Imagine, just for a moment, that you were only allowed to write characters who were like you. Only those that existed within the limits of the community with whom you identify.
Who would be in your plays?
Whose stories would you feel permitted to tell – or perhaps more worryingly, whose stories would you not feel permitted to tell?
One of the best plays I’ve written was about inseparable best friends. Then one falls in love with the other and the friendship is gradually and irrevocably broken. The characters were one white and one Black working-class Limehouse (East London) teenage girls, aged between 14 – 16.
When it was produced, I was a 30-year old middle-class white male living in Bristol. It was nominated for the Meyer-Whitworth Award as one of the best new plays of 2010.
Over the last 18 months, there’s been ongoing conversations about representation on and beyond the stages of British theatre, into the boardrooms and executive meetings, and right through the infrastructure of how writers, performers, directors and all creative roles are trained and supported into the profession.
These are urgent and vital debates triggered by global movements and global crises.
They’ve funnelled down to questions about who is seen on stage, whose stories get told, how those stories are told, and who is telling them.
In terms of playwrights, at the furthest reaches of this necessary sensitivity towards representations of communities is the nervous feeling – or as I discovered on a Twitter discussion last week about another writer, the literal experience – of being ‘policed’ in our writing.
You’re not permitted to write a character who isn’t like you.
On the surface, as an isolated instruction, that is censorship of the imagination. It is robbing a playwright of the possibility to exercise and extend their empathy for others, without which it is impossible to write.
And also, once you dig into the nuances of meaning and context, as a global community of human beings what the hell does it really mean to be ‘like’ or ‘unlike’ somebody else?
I know it’s more complicated than that, of course.
We’re in the middle of (hopefully) a re-adjustment of assumptions, privileges and representations in theatre programming and theatre business and training across the land. It’s a fact that there is a redressing of balance still to come in terms of how all of that is managed and developed.
But the dangerous response for writers is a knee-jerk one of exclusionism and policing. There are other ways into the conversation.
We are all different. In some ways we are all the same. That’s the paradox. So where are the gaps? Where are the connections? These are the spaces into which we can both imagine and research via sensitive and thoughtful creative processes.
In the last fifteen years of reading and working on thousands of plays in development, I’ve read wince-inducing representations of characters outside the lived experience of a writer’s own neurology, age, gender, ethnicity, physical ability and state of mental health.
Where possible, those have become discussion points with the writer, approached with sensitive questioning:
- What’s led you to choose to write about this character’s experience?
- What empathic connection or intellectual understanding do you have of them? How do you know if that’s emotionally truthful?
- What sort of creative or practical research have you done to inform that?
- Have you shown, shared and/or discussed this character’s experience with others who might be able to guide and advise?
There are more, of course – and I’m well aware that even on their own, these questions could potentially piss off a lot of writers and they’d call ‘police’ on me.
But I think this searching and probing is also a question of agency, phrasing, timing and context:
Agency: who is doing the asking of these questions?
Timing: when are they asking them in terms of the play’s journey of development?
Phrasing: how are they being asked?
Context: what’s the scenario or situation in the storytelling that’s led to them being asked?
Handled with that framing in mind, it’s not policing. It’s supportive and genuine dramaturgical work.
It might be done by writer, director, performer, dramaturg, designer, sound designer and so on, and could be happening at the stage of dreaming up the play’s concept or literally on the stage itself during rehearsal.
I’ve been in both situations myself as a writer and have appreciated the benefit first-hand.
I’m also writing from a place of personal experience. Apart from a couple in the last fifteen years, none of my plays have, on the surface at least, been about ‘people like me’.
I’ve had plays produced about children in poverty, farming communities in North Devon, Afghan refugees, parkour athletes, families displaced in Basingstoke’s 1960s redevelopment, teenagers in a war-torn England, Middle East female soldiers, synthetic biologists and next year in production at Bristol Old Vic, a play about a North and South Korean father and daughter divided by the Korean war.
But in each of these cases I’ve done extensive research (reading, watching, listening, interviewing, experiencing, imagining); extensive sharing (collaborating, sharing treatments and first drafts, opening my work up for questions, blogging openly about my process); and most importantly, extensive internal emotional searching.
It’s in this last one that my deeper connection with writing the play reveals itself to me.
If I can’t truthfully emotionally connect – deeply empathise and understand – the characters that I’m writing, and therefore writing from a place of connected experience, then I know my writing will lack life, authenticity and emotional verisimilitude.
I’ve had projects that have suffered and died because of this lack of connection and, upon reflection, that’s been the best thing for them.
Perhaps I’m also lucky in that I write largely via collaborative processes – I write up the script alone, but that writing is being generated with and for specific audiences, communities, contexts and companies.
Holistic and inclusive research and questioning becomes part and parcel of that journey.
What I suppose I’m searching for, and what excites me as a writer, is a process whereby those who own particular experiences can be carefully and openly invited in to collaborate with my growing understanding of what it might mean to author them – how I can shape them into a poetic reflection of their lived truth and experience – and through that sensitive relationship, sharing and discussing and offering work back and forth for questioning, perhaps having something revealed that we’d never noticed before.
Great theatre thrives on healthy, well-managed and trusting collaboration that comes from a place of openness and transparency of intention.
If we can embrace that same principle as writers, we can – and we should – be exercising our muscles of empathy in all directions, understanding not only what and who we’re writing, but how it might be received and the responsibilities that come with that.
N.B. Since publishing the blog here there have been some really helpful different perspectives offered – please read on to the comments below, and add your thoughts too.
Also check out this related blog from playwright Naomi Westerman on The Right to Write: Why Finding Your Truth Matters