Directing Little Wonder Radio Plays means I have read several hundreds of play submissions. Many of them are bursting with passion for their themes: anti-patriarchy, anti-feminist conspiracy, dealing with Alzheimer’s, coping with loss, divorce, corrupt politicians, global pandemics. This is great! Passion is great!
At the same time, everyone in the human race suffers from a little beastie known as confirmation bias: we are more likely to believe things we believe already, and we like to hear stuff that tells us we were right all along.
So, everything is great, right? Passionate people write plays (books, poems, films) for people who share their passions to agree with. Unfortunately, everything is not great. Nine times out of ten an excess of passion results in crap writing.
In this article I am going to explore why your passion is sabotaging you, and what you can do to make it work for and not against you.
Passion is good
Drama thrives on passion. If you do not care about the subject how the hell are you going to make the audience care? This is even true for comedy (actually, most things about good writing are especially true for comedy). Now you do not have to be passionate about BIG SHIT (CLIMATE CHANGE! DONALD TRUMP! WHAT IS IN CHICKEN MCNUGGETS!?). But you do have to have passion: you have to have an angle by which the subject of the piece touches you personally, so you can find a way to touch the audience personally (starting to feel like a Deadpool joke).
Pseudo-Monologues are Bad
The worst examples (and I’ve seen many) of when passion destroys a play are when the play is a monologue or pseudo-monologue, with any other characters only existing to agree with the protagonist or make paper-thin arguments to make the protagonist look better. This is not theatre. It is not even storytelling. If you want to write speeches, go work for a politician.
Don’t make Passion the Enemy of Conflict
Drama needs passion but it thrives on conflict. This is where your passion becomes a problem. If you are so wedded to an idea that you present it as self-evidently correct, then there is no space for conflict or growth: your heroes are right, remain right, and finish right; your villains are paper thin, wrong, obviously wrong, and should stay sat in the corner being wrong.
This is a catastrophe.
You play is no longer a play. It is a 2000, or 8000, or 20,000-word diatribe about how we should save the whales. Or save Wales. Which may both be valid desires but are not theatre. Ever fallen asleep during a lecture or a class at school? So will your audience. So how do we turn passion into theatre?
What make’s something a story?
What do we know about theatre? It normally begins with characters living a life that in some way is unsatisfactory. An opportunity to change arrives, which initially they reject, but which is then forced upon them. They attempt to overcome this challenge but fail because of an inherent character flaw. They then either resolve this flaw and triumph in their darkest hour or stay the same and lose what they love.
This may sound pretty familiar – we have talked about it before – and I am sure you also know that there are lots of ways to play with the formula. However, there are two essential parts that you cannot fuck with: the protagonist’s flaw and the strength of the challenge (usually personified in an antagonist, and best of all an antagonist with whom we can sympathise)
An example of how not to do it.
So, let us try an example of a bad passion play. We’ll set it in America, both because I can’t write American and all the really stupid stuff seems to come from there these days (blah blah blah, Boris Johnson, I can’t hear you, Katie Hopkins, that guy who stuck 9 Cadbury’s cream eggs up his bum, all is well with Britain, nothing to see here. )
Francis works for an environmental charity. She is invited by the Republican governor to come and give a speech alongside him about the dangers of climate change. Her colleagues warn her it is a trap, but she says it is a chance to make a difference. Using super computer skills she happens to have, she does clever research and digs up dirt on his finances. On the day of the speech reveals not only that his voting record reveals him to be a hypocrite about the environment but that he has also been taking campaign donations from big oil. This devastating revelation results in him losing the election, and Francis is hired by the incoming Democratic governor to help make a real difference in the state.
First things first, this is a damned sight better than a lot of the plays I get (e.g. the pseudo-monologues). I mean, at least something happens. But hopefully you can see the problem. Francis is always right. The villain is always wrong. There are not any real moments of tension, and her beliefs are never challenged. It is boring.
A couple of examples of doing it better.
Let us try again.
Francis lives at home with her mother who provides for both of them while she works for an environmental charity. She is asked by the Republican candidate for governor to come and speak with him about climate change but refuses because she is already supporting the Democratic candidate and does not want to lend the Republicans credibility. However, he turns up at her home one night and explains that even though he genuinely believes in the dangers of climate change, if the Democratic plan she proposes goes through it will result in the closing down of a large number of factories in the region – including the one where her mother works. The consequent economics crisis would rob the state of the finance required to combat climate change in the first place, and he says he wants to work with her to find a compromise.
Francis refuses, claiming that nothing is more important than repairing the environment. But then she has a fight with her mother, who points out that they are already in financial difficulty without the threat of job loss. Francis goes to see the Democratic candidate, who accuses her of being a class traitor and reveals that she has proof that the Republican candidate is in the pocket of the companies he claims will be forced to close in the first place – and that regardless, if people have to lose their jobs to save the planet, so be it. The Democrat will not compromise.
Francis wants to believe this, but she cannot stop thinking about her mother. So she takes the info she illegally hacked on the Republican’s donations, goes to him, and offers to work with him to find a slower paced means to move towards a green economy – keeping in mind that she has proof of his corruption. She remembers her early speech, claiming nothing is more important than the environment, and wonders if she has lost something of herself. With her help, the Republican wins, the factories stay open, and real legislation is passed to reduce emissions in the state – fast enough to save the planet? Who knows?
Reading that back it does not exactly feel like it is going to win an Olivier award – it is more like a Liberal Democrat campaign leaflet. However, it does a couple of essential things that the first does not. Francis has a flaw: she is blinkered to the complexity of the climate change problem. Her antagonist is still a bad guy (corrupt politician), but maybe not all that bad – he shares some of her beliefs, he puts himself on the line coming to her home, and he has a genuine good reason to disagree with her (jobs in his state – including her mothers, which gives Francis a personal stake.) Finally, in order to win, Francis has to change. She has to compromise with people she dislikes in order to protect the things she loves.
Let us try another way round, just to show that your message is less important than your method here. Francis hears what the Republican has to say but her convictions tell her that climate change is too important. She goes to the Democrat and says that she will give her the data on the republican corruption in return for a paid position in the new Governor’s office, then moves out of home – at the expense of a huge argument with her mother, who says that her life will be destroyed by the loss of the job. Francis says that some lives must be sacrificed for the greater good.
There are a million other ways to tell this story, and most of them will be better, but the crucial example I’m trying to give is that you can’t just preach and your character can’t just be right all the time. Characters must be complicated, the choices they have to make difficult, and if you must have a happy ending then make sure the protagonists damned well worked for it.
Passion is important – but don’t lose your head.
Passion is essential to writing. But remember your principal role is a storyteller. Plays that are about heroes vs strawmen (e.g. Courageous men’s-rights activist vs man-eating slut [yes, that was a real play I was sent]) are dull (and, in that case, utterly bonkers). Take the thing you are passionate about and question them. Push it as far as it will go. Make the people who disagree with your passion real people, with real, sympathetic reasons to disagree – the world is a complex place and even people who are wrong often have strong reasons why they are wrong. Then, sure, have your passion win in the end. But work for it.
Do not preach to me. Tell me a story. That is when I will listen. And maybe, just maybe, you will make me change my mind.
PS. Just in case anyone confuses my storytelling with my beliefs, I am a neo-Marxist who passionately believes that if we do not take extraordinary action to combat climate change all our grandkids may well all die or at least live in post-apocalyptic misery. I would close the factories, and make massive state investment to create new jobs for the people who had become unemployed – along with a universal basic income and variety of education support to ensure that they get every possible chance to start over. So, I do not actually agree with Francis in either of the stories. I am a storyteller. It is not always my job to tell you my story.
PPS. Before you leave comments about how my previous postscript is insane commie nonsense, first, I do not care, second, I will bet my PhD against yours 😉
PPPS. Notice how my preaching in the first postscript was a bit boring? That is why telling stories beats giving speeches 😊
PPPPS I hope Butterbur sends this promptly. A worthy man, but his memory is like a lumber-room.
PPPPPS Yes, I know it is the wrong number of Ps on the Butterbur joke. Sorry.
