The write stuff ... A collection of Harold Pinter's scripts. Photograph: Graham Turner
The JMK Trust recently announced the list of plays, selected by Nicholas Hytner, from which those applying for The James Menzies-Kitchin young directors' award can propose a new production. The trust offers young directors a mouthwatering opportunity and Hytner's list is appropriately fascinating, a cocktail of familiar names like A Midsummer Night's Dream and Miss Julie mixed with Sanskrit plays and resonant modern dramas like Caryl Churchill's Mad Forest and Brendan Behan's The Hostage. In itself, the list is a fascinating alternative history of written drama - a tribute to the lasting power of the play script.
Our major theatres are built, in more ways than one, on a mountain of scripts. Stroll into the National Theatre or the Royal Court and one of the first things you are confronted by is a Technicolor wall of scripts, emblazoned with monumental sounding surnames; Bond, Kane, Beckett, Shaw. Indeed, if you're lucky enough to get a press ticket to a show at the Royal Court, they give you a copy of the play you're about to watch as you enter the theatre. But I find these glossy souvenirs to be a uniquely confusing part of our theatrical landscape.
Our love of scripts is, I think, partly to do with the fact that theatre remains haunted by the spectre of English Literature and its insistence on the importance of the written word. Too often we mistakenly believe the script to lie at the heart of theatre, to be its point of origin, which it absolutely isn't. Theatre begins and ends with live performance, everything else is simply reading. And yet, we need something to hold on to, something tangible that remains once all the theatre has happened. And that's where the script comes in.
Take a closer look at the published play script and you begin to notice that it is a lot more complicated than being a blueprint for performance. For example, what's the first thing you notice when you open a modern published play? Not anything written by the playwright, but instead a description of the where and when and who of the play's first performance. Before you've even begun to read, the play's previous performances are imprinted in the words on the page, as Anthony Sher once beautifully described it, like teeth marks.
Even the layout of the text on the page can be used to suggest actual performance, as is the case when Harold Pinter's famous pauses are given a whole line to themselves, surrounded by the dramatic white nothing of the empty page. The play script tells us how the words have been performed, where they were performed and who once performed them. In this way the published script is a memorial to performances past more than it is a blueprint for future ones. This is particularly the case for companies such as Complicite, or indeed Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop who helped create The Hostage. These companies never worked with a script in the form we find it, improvising, devising, piecing the live performance together only to have it recorded and remembered in the stony finality of the printed word.
The play script is a ghost. A memory of past performances and past performers. A memorial to dead actors and dead writers. And it is upon these ghostly fragments that we build, not only new productions, but our entire theatre tradition. No wonder Hamlet has become such an icon of British drama, gazing theatrically at the haunting skull of an earlier performer. When we create a new performance out of The Hostage, replicating exactly words that were once conjured out of the fevered, sweaty unpredictable melee of the Theatre Royal Stratford East, it is an act of necromancy as much as it is an act of theatre. Which is, perhaps, why this tradition is so staunchly defended by dead white males.
