12.2: Read

Place and situation

Clare Bayley

The question of where to set a play or a scene is more than just a decision about location. Sam Smiley expresses it like this: ‘If the writer envisions a scenic metaphor that visually represents the overall dramatic image, then the setting will tend to suggest, intensify and sometimes compel the action.’

Within your chosen milieu, you need to decide whether the action will play out in one defined location, or in a number of different settings. If you want to use a unified space, the key is to choose somewhere that will offer the greatest dramatic possibilities.

TOP TIP

The first place you think of isn’t always the best. Sometimes you have to disregard the most obvious setting, and think instead about the most dramatically interesting place to place your characters.

REALITY VS THEATRE

In reality much of the drama of our lives plays out in sitting rooms and offices; many of our life-changing conversations happen over a kitchen or restaurant table. But how interesting is this for an audience to watch? Could these conversations be heightened by putting them in a more challenging environment?

Some playwrights consider that putting your characters in a place is less important than placing them in a situation with dramatic potential. In other words, that the setting is entirely subordinate to and determined by the action of the scene.

It’s always useful to consider how the space acts upon the character. Do they feel nervous or relaxed, nostalgic, claustrophobic or confident in that place? The more ‘stuff’ that is going on for them, the more active and dramatic your scene will be. Even better if the location suggests activities the character has to perform. How can that develop? Does their sense of competence wax or wane, does the task in hand become more or less easy for them? If the dialogue is happening while one character is trying to

conceal their lover behind a screen (as in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal), or to do some DIY with an electric drill (as in Ayckbourn’s Just Between Ourselves), the potential for the playwright is infinitely richer than if they were simply sharing a cup of tea.

Unity of place

As Alan Ayckbourn cannily says, ‘Unity of place is always very satisfying and economical, not just financially but dramatically.’

His plays frequently take place in a liminal space, which unites what could have been several different sets. So his comedy Season’s Greetings, for instance, is set in the hall of Neville and Belinda’s suburban home, with a view into both the sitting room and the dining room. The story kicks off during a Christmas Eve party being held in the house. During the party, the characters must go through the hall to get to either of the other rooms, while – satisfyingly – they can also catch sight of people in those rooms (and be seen by them).9

In the nineteenth century the unity of place became popular in naturalistic theatre, and Ibsen was a master of the technique. Hedda Gabler is entirely set in Hedda’s drawing room, which has a smaller room off it. Hedda’s force of character and her magnetism are such that characters are inevitably drawn to visit her; her problem is that she’s trapped in her life and her marriage, and, despite herself, rarely leaves. Despite her destructive power over others, she has failed to escape from her own literal and figurative confinement in this house. When she finally leaves the room, it marks her departure from this life.

To set your play in one room requires considerable technical discipline. You have to get characters on and off stage and develop the action without any of it seeming contrived. You have to suggest the past history and the wider world of the play while never stepping outside. However, whether the space is a prison cell, a drawing room or an underground bunker, when successfully achieved this technique is highly satisfying for the audience, giving them a heightened focus on the drama.

Linked but unified settings

There are times when a single setting is too restrictive for the story being told, though there is still a unity about the places chosen. Rona Munro’s 2002 play Iron takes place fifty years into Fay’s life sentence

for murdering her husband. At the beginning of the play, her 25-year-old daughter Josie has come to visit her for the first time since she was sent down. You might expect all the scenes to take place in the prison visiting room; but in order to afford us glimpses of the characters alone, or talking to prison officers, there are also scenes in a waiting room, an interview room and Fay’s cell. Expanding the settings in this way prevents them becoming restrictive, while still keeping the characters – and the audience – firmly within the prison system.

Setting which determines action

In some cases the setting can determine the action of the play. The advantages of setting a play in a place intended for a specific activity are manifold; a gym, for example, or a betting-shop, or the rehearsal room for a play. You can exploit these expectations for stage business; but more importantly, you can use the activities to comment on the thematics and symbolism of the play. Roy Williams’ Sucker Punch takes place entirely in a gym where the characters Troy and Leon are learning to box. This setting includes a ring (which in breakout monologues stands in for the rings where Leon’s fights take place), as well as lockers, punchbags, the trainer Charlie’s offstage office, the permanently blocked and flooding toilets. It’s a public place, so that characters can come and go, and turn up unexpectedly. The activities they engage in (sparring, romancing, arguing) reflect the action of the whole play and the setting becomes a metaphor – it’s a place where disadvantaged black kids can go and try and make something of their lives; where they may find love, but will also encounter racism and learn that corruption is rife – even the ambiguous father figure Charlie is involved in match-fixing.

Multiple settings

For epics, history plays – all kinds of dramas unfolding across time and space – playwrights from Shakespeare to Brecht have needed the freedom to roam. King Lear takes place in court, on the blasted heath, in a hovel, outside castles, in dungeons, on clifftops. The settings are conjured through the verse, most wonderfully in Act Four, scene Six, where Edgar, in disguise, leads his blind father Gloucester to a hill which he claims is the top of the cliffs at Dover. Edgar knows that Gloucester will try to throw himself off the cliffs, and to save him he deceives him:

Come on, sir, here’s the place. Stand still: how fearful

And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low.

The crows and choughs that wing the midway air

Show scarce so gross as beetles…

The ensuing scene – where Gloucester jumps on flat ground, believing he is on top of the cliff, and lands in a faint, so not realizing his mistake – is both arresting and poignant. Moreover it mirrors the story of Lear, and shows another great fall from grace of a self-deceiving parent. Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good tells the story of a group of convicts arriving in seventeenth-century Australia. Their enlightened Governor in Chief encourages them to produce a play, in an attempt to create a civilizing effect and ‘change the nature of our little society’. Because Wertenbaker’s play is about the staging of a play, there are certain activities which immediately suggest themselves for scenes, such as an audition, line learning, rehearsals and the performance itself. In these scenes the situation or activity is sufficient to give context to the scene, and the playwright leaves the choice of location to the director/designer. But in other scenes, where the action is more abstract or emotional, the setting is specified, and the action is conceived to reinforce its meaning.

There’s a scene between Harry, the part-time hangman, and his convict-mistress Duckling, set in a rowing boat. Duckling was condemned to hang in Newgate prison until Harry took a fancy to her and managed to get her sentence commuted to deportation. She sees this as merely exchanging one prison for another, however. Harry’s love is unrequited; the more he tries to win her round, the more she feels stifled by him:

‘I wake up in the middle of the night and you’re watching me … JUST STOP WATCHING ME’, she exclaims.

Harry intends this rowing expedition to be a romantic treat for Duckling; she sees it as just another situation she can’t easily escape from. She longs to be free of him; he longs for love; in a moment of truce and compromise they agree she can take part in the play. He ruins it all with the last line of the scene:

‘I’ll come and watch the rehearsals’, he says. And they row off together in their unhappy little boat.

References: Sam Smiley, Playwriting: The Structure of Action (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 259.

Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 29. Ayckbourn also recounts how he was commissioned to write a play (Bedroom Farce) for the newly completed Lyttelton stage: ‘I could not for the life of me think how to fill that big wide stage. So I divided it into three and wrote a play set in three different bedrooms.’

In the National Theatre’s lavish production in 2010, the set showed the whole three-story house, which Michael Billington in his review considered actually reduced the comic impact of the play (The Guardian, 9 December 2010).