Discussing Dialogue

There's a world of a difference between talk on the page and on the stage yet why and how is that so?

Over recent weeks I have toyed with the idea of writing a play. It is not something I have ever attempted, or considered, before, although some friends say that because I use a lot of dialogue in my fiction I should try my hand at drama. An interesting suggestion to be sure but it sets off a warning bell in my head because I know that dialogue in a prose narrative is very different from that which is spoken on a stage.

 This was confirmed by a public conversation between playwright, Billy Roche, and director and founder of the excellent Druid Theatre Company, Garry Hynes. (I heard them at a fringe event, the Festival Forum, in the Wexford Festival Opera, WFO, which I mentioned in my last newsletter.) Hynes spoke of quickly sensing whether a playscript could work on the stage. She reserves judgement, however, until she hears the actors read the lines.

Speaking of Lady Gregory (subject of a ‘pocket opera’ by Colm Tóibín and Alberto Caruso at the WFO) Hynes contrasted the popularity of Gregory’s plays with W.B. Yeats’ more austere offerings. After watching a Yeats play audiences felt like ‘banging their heads off a granite wall’ she said. An apt image, given the poet’s own description of his writing for theatre, ‘. . . tragic drama must be carved out of speech as a statue is out of stone . . .’ . Comedy wasn’t his thing.

  So what exactly constitutes the difference between dialogue on the page and on the stage? Over the weekend, I heard an interview with Oscar-winning actor, Cillian Murphy, about his latest project, the film version of Claire Keegan’s story, Small Things Like These. The adaptation was written by Murphy’s friend, playwright Enda Walsh. As Walsh worked on the script Murphy asked him to pare back his character’s lines. He likes best, he said, to play a role with few words, using physical expression instead.

In the hands of a good actor clever camera angles and close-ups can help that to work on the screen, whereas on the stage there is a fixed physical and visual distance between actors and audience, coupled with a level of live anticipation in the theatre. Hence, in part, the asides so integral to Shakespearian drama, as the character discloses their true feelings to us, unbeknownst to their antagonist.

  The word dialogue originates in the Greek dialegesthai – dia meaning through and legein speak – ‘through speech’ then is its first meaning. While ancient philosophers used the form to elaborate their ideas, Plato’s dialogues would fall flat on the stage. They lack the kitchen sink dimension. For a play to grab the audience’s attention it must offer rounded characters interacting in a credible way that traces the arc of their story.

 Last July I saw a production of Visit from an Unknown Woman by Christopher Hampton, based on a story by Stefan Zweig called ‘Letter from an Unknown Woman’. As Hampton describes it in interview, the original text comprises a letter from the woman to a man who appears only breifly at the beginning and end. In order to transpose this to the stage Hampton altered the time scale and incorporated some of Zweig’s biography to create a series of dialogues – the play is really a two-hander – that keep the audience guessing about the nature of their relationship even after the curtain has fallen.

Like all playwrights, Hampton revises as he goes along, ‘In the first two or three weeks – and of course you have much longer rehearsal periods in Europe – you can explore things and kick things around and change things.’[1] This enables the actors to workshop the lines although he concedes that it can also drive them mad, so he draws a line at a certain point, marking a fixed text.

  The reverse happens in R.B. Sheridan’s play, The Critic.[2] Mr. Puff brings his friends, Mr. Dangle and Mr. Sneer, to watch a rehearsal of his tragedy The Spanish Armada only to find that the actors have decimated his script:

PUFF: Hey, what the plague!—what a cut is here! Why, what is become of the description of her first meeting with Don Whiskerandos—his gallant behaviour in the sea-fight—and the simile of the canary-bird?

TILBURINA: Indeed, sir, you’ll find they will not be missed.

Surprisingly, he acquiesces in this ‘lopping and topping’, with the caveat that he will publish the entire script. Puff’s complaint to the actress underscores the primacy of stage, as opposed to page, dialogue (helped by occasional monologue) in telling the story. It must also hold the attention of the audience, which apparently Puff’s script did not do, leading the actress to cut lines.  

The fiction writer, by contrast, has the space and the leisure to set the scene or fill in the background, either by way of an omniscient narrator following a linear progression, or through flashback, recollection and shifting points of view. These devices are available only to a limited extent to the playwright, within the constraints of time and space, and without testing the audience’s patience. No two performances are the same because every audience is different and the mood or condition of the actors varies from night to night. We all have our good and bad days, and actors are no exception to that.

  When we read a book we commune privately with the author and the characters, forming their image in our minds, hearing their voices in our heads. That’s why so often film or stage adaptations of our favourite books disappoint us because they don’t match our internal experience of them.

As a writer of fiction Nadine Gordimer’s advice on dialogue was to individuate each character’s idiom such that the reader instantly recognises who is speaking, without the need for a handle such as A or B says. She was right but even following that guideline does not create dialogue that can step immediately from the page to the stage.

Our recognition of the individual idiom is conditioned by our prior knowledge of the characters, as presented by the narrator. The characters we see on stage must reveal their personalities at the same time as advancing the plot, through their interactions and physical gestures.

  English novelist, Alan Hollinghurst, is a master of dialogue. Here, he catches the sexual undercurrent in an evasive conversation between an older and a younger man:

‘You still haven’t told me,’ he said with a reproving pause, ‘about your visit to West Tarr.’

  ‘You had our card?’

  ‘Yes, sweet of you, but it didn’t tell me anything I wanted to know.’

  ‘Oh . . . well, it was OK.’

  ‘The house was all right?’

  ‘Yes, not bad – a bit damp and dirty, but we made do.’

  ‘Oh good. I’d been wondering how you got on.’

  ‘The two of us you mean?’

  ‘I’ve grown very fond of that boy.’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘He’s a good artist – good drawer, I don’t know what his painting’s like.’

(From The Sparsholt Affair, 2017)

 

  By contrast, here’s a section of dialogue between a mother and son from a play, The Beacon (2019)[3] by Nancy Harris:

BEIV: It’s useless going over and over this, Colm.

COLM: We haven’t gone over and over it.

BEIV: Am I not entitled to be here if I want to be?

COLM: Does this sell your paintings or something, is that what it is?

BEIV: Don’t be facetious.

COLM: No I’m serious. It’s obviously helped your reputation.

BEIV: That people think I killed my ex-husband?

COLM: It’s a great publicity spiel.

BEIV: I’d like to think they like my work.

COLM: What – red blobs on a canvas?

BEIV: That’s what you see.

COLM: That’s what it is.

  Each sentence in this scene carries information that helps to improve our knowledge of the characters and the nature of their relationship, as well as foreshadowing the closing scene and speech of the play.

Photo by Rob Laughter on Unsplash

 Hollinghurst’s dialogue is prefaced by a glimpse of the younger man’s feelings, represented as a swirl of form and colour inspired by his friend’s mantelpiece crammed with cards, and dominated by a large painting. Their elliptical exchange is coloured by the emotional tone of that setting. Conversely, the set in Harris’ play needs the dialogue to imbue it with tension, one which, for all its architectural elegance, is hostile.

  While the conversation in the novel appears inconsequential, its dramatic irony lies in the reader’s understanding of the real question being asked. Conversely, the back and forth between Beiv and Colm is patterned with repetitions which accumulate to reveal the deeper story at the centre of the play. What we ‘see’ and what ‘it is’ are very different things.

 This is not to say that the narrative writer’s task is easier because he or she can fill in the background. After all, readers tire of endless description, or litanies of ‘facts’. The old distinction between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ holds true. No one wants to feel they are being lectured at.

The playwright’s work by contrast, is collaborative, the ‘showing’ depending as much on the actors, designers and director, as on the words. Nevertheless, before the creative team gets involved, the script must possess a rhythm and structure that make it viable on the stage. And then, as Garry Hynes said, it may or may not work. The audience, like the reader, will have the last word.                 

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[1] The play was commissioned by the Viennese Theater in der Josefstadt. Interview by Greg Ripley-Duggan, Executive Producer of the Hampstead Theatre.

[2] The operatic version of The Critic, by C.V. Stanford, features at this year’s WFO.

[3] The play was first performed by Druid, under Garry Hynes’ direction.

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Readers, writers, playgoers, what do you think about the shape of speech in different forms?