When playwright, David Edgar, was setting up one of his seminars as head of the excellent degree course in playwriting at Birmingham University, he invited – among others, including me – fellow playwright, Timberlake Wertenbaker to participate.  She
accepted but expressed reservations that still merit thinking about.  She felt strongly that writers can best learn by just doing it.  Playwrights, she thought, might do better to train as actors or stage managers so that they get to feel theatre in their bones rather than in their mind. 

There is no doubt that one learns a great deal from just doing it, but having done it can ‘it’ be usefully commented upon?  Though I’ve declined invitations to teach full time I have conducted short courses, and inevitably have been at the receiving end of unsolicited manuscripts.  There was one instantly recognisable fault among aspiring writers that I saw could be addressed:  layout.  A technical feature.

I am amazed by the indifference to clarity revealed by some young writers who type huge blocks of verbose stage directions, often in CAPS so that one confronts an ugly, airless page and is almost put off going further than page three.  I have on occasions re-typed a few of their pages in order to demonstrate to the aspirant how his or her play can breathe better if fewer words described character and setting.  Some write dialogue with single-line spacing between the characters so that the page looks like one long speech.  A clear layout is not only easier to read, it also contributes to atmosphere, mood, the rhythm of scenes.  Layout can be taught.  Can much more be taught?

I have given lectures ‘On the Nature of Theatre Dialogue’, ‘On the Nature of Development.’  On ‘Interpretation – to explain or impose.’  I have even attempted to break down ‘The DNA of a play’. And when a young writer asks for advice I give them my ‘Notes to Young Writers’.  But do the observations handed on through those notes and lectures help to make a playwright?  No one handed them on to me before I wrote my first play The Kitchen.   Had they done so I might not have written the play because it was set in a huge restaurant kitchen for thirty-one characters.  No playwriting tutor would have encouraged a young writer to write a play with such a large cast.  No one in the profession thought it could work, and it was only permitted a Sunday night ‘Performance Without Décor’ at The Royal Court after the success of my third play Roots. 

But I had spent some years as an amateur actor and had even harboured ambitions for the professional stage.  The ambitions never took to sea.  I twice passed the entrance examinations for RADA and twice failed to obtain a grant.  I had almost fulfilled one of Wertenbaker’s requirements.  Acting was in my bones.  Even now I’m in my element giving public readings.

In June of last year I agreed to share the tutoring of a five day ‘Advanced Playwriting Course’ with Peter Rowe, artistic director of The Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich.  It was organised by The Arvon Foundation, an organisation that owns three large houses around the country in which weeks are devoted to courses in writing novels, poetry, journalism, theatre, and TV drama.  Students pay for board and lodging.  Some – who can’t afford it – obtains grants.  The first house was in Devon; when the poet, Ted Hughes, died he left his Yorkshire house, Lumb Bank, to the Foundation.  The late John Osborne’s house Shropshire has also been bought by Arvon and soon courses will begin there, or perhaps they’ve started already. 

The atmosphere was like camping.  We all made our own breakfast; the Foundation wardens, a young friendly and welcoming married couple, laid out lunch – cold meats, salads, cheese and such.  In the evening students took turns in cooking the dinner – which was laid down the same each week for each course so that the ‘wardens’ routinely knew what to buy.   

We had a good crowd ranging in age from 30s to 70s.  Some married, some single,  one recovering from a broken marriage – female needless to say, attractive, with two grown children, resilient.

Peter and I discussed how we were going to conduct the five days.  It was agreed that we’d kick off each morning at 9.30 with me reading one of those lectures on theatre after which we’d invite the ‘students’ to discuss. I put ‘student’ in quotes because most of them were mature, some had even been performed.  The rest of the time was taken up talking with them on an individual basis after reading their work.
We gave them two exercises devised by Peter:  they picked out of two separate bags a slip of paper naming a couple – like ‘mother and son’ ‘policeman and criminal’ ‘doctor and patient’; and from the other bag a setting – like ‘a park bench’ ‘a doctor’s surgery’ ‘an aeroplane’ and so on.  They had to write five pages of drama about their random picking. 

Another exercise was a variation on that – we gave them the couple and the setting, ‘nurse and wounded soldier at the battle front’, and they each had to handle it as they wanted.  An exercise that demonstrated how different writers handle the same subject.  Each asked the others to read the parts for them.  It was fascinating.  Some were really good sketches.  One young woman, a published poet who felt she’d gone as far as she could with poetry, and now wanted to experiment writing plays, was not half bad, and discovered herself to have a talent.  Most had a spark but not all sparks fly afire.

I thought, as part of my tutoring, that it would be useful to read to them something of my own.  After all there comes a point when the ‘hints’ one’s trying to pass on become meaningless words requiring illustration, so one says ‘here’s how I do it’.  Is that useful?  After all how I ‘do it’ may be utterly alien to the creative spirit and rhythm of the ‘student’.  Arrogantly we hope our work establishes a standard. 

So, a little bit of theory, some technical advice, a personal demonstration, but then one is left confronting the writer’s actual work, and three things become apparent.  Their dialogue is sharp, rhythmical, weighty - or it isn’t! They have a sense of dramatic structure or they don’t!  And, most important of all, what they want to communicate has substance or it hasn’t!  Content is thin, ordinary, mundane.  If  anyone of those is negative there is nothing a tutor can do to help.  If the writer’s ears pick up only planks of wood to reproduce dialogue that is wooden, you can’t perform surgery on their ears to stop that happening.  If a sense of tension or dramatic unfolding is not – as Wertenbaker would like – in their bones you can’t transplant it like bone marrow.  If no intellect or poetic imagination is at work you can’t place it there.

I suspect that tutors of writing would like to say to many of their students ‘forget it!  You haven’t got it!’  But that is such a monstrous judgement to articulate that most, for pity’s sake, withhold.  And of course they may be wrong.  It may be that the writer was getting a lot of dross off his/her chest/bosom before sweet talent could surface.

In disagreeing with me some tutors might say ‘our task is not impose our rules and standards,  our task is to identify what the writer is trying to achieve and help them achieve it;  to identify their strengths and help make them stronger which might chase away their weaknesses.’  Maybe.  The problem arises when you read a work and know there is a boring mind and personality at work here.  It is difficult.  Rejection of one’s creative output is a rejection as searing as the rejection of love.  Tutoring writing involves breaking hearts.  I’m not up for that.

Nevertheless I’m left with the fact that in the past over short courses I have been of help.  I know it because I’ve been told so.  What precisely is it that I’ve done?  Peter Rowe brings to bear his experience as a director.  The writer/director relationships is at best a dynamic relationship, at worst hostile.  The writer as tutor brings kinship.  ‘Here’s a successful practitioner,’ thinks the student, ‘I can get close to him/her and find out how s/he does it.’  Just that, I’m told, is useful enough.

Of course one offers more: comments on submitted written material; questions urging the writer to think more closely about intention, meaning, clarity, technique.  The act of giving up time to be with them and take their work seriously is a source of encouragement.  All that is both real and sentimental at the same time, for though the encouragement can’t be denied or dismissed the reality is that mounting a play costs a lot of money, and the audience for good theatre is diminishing as curiosity to gawp at a TV or film star on stage takes over.

The teaching of the craft can’t be separated from the economics of its practice.  And there’s worse to be confronted out there in the real world.  The competition can be overwhelming.  Everyone, it seems, wants to be a writer.  For the serious writer the warriors to confront are legion:  Bond, Pinter, Hare, Bennett, Edgar, Churchill, Frayn, Shaffer, Harwood, and Wertenbaker et al, to say nothing of the new discoveries like Ravenshill, Harris, Greig and the late Kane, plus.

And last, there is the nature of the director who may or may not be in tune with what the writer is endeavouring to communicate.  Let me end with a salutary anecdote.  I was recently invited by the Union of Swedish Playwrights to deliver my lecture on ‘Interpretation – to explain or impose’, about the tensions that can exist between playwright and director.  A panel of professionals discussed with the public what I’d said.  One of the panellists was a young director who revealed that when she finished training she was advised not to start her career with a new play because then more attention would be given to the play than her production.  You can’t teach a young playwright how to handle that.