Is playwriting as easy as A, B, C?

As the Tony Kushner affair rumbles on, Simon Stephens and Edward Albee have been musing on the art of modern theatre. Apparently it’s all in the rules We begin in the company of the dramatist Simon Stephens, whose latest play, a translation of Jon Fosse’s I Am the Wind , opens at the Young Vic on 10 May. Stephens was recently invited to give the keynote speech at the Stückemarkt Theatre festival in Germany. He based his lecture around five principles he’s learned from his seven-year creative relationship with the German director Sebastian Nübling . These are: 1) Theatre is a physical medium; 2) Theatre is multi-authored; 3) Theatre is art; 4) Language is noise; and 5) The English are polite and arrogant. What emerges is a ferociously brilliant piece of polemic that interrogates in great depth notions of authorship, the role of the director, the influence that commercialism has on the psyche of British theatre-makers, and the limiting scope of so much British theatre criticism. It is an argument that combines Stephens’s own personal humility with an acerbic, unsentimental view of theatre in the UK. If you have any interest at all in our contemporary theatre culture, it’s a must-read. Another playwright making a buzz among bloggers this week is Edward Albee – whose play A Delicate Balance is about to be revived by London’s Almeida . Albee, it seems, can be an intimidating guy. Indeed, Jasper Rees, writing for the Arts Desk , describes his first meeting with the great man as “probably the most bowel-shrivelling experience of my professional life”. However, when not reducing journalists to jelly, Albee can provide some penetrating insights into his craft. The Playgoer , for instance, was particularly stuck by his comments in this interview , in which he says: “If you want to know something about the structure of a play, listen to some Bach preludes and fugues … I think I learnt something about the nature of dramatic structure from the nature of the music I was listening to.” Given that Simon Stephens argues in his lecture that critics often choose to ignore a play’s structure, they might do well to heed this advice. Of course, the playwright who’s found himself most in the headlines recently – for all the wrong reasons – is Tony Kushner . As Michael Billington writes , Kushner was due to receive an honorary degree from the City University of New York (CUNY), but the award was vetoed by Jeffrey S Weisenfeld, one of CUNY’s trustees, because of what he saw as Kushner’s anti-Zionist political stance. The affair has caused uproar among bloggers. Isaac Butler takes Weisenfeld to task for saying of the Palestinians, in the New York Times : “People who worship death for their children are not human … They have developed a culture which is unprecedented in human history”. Others might be more offended by this article , in which he compares Kushner to the white supremacist David Duke . For critic Aleks Sierz , it’s simply depressing that no other CUNY trustee appears to have challenged Weisenfeld over the veto. As a result, Sierz argues, they have all “distinguished themselves by a truly irritating show of ignorance, indifference and bad faith”. As George Hunka points out, the controversy has been severely embarrassing for CUNY – drawing criticism from such luminaries as Harold Bloom and Barbara Ehrenreich. Latest news is that the university board have voted unanimously to overturn the decision, and offer the honorary degree anyway . The question is – will Kushner want to accept? Theatre Edward Albee Blogging Newspapers & magazines Digital media Chris Wilkinson guardian.co.uk

Posted by on May 10, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.