Award-winning Scottish playwrights Stef Smith, Nicola McCartney on their creative processes, the thrill of theatre

Rome was not built in a day. Neither were the Egyptian pyramids, and nor was the Taj Mahal. Sophocles did not write Oedipus Rex in a few hours. William Shakespeare did not complete Hamlet or King Lear or Macbeth in a day. Oscar Wilde didn’t finish The Importance of Being Earnest in a week. Samuel Beckett must have thought about Waiting for Godot for a long time before he finally penned it down. Tennessee Williams would have spent hours at his desk, writing and re-writing The Glass Menagerie. History remembers these plays well, but is more awestruck by the playwright who wrote it, decades and even centuries later. An inexplicable amount of effort goes into crafting a script. A playwright has to write, re-write monologues, edit, remove characters, introduce new ones, change the settings as the script progresses. Theatre is a collaborative art form where the playwright only provides the inspiration and the others make it happen, agree Stef Smith and Nicola McCartney, both award-winning playwrights from Traverse Theatre in Scotland who were in Mumbai as a part of Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre’s tie-up with city-based theatre group Rage Productions for ‘Class Act’. [caption id=“attachment_4304913” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Scottish playwrights Stef Smith (left) and Nicola McCartney (right). Getty Images/ unitedagents.co.uk[/caption] The ‘Class Act’ is an educational initiative to encourage and help children bring out the inner playwright in them. Both Smith and McCartney are in the process of mentoring students across Mumbai to create their own plays, which were then performed by professional actors at the Prithvi Theatre on 23 and 24 January. The two playwrights recently held an hour and a half-long discussion on playwriting, moderated by writer, director and lighting designer Arghya Lahiri.

“A play is never finished, just abandoned,” says Smith. One has to write and write. “All of my plays have undergone five to eight drafts,” says McCartney. “My first play for Traverse Theatre was five and half hours long, and I cut three hours of it overnight,” she explains.

For Smith, whose work includes Swallow, Roadkill, Human Animals, her drafts vary between 10 and 20, the most ever being the latter. “I write a lot of drafts. I write quickly and a lot. I like to throw everything into writing a play and then scale it back upon subsequent editing,” she shares. When McCartney and Smith decided that theatre was the path they wanted to pursue, it was quite unheard of in the 1990s. “I grew up in rural Scotland where it was a 40-minute drive to the theatre. The first play I saw was on drunk driving. People from school mostly ran a shop. It was one of my teachers who suggested I do theatre. That’s when, at 16, I joined my undergraduate course in theatre,” narrates Smith. Her first play was quite by accident, she says. “I wrote a lot of poetry, which is now a part of my work. One of my biggest inspirations is music. I feel playwriting is like jamming with oneself. Some of my peers had seen my poetry and liked it. I was invited to write a couple of passages for an upcoming play, and soon it became my first play, Roadkill,” she says. “And it’s her first play that won an Olivier award,” quips Lahiri. McCartney, a playwright, director and dramaturg, hails from Belfast and started dabbling in writing at the age of 10. “I naturally started writing plays. One of the first plays I wrote was performed in school. I took inspiration for the story from my family. So, when my mother came to watch it being performed, she was mortified to see all family secrets tumbling out on stage. People loved it. When they came up to her after the show and asked where I had gotten the idea for the play, she would just say, ‘I have no idea!’” shares McCartney. However, it was not easy when she had to break the news about studying theatre to her family. “People from my school either became writers or lawyers. As a result, I had applied to Queen’s University to study law and had secured admission as well. But I had also applied to study direction in theatre at the same time. In a few weeks, I got to know I had been selected for the course. I knew I was not going to become a lawyer. My friend and I were sitting in the car and my mother was driving us home when I told her ‘I’m not going to Queen’s University. I’m going to do theatre.’ She stopped the vehicle and said, ‘Get out of the car.’ My friend and I had to walk seven miles home,” narrates McCartney. As a playwright, her body of work includes Laundry, Easy, Home, Lifeboat to name a few. For McCartney and Smith, playwriting is a personal and individual process, requiring a lot of work. [caption id=“attachment_4304923” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Nicola McCartney, Arghya Lahiri, and Stef Smith at the workshop. Facebook/Rage Productions[/caption] Each of these playwrights has a different approach to playwriting. McCartney usually has a rough idea or a plan of how the story will play out. “I’m a structuralist in that sense. I plan ahead. I visualise the last scene or take up a proverb and then work backwards to see if it works. It is like a jigsaw puzzle. I make grids and put them up on the wall, and analyse my drafts as I go along,” McCartney explains. “For me, the writing process is a physical one. I walk around a lot when I’m thinking about the characters and what to make them say. I’ll act like the character to see if it fits in well. I like to embody the character as I write,” she says. Since she started directing first and then playwriting, McCartney derives a lot of energy from her actors. “About halfway through the first draft, I have a reading with the actors to see how the play sounds. Sometimes, what is written on the page is not as attractive as compared to how it would sound on the stage. It is important to know I’m writing for the stage, and not the page,” says McCartney. She is of the opinion that a director needs to understand the playwright first in order to understand their play. Conversely, Smith starts writing with a sensation. “I don’t structure my play before writing. For me, it takes away from the thrill. When I begin, it is with a sensation; a few themes and images in my mind. The first draft is very instinctual. It’s from the second draft onward that the structure and planning bit comes into the picture,” says Smith. Both playwrights agree that they start making changes or editing only after the first draft of the script is complete. Smith likes to collaborate with the director and be as involved in the process as is possible. “I let people read my work early on. However, I’m very picky about the directors I work with. I feel a director is someone with whom you must share an element of trust. I want someone who will work with me, and not in opposition to me,” says Smith. “But sometimes, some directors are just stupid if they deviate and change the entire perception of the script altogether,” feels McCartney. So is there a formula to playwriting success? No, there is no formula, say Smith and McCartney. “Knowing the craft is more important. Read plays by different playwrights, from different countries and absorb as much as possible,” says McCartney. “The key thing is to ignore the voice in your head that says, ‘You can’t do this, you’re rubbish,’” she adds. Smith also says one has to just write and write. “It is a job. You just have to turn and write. A lot of it has to do with craft. We are sculptors with words, but there is no magic,” she says.