The Script as the Fetish

Fragments 0.1

So sucking fucking straight

When you ride that script

Praise its stiff form

Like some kinda dick

Fake pleasure for the same old shit

No ‘maginaries left in this funding cesspit

I spend the majority of my freelance dramaturgy looking at scripts. I will read play texts for fun, and I will purchase texts from plays I’ve particularly enjoyed. To see how they’ve been transcribed and then translated onto the stage. However, since moving to Scotland, the majority of dramaturgy jobs revolve around script reading. And the majority of those jobs are taken by non-dramaturgs.

Scotland seems obsessed with the script as an art object. And this isn’t an original or innovative thought, we been in the know. But as commissions dramatically deplete in number, then it poses the questions, what’s the point in a script? Opportunities become fewer, and even the very small-fry development opportunities seem to require a script that is ultimately polished and ready for some kind of performance, otherwise how else will you beat out the other hundred odd applicants?

You’ve got to prove your skill by submitting scripts. You’ve got to pitch your work with either script-at-the-ready or another script that’s been picked up elsewhere. You’ve got to evidence that your idea will fit neatly into script form so it demonstrates a concrete and complete objective. Something to tick off for the funders’ evaluation. And all of this for who? Administrators who can’t even begin to imagine theatre outwith the confines of scripted productions? Or salaried artists with no more need to prove their artistic mettle and just want to make pretend with their friends?

How dull.

Cock-tease bitch wanting dramaturgy

Aint selling my bussy for your dumb perjury

Read another script for a few quick quid

Did you really go to Oxford just for this?

Script reading—or a journalist writing

Script reading—when you’re not play writing

Script reading—but only for your bestie

This reading—is it worth more than twenty?

A Tory unimaginative leech, somehow managing to access arts funding opportunities despite not being an artist in any shape or form is “doing dramaturgy”. And it’s so easy, they’ll proclaim. Because it’s just breezing through a script and ticking a yes or no box, never provided with a legitimate feedback/dramaturgical framework of assessment. Anyone can do it, and anyone is doing it. Much cheaper that way too, what’s the point in opening an opportunity if you have to pay professionals fairly to assess the many applicants?

The leaders of an organisation will bless us all with the singular opportunity of the year, unable to effectively answer what a dramaturg is, demand vague experience based on that lack of knowledge, and then shrug their shoulders to hire someone that doesn’t fit the bill. But it’s fine, because it’s just script reading… or offering a series of workshops that are already being delivered by dozens of other organisations. Applause for dramaturgy.

Someone will back-handedly ask what the difference between a dramaturg and a director is, and you’ll reply with a very clear answer. You’ll both enter a rehearsal room to watch a showing, then watch as the dramaturg directs the room, the director feebly standing in the playing space. We wonder why directors hate dramaturgs. Or why they think they themselves are the dramaturg as they cut, and cut, and brutalise a script, make actors feel uneasy, and then put their friend’s name as the production dramaturg because they probably bitched about the writer together over a glass on wine…

Clap clap. 

They don’t know shit here at PKC

So gotta write an email to John Swinney

“Spenny spenny spenny” girl, where’s the money?‘

Coz it ain’t fucking here , cut like Dundee.

Gotta make work to be fucking seen

But won’t get money if you ain’t been seen

Halfwits in the council sitting evergreen

Throwing their cash on more admin.

Got an idea that a board will block?‘

Coz they don’t know art from a fucking rock

Have you tried the open fund, that’s more your flock

Why not write a script? Oh, suck my cock.

Why are we starved in Scotland of labs and experimental spaces to just simply workshop ideas on the floor? These things cannot be mediated by a script. Just because it’s cheaper to pay a single person to sit at a desk and write something doesn’t mean you’re getting the most for your money. Imagine artists playing with form, shape, structure, narrative with their bodies with lights and materials, with a dramaturg documenting, noting, provoking, nudging, curating… Think of what could be created there. Something that won’t fit neatly onto an A4 page.

Studios are starving in buildings across the country, neglected because they don’t generate enough income. These are supposed to be the spaces to play, but instead they just become the spaces subsidised by the Touring Fund, eaten and consumed by a commercial enterprise or a poor sod that has to be everyone all at once, bearing the burden of expectation and disappointment. Your council won’t see such spaces as useful, not if they can sell it on to some landlord who’ll keep it closed until someone can afford the rent. 

Then we’re left with barely any development time on pieces. Maybe years of an individual slaving over a work with very little input from outside eyes. Maybe a week of development once every quarter, if you’re lucky with the open fund. Maybe a three-year commission that pays so badly you’ll have to do multiple other jobs which take your focus. Maybe your director will be able to carve out some development time during the three week rehearsal period before tech starts.

Great art. Bravo!

We all be saying it, this system’s cooked

The quality of theatre should have us shook

Bogged down by the easy, by a fucking script

Like the beauty ind’str’y, tucked and nipped

Some blond hair blue eyed straight laced cunt

Neo-c’onial attitude, never touched a blunt

Minds so closed blind to their binty way

Fucking up a nation, Lizzie Truss cosplay.  

We’ll be extinct in no time. Is it a dramaturg you really want? For what is a dramaturg without a script? Oh… is it a script you really want?

Scotland. 

The theatre industry. 

Ingenue (a young actor, probably): I’ve got an idea.

Daddy (a middle aged man, probably): Too abstract.

Ingenue: I’ve got a script.

Daddy: Oh, fuck…

He cums. Takes the script to clean himself up. Gives it a cursory glance.

Daddy: Needs a dramaturg.

He means director.