Lane, D. (2010) A Dramaturg’s perspective: Looking to the future of script development. Journal of Media Practice, 30(1) 127-142.

• “‘dramaturgy’ is not only a word applied to the composition of work, but is also ‘a word applied to the discussion of that composition’QTD” (128, quotation from Turner and Behrndt, 2008, 4, emphasis theirs) – Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2008) Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• “‘the rules of meaning-making within a script or production’” (Haring-Smith, 2003, 46) – Haring-Smith, T. (2006) Dramaturging non-realism: creating a new vocabulary. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 45-54.
• “With Crouch, the dynamic of conversation between stage and audience must be recognized as an active element of the play’s dramaturgy, and to ignore the anticipated presence of the live encounter during script development is reductive, creating a limiting approach that serves only to ‘collapse dialogue into monologue and to ignore the art form’s place in a complex web of cultural connection’ (Meyrick 2006: 280).” (128) – Meyrick, J. (2006) Cut and paste: the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre. Theatre Research International, 31(3) 270-282.
• “The common terminology on offer when developing a play text takes its lead from the realm of psychological realism, where phrases such as character, narrative, language, location and plot carry particular associations. They are part of a broader understanding of theatre where stories are linear, characters are three-dimensional; dramatic action, and therefore plot structure, has a basis in causality; spoken text takes the form of conversations between characters; and locations are identifiable as part of the material world we recognize in everyday life. This extends also into associations regarding the style of performance: acting embedded in naturalism; a compliant audience that receives rather than constructs meanings; a performance space within a theatre building, carrying with it the conventions of that particular arena; a design that attempts to replicate rather than suggest; a text that has been rehearsed rather than one that is improvised; and a theatre experience that is live only because it occurs in a shared space and time, rather than one that fully exploits, within its composition, the risks and tensions of live performance. These characteristics belong to what Hans-Thies Lehmann (2006: 21–22) refers to as the persistent ‘theatre of dramas’: a near-inescapable bind to ‘dramatic theatre’ that defines the human through speech, represents a totality and oscillates around action, plot and mimesis – the key tenets of a European, Aristotelian conception of theatre, which he arguably goes on to present as limiting criteria in creating new work.” (128-9)
• “whilst Lehmann (2006: 24) emphasizes the primacy of the text in his argument, he also acknowledges playwrights who fit a ‘postdramatic’ model, citing Heiner Müller and Peter Handke as examples” (129)
• “Perhaps in a bid to form a coherent and flexible approach to the development of play texts, Meyrick identifies three critical categories put forward by Aristotle – plot, character and language – that under his definition can extend the boundaries for play composition, thus echoing Lehmann’s acknowledgement. Plot can be ‘anything which maintains tension in time’; character, ‘anything which allows an understanding of what is taking place to thicken and deepen as the drama progresses’; and language, ‘anything that can perform the function of bringing order to the onstage world’ (Meyrick 2006: 278). By reducing the base elements of a play text to a simple paradigm – a play is a sequence of events that unfolds in time, allows accumulation of feeling or thought and arises from a coherent stage language – common ideas of what might constitute a play can be greatly extended. Meyrick’s adjusted definitions create a space of exploration and innovation. The first task of the dramaturg is, then, to look at how a writer might be challenging or deconstructing the more limited understanding of Aristotle’s terms as Meyrick has done, and to what ends.” (129)
• “this notion of presence and absence, and a demand upon the audience to interpret meaning by comparing the two, is a cornerstone of much of Crouch’s dramaturgy.” (130)
• “In script development this signals a clear task for the dramaturg: to explore the rules the writer has set and to assess whether they are effective in achieving his or her intentions, rather than dictating from the outset that the work should fit an existing dramaturgical model – the model is a tool rather than a mould.” (130)
• “When applied as a mould, this one-size-fits-all approach becomes a barrier to the discovery of new theatrical forms, an attempt to ‘dramaturgically “terraform” the work without lending credence to the rules of this new world the writer is attempting to create’ (Bly 2006 20). This delicate or ‘listening’ analytical approach may be one we are more used to applying to ‘performance writing’ rather than ‘playwriting’, treating them as separate entities – which is an unhelpful division in the case of Crouch.” (130)
• “He is certainly writing plays, but his play texts demand these approaches.” (130)
• “John Freeman (2007: 10) uses the term ‘performance writing’ rather loosely, suggesting that its role is to ‘challenge mainstream sensibilities in ways that are both provocative and original’. Although this definition may characterize performance writing unhelpfully as simply a novelty reply that takes its lead from the mainstream, it does bring us neatly to the focus of the article: Crouch’s work and how it uses familiar characteristics of drama to provoke, challenge and ask us to rethink our assumptions.” (130)
• “‘the visual arts have stolen a march on theatre in their ability to handle progressive forms’” (Crouch, 2003, 9) – Crouch, T. (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.
• “This statement is both a subtle lament for the theatre’s dependency on familiar dramaturgies and, as the play itself demonstrates, a nod towards the bafflingly infinite boundaries of what constitutes visual art.” (130)
• “The difference in Crouch’s work, and what is exciting from a dramaturgical perspective, is that it is actively asking questions about the authorship of art and theatre through its form and content, resulting in scripted performances that present us with unexpected transformations and interpretative challenges.” (131)
• “Crouch transposes the messiness of the real world he is exploring into the play’s dramaturgy, expressing reality not by rearranging it into a clinical and fixed dramatic model, but by re-framing it to maintain its confusion and chaos.” (131)
• “It is an escape from a habit of theatre that American playwright Mac Wellman (2002: 229) apocalyptically refers to as a ‘tyrannical domination of meanings so fixed, so absolute, as to render the means of meaning, which is to say the heart and soul of meaning, a mere phantom’.” (131)
• “false coherence of representational mimesis” (Freeman, 2007, 20)
• “An Oak Tree explores a different sort of projection. A father responds to the loss of his daughter Claire in a road accident by spending all of his time by an oak tree. He believes he has ‘scooped up the properties of Claire and changed the physical substance of the tree into that of my daughter’.” (Crouch 2015: 52)
• “This paradoxical relationship between the unpredictability of live performance and the relative security of a script’s structural framework manifests itself with greater force in Crouch’s second play An Oak Tree […]each night the Father is played by a new performer who has never seen the script before. The live and unpredictable collision of image and object in My Arm is developed into something much more risky: the live response of a performer to a script, in a story about which he knows as much as the watching audience does.” (133-4)
• “An Oak Tree also disrupts the linear narrative of the Father’s story and instead creates an impressionistic structure that moves backwards and forwards in time and simulates various locations. Crouch and the performer also take on numerous roles beyond that of Father and Hypnotist. Crouch plays the Hypnotist and the Father’s wife, and the performer plays seven different contestants during the Hypnotist’s faltering stage show, and over time the worlds of the real, the simulated and the hypnotic begin to bleed and blur into one another until it is almost impossible to decipher what is real and what is not – a clear parallel to the Father’s problematic belief that he has somehow transformed his daughter into an oak tree.” (134)
• “First, there is the narrative Crouch has created in the fictional future ‘in a pub a year from now’ (Crouch 2005: 18), of a meeting between the Father and the Hypnotist who ran over his daughter. Second, there is the narrative in the fictional past, of the death of the daughter and how the Father and his family have responded. Third, there is the present ‘real’ narrative of the relationship between Crouch and his invited performer on the particular night – though it is a simulation of the real, because all of their conversations about the play they are performing in are scripted. Finally, there is the only real present-tense narrative, one that sits outside the fictions Crouch has constructed: this is the story of the performer as he or she encounters and navigates an unknown text. The dialogue may be prescribed, but the choices the performer makes in the delivery are unrehearsed and occurring in real time.We watch this as closely as we watch the other three constructed narratives within the play.”(135)
• “An Oak Tree requires us to experience the Father’s confusion by disrupting our own assumptions about the play’s logic. The logic is deliberately problematized: the form expresses the content, but it simultaneously requests that we relinquish our desire for a neat resolution.” (135-6)
• “For a dramaturg, the revisions in developing writing for performance start to present themselves: the honouring of problems rather than solutions; the pursuit of a question of meaning rather than meaning itself; the elevation of the experiential above the passive; the construction of theatrical conceits such as anticipated narratives that demand a live performance to be fully realized; the use of the stage as an arena of imagination and playfulness presenting multiple frames of fiction, simulated reality and the risk of the real itself.” (136)
• “whilst Crouch employs these elements effectively, he always anchors the audience with the drama of a single protagonist facing a problem in the world, and by placing this character at the centre we are given a clear point of reference to which we can relate the expressiveness of the form. The protagonist’s emotional journey informs our understanding, and this is a vital foothold when the play asks more questions than it seeks to answer.” (136)
• “This is a dramaturgy that ‘makes us aware of the mechanisms of communication and the artificial construction of imaginary (real) worlds, even while we are moved and engaged by them’ (Turner and Behrndt 2008: 193).”
• “swapping of roles half way through the act emphasizes our naïve dependency on the English language to communicate identity and intention” (137)
• “An Oak Tree operates within fluid but identifiable frames of fiction and reality” (138)
• “For the dramaturg working in script development, what is left in the wake of Crouch’s body of work is a world of playwriting that expects the audience to invest in an act of creative construction, rather than creative response. All audiences respond: Crouch’s audiences are expected to work. The boundary between ‘performance text’, referring to the dramaturgy of the whole event, and the play text, the written document upon which that performance is based, is not removed by Crouch but nudged gently aside to create what Freeman (2007:139) gamely refers to as a ‘textual playground’ where the possibilities begin to extend infinitely” (137)
• “The level of demand upon the audience to construct their own meaning, or coherent thematic or narrative conclusions increases with each of Crouch’s projects and, in turn, the dramaturgy of the scripts increasingly resembles that of an open performance score, rather than plays that are concerned with answering all of our creative questions. Dramaturgs solve them at their peril. To do so would corrupt the complexity of the craft, by eradicating the potent unease of possibility that is intentionally created through risk, and the absence of clear answers: Crouch’s work calls for an ‘open, fluid and plural’ reading that stays mindful of the potential of play texts to be in flux, and not finite or resolved (Turner and Behrndt 2008:
  “The effectiveness of Crouch’s compositional choices suggests two important areas of focus for the dramaturg in the development of future creative relationships. First, the dramaturg should be prepared for the terminology he or she uses in play analysis and the writing process to invite, necessarily, innovative responses from playwrights, and these in turn can suggest innovative solutions and suggestions regarding form and its purpose. If each element of playwriting is considered as a site of exploration, rather than as a fixed entity with a fixed function, the writers’ options extend, as does the dramaturg’s capacity to engage with unfamiliar compositional choices with an open mind. Second, a vocabulary including the words silence, discord, lack (of answers), collision (of time and space) and evasion (of absolute clarity) can operate within the structural paradigm of playwriting suggested by Meyrick, where plot, character and narrative are the core components. Michael Pinchbeck might describe these additions as intentionally problematic: they problematize traditional narrative structures, but also create a narrative out of problem. When the heart donor’s mother ‘speaks’ in England the silence creates a problem for the audience – we never hear first-hand what is actually said – but this also expresses vividly the same problems the characters are facing, which in turn is the narrative of the play’s second act. Such ‘problems’ indicate a mindfulness of the live nature of theatre and operate beyond provocative theatrical gimmickry to enhance and illuminate an audience’s understanding of the work. Taking the elements of playwriting as sites for exploration and introducing a technical vocabulary that includes ‘problems’ as dramaturgical choices may indicate a desire to place greater responsibility upon the audience than on the playwright: it might indicate a shift towards a looser, less disciplined, dramaturgy that shirks the need for the writer to have a detailed understanding of the craft. Traditionally, problems in the text are to be solved before it reaches production. However, these developments should be viewed as an extension of the writer’s and dramaturg’s choices, not an outright replacement. For the time being, they complement existing practice, as evidenced in Crouch’s work. A clear understanding of the relationships among form, content and intention should still be one of the first responsibilities of the playwright. There is no overarching system that will solve all play texts, and we are warned that dramaturgy remains a double-edged sword: ‘a search for an unyielding truth that the nature of the theatrical process precludes from the start’ (Meyrick 2006: 271). However, even though theatre thrives on ambiguity, chance, risk and the phenomenology of performance, Crouch’s work provides the dramaturg working in script development with models that draw together the act of playwriting with the possibilities of live performance: their relationship is symbiotic, rather than accidental. The ‘lack’ or ‘problem’ in the structure, as expressed above, can push the writer to unlock the unique qualities of their craft, and in turn transform the work, rather than slavishly moderating it to fit an inflexible and preconceived dramaturgical model. A flexible approach to terminology from both the dramaturg and the playwright is the means through which a shared language can evolve in the long-term development of the work. Vocabulary is only the beginning (Haring-Smith 2003: 53).” (139-40)

My notes:

• “the rules of meaning-making within a script or production”: Ultimately what dramaturgy is concerned with – meaning-making within the production process, the artwork itself, and the discussion around it.
• “acknowledges playwrights who fit a ‘postdramatic’ model”: There is precedent for including Crouch’s work even though it is based upon the play text
•  “false coherence of representational mimesis”: AN OAK TREE AND AIDY REMOVE THIS FALSE COHERENCE – An Oak Tree does this, for example, by replacing real-life objects with completely different objects.
• “asks more questions than it seeks to answer”: Crouch’s use of traditionally dramatic methods is a way of supporting its postdramatic methodologies so that it doesn’t become impossible – dramatic anchors used to support and underpin the postdramatic
• “The boundary between ‘performance text’, referring to the dramaturgy of the whole event, and the play text”: Crouch’s method of using text

Works cited

Freeman, J. (2007) New Performance / New Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Crouch, T. (2015) An Oak Tree (10^th anniversary edition). London: Oberon.

Crouch, T. (2003) My Arm. London: Faber and Faber.

Wellman, M. (2002) The theatre of good intentions. In: M. Delgado and C. Suich (eds.) Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 229-40.

Bly, M. (2006) Pressing an Ear Against a Hive or New Play Explorations in the Twenty-First Century. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 19-22.

Meyrick, J. (2006) Cut and paste: the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre. Theatre Research International, 31(3) 270-282.

Haring-Smith, T. (2006) Dramaturging non-realism: creating a new vocabulary. Theatre Topics, 13(1) 45-54.

Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2008) Dramaturgy and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.