Tamar Saphra and Tommo Fowler are co-founders of RoughHewn, a script-reading service offering dramaturgical support to writers of all experience levels. Between them, they have read for many theatres and competitions including the Almeida, Royal Court and Bruntwood Prize. They are also both freelance directors specialising in new writing.
This interview is condensed from a longer conversation.
TF What makes best friends really good is that they know you really well; they know your history and what you want to get out of life. They know how to hear what you're saying underneath what you're saying. Being a dramaturg is that, but for plays.
TS Best friends also know how to put their own feelings aside when they’re not helpful to you. Dramaturgy is that process of filtering - listening very carefully and figuring out the most useful things to ask or offer.
TH Why is the dramaturg a useful person to have in the process of making a play?
TS Sarah Lunnie, who was dramaturg at Playwrights Horizons and is now freelance, wrote this beautiful article where she pointed out that the dramaturg is the play's first audience, in a way that I think the director can’t always be because they're too inside it.
TF In my own directing work, I find it useful having someone to help me look back and say, ‘I think we've made a wrong turn somewhere and the work is not doing the thing it was supposed to anymore.’
TS If the director is the person who is asking everyone else ‘why?’ all the time, then who is asking them?
TF I think the dramaturg should be the person with the least ego. To have someone who stands to gain nothing apart from, hopefully, narrative clarity. We’re coming at dramaturgy as a kind of self-sublimation – it’s empathy for the artist and the work, not some sense of ‘dispensing knowledge from on high’. As a dramaturg you're opening doors and asking: do you like what you see?
TS Your first responsibility as a dramaturg is to find out what the writer thinks the play is and what they want the play to be, and then base the conversation you have with them around that, rather than around what your ideas are from reading the play and what you might think the play is.
TH What's the process that makes that possible?
TS We invite writers to answer a few short questions when they send us their play, and one of them is ‘can you distil the story into a single sentence?’
TF Arthur Miller said that every story should be able to be told to the person next to you on the train. It can have loads of dexterity, but you should still be able to boil it down to 'a young woman fights to save a world that is burning’. Even in a really complex plot, there’s a clear, simple story that’s being told.
TS Sometimes that sentence might be wildly different to the play we think we’ve read, and that’s the conversation starter.
But what’s really important for us in our process, is that we read the play before we read what the writer has told us about it. We read without preconceptions, then compare our thoughts with the writer’s and work to bridge the spaces in between.
TH When you're formulating your own thoughts, how are you structuring that? Are you writing during reading or afterwards?
TS During, always. We both use lots of capitals and exclamation marks and generally just splurge whatever comes to mind. Then when we come back to those notes, we’re coming back to the feeling we had when we first experienced the play – and from that we distil and pull out what feels useful.
TF There’s sensible stuff in the splurge too, like themes that look like they might be coming out. And then we can go back over everything and filter it through the lenses of form, structure, characterisation, dialogue, etc.
TH What else can dramaturgy be at that early stage?
TF Story hunting. You can start before they've put pen to paper. I'm about to work with a writer on exactly that: they have a theme but aren’t exactly sure where the story is.
TH There's that and there's also noting?
TF We've started talking about having a conversation instead of ‘noting’
TS Questioning
TF Finding gaps
TH Yes - the language we use is powerful, when you shift the language then you start to shift the thinking.
TS Exactly – and it was these kinds of conversations that made us want to start RoughHewn. . Our process has been developed in response to frustrations we were hearing from writers. We wanted to try to figure out what best practice looks like in dramaturgy, and empower writers to get it.
TF And we’re still at the beginning of that figuring out – we only launched in late March – so the process is constantly evolving in response to feedback we get from the writers we collaborate with.
TH What do you think should be the top priority for writers?
TF I think affording yourself space to think and feel your way through your own process. There's a billion books on how to write. But I learned by seeing theatre and going back on it to ask why it did the thing it did. It's just asking ‘why?’ a lot.
TS When I enjoy theatre it’s because I feel something incredibly strong. So as a writer, you might do something as simple as work out the places where you really feel things, and come back to your own work and ask, ‘how can I invite an audience to feel that?’
TH In the rehearsal room, who's the dramaturg's main focus - are they there for the director or the writer?
TS They’re there to be whatever is most useful for the lead artists. They could be a link between the director and the writer, that’s probably the most common.
TF Although they might have some interaction with the actors, for example, if the play’s world is different to the shared experience in the room, they could bring in research to contextualise it if that’s useful.
TS Once you’re in rehearsal, it’s about reading the room and knowing what’s most useful to offer and when to do so. If you've got a writer who needs continued support for whatever reason, you might have a dramaturg who becomes more like the writer’s partner in the process.
TF The dramaturg is a support mechanism to help take care of the key creatives’ intentions for the work. They aren’t there to make creative choices themselves, they’re there to be a sounding board who can help everyone else think through their choices, and how they reverberate through the production as a whole.
TH How can dramaturgy help with finding form?
TF One of the big dangers of our theatrical tradition is that it broadly tries to replicate things as they are – i.e. realism – and find meaningful links between them. It shows the consequences that actions ‘must’ have, and so that leads to a sort of inevitability – it makes a type of theatre that binds us into the idea that things can’t change. One of the benefits of dramaturgy is exposing the mechanics of that form, and perhaps of challenging it. It can agitate for change, for things to be otherwise. The brilliant thing that dramaturgs can do is expose absolutely everything that happens in a play, whether on the page or on the stage, as a choice.
TS Those infinite possibilities are what free us. I keep thinking of The Writer and the form of that play. Ella Hickson was asking what happens if we mess with form and see if there’s a world where the climax doesn't necessarily happen once at the end. I think the job of the dramaturg when it comes to form is to encourage the writer to see the form and content as bound together - form is as powerful as dialogue in communicating the play’s gesture. What The Writer did was to say ‘naturalistic form is patriarchal’, and then fuck it up.
TF Setting up the rules of the world is really important. The genius thing The Writer did was to set up the first scene as entirely naturalistic – you think, ‘this is an issues play where two people will say opposing things to each other’ – and then it continually subverts that. As a dramaturg you expose norms as choices, which constantly reaffirms that everything is possible.
TS That comes back to theatre being aware of itself as a live art form. It should be playful; we love being surprised.
I also don't think it's entirely the writer's responsibility to work out the physical form of the play they're writing. I think it's fine for them to go ‘this is what I want to write but I don't know what that looks like’ - a dramaturg is there to help with that.
TF We haven’t talked that much about responsibility. A dramaturg’s responsibility extends to an awareness of themselves, too, which comes back to that sort of radical empathy we were talking about. Who am I through the writer’s eyes? Thinking about the words I use, or the cafe I’ve picked for a meeting. It’s a huge responsibility to take someone’s work, and we can’t imagine we are somehow free of the structuresthings we are trying to expose.
TS It’s also important to frame everything you say as an option. You’re never saying you have the answers. You have to meet the play and the writer on their own terms. I’m trying to keep as much outside of my own likes as I can, but that takes continual work and a heightened self-awareness.
TF So this is what we’re talking about with being a play’s best friend. I think I nicked it out of a Laura Wade play where in the dedication she called Lyndsey Turner 'the best friend a play could ever have'. We’re working to be that. What we're trying to evangelise about is that receiving unhelpful dramaturgy does not mean that dramaturgs in general are not for you, it only means that you and a particular dramaturg may not have have not spoken the same language – you just need to find someone who will.
TS It all comes back to basically just being consciously and systematically empathetic. That doesn't mean you can't be challenging – of course you can – but for us our job is about recognising and respecting how extremely hard it can be to write a play, and helping to make that process more manageable.
