James Martin Charlton

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Description and Evaluation of subject-specific curriculum innovation project, to be submitted in

the form of a journal article for an appropriate pedagogical publication.

Article: Teaching Drama Writing

Proposed Journal: Writing in Education (published by National Association of
Writers in Education, NAWE).

Introduction

When I first began my contract as lecturer on the Creative Writing programme at Middlesex
University, specialising in scriptwriting, I inherited an undergraduate creative writing module with
the deceptively simple-sounding title Drama Writing. But the simplicity of the title hides a particular
series of issues concerning the contents of the curriculum, what exactly should a student be learning
to do when they learn to write drama. The module might have been called Scriptwriting or
Playwriting or Theatre Writing but Drama Writing. What exactly is drama?

When began teaching the module, and before I was au fait with some of the particular issues
involved in the delivery and assessment of creative writing modules, I didn't realise that the basic
question of "what is drama?" would be a question. But it became clear that students arrived at the
beginning of the module without a clear idea of what drama actually is. Their ideas about drama had
been infected - that doesn't seem too strong a word - by TV soap operas and multiplex cinema. Now,
these things might or might not be good in themselves. But whether Hollyoaks or the Lord of the
Rings films essentially or mainly involve drama is debatable. For a start, although cinema and
television can be Dramatic mediums, there is an element of narrative visual storytelling involved in
writing for the screen (big or small) which is something supplementary to the Dramatic content. The
basic and bald name of the module calls for skills in Drama Writing as the learning outcome of the
module. And as ever with any formal educational enterprise, clear and distinct criteria as to what the
student is supposed to be learning, and what the students work will be assessed on, is of vital
importance - "Well designed assessment sets clear expectations."1 Add to this large cohorts of
students on the module - around 50 per year - and it becomes vital that they are all delivering work
which can be judged against a common objective goal.

1
Core Principles of Effective Assessment, Centre for the Study of Higher Education [Online] at
http://www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/assessinglearning/05/ Accessed 20.10.2007

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Journal Article - Teaching Drama Writing

Students study more effectively when they know what they are working towards. Students value, and
expect, transparency in the way their knowledge will be assessed: they wish to see a clear relationship
between lectures, tutorials, practical classes and subject resources, and what they are expected to
demonstrate they know and can do. They are also wish to understand how grades are determined and they
expect timely feedback that 1) explains the grade they have received, 2) rewards their achievement, as
appropriate, and 3) offers suggestions for how they can improve.2

And the goal of this module is, as it says on the tin, Drama Writing.

Two Possible Approaches.

When I first inherited the module it was unclear as to which medium the students should be
producing their dramatic writing for. Some attempt was made by both earlier tutors and myself when
I began to cover writing for the stage, the screen and even radio. It soon became apparent that this
was too much to cover in a single, semester-long module. I decided to concentrate the module on
stage writing, sensible as writers for the stage are most likely to be described as dramatists - when
was the last time you heard a screenwriter described as such? Most films are dramatic but also
involve forms of narrative visual (and sometimes verbal) storytelling and movement-image symbols
which are additional to, supplementary to, interactive with the dramatic element but not pure drama
in essence. Manfred Pfister in his Theory and Analysis of Drama writes "there are a number of
features specific to film texts that are reminiscent of narrative texts in certain areas and clearly
distinguish them from dramatic texts."3

So what is the essence of drama? It appeared to me that my job in a Drama Writing module is to help
students develop the tools a dramatist needs. Creative Writing at Middlesex being about practise-
based learning - "Creative Writing provides an engagement with different kinds of writing, from a
mainly contemporary perspective and (…) develops your skills and talents through creative work."4
and so my job is to draw students' attention to these tools and get then get the students to practise
using them. What are the tools? It's should be simple to the primary ones - creating characters,
showing them in conflict, showing that conflict through dramatic action and dramatic dialogue.
Again, we encounter the world dramatic and it is no good using it before knowing what it means. We

2
Ibid.
3
Pfister, Manfred The Theory and Analysis of Drama (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.24.
4
Course description, BA Honours Film with Creative Writing [Online] at http://www.mdx.ac.uk/PIPupload/UG/UG-
Media,%20Culture%20and%20Communication/BA%20Film%20with%20Creative%20Writing/135P3WV.asp Accessed
22.11.2007

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are an academic course, so the students needs to be able to cogently comprehend and argue with
academic rigour what drama is, and why the work they submit is drama and not something else. I
have no problem with them writing something else somewhere else, but if this is a Drama Writing
module and they are being assessed on their dramatic writing, this is what they need to submit and
this what they will be assessed on. So how do I help them formulate a view of what drama is?

There are two approaches to this, both of which I have tried. One of them is successful, the other less
so (although not without its rewards). Both of them involve using plays by dramatists as teaching
tools. One of the ways, the less successful, involves a historical overview of the development of
drama. The other involved plunging students into the maelstrom of what currently or recently
practising dramatists are writing, which has had much more successful results. In both cases, all class
discussion and writing exercises spring in some way from our study of the published and performed
results of a dramatist practising his or her craft.

At first, I tried a "history of drama" approach. My (ambitious!) objective was to teach the students a
basic "narrative of drama in the West" from the Greek, Roman and Medieval theatre through the
Elizabethans to the realist dramas of the late-19th and early 20th century then on to Brecht, post-war
trends and the contemporary scene. I suspect that some readers of this paper might convulse with
frustration over what is left out of such a short précis, and this is the main drawback in trying to cram
three millennia of dramatic history into one semester's learning. Allardyce Nicoll's mighty tome
World Drama5, first published in 1949, takes a thousand-pages plus to tell the story, and then each of
the episodes, eras and important players are scarcely deals with in any more depth. What can a
creative writing lecturer do in ten two hour seminars?

But despite this significant drawback, the "historical narrative" approach did possess a number of
highly successful aspects, as well as one significant flaw. I will deal now with a number of the
winning features, the core principles of which would be retained in teaching even when the
Historical Narrative Approach was abandoned.

5
Nicoll, Allardyce World Drama (London: George Harrop and Co. Ltd., 1949).

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Historical Narrative Approach

Most narratives of the history of drama begin with the Greeks, and touching on the roots of drama in
Greek theatre in a module of this kind allows students to look at these roots for some elucidation of
the meaning of drama. According to the German scholar Walter Burkert, drama originated in the
tragoidia or goat songs – "tragoidia or tragedy was explained as a song for the prize of a goat or
song at the sacrifice of a goat."6 Dancing is a symbol of concord and union7 - and where there is
concord there is no drama. When discussing with the students, it is always worth asking them why
concord isn't drama, as they usually already know the answer and them articulating it is the
beginning of a real consciousness as to what drama is. Articulation ""enhances retention, it
illuminates the coherence of current understanding, it sensitizes knowledge points for impact by
subsequent feedback, and it forces the learner to take a stand on his or her knowledge in the presence
of peers, making a commitment that calls for assessing and evaluating that knowledge and setting the
stage for future learning."8 The students learn that the first drama came about when one of the
members of the chorus came out of the group, became individualised – "Arion caused one of the
chorus to mount upon the sacrificial table or the step of the altar and deliver a narrative"9 - and so
gain an insight not merely into the fact that drama at its root must involve divergence and moreover
that the primal divergence, or better still call it conflict, happens between the individual and the
group, the private person and society. More actors were then added and so the conflicts became
between individuals as well as between society (and a conflict between individuals might cause a
wider conflict with and within society), until in later phases the chorus drops away and we have a
number of actors all in various degrees of conflict with each other. It's worth asking whether, if the
chorus drops away society also drops away? There isn't an answer to this, but it's a question which
must perforce bother dramatist, one of their main concerns being to show man in society. This kind
of in-class discussion can lead on to very basic exercises in which students identify conflict
situations within their present society, and within their own lives and the lives of people they know.

6
Dunkle, Roger Introduction to Greek Tragedy [Online] at
http://depthome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/classics/dunkle/tragedy/intr2.htm Accessed 21.10.07
7
"Dances performed by people with linked arms symbolize cosmic matrimony, or the union of heaven and earth - the
chain symbol - and in this way they facilitate the union of man and woman." in Cirlot, J E A Dictionary of Symbols (2nd
Edition, London: Routledge, 1971), p. 76.
8
Koschmann, T. CSCL: Theory and Practice of an Emerging Paradigm (Computers,
Cognition, and Work (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlabaum. 1995, p. 93), quoted in Goodman , Bradley; Soller, Amy;
Linton, Frank; Gaimari, Robert Encouraging Student Reflection and Articulation using a
Learning Companion [Online] at http://aied.inf.ed.ac.uk/members98/archive/vol_9/goodman/paper.pdf Accessed
21.10.07

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The Greeks are also a useful teaching tool with their division of plays into two distinct genres,
tragedy and comedy. The students can look at examples of these genres - I used Oedipus Rex10 and
The Bacchae11 for tragedy, with Aristotle's Poetics as a theoretical backbone; Lysistrata12 and The
Pot of Gold13 for comedy (with a clarification of the differences between Greek Old and New
Comedy), and again utilized exercises springing from this exploration involving students identifying
examples of hubris and downfall and also subjects worthy of satire in our own society and their own
lives. Thinking of subjects for satire is a chance for students to really enjoy themselves, and it is at
early moments like this that a tutor can identify any student with particular comic imaginative gifts,
and encourage the pursuit of these within that student's dramatic writing. The most important thing
here is to encourage deep learning, so that students know the definitions of tragedy and comedy from
the inside, pertaining to stories that are relevant and present for them. The down side is that the
paradigm, tragedy and comedy, might be a dated or outmoded one, as Harold Pinter suggested all the
way back in 1961 - "the old categories of comedy and tragedy and farce are irrelevant"14. But
perhaps it is worth knowing what "outdated" categories we, as modern writers, are rejecting before
we can reject them.

The importance of the medieval play The Summoning of Everyman15 in the development of Western
drama cannot be underestimated: with the root here of both the idea that a character undergoes a
journey from one state of consciousness or mind to another in the course of the drama and the idea
that drama can have a propagandistic or moral agenda at its centre. It is useful for students to see in
Everyman characters stripped of their social and historical aspects and seen as purely abstract or
emblematic figures in a drama. Whether this leads to a rich and/or modern dramaturgy is a matter for
classroom debate - but it is important for students to dissect drama by means of looking at in the way
Everyman and the medieval Morality plays show us characters whose only existence is as a role in a
drama - as Pfister writes "the connotation of the world 'figure' (…) hints at something deliberately
artificial, produced or constructed for a particular purpose"16. Everyman's friend Fellowship only
exists as a friend to the protagonist, and his interaction with the protagonist shows us his true
character, as a fair-weather friend. The scene between them17 is a perfect example of drama at its

9
Norwood, Gilbert Greek Tragedy (4th Edition, London: Methuen & Co., 1948), p. 4.
10
First performed circa. 429BC.
11
First performed 405BC
12
First performed 411BC.
13
First performed circa. 317-07BC.
14
Pinter, Harold "Writing for Myself" in Plays: Two (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 12.
15
First performed circa. 1485.
16
Pfister, p.161.
17
Cawley, A. C (Ed.) Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays (London: Everyman's Library, 1977))p.213-215.

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most primitive and least sophisticated: their encounter both radically changes the nature of their
friendship (which has hitherto been based on an illusion) in a way which is irrevocable, changing the
attitude of the lead character significantly and moving the action along in the process. This is the
essence of the dramatic scene as it is commonly understood in English speaking countries . As a
corollary to this, it is worth mentioning that a comprehension of the idea of the French Scene - "a
convention where you divide the story into sections based on when a character enters or leaves a
scene"18 - is useful to develop a understanding of the changes in energy and status effected when
characters come on and off stage. Kathleen Jones advises those running playwriting workshops that
"most playwrights find themselves structuring things by French Scene. (…) Exits and entrances key
the changes. (…) Within the French Scenes, something must happen."19

Getting the students to work with Morality figures of their own devising and writing French Scenes
in which those figures encounter and act upon each other, test each other, gives them students an
opportunity to develop a basic skill. This positive must be counterweighted with the fact that their
writing might fail to develop if students remain at a primitive stage, without that is good aesthetic
reasons for doing so. If students don't add the psychological depth, historicity and social placing that
contemporary audiences expect from their drama, their work risks being judged by contemporary
audiences or critics as anaemic or schematic. A writing exercise is just that - an exercise - and the
final assessment is looking for more developed pieces of work. The students need to be made
consciously aware of this difference between the classroom exercises and weekly assignments they
write during the course and the more advanced final product. These two aspects of a module
curriculum are its formative and summative assessment methods - tutor observation and feedback on
exercises and assignments fit the pattern of formative assessment, which is "not graded…[and]
…used as an ongoing diagnostic tool; hence, the instructor employs the results of formative
assessment solely to modify and adjust his or her teaching practices to reflect the needs and progress
of his or her students."20 Exercises and assignments show the tutor whether or not a student is
grasping key concepts; but (to avoid the pitfall of final students product being thin as mentioned
above, the tutor must ensure that the students are aware that the formative compositions are working

18
Bardwell, Kit Backyard Drama [Online] at http://accessiblearts.org/Tips-Tops.html Accessed 28.10.07
19
Jones, Kathleen Playwriting: The First Workshop (Focal Press, 1994), p.154.
20
Richard Swearingen A Primer: Diagnostic, Formative, & Summative Assessment [Online] at
http://www.mmrwsjr.com/assessment.htm Accessed 28.10.07

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towards the goal of that work which will be graded in summative assessment, as "assessment in the
classroom involves both student and teacher awareness of a goal".21

Given the limited time that a semester or term length module gives students and tutor to cover a
lengthy historical narrative, great leaps and bounds are forced upon the learning curve and major
omissions may occur. Shakespeare and his contemporaries remain theatrically effective writers but
strangely, in terms of teaching dramatic technique, I found not find them particularly useful. There
may be ways of working with Shakespeare's stories and dramatic situations and getting the students
to update them, find contemporary analogies. But often when this is done in contemporary writing,
as with the recent BBC series ShakespeaRe-Told - "which included an idiotically reworked Much
Ado About Nothing set in a Bournemouth television newsroom"22 - the results are slightly
embarrassing and suffer hugely in comparison with the originals. Many of Shakespeare's plays
revolve around plot points (supernatural appearances, bed tricks, mistaken identities, cross-dressing
disguise) which worked in the theatrical and cultural circumstances of the Elizabethan stage but
which seem forced and awkward when shoe-horned into current circumstances. What is more, the
real genius of Shakespeare lies in his language, an understanding of which is a fine thing to have but
almost completely without practical application in terms of contemporary dramatic writing, with its
insistence on a low-mimetic realism in dialogue.

Ibsen is a safer bet, as although the structure of the well-made play he was working with is not
contemporary, his approach to confronting issues and opening up taboo subject matter might help
takes us to an important purpose of drama as well as demonstrating how drama can have a very
definite effect on the world. I worked with students on A Doll's House23, and there was always a
wonderful moment when I suggested that the very fact that the class was made up of men and
women was partially as a result of the effect A Doll's House had on the history of the emancipation
of women. A Doll's House and the aftershocks it caused is the perfect refutation to anyone who
claims that drama cannot change the world.

Ibsen's characterisation of Nora and Torvald in A Doll's House is worth exploring with students.
They are characters with a very specific social and historical place, and they have individuated

21
Starkman, Neal "Formative Assessment: Building a Better Student" in The Journal (THE Institute, September 2006)
[Online] at http://thejournal.com/articles/19174 Accessed 28.10.07
22
Rosenthal, Daniel "The Bard on Screen" in The Guardian (Saturday April 7, 2007) [Online] at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2051683,00.html Accessed 28.10.07
23
First performed Norway, 1879.

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psychologies. Yet there is also something typical about them - they are a typical bourgeois couple of
their time, or rather Ibsen means them to represent such. If Ibsen had worked in advertising and
wanted to make an commercial for a quality product, Nora and Torvald could well have been the
protagonists of the ad. Such analogies help students to comprehend the process of creating typical
characters which is a major strategy of realism. For the Hungarian critic of Realism, George Lukács,
The central category and criterion of realist literature is the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically
binds together the general and the particular both in characters and situations.24

The use of types is important not just in realism but in of other forms of dramatic and for that matter
non-dramatic writing. As in all Drama Writing sessions, I wish the students to know the technique, in
this case creating "typical" characters, from the inside. I get them to practise it by setting an exercise
in which they invent a "typical" couple in our society, characterise them as fully as possible and then
put them into a dramatic situation of their own devising. This latter part of the exercise - putting their
types in a dramatic situation - reiterates the major learning goal of the module, to write drama from
an understanding of what drama is, so helping with formative assessment that the learning goal is
being worked towards and comprehended.

A similar use can be made of Chekhov, with students taking a close look at the emotional plotting in
a play like Three Sisters25 and then applying this learning to their own work - sometimes even using
spider maps to depict the tangle of interrelationships they are working with. Getting students to plot
and plan both the inner and outer events in their characters lives is an important part of any drama
writing course, even though it can be controversial. Some professional dramatists plot out their plays
minutely in advance - Edward Bond "plans, patterns and structures his plays with extreme care"26 -
whilst others plunge blindly into writing then rewrite, render and winnow - American playwright
Mia McCullough "prefers not to plan everything out before she begins writing because she believes
such rigid organization prevents her from discovering the circumstances that can take her characters
in intriguing new directions or fresh insights they might convey in their dialogue."27 That students
become conscious of their process in writing their scripts is of prime importance in terms of our
graded summative assessment on Middlesex University's Creative Writing programme, which is split
fairly evenly 50-50 between creative and critical work. Even if they don't continue to be writers who

24
Lukács, Georg Studies in European Realism (New York: Hillman, 1950) p.5.
25
First performed Moscow, 1901.
26
Winkler, Elizabeth Hale The Function of Song in Contemporary British Drama (Delaware: University of Delaware
Press, 1990), p.131.
27
Mauro, Lucia "Mia McCullough is not Chagrined" Performink Online (10 December 2001) [Online] at
http://www.performink.com/Archives/stagepersonae/2001/McCulloughMia.html Accessed 28.10.07

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plan, and I make no stipulation that they should, agreeing with David Rain that the "question of
whether to plan or not is an individual matter"28, the encouragement to plot and plan in module
exercises, assignments and for the final graded creative product will help students through the critical
part of the assessment, as a means of developing critical thinking about their process, as "to do well
in your studies you need to think 'critically' about the things that you have read, seen or heard"29 and,
we need to add in a creative writing context, written.

Above I have given a summary of the possibilities raised by the historical narrative approach to
building a Drama Writing curriculum. However, there are real and present problems with spending
so much time in the module studying classical drama, and that is that it leaves very little time for
contemporary writing, as well as potentially alienating students. It is an uphill battle getting the
majority of students to read or watch anything which isn't bang up to date and getting them to use
their imaginations to connect with the essence of what the dramatists of the past were doing, as
Edward Bond might say getting them to see the shore - "The past is the shore - and for dramatists
that is Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht. A modern writer needs those writers and many more."30
Seeing that shore can be time consuming and exhausting for both tutor and students, although given
more time it would be worth it. We always work within the limitations of our institutions and their
learning frameworks. The historical narrative approach left me only a two or three weeks to cover
contemporary drama, and it was clear after one year of attempting this that it was wise to take a
populist scriptwriting tip as my cue and cut to the chase. I decided to try plunging the students
straight into the maelstrom of contemporary dramatic theatre writing. Bond again:
"The writer must create the observed. The writer arrives at this by comparing what has been
written and recorded of the past with the maelstrom of the present. (…)But they are not in the
maelstrom with you."[Bond's italics] 31

Contemporary "Maelstrom" Approach

My teaching strategy using contemporary texts is essentially the same as when using older plays -
closely read sections of the play being studied, look at its dramatic strategies, abstract some wider
implication for drama from those strategies, discuss this with the class and then set classroom

28
Rain, David "Believing Stories" in Butt, Maggie (Ed.) Story: The Heart of the Matter (London: Greenwich Exchange,
2007), p.5.
29
"Critical Thinking" Skills for OU Study [Online] at http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/critical-thinking.php
Accessed 28.10.07
30
Bond, Edward The Hidden Plot: Notes on the Theatre and the State (London: Methuen, 1999), p.172.

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exercises and homework assignments which spring from the play studied and, more importantly, its
implications. This teaching strategy bears some comparison to the SOLO taxonomy theory of
learning developed by Biggs and Collis32, wherein the students develops through Pre-structural,
Unistructural, Multistructural, Relational and finally Extended Abstract levels of knowledge in order
to "transfer the principles and ideas underlying the specific instance."33

As an example of the application of "Extended Abstract" knowledge in the case of teaching drama
through use of contemporary texts, I have used two plays - Saved by Edward Bond34 and Blasted by
Sarah Kane35, to open the students up to the idea that drama takes its characters to the extremes of
human existence, which Bond believes is one of the salient features of dramatic writing, from the
time of the Greeks: "You have to go to the ultimate situation in drama. The Greeks said very, very
extreme things in their tragedies. They were told the best thing was not to have been born, but, if that
misfortune struck them, the next best thing was to die young. And they all said, 'Hurrah,' and went
down to their city rejoicing. Why? Because they'd faced the extreme situation, not at Auschwitz but
at the Theatre Royal."36 Both Saved and Blasted are extreme. In Saved, a baby is stoned to death in a
public park by a gang of young men, whilst Blasted features male rape, an eyeball sucked out and
eaten and the corpse of a baby cannibalised. The texts themselves beg many questions which the
students are often keen to ask - why is the writer showing us these horrible things? is the world really
this bad? what has this to do with entertainment? In using the two texts together with the Bond quote
above, the students can reach an understanding of what two of the most important post-war British
dramatists thought drama to be, see the links between these two plays and the dramatic strategies
within them and wrestle with these ideas in their own dramatic work. That is not to say that all the
students will suddenly write scenes of extreme horror and violence - simply copy Bond or Kane - but
will apply the idea of testing characters in highly testing situations as an essential aspect of drama to
their own work. "If their plays do not do this, then are they drama?" is a question the students do well
to ask themselves, and which helps clarify the criteria in which their creative work for a module
called Drama Writing is assessed on. It also helps that there is, despite a thirty plus year gap between
the composition of two plays, a clear line of influence and inspiration which can be drawn from

31
Ibid.
32
See Biggs, J and Collis, K Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO taxonomy (New York: Academic Press,
1982) and Biggs, J Teaching for Quality Learning at University (Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press 1999)
33
Atherton, J S Learning and Teaching: SOLO taxonomy (2005) [Online] at
http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/solo.htm Accessed: 31.10. 2007
34
First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1965.
35
First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1995.
36
Bond, Edward The New York Times (February 18, 2001) quoted at Bond on Bond [Online] at
http://www.amrep.org/articles/3_3a/bond.html Accessed 31.10.07

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Bond to Kane. Mark Ravenhill writes that the "late Sarah Kane was influenced by his work. 'You can
learn everything you need to know about playwriting,' she once told me, maybe with a hint of
provocative overstatement, 'by studying Saved.'"37 In learning that Ravenhill has quoted Kane in this
way, the students also glean another valuable lesson in Drama Writing: that playwrights do not write
in glorious solitude but as part of a wider body of Dramatic Writing, navigating through the
maelstrom of the now by using the shore of the past as a guide.

Other contemporary plays that I have used in my teaching on the Drama Writing module have plays
by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Harold Pinter, Joe Orton and Caryl Churchill. Stallerhof by Kroetz38 for its
insight into what Pfister calls "the principle of succession" wherein "two successive scenes present
two successive stages of the story and overlaps do not even occur when these two phases involve
different sets of figures."39 In the first act of Stallerhof, each short scene in succession gives the
audience an increased awareness of the dramatic situation and progresses that situation once the
dramatic situation has been exposed; Pinter's The Homecoming40 shows clearly how subtext can
inform dramatic dialogue and action, with the first scene between Lenny and Ruth in Act One being
somewhat perplexing on the surface but clear when seen as an expression of an immediate but
unspoken sexual desire between the two characters; Orton's What the Butler Saw41 is an excellent
illustration of the need to plot certain forms of dramatic material, of the use of exits and entrances,
furniture and props within a three-dimensional space, and of the idea that the subject matter of
dramatic comedy is little different from that of tragedy (Orton's character Geraldine Barclay is
stripped of her social identity as completely as any character in a play by Sarah Kane) although the
tone and pace of the writing is different; Churchill's Top Girls42 shows how a dramatist can
schematically structure her material in order to explore an important contemporary issue, in this case
the role(s) of feminism in advanced Capitalist democracies. The important thing is that in each of
these cases, reading and discussion of the play combined with exercises and assignments springing
from this leads to the students crossing a particular threshold concept, involving the two key
characteristics of a threshold concept - that "it is transformative, leading to a significant shift in

37
Ravenhill, Mark 'Acid Tongue' in The Guardian (9 September 2006) [Online] at
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1867684,00.html Accessed 31.10.07
38
First performed 1972.
39
Pfister, p.201.
40
First performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre in 1965.
41
First performed at the Queen's Theatre, London in 1969.
42
First performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London in 1982.

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perception or a new world view; and it is irreversible, unlikely to be forgotten and more or less
impossible to unlearn."43

I like to keep the list of plays I use as teaching tools flexible, and will change things according to
student response and queries. Recently a student asked why all of the plays on the list were written
by white dramatists, as the class is multi-ethnic and moreover some of the non-white students were
troubled by some of the racial language uttered by characters in the plays. This has encouraged me to
exchange Serving it Up by David Eldridge44 - which I was using as a first introduction to
contemporary dramatic writing as it shows a young writer composing a play about current issues in a
definite historical and social milieu not far removed from the students' own (written when the writer
was a second year undergraduate) - for Fallout by Roy Williams45, which can easily fulfil the same
purpose but shows that the module takes into account the work of a practising black dramatist who is
responding to the same dramatic issues and indeed the whole business of writing drama in the
mainstream of the contemporary dramatic stage. Grappling with that awareness that Williams' white
characters are just as likely to use abusive racial epithets as characters by Bond or Eldridge might be
seen as a kind of troublesome knowledge to the students, by which they are crossing learning
thresholds which are "characterised by the "troublesome" nature of the knowledge they contain."46
That so many dramatists insist on showing the racial divisions in Western society in visceral and
provocative ways makes the exploration of some of these texts and their ideas, for both white and
non-white students, a form of "traumatic learning (…) where the learning experience causes the
individual to re-evaluate other aspects of her or his life."47

Conclusion

I have found that the "plunge into the maelstrom" approach to teaching Drama Writing - reading and
discussing contemporary plays alongside exercises and assignments arising from those readings and
discussions - has been a notably more successful method of teaching the subject than the Historical
Narrative approach. Students have been more engaged and, importantly, a higher standard of work
has been produced for the summative assessment. A greater percentage of students have delivered

43
Bradbeer, John 'Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge in the GEES disciplines' in Planet No. 15 (December
2005).
44
First performed at The Bush Theatre, London in 1996.
45
First performed at The Royal Court Theatre in 2003.
46
Atherton, J S Learning as Loss (Notes) (2005) [On-line] at http://www.doceo.co.uk/original/learnloss_notes.htm
Accessed: 31.10.2007
47
Ibid.

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 James Martin Charlton
EDX4523
Journal Article - Teaching Drama Writing

worth worthy of a 2:1 or higher grade. A greater number of students have pursued an interest in
writing for the theatre into their third and final year at undergraduate level. If time were not such a
limiting factor, if I was teaching Drama Writing for the stage over the course of a year rather than a
semester or term, I would combine the two approached, as I believe that it is important to know both
the historical and the contemporary stage in order to be a fully rounded practitioner of Dramatic
Writing. But given the limitations which the University learning framework places on me as a
lecturer within a wider creative writing programme - wherein students are given primers not just in
Dramatic Writing but also in prose fiction and non-fiction and poetry - the contemporary maelstrom
approach is the best alternative I have found.

The curriculum I have developed is, to sum up, geared towards the comprehension of a major
Threshold Concept, which will feed into later Drama Writing modules which deal with
screenwriting. The key thing is that the threshold the students have crossed will allow the students to
clearly see which aspects of their writing are dramatic and which are not. Many forms of
scriptwriting (as well as prose and poetry) call for supplementary aspects to be called into play -
narrative storytelling, visual imagery, interior monologue - and the students, with a clear
understanding gained in what is now a first year module in Drama Writing will be able to integrate
dramatic aspects with these others in whatever ways they consciously choose as writers.

James Martin Charlton,

December 2007,
(5218 words).

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