Despite a growing fashion for interventionist dramaturgy, Stephen Jeffreys insisted that “plays are never developed; they are written, by playwrights”. Nonetheless, he was justly famous for his understanding of playwriting technique, which he passed on to emergent dramatists including Simon Stephens, Winsome Pinnock, Tanika Gupta and Roy Williams, in workshops with the touring company Paines Plough, at the Royal Court, and then around the country and the world.
I persuaded Stephen to visit my playwriting course at the University of Birmingham, where he presented us with his groundbreaking analysis of open and closed scene structures (major insight: the smaller the number of scenes, the hotter the action; major warning: in real-time plays, making buttered crumpets takes exactly as long as buttered crumpets take to make).
He argued persuasively that understanding the traditional craft of playmaking enabled you to experiment (notable example: Caryl Churchill). His deconstruction of the park scene in George Etheridge’s restoration comedy The Man of Mode tells you all you need to know about writing scenes with large numbers of characters. He advised sensible playwrights to write zeitgeist plays quickly (as someone else is probably writing one too), and to place comedy just after the interval. Before his Birmingham workshop, I hadn’t really understood the rising action of Macbeth; now, I will never see the play in any other way.
Stephen’s dramaturgical legacy lies in the huge number and variety of major playwrights he taught, encouraged and inspired; happily he has written a book based on his workshops, Playwriting: Structure; Character; How and What to Write, which will be published soon, and will pass his insights on to future generations.
