Hi Mark, there is so much I agree with here such as your opening observation “To understand playscripts, we have to wrestle with them – where they come from, who wrote them and why, who edited and formatted them, when in the process of play-making they were put down in print.”
Then you follow with how, as a reader, you wrestle with what is not there or was edited out etc. How can you know what was edited out? As a playwright I would suggest all you can know is what is not there. You cannot know what is deliberately not there and what is unknowingly overlooked. All you can do as reader and/or producer is to assume if something is not there it is for a reason because any other position runs the risks of changing the intention of the story.
Do not get me wrong. This position does not deny the magic of finding nuance through direction, design, and performance but to add or remove anything of significance without – as you say – understanding the writer and the writing is to potentially draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa. A play is delicate and anything you do at the secondary or tertiary level has to be with regard to the writer and context unless you have been given permission (implied or explicit depending on the history of the play and the playwright).
I know it is an unpopular perspective, but I also agree with Michael Gow in saying that a play is not incomplete until it is produced. Firstly, the concept of a ‘written’ play can actually be dated back to the development of the oral story telling tradition which used repetition for learning and remembering (think Beowulf for example).
Moving on from that idea though, if I accept your premise that the development of print is the development of this art form then you must then accept that a written play is literature as well as performance. As a piece of literature it is complete. It is as performance it is (perhaps) incomplete. It is not true to say all plays are written to be performed and to that point I speak to the unperformable plays of Wyndham Lewis as exemplars. Of course, I would suggest most playwrights do want their plays performed as there is an assumption that we write with a thought that the true glory of the work will be realised in performance and even with my meagre contributions to the world I see that every time I work with actors to bring my scripts to some form of life. In fact, I make that happen any way I can because I believe in this concept so strongly, which is why most of them end up adapted into an audio drama format because that is all I can achieve right now.
I do love how you contextualise the works of Shakespeare as we know them and as much as this history supports your premise I think it also supports mine which means we are not that far apart. I also think, for the most part, you are saying that the writer’s intentions are a part of this process.
Given the conversations I have been involved in, subjected to, and overheard though, I think it is easy to read your essay and brush over this point, focussing on the more popular approach favoured by our elite training institutions which tends to diminish that aspect in favour of whatever the secondary and tertiary layer of artists wish to do, prioritising this over the intentions of the primary source artist (s).
Again I reiterate part of that consideration can include writers who choose to embrace this giving over so wholly and completely. I admit I am a feminist and I would be outraged to ever have any of my writing interpreted outside of that paradigm under any circumstances… 🙂
I found myself vacillating between loving what you have written and becoming very defensive but I have to assume that is because I am so strongly connected to what I write, and why and how I write it. I don’t think I was so staunch about how important intention and context was until I started writing myself and I came to understand how much work is put into creating an organism (because rather than a blueprint I think a play is a living organism, a zeitgeist looking for symbiosis…) and choosing shape and form to tell a specific story in space and time – hopefully one which can reach across space and time too – and creating something which will not stretch, pull, pill, unstitch, rip, or tear in the hands of strangers.
Thanks for making me consider my practice and that of those around me 🙂 I look forward to reading more of your essays!

Once again I find myself in agreement with you Mark. The one thing I want to leave a piece of theatre doing, and what I want my audiences to do, is to engage in robust discussion about ideas and concepts. With a production background of course I care about staging and presentation and interpretation. In the end though, what inspires me or devastates me about a piece of live theatre is the underlying ideas and then I long to talk about that with the world around me to see where I sit in the spectrum of ideas and beliefs and if this makes me comfortable or uneasy. This then tells me about the work I need to do on myself or the world I live in. It is the liveness of theatre which gives me the energy to catalyse these ideas and conversation into action in a way no pre-recorded medium can or does. It says these ideas are alive right now and I must respond to them right now. This is what I am searching for in Zoomland and what I am trying to recreate in these virtual limbic times 🙂 Oh, by the way, I have been loving the monologues!