Just a brief inquiry into David Ball’s Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays, which many have recommended to me as a vital theatrical text without which my auto-didactic explorations would be incomplete.
It strikes me as the theatrical equivalent of Newtonian physics: a close enough approximation of the truth, but only under common circumstances. At extreme scales, you have to start looking at quantum mechanics, and that’s where things really get demanding and difficult… but also more accurate as well.
So is that where Peter Brook, for example, kicks in?
This is not to say that Ball has nothing to offer, mind you. Far from it. Newtonian physics is good enough for everyday calculations (the path of a billiard ball) and for some extreme calculations (the path of the space shuttle), and I think a parallel statement might be made about Ball’s arguments, too.
So where does Ball fail to meet our needs in thinking about plays?
For one, I think the book mainly looks at the structure & content of a play after it’s complete. Only when a play is done can it line up with his approach; it can’t help very much in the initial drafting of a work, when the elements Ball discusses are still being worked out.
I’d also say that it doesn’t really address the relationship with the audience. Many plays – particularly ones with strange time structures or avant-garde presentation – do not get by strictly on a motivation-action-reaction progression within the characters. Often, it is managing the audience’s understanding that drives what scene comes next. Backwards and Forwards can’t, for instance, really help figure out how and when a playwright who has written a time-skipping play chooses to flashback or flashforward.
Lastly, it never really addresses any question of quality – only consistency. You could write and direct a play that perfectly follows Ball’s dictums, but it could still end up being horribly boring, cliched or bland.
I do love the book. I think it’s definitive when it comes to that (significant) portion of the playwriting-physics puzzle that it aims to address.
Ball is good, but focuses so strongly on the moment-to-moment that it loses all sense of the bigger picture. I recommend — ahem — my own book, “Introduction to Play Analysis” published by McGraw-Hill and co-authored by Cal Pritner.
Ahem, indeed! Thanks for the tip. I’ll have to have a look!