How To Produce Amateur Plays Part 3

During this preliminary blocking-out process, little or no attention need be paid to details: the mere outlining of the action, together with the reading of the lines by the actors, is sufficient.

Sometimes printed plays suffer from too many stage directions, and occasionally even the careful Bernard Shaw, as the following extract will prove, is far from clear. Here are the opening pages of "You Never Can Tell":[4]

[4] Published separately by Brentano's.

_In a dentist's operating room on a fine August morning in 1896.

Not the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting-room of a furnished lodging in a terrace on the sea front at a fas.h.i.+onable watering place. The operating chair, with a gas pump and cylinder beside it, is half way between the center of the room and one of the corners. If you look into the room through the window which lights it, you will see the fireplace in the middle of the wall opposite you, with the door beside it to your left; an M.R.C.S. diploma in a frame hung on the chimneypiece; an easy chair covered in black leather on the hearth; a neat stool and bench, with vice, tools, and a mortar and pestle in the corner to the right. Near this bench stands a slender machine like a whip provided with a stand, a pedal, and an exaggerated winch.

Recognizing this as a dental drill, you shudder and look away to your left, where you can see another window, underneath which stands a writing table, with a blotter and a diary on it, and a chair. Next the writing table, towards the door, is a leather covered sofa. The opposite wall, close on your right, is occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose, facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left._ _You observe that the professional furniture and apparatus are new, and that the wall paper, designed, with the taste of an undertaker, in festoons and urns, the carpet with its symmetrical plans of rich, cabbagy nosegays, the gla.s.s gasalier with l.u.s.tres, the ornamental, gilt-rimmed blue candlesticks on the ends of the mantelshelf, also gla.s.s-draped with l.u.s.tres, and the ormolu clock under a gla.s.s cover in the middle between them, its uselessness emphasized by a cheap American clock disrespectfully placed beside it and now indicating 12 o'clock noon, all combine with the black marble which gives the fireplace the air of a miniature family vault, to suggest early Victorian commercial respectability, belief in money, Bible fetichism, fear of h.e.l.l always at war with fear of poverty, instinctive horror of the pa.s.sionate character of art, love and the Roman Catholic religion, and all the first fruits of plutocracy in the early generations of the industrial revolution._

_There is no shadow of this on the two persons who are occupying the room just now. One of them, a very pretty woman in miniature, her tiny figure dressed with the daintiest gaiety, is of a later generation, being hardly eighteen yet. This darling little creature clearly does not belong_ _to the room, or even to the country; for her complexion, though very delicate, has been burnt biscuit color by some warmer sun than England's; and yet there is, for a very subtle observer, a link between them.

For she has a gla.s.s of water in her hand, and a rapidly clearing cloud of spartan obstinacy on her tiny firm mouth and quaintly squared eyebrows. If the least line of conscience could be traced between those eyebrows, an Evangelical might cherish some faint hope of finding her a sheep in wolf's clothing--for her frock is recklessly pretty--but as the cloud vanishes it leaves her frontal sinus as smoothly free from conviction of sin as a kitten's._

_The dentist, contemplating her with the self-satisfaction of a successful operator, is a young man of thirty or thereabouts. He does not give the impression of being much of a workman: his professional manner evidently strikes him as being a joke; and it is underlain by a thoughtless pleasantry which betrays the young gentleman still unsettled and in search of amusing adventures, behind the newly set-up dentist in search of patients. He is not without gravity of demeanor; but the strained nostrils stamp it as the gravity of the humorist. His eyes are clear,_ _alert, of sceptically moderate size, and yet a little rash; his forehead is an excellent one, with plenty of room behind it; his nose and chin cavalierly handsome. On the whole, an attractive, noticeable beginner, of whose prospects a man of business might form a tolerably favorable estimate._

THE YOUNG LADY (_handing him the gla.s.s_). Thank you. (_In spite of the biscuit complexion she has not the slightest foreign accent._)

THE DENTIST (_putting it down on the ledge of his cabinet of instruments_). That was my first tooth.

THE YOUNG LADY (_aghast_). Your first! Do you mean to say that you began practising on me?

THE DENTIST. Every dentist has to begin on somebody.

THE YOUNG LADY. Yes: somebody in a hospital, not people who pay.

THE DENTIST (_laughing_). Oh, the hospital doesn't count. I only meant my first tooth in private practice. Why didn't you let me give you gas?

THE YOUNG LADY. Because you said it would be five s.h.i.+llings extra.

THE DENTIST (_shocked_). Oh, don't say that. It makes me feel as if I had hurt you for the sake of five s.h.i.+llings.

THE YOUNG LADY (_with cool insolence_). Well, so you have! (_She gets up._) Why shouldn't you? it's your business to hurt people.

(_It amuses him to be treated in this fas.h.i.+on; he chuckles secretly as he proceeds to clean and replace his instruments.

She shakes her dress into order, looks inquisitively about her; and goes to the window._) You have a good view of the sea from these rooms! Are they expensive?

THE DENTIST. Yes.

THE YOUNG LADY. You don't own the whole house, do you?

THE DENTIST. No.

THE YOUNG LADY (_taking the chair which stands at the writing table and looking critically at it as she spins it round on one leg_). Your furniture isn't quite the latest thing, is it?

THE DENTIST. It's my landlord's.

THE YOUNG LADY. Does he own that nice comfortable Bath chair?

(_pointing to the operating chair_).

THE DENTIST. No: I have that on the hire-purchase system.

THE YOUNG LADY (_disparagingly_). I thought so. (_Looking about her again in search of further conclusion._) I suppose you haven't been here long?

THE DENTIST. Six weeks. Is there anything else you would like to know?

THE YOUNG LADY (_the hint quite lost on her_). Any family?

Shaw's stage directions here are more than sufficient: they are intended not only for the director, stage manager, property man, scene painter, and actor, but for the reader as well. His directions are always stimulating and suggestive, and should be studied by the actors; but, from the point of view of the director and stage manager, they are bewilderingly diffuse and sometimes confusing. The fact, for instance, that the action takes place precisely in 1896, can be of little interest to the manager. Nor can a clock indicate twelve o'clock "noon." In such stage directions as these the director will therefore have to separate the purely mechanical elements from the literary and atmospheric. Let us now apply ourselves to the rather difficult task of making a diagram of the stage and its settings.

It is a "fine August morning." The sun is s.h.i.+ning out-of-doors and, as the room looks out over the sea, the stage must be lighted through one of the windows. The dramatist goes on to say that the room is "_Not the usual tiny London den, but the best sitting room of a furnished lodging._" By inference, it is a large room. The operating chair is "_half way between the center of the room and one of the corners_."

Which corner is not designated. Let us try to plot out the stage on the a.s.sumption that we are looking at it through a window halfway down-stage on the left (the actor's left, of course). The window which lights the room is placed thus:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Looking through this window, "_you will see the fireplace in the middle of the wall opposite you, with the door beside it to your left_":

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The next article of furniture mentioned is the easy chair "_on the hearth_":

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Then come "_a neat stool and bench_" and, near them, a dental drill:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"_Near it_" is not definite, but for the time being, let us allow it to stand up-stage near the stool and bench, but a little toward Center.

Next, you "_look away to your left, where you can see another window_."

The direction here is not practicable, but the window may well go above the fireplace, instead of below, thus:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Underneath this window stands a writing table and a chair:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"_Next the writing table, towards the door, is a leather covered sofa._"

To add another article of furniture to this already crowded side of the stage would not only make the room appear unnatural to the audience, but would render it impossible for the actors to move about with ease. The director will therefore have to use his ingenuity and judgment as to where to put the sofa. Some subsequent "business" may necessitate a change of the disposition of more than one chair or sofa or stool, but the process here outlined is the first step. To proceed: the sofa, then, must be placed somewhere else. But where? By moving the drill to the left, in the corner, the sofa can be placed next to the table, as follows:

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"_The opposite wall, close on your right, is occupied mostly by a bookcase. The operating chair is under your nose, facing you, with the cabinet of instruments handy to it on your left._"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

It is at once observed how necessary it was to move the drill from the other side of the room to this: over by the table, it would be out of convenient reach of the dentist.

The difficulty of arranging the stage in this case will at once prove the imperative need of going through the play with the utmost attention to stage directions and _lines_, in order to make an accurate series of stage diagrams, property, light, and furniture plots.

Notice that in the preliminary stage directions the center entrance is not designated. It soon becomes evident, however, that a center door (or one, at least, at the back of the stage) is taken for granted.