If we are in the room discussing ‘what’ then you would say: Mr Wesker, you speak first, let’s hear your voice, and then we want to know and will listen to what the director has to say.  That would be just, reasonable, you will have heard my point of view.  It would also be the most practical method of procedure; the alternative would be a tower of Babel – everyone talking at the same time.  But if the director is imposing his views in a stage production by cutting text, re-arranging the sequence of events, placing the action in a setting different from what the playwright has imagined; and if the actor is interpreting the unfaithful wife as a ruthless woman rendering her a gentle, bewildered woman, then how will you know what it is that the playwright wanted to say?  In the room you asked to hear the playwright’s voice.  On stage you have no control and the playwright’s voice has been suppressed. How, then, can you evaluate the validity of the director’s and actor’s point of view if you haven’t been allowed to hear, and therefore do not know, what they are having a point of view about?!  And what about the sheer rudeness of it all?  Imagine the fury of a director if the rehearsal was called by the playwright or another director who began to change the shape of his or her production.  Imagine the playwright or someone leaping on to the stage and pushing the actor aside and saying, no! this is how I meant it to be done.  When the playwright’s intention is ignored or distorted then that is what is happening – he or she is being rudely pushed aside.  Worse, when another voice muffles theirs then it becomes an act of censorship and in democratic societies that is unacceptable.

So, how can the actor exercise her right to comment?  Well, there are three ways perhaps.  First she can decided not to perform the role because she is out of sympathy for it; and she can then look for a play in which the unfaithful wife is presented as ruthless. That becomes her comment.  Or she can talk with the playwright first and try to persuade him that he is wrong and that she is right.  Or she can write her own play.  The right she does not have is to accept to play the role and then to play it in a way that is against the spirit and intention of the playwright.

The same scenario can be written for the director.  He has the right to accept or not accept to direct a play, to discuss his views with the playwright, to look for another play or to write his own play.  And all this of course is precisely what is happening.  Actors, frustrated by the tyranny of directors, and feeling they have perceptions they wish to illustrate on stage, are devising their own productions.  Director’s, feeling straight-jacketed by a playwright’s vision, are turning playwright.  And playwrights, feeling their work misunderstood by directors, are taking the clay into their own hands and sculpting their own works.  I see all this as right and proper and not divisive.  I am here not to argue against actors and directors becoming playwrights, or devisors of theatrical happenings, but to explain the playwright’s function as I see it and to argue for my preference which, finally is language, not exclusively but predominantly; and I say this as the author who placed 31 actors in the setting of a kitchen where action and movement is virtually non-stop, and who from then on constantly sought telling visual settings for most of his subsequent plays.

Nor do I want to give the impression that when I finish writing a play at my desk then that is the last word, nothing can be changed.  On the contrary I need to listen to everybody’s comments: family’s, friends’, director’s, actors’, set-designer’s.  I owe many changes to them all.  Mostly I like to direct my own plays because then I can speak directly with the actors without that dread which playwrights are driven to feel that any observations they make about their own play might undermine the authority of the director.  An absurd situation in which the director’s dignity is more important than the clarifications of the play’s intentions!

Taken from “Wesker on Theatre”. Available from: Marston Book Services on tel: 01235 465 577 or email: [email protected], and reproduced with kind permission of Oberon Books.

You can read the second part of Arnold Wesker’s three act essay here.