Three Act Structure

I'm here in writing camp on Anglesey and I've been thinking about three act structures. Vile Bodies might be said to be filmic in that it has a rush of swift scenes and tying this down for the stage is challenging. Many years ago I was taken to see a stage version of Singin' In The Rain (Tommy Steele from memory), a musical which had its roots in film and which depends for its comic effect on a large number of visual gags - 'Dignity, always dignity' spoken over clips of cinematic pratfalls. This was a high ticket production and I remember being faintly disappointed that it was a very faithful transplant (almost scene for scene) of the film. One which necessarily depended on frequent and massively expensive (one assumes) changes of scenery and costume. Neither can be appropriate for my project. By the way it was Tommy Steele, I've just found the cast recording artwork, reproduced above.

Aside from Vile Bodies my reading here has been Antony and Cleopatra which is catching my attention for my Shakespeare module. This is relevant because it is a play which makes outrageous leaps of time and place and sports a vast cast of characters - 39 speaking parts, not to mention sundry 'eunuchs, courtiers, attendants, captains, servants.' Yet it is the dialogue that matters and the lack of identifying scenery (dictated by practicality) can focus the audience's attention on the text. One might argue that Vile Bodies is so much of its time (certainly Waugh himself does not seem to have granted it any wider pertinence) that the accoutrements of its era are going to be needed in dramatisation but I would argue that the tone of the language can be sufficient to fix the action where the dramatist requires. In any event some of the themes of Vile Bodies might actually be better served if taken out of the very specific context of the extraordinary era in which it was written. I think that what I am trying to say here is that Vile Bodies can validly be dramatised with a bare stage and minimal props and might actually be all the more effective for it. What I am not saying is that I am the man to do it, but I have rather backed myself into the corner of having to try!

Stating the bleeding obvious

Antony and Cleopatra does not observe the classic unity of time but it does at least have a linear plot, no flashbacks etc. Here's an example of stating the bleeding obvious (which anoraks amongst you will recall was Basil Fawlty's suggestion for Sybil's specialist subject if she ever went on Mastermind) but the reason Shakespeare can carry this off is that he was the greatest writer in English. Ever. Full stop. Waugh does not come remotely close so liberties can quite legitimately be taken, indeed will be. Which brings me back, at last, to three act structure. Having established that there is a massive gulf between Shakespeare and Waugh and that there is an even more chasmic gulf separating Waugh from me, we can settle for an orthodox three act structure because that will be comprehensible to an intended audience and because the material cannot carry a structure as daring as Antony and Cleopatra. Which I think brings us neatly back to Sybil Fawlty.

So what I propose is this: we will play fast and loose with the linear plot on the ground that the order in which things happen is not quite so important to Waugh's themes as the fact that they do happen. His is not a vision of cause and effect, but rather a nihilistic and profoundly deterministic one. His Bright Young Things are on a doomed trajectory they are unequipped (and uninclined) to alter. I think one can argue that this remains true of his later 'serious' novels just as much it is true of the frivolous comic novels. Who (at least among the bloke classes I inhabit) does not want to shout at Ryder or Crouchback, 'Do something you fairy!'

Three acts, not linked temporally but each bearing its own common theme. Firstly, the parties attended by the protagonists - Archie Schwert's party (the rump of which decamps to Downing Street), the Metroland party which provokes Balcairn's suicide. Secondly, hotels: principally Shepheard's Hotel, where Adam successively makes and loses a fortune, where a showgirl unimportantly dies; secondarily the glum hotel in Arundel where Adam and Nina consort unmovingly. Thirdly, battlefields both literal and figurative, that is the concluding apocalyptic war and, prefiguring it, the motor racing circuit.

So what we have so far is a conjectured three act structure, three themes and a lot of dialogue. I am groping towards a largely bare stage onto which small items of staging can be carried. As for costume changes, I want to keep the cast to a minimum and I am toying with there being a clothes rack at the back of the stage so that the supporting cast/chorus make their changes of costume/character in audience view. This latter device thus emphasising the superficiality of the differences between the personnel in view.