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www.ATIBOOK.irDrama 173Speaking quickly and in broken sentencesIntroducing ‘er’ in mid-sentence (self-interruption)High status (dominant)Holding eye contact, breaking it, not glancing backStretching the body to fill spaceStanding while others sit or shrinkMoving into unoccupied spaceDetecting the centre of the space and occupying itKeeping the head and shoulders still while speakingOccupying space with hand gesturesSpeaking slowly in coherent sentencesIntroducing ‘er’ at the beginning of sentences (interrupting others)When practicing improvisation, the effort to manage gesture, eye contact and positioning,can feel crude and unwieldy at first, but these effects will quickly free the actors bygiving them certain sure and reliable rules. If the gardener plays high status towards theduchess, the effect will be a dramatic reversal with convention overturned, and audiencesenjoy it when status positions change or become uncertain. The tutor-student relationshipobviously implies a fixed status position, but one that may also be flexible. Students likeit if I ask them to try and change this status relationship in a formal setting such as alecture-room. They move about, throw things, try to leave; the lecturer, like the mother inFamily Voices, is deposited on the margins and ignored. If I try to join in theirconversations, my status becomes uncertain; that makes them uneasy.In Family Voices, status transactions happen between characters within a closelyrelated group. In one sense we see mother/ father/son as one culture group. The motherthinks this culture group still operates. To the son, however, it is defunct and has alreadybeen replaced by another. But on the practical level, that is, on stage, Family Voicesbecame a play about occupying the space, making eye contact, breaking it, lowering thevoice and using a voice-tone inappropriate to the words being said. A conciliatory tone, aloving gesture, clashes with meanings and words that are effectively mocking, unfriendly,cruel. Through this inappropriateness, father and son challenge each other’s status, andthe son teases his mother’s sincere utterances by imitating them. While the mother canonly speak with an appropriate tone, father and son have become what Johnstone calls‘status experts’, able to play high or low in a game of pretence and imitative mockery.The play ends with the father’s cryptic statement:VOICE THREE: I have so much to say to you, but I am quite dead. What I have to say toyou will never be said.(Ibid:83)Is his tone here one of defeated withdrawal (low status)? Or the verbal equivalent ofbreaking eye contact—indeed all contact—deliberate (high status)? The text will not say,and its impact may depend entirely on how the actors are feeling at that precise moment,on how their status behaviour has influenced them up to the last moment of theperformance.
www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing coursebook 174Johnstone’s comments on status made frequent reference, as we might expect, toShakespeare’s King Lear. Some years after my experience with Family Voices, The WestYorkshire Playhouse asked me to write a short play for younger audiences based on KingLear, using four actors from the cast of Jude Kelly’s production. The text was to be inverse (though this requirement was flexible) yet written using the common expressionsand rhythms of ordinary speech: for this audience nothing high-flown or Shakespearean.Of course, it’s quite possible to write in speech-like language—the language of thespeaking voice—and to generate effects, images, metaphors, especially those relevant tothe condition of King Lear, for the king in the course of Shakespeare’s play loses statusso rapidly we might even say it haemorrhages from him. In my version of the play,entitled NEVER, Lear, a billionaire tycoon in the hydro-engineering industry, retires,gives away his money and power to his daughter Regan and her boy-friend (known in theplay as a ‘Soldier’), in exchange for board and lodging with them. The problem is thatLear is by now suffering a deep decline into senile dementia. His other daughter,Cordelia, disguises herself as Regan’s maid in order to look after him. Lear, though, istoo demented to recognise the daughter he truly loves and who loves him. Thus we havethe basic Lear situation, and four characters.The following short scene illustrates how Lear continues to believe he can use hisstatus, even though he has none. Regan and the Soldier have taken over completely.Driven almost mad them-selves by his deepening senility, the two decide not to kill himbut dump him out in the countryside, actually the wilderness, near to a huge waterfall.They make him think, though, that he’s actually in a residential care home. Here, theyarrive at the spot with Lear in a wheelbarrow:REGANWe’ll drop him off here then.This is the place where he failedto complete his masterpiece.He gave it up.North of here the Arctic icepours into miles of rivers.A terrible waste of power:two million volts, five hundred cities,lights visible from space. The plan.The big vision. The dam’s half-built.Before the fans turned water into heathis powers of mind went…phht, like that.Wouldn’t forward the finance.Leave him here. He’ll crawl his way to the edge,or die of cold in the drizzle from the mountain.
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