[An occasional series of playwrighting quotes]

Read This When Writing Plays

DAVID HARE

David Hare influenced me greatly not only by his plays but through his superb little book, Acting Up, about his experience performing his one man show. One of the passages there turned into part of my own practice: telling the story again and again. Maintaining that grip on the storytelling aspect of a play can get slippery as we move through the writing. Consequently, following Hare’s (and Louis Malle’s) advice, at some point, I even write down the story because it identifies glitches, inconsistencies, and excesses just as you get the feeling when telling a story to friends or family that it’s too long or complicated.. Here is how Hare explained how he came to do this:

“Louis (Malle) shared my fascination with techniques of storytelling. Once, we were meant to be working together on Damage, the film of Josephine Hart’s novel. But I came into the restaurant for supper usually dissatisfied with that morning’s read-through of the play of mine called Murmuring Judges. ‘It ought to bloody work,’ I said, ‘and it doesn’t.’ At once Louis asked me to tell him the story of the play. Together we sat for three hours, refining the narrative. Louis isolated every component of the story, and then put them all back together again in the right order. It was like watching a great car mechanic lay out the pieces of an engine on a clean white cloth before reassembling them. He did it for the sheer intellectual pleasure.… (After writing the synopsis of Damage) Every morning he would make me sit down under the vines and go back to the beginning of the story. He did it so many times that I thought I was going to go mad.”