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Should Writers Get Their Own Audience? Leave it to the Actors.

Chekhov reading The Seagull

In a column from The Guardian this week, playwright Mark Ravenhill argues that writers should never read their own work aloud to an audience. Instead, leave that to the professionals -- the actors.

Ravenhill recalls images of writers like Anton Chekhov and Charles Dickens reading to captivated groups, but realizes:

My romantic idea of the dramatist reading his work was shattered when... I spent some time living in a colony of 20 playwrights in New England. We were going to begin the month, I discovered, by reading our plays to each other. So we all settled down in the bright autumn sun, looking out at the same patch of sea that had inspired Eugene O'Neill, and the readings began. They were excruciating. The first writer read slowly in a monotone, like a speaking clock. Three hours later, as writer number two began with a barely audible mumble, I faked a migraine and fled to my room. For the next two days I pretended to have lost my voice, in order to avoid making my own contribution.

From "Whenever I hear writers reading their own work, I fake a migraine and flee to my room":

The skill of the playwright is that they can hear dialogue in their head and write it down. When they come to speak it aloud, they rarely do their own work justice. I'm sure audiences feel that somehow they are getting the authentic voice of the writer. But I would argue that the voice of the text is a very different thing from the way the author sounds: it's best left to actors to track down and present it...

There's a short story by Brecht in which a dictator, who has lost power and is living incognito, wanders on to a film set. He discovers that a movie is being made about a dictator and tries out for the part. He doesn't get the role, not being considered suitably commanding... It's also possible to read the story as a parable about acting. Brecht, that wily old man of the theatre, might be suggesting that an actor can reveal more about than you ever can yourself. It's something for writers and their audiences to think about.

But what do you think? Would you like the opportunity to hear today's biggest playwrights read their own words, or would you rather avoid those readings in favor of some other performance-based production? Personally, I relish the opportunity to see authors read from their novels, so why should the standard be set any differently with scripts?

Above photo: Anton Chekhov reads The Seagull to a company of actors.

-- Daniel Lehman

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