Dramatic Technique

CHAPTER V

FROM SUBJECT TO PLOT: PROPORTIONING THE MATERIAL: NUMBER AND LENGTH OF ACTS

A dramatist, proportioning his rough story for performance in the limited space of time the stage permits, faces at once the question: “How many acts?” If inexperienced, noting the number of changes of set his story seems to demand he finds himself in a dilemma: to give an act to each change of scene is to break the play into many scrappy acts of a few minutes each; to crowd all his needed scenes into five acts is to get scenes as scrappy as the eight which make the fifth act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth or the ten in Act IV of Henry VI, Part II. In either case, if he gives his numerous scenes adequate treatment, he is likely to find their combined length forces him beyond the time limit the theatre allows—about two hours and a half.

Let him rid himself immediately of any feeling that custom or dramatic dignity calls for any preference among three, four, or five acts. The Elizabethan drama put such a spell upon the imagination of English-speaking peoples that until recently the idea was accepted: “Five is dignity, with a trailing robe, whereas one, two, or three acts would be short skirts, and degrading.”1 Today a dramatist may plan for a play of three, four, or five acts, as seems to him best.

Why, if no change of scene be required, is not a play of one long act desirable? At first sight, there would seem to be a gain in the unbroken movement. The power of sustained attention in audiences is, however, distinctly limited. Any one who has seen a performance of The Trojan Women2 by Euripides, or von Hofmannsthal’s Electra3 needs no further proof that though each makes a short evening’s entertainment it is exhausting because of uninterrupted movement from start to finish. To plays of one long act most audiences become unresponsive from sheer physical fatigue. Consequently, use has confined one-act plays to subjects that may be treated in fifteen minutes to an hour, with an average length of from twenty to forty-five minutes. Strindberg has stated well the problem which the play in one long act involves: “I have tried,” he wrote in his Introduction to Miss Julia, “to abolish the division into acts. And I have done so because I have come to fear that our decreasing capacity for illusion might be unfavorably affected by intermissions during which the spectator would have time to reflect and to get away from the suggestive influence of the author-hypnotist. My play will probably last an hour and a half, and as it is possible to listen that length of time, or longer, to a lecture, a sermon, or a debate, I have imagined that a theatrical performance could not become fatiguing in the same time. As early as 1872, in one of my first dramatic experiments, The Outlaw, I tried the same concentrated form, but with scant success. The play was written in five acts, and wholly completed, when I became aware of the restless, scattered effect it produced. Then I burned it, and out of the ashes rose a single, well-built act, covering fifty printed pages, and taking an hour for its performance. Thus the form of the present play is not new, but it seems to be my own, and changing aesthetical conventions may possibly make it timely.

“My hope is still for a public educated to a point where it can sit through a whole-evening performance in a single act. But that point cannot be reached without a great deal of experimentation.”4

The difficulty with a play of only two acts is similar. If the piece is to fill an evening, each act must last an hour or more. The Winter’s Tale is really a two-act play: Act I is the story of Hermione and Leontes, Act II the story of Florizel and Perdita, with Time as Chorus separating the acts. Division of this play into five acts and use of modern scenery have given it the effect of breaking to pieces midway, where Time speaks. When each of the two parts is played uninterruptedly, as in Mr. Granville Barker’s recent revival, this effect disappears and it becomes clear that the original division is artistically right. However, so long is each of the two parts that The Winter’s Tale, when seen in this way, badly strains the attention of a present-day audience.

Contrastingly, to use more than five acts in the space of two hours and a half is either to carry the performance over into a second day, as with the two-part play of Elizabeth’s time—something we cannot now tolerate; or to write such scrappy acts that the frequent shifting of scenery and dropping of the curtain spoil desired illusion. If it be remembered that there is nothing essentially wrong in a play of one, two, six, or even more acts, and that changing tastes or the necessities of particular subjects may in very rare instances make any of these divisions desirable, it can be said that three, four, or five acts are today the normal divisions for plays.

An objection to long plays of one or two acts is that when the piece lasts only an hour and a half, as in the case of Miss Julia, the evening must be filled out with something else. In the first place, it is by no means easy to arrange a mixed program in which each play shows to complete advantage. Nor are audiences usually fond of adjusting themselves to new characters and new plots two or three times in an evening. On the professional stage, Barrie’s short plays have done something to make the general public more ready to shift their interest to fresh subjects in the course of an evening, but a mixed program of plays is rarely popular except in theatres of the so-called “experimental” class.

The advantage in three acts is that each allows a longer space than does the division into four or five acts in which characterization may develop before the eyes of the audience, or a larger number of illustrative actions bearing on the central purpose of the act may be shown. The offset is that three acts provide only two breaks by which the passing of time may be suggested. Neither four nor three acts have any essential superiority over each other, or over five acts. Five acts, in and of themselves, have no superiority over four or three; nor, as some persons have seemed to think, are they the only divisions in which a drama in verse may be written. Avoidance of awkward changes of scene within an act may compel use of four or five acts rather than three. The more episodes in the story to be dramatized, the more aspects of character to be shown by action, the more acts or scenes the dramatist must use. If long spaces of time must be allowed for because they are part of the story or marked changes of character demand them, the dramatist will need more entr’acte space, and, consequently, more acts. It is, then, necessary change of place and passage of time which are the chief factors in determining choice among three, four, or five acts.

For centuries theoretical students of the drama have worried themselves about the two unities: place and time. Practising dramatists, however, have usually found that generalizations in regard to them help little and that in each individual play they must work out the place and time problems for themselves. Practice as to shifting scenes has depended most, and always will, upon whether the physical conditions of the stage permit many real or imagined shifts. The Greek stage, with its fixed background and its chorus nearly always present, forced an attempt at unity of place, though the Greeks often broke through it.

The Elizabethan author writing, in his public performances, for an audience accustomed to build imaginatively a setting from hints given by properties, signs on the stage, or descriptions in the text, changed the scene at will. Recall the thirteen changes in Act III of Antony and Cleopatra.

On the modern stage such frequent change is undesirable for three reasons: the expense of constructing and painting so many scenes; the time consumed in making the changes, which may reduce decidedly the acting time of the play; and the check in sustained interest on the part of the audience caused by these many changes. The growth of the touring system also has led to reduction in the number of scenes, for transportation of numerous and elaborate sets is too expensive. Moreover, the interest in extreme realism has carried us more and more into such scenes of simple or sordid living as call for only one to three sets in a play.

At times it is easy, or at least possible with ingenuity, to have for a play, whatever its length, but one setting. Von Hofmannsthal’s Electra is an illustration. Another is The Servant in the House, a play in five acts by Rann Kennedy.

Hervieu’s Connais-Toi, a play of three acts, is another instance of one setting throughout.7

Not infrequently it is comparatively simple to confine a play to one set for each act, or even less. The Great Divide, by William Vaughn Moody, and The Weavers, by Hauptmann, show a new setting for each act. In The Truth, by Clyde Fitch, Acts I and II have the same setting: “At Mrs. Warder’s. An extremely attractive room in the best of taste”; Acts III and IV are in “Mr. Roland’s rooms in Mrs. Crespigny’s flat in Baltimore.” In the four acts of The Witching Hour, by Augustus Thomas, there is a change of set only for Act II.8 Such reducing of possible settings to two or three for a play of four or five acts requires practice, and, in some cases, decided ingenuity. In present-day use the safest principle is this: a set to an act, if really needed, but no change of set within the act unless there be unavoidable reason for it.

What, then, is the would-be dramatist to do when faced by six or more settings to a five-act play, or two or three settings within what he believes should be an act? Often what seems a necessary early scene is but clumsy exposition: skilful handling would incorporate it with the scene immediately following. Scene 1, Act III, of Dryden’s The Spanish Friar is in the street. Lorenzo, in friar’s habit, meeting the real friar, Dominic, bribes him to introduce him into the chamber of Elvira. The scene is merely the easiest way of making the audience understand why the two men enter together very early in the next scene.

Here follow some fifteen speeches in which the arrangements are made. Then:

All the needed exposition given in Scene 1 could, with very little difficulty, be transferred to Scene 2. Were the two men to enter, not to Elvira, but by themselves, they could quickly make their relationship clear. The conduct and speech of Elvira could be made to illustrate what she now states in soliloquy just before the two men enter.

In the original last act10 of Lillo’s George Barnwell, the settings are: “A room in a prison,” “A dungeon.” The whole act could easily have been arranged to take place in some room where prisoners could see friends. Today we should in many cases exchange a number of settings as used in eighteenth century plays for one setting.

Scenes, which in the original story occurred upstairs or downstairs, inside or outside a house, may often be easily interchanged or combined. The Clod, by Lewis Beach, a one-act success of the Washington Square Players, in its first draft showed a setting both upstairs and downstairs. This unsightly arrangement was quickly changed so that all the action took place in a lower room. At one time Bulwer-Lytton thought seriously of changing what is now Scene 1, Act I, of his Richelieu, an interior, to an exterior scene. To Macready he wrote:

Greek plays, because of the fixed backing, provide many illustrations of interior scenes brought outdoors:

When it is not easy to see how a number of settings may be cut down, a dramatist should carefully consider this: May episodes happening to the same person or persons in the same settings, but apparently demanding separate treatment because they occur at widely different times, be brought together? The dramatizer of a novel faces many opportunities for this telescoping of scenes. Any one adapting A Tale of Two Cities, if he uses Jerry Cruncher, will probably combine the two scenes in his home. To bring together incidents happening to the same person or persons at the same place, but at different times, is the easiest method of cutting down possible scenes.

It is, of course, possible to bring together circumstances which happened at different places at different times, but to the same persons. A notable instance is Irving’s compacting of two scenes in Tennyson’s Becket: he places at Montmirail what is essential in both Scene 2, Act II, Montmirail. “The Meeting of the Kings,” and Scene 3, Act III, “Traitor’s Meadow at Freteval.” It is, indeed, often necessary to transfer a group of people from the exact setting in which an occurrence took place to another which makes possible other important action. In Haraucourt’s adaptation of Les Oberlé, a dinner party at the Brausigs’ is transferred to the home of Jean Oberlé, with his father and mother as hosts. This change permits the adapter to follow the dinner party with episodes which must take place in Jean’s home. This group of changes concerns, obviously, bringing to one place events which happened to the same persons at another place, and even at another time.

Sometimes necessary condensation forces a dramatist to bring together at one place what really happened at the same time, but to other people in another place. For instance, the heroine of the play is concealing in the house her Jacobite brother, supposed by the people who have seen him to be the Pretender himself. The Whig soldiery come to search the house. Sitting at the spinet, the girl makes her brother crouch between her and the wall, folding her ample gown around and over him. Then, as the officer and his men minutely search the room, she plays, apparently idly song after song of the day. Just at this time, but at a distance, her lover, a young Whig officer, is eating his heart out with jealousy, because he fears that she is concealing the Pretender through love of him. Why waste time on a separate scene for the lover? Make him the officer in command of the searching troop: then all that is vital in what was his scene can be brought out when what happened to the same people at the same time, but at different places, is made to happen at the same place.

Similarly, what happened to two people in the same place but at different times may sometimes, with ingenuity, be made to happen to one person, and thus time saved.

Finally, what happened to another person at another time, and at another place may at times be arranged so that it will happen to any desired figure. About midway in the novel Les Oberlé, Jean and his uncle Ulrich hear the women at the autumn grape-picking sing the song of Alsace. In the play, in the first scene, Jean sings it as he passes from the railway station to his house.13 Shakespeare, in handling the original sources of Macbeth, also illustrates successful combination around one person of incidents or details historically associated with other persons, times, and even places.

Marlowe, in his Edward II,—a dramatization of a part of Holinshed’s History,—proves that he perfectly understood all these devices for compacting his material.

The essential point in all this compacting is: when cumbered with more scenes than you wish to use, determine first which scenes contain indispensable action, and must be kept as settings; then consider which of the other scenes may by ingenuity be combined with them.

Evidently a dramatist must develop great ingenuity and skill in so re-working scenes originally conceived as occurring in widely separated places and times that they may be acted in a single set. As has been said, the audience of the public theatres in Shakespeare’s day imaginatively shifted the scene at any hint from text, stage properties, or even signs. With the Restoration came elaborate scenery, a gift from earlier performances at the English court and from the continental theatres which the English nobility had attended in their exile. By means of the “drawn scene” dramatists now changed rapidly from place to place. In The Spanish Friar, Scene 1 of Act II is “The Queen’s ante-chamber.” For Scene 2, “The scene draws, and shows the Queen sitting in state; Bertram standing next her; then Teresa, etc.” These drawn scenes held the stage until very recently. Painted on flats which could be pulled off stage from left and right, these scenes could not be “drawn” without hurting theatrical illusion. If moved in any light, all illusion departed; if changed in darkness, but not instantaneously, they interfered with illusion. To overcome these objections there have been many inventions in recent years—Revolving, Wagon, Sinking Stages.16 Undoubtedly, these make changes of scene within the act well-nigh unobjectionable. The difficulty with them is that most are elaborate and expensive, and therefore exist in only a few theatres. It is, consequently, useless to stage a play with them in mind, for on the road it will not find the conditions of production essential to its success. Occasionally, as in On Trial, some simple, easily portable device makes these very quick changes possible even on the road. At present, though invention tries steadily to make change of scene so swift as to be unobjectionable, it is wiser to keep to one setting to an act, unless the play will greatly suffer by so doing, or the change is one which may be made almost instantaneously when the lights are lowered or the curtain dropped.

On the other hand, recently dramatists have rather overdone reducing possible settings to the minimum. While a change of setting within the act always demands justification, forcing a play of three to five acts into one or two settings when, at a trifling additional cost, a pleasing variety to the eye and a change of place helpful to the dramatist might have been provided, is undesirable. Lately there have been signs that our audiences are growing weary of plays of only one set, especially when they suspect the play has been thus arranged by skill, rather than necessity. Certainly, the newer group of dramatists permit themselves changes of scene even within the act. Act II of The Silver Box,17 by Galsworthy, shows as Scene 1, “The Jones’s lodgings, Merthyr Street”; as Scene 2, “The Barthwicks’ dining-room.” In Hindle Wakes,18 by Stanley Houghton, Scene 1, Act I, is the “Kitchen of the Hawthorns’ house”; Scene 2 is the “Breakfast room of the Jeffcotes’ house.” To the preliminary statement of scenes the dramatist appended words which hint the underlying danger in all changes of setting,—disillusioning waits:

All things considered, it is probably best to repeat the statement already made: a change of scene within the act is desirable only when absolutely necessary; a change of scene with each act is desirable, except when truth to life, expense, or undue time required for setting it forbid.

What exactly does this constantly repeated word “Scene” mean? In English theatrical usage today, and increasingly the world over, it signifies: “a change of setting.” All that happens from one change of set to another change makes a scene. French usage, based on the Latin, till very recently always marked off a scene when any person more important than a servant or attendant entered or left the stage. For instance, in Les Petits Oiseaux of Labiche, known in English as A Pair of Spectacles, four consecutive scenes in Act I, which throughout has no change of setting read thus:

A scene of some fourteen brief speeches follows, when:

After a scene of eleven short speeches,

What this French use of the word “scene” leads to, when logically carried out so that even servants entering or leaving the stage create a scene, the following from Act IV of George Barnwell, will show:

This French division of scenes is, of course, made for the convenience of the dramatist as he composes and for the reader, not for the actor or the audience. Though somewhat copied in the past by English authors, it is now rejected by most stages. Even French dramatists are breaking away from it. Memory of this French usage, however, still affects popular speech: when we speak of any part of an act in which two or more people are on stage, we are very likely to call it their “scene” no matter whether they have come on in a changed setting or not. Obviously if scene is to correspond with setting, we need another word for what in our practice is the same as the older French scene.

Not only do necessary changes in setting make proportioning material into acts and within acts difficult, but the time question also raises many problems. It may be troublesome within the act, between the acts, and at the opening of the play. In the final soliloquy of Faustus (p. 35), an hour is supposed to elapse in some thirty lines. Though the Elizabethan, in a case like this, was ready to assist the dramatist, today we are so conscious of time spaces that practically all stage clocks are temporarily out of order, lest they mark too distinctly the discrepancy between pretended and real time.21 The novelist, in a few lines, tells us of many happenings in a considerable space of time, or writes: “Thus, in idle talk, a full hour passed,” and we do not query the supposed passage of time. On the stage, however, when one gossip says to another: “I must be off. I meant to stop a minute, and I have gossiped an hour,” auditors who recognize perfectly that the two people have not talked ten minutes are likely to laugh derisively. As has been pointed out,22 this time difficulty has made it practically impossible to dramatize satisfactorily Stevenson’s The Sire de Maletroit’s Door. The swiftly-moving simple story demands the one-act form, but certain marked changes in feeling, convincing enough when they are said to come after ten or twelve hours of strong emotion, become, when they are seen to occur after twenty minutes to an hour, unconvincing. The central situation may be used, but for success on the stage the story must be so re-told that the marked changes in feeling are convincing even when seen. A dilemma results: lapses of time are handled more easily in three or four acts than in one act; the moment The Sire de Maletroit’s Door is re-cast into three or four acts, it needs so much padding as to lose nearly all its original values.

When a dramatist faces the need to represent on stage, a passage of time which could not in real life be coincident with the action of the scene, he must (a) hypnotize an audience by a long scene of complicated and absorbing emotion into thinking that the required time has passed; or (b) must discover some motive sufficiently strong to account for a swift change in feeling; (c) or must get his person or persons off stage and write what is known as a “Cover Scene.”

An audience led through an intense emotional experience does not mark accurately the passage of time. Make the emotional experience protracted, as well as absorbing, and you may imply or even state that any reasonable length of time has passed. The fearful agony of Faustus so grips an audience that it loses track of the time necessary for the speech, or would, were it not for the unfortunate emphasis on the actual time: “Ah, half the hour is passed; ’twill all be passed anon”; “The clock strikes twelve.” In Hamlet, the fourth act takes place during the absence of Hamlet in England. By its many intensely moving happenings, it makes an auditor willing to believe that Hamlet has been absent for a long time, when in reality he has been on the stage within a half hour. Such time fillings may, of course, be a portion of a scene, a whole scene, or even a whole act. In most cases, it is quite impossible that the time really requisite and the time of action should coincide. The business of the dramatist is to make the audience feel as if the time had passed—to create an illusion of time.

The second method of meeting the time difficulty, finding motivation of some marked change in character or circumstances which permits it to be as swift as it is on the stage, is best treated in the next chapter.

In The Russian Honeymoon,23 a play once very popular with amateurs, there is bad handling of a time difficulty. The hero, going out in his peasant costume, must return after a few speeches, in full regimentals. A lightning change of costume is, therefore, necessary. More than once this lack of a proper Cover Scene has caused an awkward wait at this point in the play. Mark the absurdly short time Steele, in his Conscious Lovers allows Isabella for bringing Bevil Junior on stage. Apparently, the latter and all his group must have been waiting at the end of the corridor.