The first time I came to stay in Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco, was 2009 and I was avid to find out what was happening at the Californian cutting edge of theatre ~ or theater, as the more logical spelling is here. My research unearthed an article in the Boston Globe ~ yes I know it's the other side of America but on roughly the same latitude ~ which I've recalled several times since. Notably when I saw Dennis Kelly's play DNA at the Egg in Bath last year, a production which vividly supported the argument below. I'm reproducing the piece, I assume with writer Louise Kennedy's tacit approval, in near-entirety. Because I agree.

Shock theater has lost its value 
 I came to a shocking realization the other day: Apparently, I can't be shocked anymore. Or at least I can't be shocked by any play that bills itself as shocking. I can be irritated, titillated, insulted, or annoyed; more often than anything else, I can be bored. But shocked? No. I've been trying to figure out why. After all, some of the plays I've seen deal with unquestionably disturbing subjects, from child abuse to incest to torture to rape, while others use a whole sex shop's worth of props to shove their daringness in the audience's face. Many do both, and they may also throw in a few hairpin-sharp twists to keep a viewer off balance. And yet, somehow, they fail to shock. 
Take David Harrower's "Blackbird," which recently closed at SpeakEasy Stage Company.  It shows us two people discussing their former love affair - except that it turns out he was 40 and she was 12 when they had sex. He has done time, moved to another town, changed his name; she grows up, sees his picture in a magazine, confronts him at work; they argue, reminisce, almost have sex on the break-room floor. Along the way, we learn that their feelings about each other and about what happened between them are more complicated than the clinical language of pedophilia and child abuse would allow them to express. 
          To which I can only say: Well, no kidding. Life is always more complicated than the labels we give it. Human beings - all human beings - are a mess of motives and schemes, some noble and some horrific, and they find an infinite number of ways to act out or repress their desires, very few of which can be reduced to neat categories.  To pretend, by suspensefully withholding and then dramatically unveiling this information, that you are shocking me is to condescend to my intelligence, as a theatergoer and as a human being.  
         Other plays I've seen recently find different jolts to administer, but their effect feels much the same. Adam Bock's "The Receptionist," ... Martin McDonagh's "The Lieutenant of Inishmore"... even Tracy Letts's "August: Osage County," Pulitzer winner and critical darling on Broadway last season, strikes me as an overcooked stew of every dysfunction in the book. With more twists than a nighttime soap, it ultimately reveals . . . what? That families are crazy, and some families are really crazy? Well, again, no kidding. 
           These are just a few examples of the kind of play that I've learned to anticipate with a weary sigh. The more I hear that a play is full of startling revelations, daring honesty, fearless confrontations with hard truths, the more I dread what I'll be seeing onstage. I do try to lay aside my dread, not least because I believe absolutely in reviewing the play, not the hype, but also because I always hope for a real theatrical experience in the theater. 
           The thing is, I want to be genuinely shocked. I want plays that shine a light into the darkest recesses of the human soul, that lead the audience on a journey that leaves us breathless and invigorated even if we've been terrified and deeply shaken by what we've seen. At their best, Sam Shepard and David Mamet can do this. I'm also delighted by outrageousness of the most graphic sort - Ryan Landry's deliriously blood-spattered, giddy, and weirdly moving "Medea" comes to mind, along with the flawed but incisive dark satire of Bruce Norris's "The Pain and the Itch," - as long as it treats me as an equal, a grownup with a sense of humor, rather than as some stick figure who needs to be shaken out of her imagined complacency.
For my money, if you want real shock, it's hard to do better than Shakespeare and the Greeks. There's no shortage of gore, but the gore always means something. And - crucially, I think - the action unfolds in language, more than in elaborate visual effects. Heck, the Greeks don't even let anyone get killed onstage; we just hear about it afterward, in some of the most powerful stage speech you'll find anywhere. And while I'm not asking our current playwrights to be as great as Shakespeare or Euripides, I am asking them to remember that those are the heroes of the tradition in which they work.  For I think a lot of what drives the latest wave of shock theater is a desire to compete with the dominant media of our time: movies and television.
           Playwrights seize the tools of these essentially visual media - graphic imagery, turbo-powered plotting, and a heightened version of reality - and apply them to a medium that is quintessentially not visual but verbal. It's a mistake on two levels. First, because it can't possibly compete with film and TV: A stage will never look as "real" as a movie set, and stage effects become less and less powerful the more they move away from imaginative symbolism to imitative realism.  More important, in moving away from the essence of drama - that is, the subtle and expert use of language and carefully developed action to illuminate human life - toward thrill-seeking and adrenaline jolts, playwrights give up their own most precious gifts. 
          And the audience? Jaded by the thousand unnatural shocks that electronic entertainment is heir to, we remain unmoved by its awkward imitators in the theater, even as we remain hungry for the real, visceral, cathartic thrills that true theater can provide. That's not just shocking. It's sad.

My writer friend Emily sends me a Harold Pinter quote:  "What I write has no obligation other than to itself.  My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors or to my fellow men in general, but to the play in hand, simply."

It's from the Introduction to his collected plays published by Faber and I'm intrigued enough to look further at this transcript of a speech made in 1962 ~ in Bristol ~ to the National Student Drama Festival. In 2008, under the heading The Echoing Silence, the Guardian published a digest of this piece a fitting obituary for the writer whose final writing voice was not quiet but vociferous against war and political oppression. Here's a further digest general thoughts in that article: the personal stuff is fascinating too:

"The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity; a poem or a play, no difference. These facts are not easy to reconcile. The professional theatre, whatever the virtues it undoubtedly possesses, is a world of false climaxes, calculated tensions, some hysteria and a good deal of inefficiency. What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself. My responsibility is not to audiences, critics, producers, directors, actors or to my fellow men in general, but to the play in hand, simply.

I have usually begun a play in quite a simple manner; found a couple of characters in a particular context, thrown them together and listened to what they said, keeping my nose to the ground. The context has always been, for me, concrete and particular, and the characters concrete also. I've never started a play with any kind of abstract idea or theory.

If I were to state any moral precept it might be: beware of the writer who puts forward his concern for you to embrace, who leaves you in no doubt of his worthiness, his usefulness, his altruism, who declares that his heart is in the right place, and ensures that it can be seen in full view, a pulsating mass where his characters ought to be. This kind of writer clearly trusts words absolutely. I have mixed feelings about words myself. So often, below the word spoken, is the thing known and unspoken. My characters tell me so much and no more, with reference to their experience, their aspirations, their motives, their history. You and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we're inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, obstructive, unwilling. 

But it's out of these attributes that a language arises. A language, I repeat, where under what is said, another thing is being said. Given characters who possess a momentum of their own, my job is not to impose upon them, not to subject them to a false articulation. The relationship between author and characters should be a highly respectful one, both ways. And if it's possible to talk of gaining a kind of freedom from writing, it doesn't come by leading one's characters into fixed and calculated postures, but by allowing them to carry their own can, by giving them legitimate elbow-room. It is in the silence that they are most evident to me.

There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smokescreen. When true silence falls, we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness. 

 We have heard many times that tired, grimy phrase, "failure of communication".I think that we communicate only too well, in our silence, in what is unsaid, and that what takes place is a continual evasion, desperate rearguard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves. Communication is too alarming."

Returning to that striking opening thought, that the task of a writer is to write for no-one but himself, I'm reminded of Toby Whithouse, when his TV series Being Human was at the height of its popularity, responding is an interview to that old conker of a question And finally, what advice would you give to an aspiring TV scriptwriter today?
 His answer has sustained me through many rejections, though I'd have changed the last word. I'd aim for satisfaction rather than wealth.

"You should never write for an audience. The only thing that defines you as a writer is your own voice and so nurturing and defining that individual voice is the most important thing you can do. Every time you write a script or a manuscript or whatever, say to yourself, “this will never ever be performed” or “no one else will ever read this”. Because when you do that it liberates the work. It means that you are just writing for yourself and gradually defining and sculpting your own voice. Ultimately, it is that voice that is going to make you successful, that is going to make you happy. It’s also that voice that will be the thing you rely on for the rest of your career so the moment you start writing to please this person, that person, an agent or an audience, you’re diluting the very thing that makes you different. You can be inspired by people, you can be influenced by people, but you should never change for people because the thing that makes you unique is going to be the thing that makes you rich."

I've been reading Comedy Rules, the entertaining memoirs of Jonathan Lynn offered as 150 tips for scriptwriters. As his successful writing career culminated in Yes Prime Minister ~ an updated theatrical version of which is touring nationally as I write ~ his witty anecdotes also embody substantial useful advice. There's discussion on the role of comedy in performance (self-recognition and anger management, to précis), the relationship of farce to tragedy (two sides of the same coin ~ action driven by hideous dilemmas), the importance of dramatic irony, the need for 'treacle cutting' with a dry comment after moist emotion, the reason suspense works better than surprise, the causal connection between character and plot, and a great deal more too. One of my favourite rules is number 71, relevant to all creative activity and not just writing: Where do ideas come from? Some I get from newspapers. I also get them just from gazing out of the window.... sometimes when I’m out walking, or when driving. But where do they come from? I think that they come from programming your brain in advance, by setting it a problem and then leaving your subconscious to mull it over without supervision. 
I cherish also number 124: Polish the dialogue until it sparkles. Great dialogue, though it may seem realistic, seldom is. It requires artistry, impeccable phrasing, the perfect vocabulary for the character, and the script should sustain a level of wit (whether or not the characters are aware of it) that is not possible in real life.  
And for a light look at how to to get 'em laughing, The Last Supper sketch is remembered fondly by the author from his days with the Monty Python crew.

Rather than reproduce comments already on My Blog, as I inventively titled postings of 'all the goss from a writer's life' back in 2006 when bloggers were rare as natterjacks, I intend to make this a collection of interesting snippets from online and offline sources. This is playwright David Lane on the craft of drama and dramaturgy:
"You walk into the Tate Modern with a certain set of interpretive tools: are these tools the same ones you expect to take into a theatre? What do you expect from an art gallery in terms of meaning, and how is that different to what you expect when you walk into a theatre? Why? 

One of the tasks I recently gave writers was to adapt a Picasso painting. What would it look like if it were a play? What happens to character and place and time and structure? We were looking at later Picasso…cubist, refracted images…
Why can’t we write a play like that? Why do most plays look like photos not Picasso paintings?"
It's an interesting question, so I've set myself to write a ten minute play that looks like this image.

The rest of David's talk is on Hanna Silva's blog.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic ~ Edward Albee

Shaw, who knew a thing or two about plays as well as criticism, reckoned 'absolute honesty is an absurd abstraction' and the subjectivity of personal opinion is as self-evident in reviewing drama as food, or holidays, or dogs that look like their owners at the local fair. The job of the theatre critic is not to be objective or even unarguably fair, it's to show the highlights and the warts and ~ in the words of the great Ken Tynan ~ 'to make way for the good by demolishing the bad'. Which is quite a lofty aim, and one which may not always be appreciated by its smarting recipient/s, so here comes a final quote on the subject from prolific drama critic Lynn Gardner: "a reviewer is entitled to be spiteful as long as she is honest." The 'she' came about because this is taken from a court ruling after legal action, but gender is irrelevant when steering a course between sharp-tongued and mealy-mouthed, with one eye on wounded feelings of writer / director / actors and the other on a responsibility to punters about to part with mega-squids for 3 Acts of pretentiousness masquerading as edgy contemporary drama. Sorry Mr Bartlett but I appear to be alone in this view, so no harm done eh?

So what's this new blog about then, apart from a patchwork of quoted thoughts on critiquing? I've decided, as my personal blog is supposed to be mainly about my life & times in Frome, promoting the lively local scene and including various aspects of creativity and culture from jazz jams to art exhibitions & festivals, that I would start another blog purely for issues around theatre. That way I can explore responses and ideas more fully...   and hopefully become a much better playwright myself in the process.

And the blog title, if you're not familiar with Tom Lehrer's caustic take on American history, concludes with the kind of ruthless single-mindedness of a writer, director, or indeed any participant:  Apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?