WRITING MONOLOGUES FOR THE THEATRE: Anthony Skuse, Director of Bite Me: The Voices Project 2014 Often writers have experience writing poetry or prose. Try to think about writing for live performance. How can you take this piece of prose and re-work it as a theatrical or performance text? The ideas I put to you are: 1. Allow space for the actors to live in the language and to inhabit the moment If you are writing prose fiction, you fill in the detail because the action happens in the head of the reader. For a live performance there is another body in front of you and the audience wants to see them living in the moment. The written script is only one aspect of a

performance text. It is the actor’s job to embody the text and that means they will convey as much information through

their tone of voice, gesture and even their silence as they will through language.

2. Why does the character keep talking? It is not enough for characters to keep talking because you have to write a seven minute monologue. There has to be something driving them. What is the character reaching for? The character keeps speaking because there is something they are trying to work out, something they are searching for, or yearning for. Saudade is a Portuguese word that describes a deep yearning for an absent something or someone. I find it helpful to imagine that it is the character’s yearning that drives the piece. The character doesn’t always need to be able to articulate what it is they are yearning for, but you need to know what it is. 3. What don’t you need to say? 4. How do they say it? Is your choice of language suitable to the character’s age and socio-economic background? Russian playwright Anton Chekhov employed a very simple vocabulary

!Try to create the best work you can in this moment.  

for his characters and their speech is natural rather than literary. 5. Be clear about how you are using punctuation. What is the difference between a comma, a pause, an ellipse, a beat and a silence? How do the thoughts arrive – in short bursts or an extended flow? Chekhov used punctuation as if it were a series of coded messages, which reveal characters’ relationships and emotions. Does one thought lead you logically to the next one? 6. Play with tense. Bringing writing for the theatre into the present allows a piece to gain momentum, avoids a passive voice. Ask yourself what is dramatically the more exciting choice, to already

know the answers or to discover them in the moment? Dramatically it is more interesting if the character is

discovering the thoughts as they speak. 7. Don’t forget the medium you are writing for – avoid being overly proscriptive in your stage directions. When writing for theatre you can afford to be subtle; the suggestion of place can be more powerful than its explicit representation. 8. When writing consider how the words fall on the page.

Avoid presenting your monologue as a block of text like prose. The lay-out of the text gives the actor guidance on how it is to read, on how the thoughts are broken up and when to give a though space. The way the text is set out on the page can suggest the topography of the character’s journey. It also suggests the way a character breaks up their thoughts. If it’s more carefully laid out it provides clarity. Have a look at the work of Michael Gow, Sarah Kane or Mark Ravenhill for example. Lastly . . . . Try to create the best work you can in this moment.

Some practical logistical advice: An artist needs to be pragmatic about a few things when you are setting out a text on the page. • Use 1.5 spacing • Use font no smaller than 11pts, 12 is good • Number the bottom of the page • In the footer include the date and the number of the draft. This prevents you wasting time during the writing/development process.

!for advice on performing monologues visit www.atyp.com.au