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On Writing for the Theatre...by
Natalia Ginzburg
I wrote The Advertisement in November 1965. It is my second play. The
first, Ti Ho Sposato per Allegria,
was written in July of the same year.
Ti
Ho Sposato per Allegria is a comedy even if, basically, it has sad
and bitter elements. The Advertisement is essentially tragic, although it has comic
features. Both plays,
however, are similar in structure.
Both have a long first act in which the protagonists pour out
their hearts to the first person who comes their way.
In Ti Ho Sposato per
Allegria the recipient is a woman cleaner; in The
Advertisement it is an unknown girl who rings the bell of the house
where the hysterical Teresa lives with her ghosts.
Before
writing these two plays I had never done anything for the theatre.
I had written novels and short stories.
I had started a number of plays but always stopped after the
second line. Usually I
found that the characters on whom I had based my plays just wanted to
stop talking after a couple of speeches.
And you can’t make plays out of silences.
By contrast, when I wrote Ti
Ho Sposato per Allegria I found that my characters were quite
miraculously talking. But I
realized they were talking far too much. I was in danger of allowing myself to be drawn in a flood of
words. The ease, the speed
with which they spoke and I wrote made me suspicious. This
facility might be the result of blissful ignorance and lack of
experience rather than the delight of creation.
Besides
which, every time I had tried to write a play I had felt myself
stiffening up, paralyzed by a kind of shyness, a feeling of shame and
repugnance. This time as
well after a couple of speeches I felt the same.
But I decided to take no notice and push on.
And suddenly I realized the origin of these feelings.
They arose from the fact that I was writing for a theatre
audience: I was thinking all the time about the audience.
When
I wrote a novel or a story I never thought about my public; or if I did,
the one I imagined, the one I intended my work for, was a vague, shadowy
group without real form, a nebulous mixture of friends, loved ones and
strangers all linked to me by secret ties:
my relationship to them was intimate, deep and strictly private.
But in writing a play rather than a novel I was no longer
confronted by something nebulous but something real, something of flesh
and blood, external to me and, to a certain extent, hostile; and my
relationship to this group of real people was neither deep nor secret,
but superficial and public. This
kind of relationship made me feel uneasy, made me shy, it put me off.
And so it was that I came to understand why I had not written any
plays before.
This
feeling of malaise was absurd and I knew it.
In fact the people I intended my novels for were the same people
who would see my play. But
still I had this feeling and there it was; it was nobody’s fault, not
mine, not theirs. I tried
to rid myself of it and slowly as I wrote I forgot that I was writing a
play instead of a novel. None
the less I think that certain faults in my plays spring from this
initial feeling of uneasiness.
I
went to a discussion once in Rome between writers and theatre people.
Someone present said that authors did not write for the theatre
because they were afraid of the
audience. This seemed
to me true but at the same time it was wrong, I thought, to treat their
fear as something contemptible. It
seemed to me that authors are not just afraid of the audience but of the
actors too, the directors, the lights, the sound effects, in fact of all
the things that go on when a play is produced.
And writers, if they are to be able to write at all, must not
feel afraid, must not be disturbed by outside influences.
Besides, in the case of a writer confronting the theatre,
something more is at stake than a vulgar fear of failure.
There is also the fear of replacing, in his own mind, a secret,
private relationship such as he usually has with the people he writes
for, by one which is public, noisy and shamelessly exposed to the light
of day.
Doubtless
I will be told that innumerable authors have written for the theatre
without feeling this repugnance or this malaise. But today, in the world we inhabit, intimacy and privacy are
precious things that are continuously being trampled on and destroyed.
The relationship of an author to his reader is one of the few
remaining human treasures that have survived and can still be preserved.
Of
course, I know now that when you write a play you have to forget the
voices, the people and the noise, and try to find that private
relationship with your neighbor which pervades the darkness and the
silence, that private relationship which is the only one the act of
creation will allow.
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