Corinne.x

Letter Three: Battleships

2008-11-28T14:44:00.007Z

Dear Will,

Today to the Collaboration Project which we're working on with Performance Making Students and a MA Composer. Battleship Potemkin is our starting point for a 3-5 minute piece which "does not have to include words". I'm sorry, but the very fact that of all the playwrights ever I have chosen to write to you - not exactly famed for your lack of wordage - points to the fact that I quite probably like words. So, yes, I think my piece does indeed have to have words otherwise it would not have been written by me.

Not that I feel that the piece in question actually is written by me. A combination of circumstances and some bad planning (not on my part, at least this once, I would hasten to add) has led me to take on a role which I realised today is more Dramaturg than Writer. Oddly it feels quite liberating - pulling things together, asking questions, pushing things in different directions. Indeed the only bit of writing I've done so far is a six line re-draft of the ending (excluding the use of my delete key, much easier to kill someone else's lines rather than your own, after all).

I had the vague impression before starting this project that I was maybe on a hiding to nothing in terms of marks - I don't really think my artistic sensibilities (whatever they might be) quite tally with any project that suggests no words. But it's certainly led to a discovery that I quite like the role I've fallen into. Obviously, however, there is a whole fortnight for it to go hideously wrong.

Corinne.x

Letter Two: Teenage Kicks

2008-11-26T16:01:00.003Z

Dear Will,

I've reserved today for a degree of panic regarding my Specific Audiences Project. I know, Will, you're rolling your eyes at that. Specific Audiences. Well, if you were around today I suspect that at the very least the National would be pestering you to write something for their New Connections season. Plays for Young People we might also call it. And my young people are between 14 and 18. So I have twenty minutes, four actors and a set which needs to be able to be packed up in a van and assembled without needing a helicopter. And that's a bit scary. Because a fifteen year old will tell you if your work's shit. Loudly.

So I'm playing around with what my piece may be. Female centric certainly (if ever there was a time to make use of having been educated in a single sex high school then this would be it...). My instinct is to set it during a school trip - possibly collapsing two of my recollections of school trips to the Isle of Wight when I was 13 and the South of France when I was 14. I also don't think I can do a 'straight' naturalistic play - I'm a little incapable of writing anything at the moment without some form of direct address it would appear - so it would have to be some sort of mixture of dialogue and monologue. Would I want all of the actors to be female? There would have to be some male presence (a teacher, the owner of the hostel, a boy from another school) but would they be played by a single man or be embodied by the girls? If it becomes their story then maybe this would be the route to take - especially if I'm going to have a form which is quite theatrical to start with.

The other thing that worries me - the references. As a teenager I was a worrying encyclopedia of pop-trash knowledge. All that utterly useless but wonderful trivia about a culture I know little about. So - I need to look at music (though there aren't really even any boybands, I don't know what teenage girls do now), tv (obviously X-Factor, anything else?), they're much more technologically savvy than I would have been at that age (having my first mobile - one of those nokias where you could push the cover off and change its colour - suddenly seems rather quaint). And language...all those twists and repetitions which I remember of my own teenage years (reading back my diaries, I remain unsure how I managed to do consistently well in in exams given the worrying grasp on grammar and spelling I seem to display).

Reading lots of plays it seems that working class teenagers are the focus, I want to get away from that slightly, or at the least not write a knives and street corners play...

Corinne.x

Letter One: In The Beginning

2008-11-18T20:12:00.000Z

Dear Will,

Maybe I should start with why I'm writing this. After all, I'm sure your inbox is clogged up with speculative letters. Directors. Actors. High School Students. I wouldn't blame you if you foisted some off to Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or Marlowe just because. The reason that I'm adding to the ever growing pile? I have to confess, I stole the idea (I assume that's a sentence you've had to use a lot too). Pursued by a reading list (it is four years since one of those pursued me) I discarded the texts I had either read already (erm, one of yours might have been on that list, but I'm sure we'll come back to it, I have read Timon and there can't be many people who say that) or was reluctant to read (erm, Tim Etchells I mean you) and had plumped for the book I found most intriguing. This turned out to be Max Stafford Clark's Letters to George* and, you know what, I adored it. Not only for what it says about plays as living breathing entities (all of which was utterly brilliant and which I shall steal hopelessly) but just because it made me smile. It entertained me. Before reading the book I knew nothing of The Recruiting Officer, other than in its connection to Our Country's Good. Truth be told, Will, after the whole 1642 business (with only a few notable exceptions) I loose interest in British theatre until the 20th century dawns. But Max - and indeed George - sold it to me completely.

But all that, as nice a preable as it is, doesn't explain exactly why I'm here. So, let me give you the basics. I have abandoned sanity, financial stability and whatever 'career' I was shaping up to have (it's okay, it involved more vomit than any career in the theatre should) to return to school in order to study that thing called playwriting. Or 'Writing For Performance' as my MA is actually titled. I'm studying south of the river at Goldsmiths (their blurb on their location would probably say something about it being diverse, young and urban - I, however, am not hanging around too late at night to find out). I know you who wrote Hamlet in a brief three week stretch may be shaking your head at the idea of learning playwriting (don't mention it to Jonson, eh? I'm sure he'd have something to say about it) but this is, it would appear, what we do now. Or at least what I have chosen to do now. And since I am here, baffled once more by a library photocopier and counting my pennies, I thought that it might be useful for me to throw my thoughts out to someone who might understand. In a rhetorical way, I hasten to add (though if you felt like dropping me a message in the comments box, that would be absolutely fine). Why did I choose you? There are other writers who, if they were alive today, I would probably be non-stalking (I believe Byron was quite into that sort of thing, Virginia Woolf probably less so) and then there are other playwrights who I would quite happily spend some hours talking to (one day I may tell you about being too scared to talk to either Alan Bennett or Tom Stoppard, in neither story do I come across at my most dynamic I confess). But, for many reasons, you were the name I kept coming back to. I have a bewildering range of your merchandise so maybe it was a subliminal thing. What can I say, the RSC market your tat well.

What am I going to write to you in these letters? Truth be told, I'm not exactly sure what the contents will be myself. A record of myself as I move through the course, of the words I bash out at odd times of the day, and those things that I shouldn't really say but choose to publish to the internet at large anyway. There might be narrative, there might be questions, there might even be the odd rant (I should warn you, I like a good rant almost as much as I like a new dress, which is to say quite a lot). Beyond that - who knows? But I shall look forward to finding out.

Yours

Corinne.x

*Do you know the work? Stafford-Clark, unable to engage in face to face debate with a living author, wrote letters to George Farquhar.