Authors Electric

Alas, poor Yorick. When Hamlet gives his instructions to the players, we’re hearing from Shakespeare as writer and director. ‘Here are my words,’ he’s saying, ‘don’t eff them up. Treat them with respect. Don’t do all that acting stuff. Be normal.’ Hmmm. What you write is a blueprint for a production. It calls for teamwork so, even though it’s your baby, you have to accept the fact that you’re only a part of the experience. You may get requests for rewrites, actors may ask questions about their role to which you don’t have answers.  For them, their character is everything, for you he/she is part of a larger whole. In my last radio play, the main character,  a blind woman, receives things through the post from her grandson which may be ordinary postcards or examples of his own sketches. She shows them to people, proud of the fact that she has an artist grandson and people, not wanting to upset her, tell her he’s very talented. The actor playing her asked me whe...

The Empty Space is what Peter Brook called his terrific book on performance. It’s a space which only superficially resembles that occupied by the audience in the theatre and in their daily lives. In ‘real’ life, we live in a perpetual ‘Now’. In that ‘Now’, we construct a past from memories and a future on speculations, so they're both fictional rather than actual, built from the elements we prefer to select and stress.  But when writing for the stage, we’re not confined in that way. Simultaneity of past, present and even future can be achieved by such simple tricks as having two or more sets, dividing the stage area into locations that represent different time periods in which actors can ‘be’ the person they’re depicting at different times of their life or, indeed, the character may be represented by different actors so that the audience sees older and younger versions of him/her at the same time. And if we can simultaneously represent, for example, the barely comprehens...