This is a long-read essay, the second in a series on playwriting and drama by Julian Meyrick. Part one is here.
Asked whether his films had a beginning, middle and end, the director Jean-Luc Godard famously replied “yes, but not necessarily in that order”.
He was wrong. That is exactly the order of his films. Or any other film. Time is the condition of drama, and this proceeds in linear fashion regardless of the content in it. Writers can re-arrange or explode the formal surfaces of their plays. This makes no difference to the fact of time on which they rely for their real-world existence.
If we see a play that is two hours long we emerge from it two hours older. Time passes in successive increments, out of the impenetrable future, into the fading past. It reflects, and can only reflect, this pattern: now this/now this/now this /now this/now this/now this/ etc.
Drama’s existence is fugue on the temporal dimension of life. We don’t get those two hours back. Which is why we are so pissed off when we see a play that doesn’t “work”.
What Gets Understood Onstage?
Given the centrality of time to drama’s unfolding, it is odd that it receives so little attention in academic scholarship. Instead, a play’s literary merit is often the thing discussed, its nature spread flat out, like a musical score, as if it could be comprehended all at once.
But this is not how drama “works”. Drama involves a time-reliant combination of information and expectation, such that a certain kind of attention is elicited. To put it simply, drama is less about what gets said, than what gets understood.
A dramaturge focuses not on the literary merit of a play, but on the accrual of understanding. It may happen that it is both a literary masterpiece and “works”. But the two do not necessarily go together, as high viewing figures for sub-average TV drama frequently attest.
From a dramaturgical perspective many of the scholarly observations made about plays – who wrote them, when and why, their history, their canonical status, or not – are irrelevant. Audiences do not need to know such things to watch a drama.
Plays provide their own map legend, allowing sense-making from within. Likewise they rarely assume specialist knowledge or use purely private imagery. Instead, they present in a publicly-accessible manner, “for the many and the wise”. Their communicative shape is outward, participative.
They actively seek connection with audiences. Of all the art forms, drama is the most forward.
New Mourning
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays written by the American playwright Eugene O'Neill in 1931. How do they “work”? Under what conditions could they “work”?
In his Poetics, Aristotle identifies six structural features of drama, the main ones being narrative, character and language. He allots primacy to the first because: “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action. The end for which we live is a certain kind of activity, not a quality … In a play [people] do not act in order to portray the characters. They include the characters for the sake of the plot.”
Aristotle wasn’t right even in 4th Century BCE. But he did pose a key question: “What counts in a play when it is actually performed?”
Mourning Becomes Electra is a transposition of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the earliest complete play in existence. Aeschylus set his story at the end of the Trojan War, thereby raising issues related to Ancient Greece’s recent conflict with Persia.
Having said the scholarly context of a play is irrelevant to its performance, the social context of the audience clearly isn’t. Plays make assumptions about spectators’ general knowledge. If they did not, no dramatic understanding could accrue in the short time available.
O'Neill sets the different parts of his trilogy – Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted – at the close of the American Civil War. For US audiences, this was a time of both history and myth, similar to the Mycenaean era for Aeschylus. The recent conflict was the first world war.
