In the final stages (ish) of a thing called When This Is Over, which is essentially a verbatim theatre piece with a youth theatre, borne out of their reactions to COVID, the multiple lockdowns, and young people’s response as their lives go back to normal (although of course, as this month is proving, life never goes back to normal, or we’re all going to have to spend a lot of time, energy and graffiti pens going over our dictionaries to redefine exactly what we think ‘normal’ is.
This being verbatim theatre, and this being youth theatre, there’s had to be a lot of re-editing going on. A lot of the early stages was simply collecting conversations and musings, which to the outside ear might have sounded like unfocused chat (and indeed it often was), but the aim was that out of every thirty minutes of talk, there might be one minute of gold (and indeed it often was). Because a lot of the young people have other commitments, they might not always have been at the classes, and so didn’t get an equal chance to contribute their words. And it can take until final rehearsals (like now) to spot that Person B has less than half the lines of Person A.
Not that that’s always a problem: it isn’t, believe it or not, always appropriate to make the attempt that every Youth Theatre Cast Member gets an equal number of lines, but equally you don’t want someone who perhaps doesn’t always put themselves forward to get pushed to the back. So, there was a bit of juggling, hacking, and rewriting to get to a decent enough working draft. Which was of course, terrible.
I want to be a bit clearer about that, in a way that I don’t really have time to get into right now. But it’s not self-deprecation, or in any way speaking ill of my own writing: it is, I believe, perfectly possible to produce a first (or fifth) draft that is basically essentially decent and workable and fun and You’ll-Get-Away-With-It-For-Now, that is also, in the writers opinion, also terrible.
Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not talking about the Tortured Procrastinating Artist’s lament – the idea of ‘oh, it just needs one tweak and it’ll be perfect’, and indeed I’m not even talking about the Perfectionist’s Paralysis (is that a coaching term, or a chapter in a self help book? If it isn’t, it should be: I’ll send you an invoice). I’m basically talking about a very normal, workman-like, almost banal approach to the text. Once I’d got this working script done, and read for the first time by the cast, I could hear where all the lulls were, and more importantly, where all the links weren’t.
My first drafts are often pretty sound. Again, don’t get me wrong: I end up doing a second, third and ninth draft – but a lot of the major work has already been done in the first version, and there’s not a lot of plot or narrative differences to be made: my subsequent drafts tend to be making ideas and themes stronger, editing out the moments when I’ve repeated the same point too often, or simply set up a plot point that got RESOLVED IN MY HEAD, but not, as it turned out, within the actual text.
This then, was an interesting writing experience for me: perhaps not for anyone else who may have been writing this way for years, but I’m not sure I remember the last time I wrote something that was functionally the same in two drafts, but aesthetically quite different (that’s almost a lie – I have two different versions of a play about Mary Shelley and her half-sister Claire Clairmont: one’s a play for three actors, and the other is for five. The difference there is that I think they’re both fundamentally as decent as one another, and both equally valid for future production). Having an later draft that was quite different from an earlier one, but where all the main points were basically in the same place, or shifted to clearer vantage points, was genuinely quite exciting. It was like going into unfamiliar territory with a blank piece of paper, sketching out a rough map, coming out for a bit to get your bearings, and then going back in again from a different angle and adding in more landmarks.
Anyway, that’s how it’s all going at the moment. We’re in our last couple of weeks of rehearsal, and then When This Is Over will be ..
Well, it might not be over, actually.
This is Andrew Allen 