Sylvia Entwistle – Film & TV production Joint Honour student. Researcher, script writer for Buchner scenes. Will be playing Buchner throughout the performance.
“I’ve never played a male role before but the more I researched the life of Buchner, the more I wanted the honour of playing him. There are various different accounts of him by friends and family found in letters and such and therefore it will be a challenge choosing the right tone and approach, but that is just what I like in my acting roles.”
This module started with our modest group of four coming together out of necessity. Whereas other groups formed out of interest for a common play, we did not have such a luxury. So the task of choosing a play that we all liked was a challenging one. As Georg Buchner was a playwright I had never heard of before the module, I read the introductory biography about him (Price, 1971, p.vii) with great interest. This led to a quick discussion with our tutor about the option of doing a piece on his life, an idea that got full support by Mark and an idea that we all really liked. Being a playwright, we could not ignore Buchner’s plays and therefore we decided to create brief representations of all three in the form of dreams. Also, since we are all joint students, we decided to utilise our extra skills from other parts of our degrees, Dance and Media.
With the time limit of 6 weeks, and clashing timetables meaning that our extra rehearsals would be less a week than the single honour students, the pressure was on from the start to develop a script fast. It was quite convenient therefore to split the plays research between three people and for me to learn more about Buchner for the main script, as I had shown the initial interest. This lead us to our first conscious experience of the role of dramaturg. Through presentations and reading of the book Dramaturgy and Performance, I have concluded that there is no single definition that can describe such a position. Nobody seems to know what it is specifically, but this does not seem to bother most dramatists, in fact it seems to serve a very useful purpose by being so vague. As Turner and Behrndt deem it, the term has “in contemporary theory and practice, become an altogether flexible, fluid, encompassing and expanded term” (2008, p.17). Staging a play is such an organic process, individual to every performance, because it involves people with different minds, bodies, and perspectives, forging original and recycled ideas into one tangible production, and still, every single performance of that production, will differ from the last. For us, the first dramaturgical step was taken by each of us, in the form of research.
In this process, we had a whole history of one man’s life to explore, then even further back to the history that shaped his life and actions, and the influences which inspired his writings, for example the French revolution and the much debated execution of a man with a mental illness. It is this depth, that makes writing a biographical script an immensely difficult but interesting task. I researched several biographies written about him online and got varied information, however I managed to grasp an overall picture of his life. Ironically the one that seemed the most viable and well-documented was the very first one I had read because it gathered it’s information from people that knew him, and letters written about, by and to Buchner. It was at this point that I realised that since I had learnt to the most about Buchner himself, I wanted to be the one who played him, because I felt I could do him justice with a knowledge of the context. The others agreed to this without protest and during the writing process I asked what roles they would like. For the purpose of costume changes we decided to give Sam all the female roles, Lena, Marie and Buchner’s wife Minna but as for the rest I tried to be fair with dialogue and parts.
As previously mentioned, we viewed our assessment for Dramaturgy to be the final performance of our creation and therefore tried to create a complete play that could sit up straight on it’s own in 15 minutes: A challenge. Logically we roughly allocated the plays 2-3 minutes each, leaving me 7-9 minutes to sum up the important parts of Buchner’s life. My chief method was to choose concentrated scenarios that could sum up several stages of his life in one go, for example, Scene 2 of Act I begins with a celebration of Buchner’s engagement to Minna among friends, and speedily changing subject to the writing of the Hessian Courier, an illegal document with treasonable instructions to it’s readers and statements intended to provoke Germans into rebelling against the ruling class and government and to realise their right of freedom. It is unlikely that this is how these events panned out historically, but with so short a time-frame, drastic dramatic license had to be flexed. I also tried to bring up influences that were too far out of the time-period we had chosen to represent, for instance with the line “I remember seeing this in my father’s journals when I was 7”, referring to the true story of the man Woyzeck on whom Buchner’s final play was loosely based upon. Another timesaver, was to represent this political pamphlet, in the programme design, treating the programme as he document itself. Unfortunately, we designed this programme early on in the process and forgot about it somehow with the nerves of the coming performance. However you can still see what we would have used as a programme on the Media page.
When considering these decisions within the terms discussed surrounding dramaturgy, I feel somewhat confused still about whether we were truly dramaturgs, for example there is an “assumption that the dramaturg is primarily involved with developing new writing, working closely with playwrights.” (Turner and Behrndt, 2008, p.100) It is the latter part which confuses me, because there seems to be a distinction between dramaturg and playwright, but I feel that we or I in particular, fulfilled both roles, perhaps because by choosing to do the biographical side of the script writing, it concerned more researching and ‘information gathering’ which seems to be the primary function of a typical dramaturg in Germany. There is an apparent difference between German dramaturgy, which appears to have a structure and definitive role, and UK theatre where “we often find that aspects of the dramaturg’s role are shared between directors, programmers, education officers, marketing managers, literary managers, associate directors and others.” (Turner and Behrndt, 2008, p.100) I consider dramaturgy to be the informed influences on creative decisions within the developing/devising process but not the decisions themselves. To use a metaphor, dramaturgy in my mind is the paint, the brushes and the landscape but not the brush strokes.
I struggled with several aspects of this production, first I nominated myself for the script writing of the Buchner scenes, but then realised that I do not have a knack for script-writing, even when based loosely on fact and secondly, I had to play him. I kept thinking in my head, “I can’t fool anyone that I am a man”. These two problems were solved hand in hand because as I eventually forced myself to write a script that was acceptable enough, I felt a character emerging. This is the advantage of having a small group and bearing several roles in the team: they feed into each other. As I read more about Buchner’s friends – as research for the second engagement party scene – I gradually understood how he might have become mentally unstable towards the end of his life. He had pressure from his father to pursue a medical career, he tried to kick-start a revolution, which meant he was unhappy with the state of the country, and by doing so one of his friends was captured and tortured to death and others arrested, yet he got off scot-free. At first when I spoke lines about friends in prison and the danger of being captured (Act II, Scene 1) I had not considered this emotion that Georg would have been feeling, I only considered my (his) own safety. But then it dawned on me that I had to build up the illness that killed him outside and inside and I tried to portray this guilt and fear in his vulnerable moments, for example in the Woyzeck scene (Act II, Scene 3). Eventually the issue of playing a man was irrelevant because I knew the audience would suspend their disbelief to go along with the story and the emotion. A mere representational and unrealistic moustache painted on, (the make-up was quite expressionistic) and unfemenine clothing were enough. I was still not entirely satisfied with my representation of him, however I felt I achieved my best considering the time constraints and I was very happy overall with the reception of the play.
Bibliography
Turner, C. and Behrndt, S. (2008) Dramaturgy and Performance, Palgrave Macmillan, London.
Price, Victor (1971) Georg Buchner: Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck, Oxford University Press, New York.
Benn, Maurice Bernard (1976) The Drama Revolt: A Critical Study of Georg Buchner, Cambridge Universtiy Press, Cambridge.
Georg Buchner Contest (1998) [accessed online] @ http://www.gbg-koeln.de/buechner/ [last accessed 7.3.11]