Lament over state of plays
BY RON ELISHA. We are told that Australian plays being written today simply aren’t worth the software they’re formatted on.
My own suspicion is that while fine plays continue to be written, they are simply not being read.
When I first began writing plays in the late ’70s, I was utterly ignorant of the world of drama. I looked up the address of the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) in the phonebook, and literally dumped a brown paper packet of eight manuscripts on the receptionist’s desk.
To MTC’s great credit, all eight plays were read and one, In Duty Bound, went on to a very successful production.
Despite the top-heavy state of arts administration in this country, this scenario wouldn’t happen today. The manuscripts would languish in a dusty corner before being shredded, possibly to resurface as burger rissoles, with fries to go. Without ever being read, let alone digested.
In the ’90s, theatre companies would read one’s plays and politely write that while one’s work was “un-put-downable”, it “did not fit in” with their season. Known as the Costanza Defence, this was their irreproachable way of saying: “It’s not you – it’s me.”
By the noughties, however, they had realised that if they weren’t obliged to respond, then why bother reading the work at all? The final, tenuous connection between Australian theatre companies and Australian theatre had been severed.
The art of reading manuscripts – indeed, the art of reading per se – is rapidly being lost to us, largely because those charged with this task have been reared on television, where the mere concatenation of words is mistaken for literature.
We’re told that the “old guard” of playwrights no longer has anything to say to a modern theatre-going audience, which is used to receiving its “information” in a different way (as if a play were mere information), and that two characters conducting an onstage conversation simply doesn’t cut it any more.
If I’m into gymnastics, I’ll attend the circus. If I want to be wowed by pyrotechnics, I’ll brave a rock concert. If it’s techno-wizardry I crave, the CGI-crafted world of film wins hands-down.
But if it’s ideas I’m after – expressed with passion, flare and courage – then nothing does it better than the theatre of words.
Given human perversity, it is perfectly plausible that in a post-apocalyptic, uber-Pinteresque world – in which dialogue has been entirely consumed by the menacing pauses once sent to punctuate it – conversation, the very attribute that best defines us as a species, will cease to exist, relegated to the scrap heap of an evolutionary process hell-bent upon chewing off its own paw.
We’re told that playwriting is no longer a solitary exercise but, rather, a team event.
Alas, these four rather obvious dots – the advent of multimedia, the loss of the art of reading, the extinction of the solitary playwright and the decline in the quality of plays – have not yet been joined in the minds of our artistic directors.
Until this fairly self-evident deductive leap takes place, we can expect to witness an ever-burgeoning slagheap of inarticulate dross accumulating upon our stages.
Ron Elisha was born in Jerusalem in 1951 and his family moved to Melbourne two years later. He studied medicine and became a GP while writing plays. He shot to fame with his first play, In Duty Bound, in 1979. Since then his plays have been staged around Australia, New Zealand, America, Britain, Europe and Israel. They include Einstein (1981), Two (1983), Paax Americana (1984), Esterhaz (1990), The Goldberg Variations (2000), Wrongful Life (2005) and The Schelling Point (2010). He has won many playwriting awards including four Australian Writers’ Guild Awards.
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