Playwrights Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin said they were dismissed from writing Tree, as a script continued to be developed by dramaturg Kwame Kwei-Armah. Tree photo: Marc Brenner
In 2007 the American dramaturg Mark Bly sat in on a performance in Houston’s Alley Theatre. An audience member asked him: “What appeared on stage as a result of what you did”?
“I can’t point to anything specifically, but if you took a knife to that play, it would bleed me,” he said. To the casual watcher, oblivious to months or years of the production’s development, dramaturgy can seem like an invisible art.
Yet, Bly’s comment opens up a hidden production history sewn together by meticulous questions and agonising decisions. It summons images of an individual listening, like a helpline, for a playwright to sort and transmute ideas aloud. A researcher decorating the rehearsal room with materials glimpsing a new stage-reality. An extra eye in a technical rehearsal observing how a visual effect fits into an overall picture.
Our own Tanya Dean, dramaturg of the recent psychodrama So Where Do We Begin?, once gave an analogy for this undercover job: “If the actors, directors, playwrights, designers, etc. are the builders of a play-world, then the dramaturg serves as the mapmaker”.
Some can chart the territory better than others. When scanning dramaturg credits in show programmes, the citation sometimes seems a means to include actors, playwrights and directors associated with the production company. I’ve no doubt artists in other fields can work hard at being good dramaturgs, but let’s not lose sight of play reading and production research as skills honed over time, never mind the required tact. (In an interview Garry Hynes once thanked her regular collaborator, the dramaturg Thomas Conway, for their “frank exchange of views”).
On the other hand misunderstandings around dramaturging can lead to productions becoming murky, and even treacherous. Two weeks ago a new play running at the Manchester International Festival was accused of removing its original authors as it continued to be led by its dramaturg-director.
Based on an Idris Elba album, Tree is a musical odyssey about a mixed race Londoner journeying to South Africa after his mother’s death. Alfred Enoch and Sinéad Cusack lead the cast. The Young Vic’s artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah directs.
In an article on the online publishing platform Medium, playwrights Sarah Henley and Tori Allen-Martin said they received a commission to script and develop Tree. When the Young Vic became a production partner, one contingency was that Kwei-Armah would direct and dramaturg.
“There was a phone call out of the blue from Idris to Tori to say he was sending over a revised synopsis by Kwame. We were a bit confused as to why Kwame would be writing a synopsis,” they said.
If dramaturgs are supposed to be mapmakers, Kwei-Armah seemed to have moved on to new terrain.
Henley and Allen-Martin’s account reads like an artistic takeover. They were offered to write a new draft of Tree based on Kwei-Armah’s synopsis. By then the play had already been announced without their names attached to it. While trying to clear up their involvement, they were dismissed.
In a response, the Young Vic said that Henley and Allen-Martin’s script and Kwei-Armah’s script are distinct projects.
It’s not difficult to see how this could have happened. The easy invisibility of dramaturgy has allowed the craft to be exploited as a catch-all term, referring to anyone who chats play ideas over coffee, or sits in on one rehearsal. It’s perilously close to becoming a paradox, denoting expertise and yet nothing specific, the kind of jargon good for a funding application.
In such a grey area, dramaturgy can warp and mean something completely different. Kwei-Armah seems to have used it as a means to assert creative involvement, instead of aiding Henley and Allen-Martin to manifest their script.
Dramaturgy may be hazy but it isn’t always undetectable. A production where events flow with crystal-cut clarity, as if underlining plot points in pen, or old texts and devices are translated into something revelatory, can all point to a dramaturg’s cartography.
Only those looking closely might have appreciated how Morna Regan assisted Katie Roche, radically revived in 2017, by narrowing its script to best suit an expressionist production. Or how Pamela McQueen neatly adapted Jimmy’s Hall to fit the mechanics of theatre.
The latter gave one of the pithiest responses to the Tree controversy, saying on Twitter that the work of the dramaturg is “nurture not napalm”.
It should become a mantra for bringing dramaturgy into the light.
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