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In a cultured mood the other week, I headed off to the theatre. It was, in fact, the Battersea Arts Centre which, according to the Guardian, is “Britain’s most influential theatre” – a fact which is usually enough to make me react like Scooby Doo to a scary old house whenever I walk past. Still, Mother Theresa associated with the lepers of Calcutta, so it’s the least I can do to periodically hang out with artistic Guardian readers in the hope that something might rub off on them.
The play I went to see was You’re not like the other girls Chrissy, a one-woman show set in liberated Paris in 1945 where Christiene, a French girl whose engagement to an Englishman six years before had been rudely interrupted by the Wehrmacht coming over the border, sits at the Gare de Nord waiting for her train to England to see her fiancée again – and marry him. And whilst she waits, she tells her story. Not the sort of thing I’d usually go to see, but hey, I thought. It takes all sorts.
The play itself was actually very good; engaging, funny, well scripted and generally a perfectly acceptable evening of entertainment. However, there was one massive, massive problem with the show as far as I was concerned. The flyer gave away the ending. You see, the flyer described the play as ‘funny, touching and ultimately poignant’, and when a play about a girl waiting for her boyfriend is described as ‘poignant’, that can only mean one thing. He’s going to let her down. You’re going to get an hour or so of heartwarming anecdotes, tales of overcoming adversity and a little bit of human drama, and then the bloke is going to turn out to be a flake who never shows up or to have married someone else in the interim.
I was thinking about this because I’m interested in stories, and how they’re structured. I’ve written a fair few of them in my time, and the act of writing a story is a process of limiting possibilities. When you start writing, you can take a story anywhere. But as the tale progresses, you reduce the possible outcomes until at the end you’re limited often to a binary choice. In the example of a girl waiting for her boyfriend, really your options are: he turns up, or he doesn’t.* What’s more narrative convention demands that stories are structured just so. You can break the conventions once you know what they are, but the entertainment –consuming audience is so aware of postmodernism these days that it’s very difficult indeed to genuinely surprise people with a twist.
If I were feeling pretentious, I’d suggest that stories are actually represented by a subatomic particle – we’ll call it a Narrat-Ion** - which begins as a wave but the more you write the more you reduce its potential until at the end you’re left with a binary choice of which slit to go through, and thus forcing the wave to become a discrete story-on particle. But I'm not feeling pretenious and I don't want people to think I haven't read any Feynman, so I won't say that.
However, I think that’s why I prefer writing games to writing stories – whilst you create the initial conditions you just never know where they’re going to end up because there’s more people than one storyteller creating the narrative and so there’s more potentials than you alone are capable of creating. And so it was with the play I went to see; it was created by one person, so the completely left-field events of a collaborative creation method like playing a game simply aren’t going to appear. It’s a story, the potential events of the story are going to collapse during the telling of it as hurdles to their relationship are met and overcome and at the end, barring aliens or zombies her boyfriend is going to turn up or he isn’t. Telling me the story was poignant just ticked me off.
Anyway, Christiene sits on the platform of Gare du Nord and talks of dodging German patrols during the occupation and sneaking illegal foods and all that surviving-during-wartime stuff, and then her problems with the post-occupation bureaucracy and how she had to overcome endless delays and barriers to getting a visa to England and then, at the end, sitting on the platform, she told how she’d done everything she could but there were no tickets left on the only day her visa was valid for. The ending was indeed poignant. She couldn’t get to England to her wedding.
Except… to my great surprise the play was based on a true story, not a created narrative where the rules of storytelling have to apply. A passing soldier, touched by her tale gave her his ticket to England, so she got there in the end. Apparently the tale was one of those ‘happy ending in wartime’ stories that the papers love and it made it into the Paris papers of the time. She travelled to England, married her boyfriend, and lived a long and happy life into her nineties, dictating a lengthy reminiscence about the events of her youth shortly before she died. It was a useful reminder that no matter what the rules of writing stories, real life doesn’t have to obey them at all; and that in real life, happy endings can be poignant as well.
*Okay, you could have her abducted by aliens or there might be an outbreak of zombies, but if you don’t want your audience to think you’re a proper wanker you probably won’t do that. Instead, like I say, he shows up or he doesn’t. And calling your tale ‘poignant’ narrows down your options still further.
**I’m pretty proud of that one, though I say so myself.
The play I went to see was You’re not like the other girls Chrissy, a one-woman show set in liberated Paris in 1945 where Christiene, a French girl whose engagement to an Englishman six years before had been rudely interrupted by the Wehrmacht coming over the border, sits at the Gare de Nord waiting for her train to England to see her fiancée again – and marry him. And whilst she waits, she tells her story. Not the sort of thing I’d usually go to see, but hey, I thought. It takes all sorts.
The play itself was actually very good; engaging, funny, well scripted and generally a perfectly acceptable evening of entertainment. However, there was one massive, massive problem with the show as far as I was concerned. The flyer gave away the ending. You see, the flyer described the play as ‘funny, touching and ultimately poignant’, and when a play about a girl waiting for her boyfriend is described as ‘poignant’, that can only mean one thing. He’s going to let her down. You’re going to get an hour or so of heartwarming anecdotes, tales of overcoming adversity and a little bit of human drama, and then the bloke is going to turn out to be a flake who never shows up or to have married someone else in the interim.
I was thinking about this because I’m interested in stories, and how they’re structured. I’ve written a fair few of them in my time, and the act of writing a story is a process of limiting possibilities. When you start writing, you can take a story anywhere. But as the tale progresses, you reduce the possible outcomes until at the end you’re limited often to a binary choice. In the example of a girl waiting for her boyfriend, really your options are: he turns up, or he doesn’t.* What’s more narrative convention demands that stories are structured just so. You can break the conventions once you know what they are, but the entertainment –consuming audience is so aware of postmodernism these days that it’s very difficult indeed to genuinely surprise people with a twist.
If I were feeling pretentious, I’d suggest that stories are actually represented by a subatomic particle – we’ll call it a Narrat-Ion** - which begins as a wave but the more you write the more you reduce its potential until at the end you’re left with a binary choice of which slit to go through, and thus forcing the wave to become a discrete story-on particle. But I'm not feeling pretenious and I don't want people to think I haven't read any Feynman, so I won't say that.
However, I think that’s why I prefer writing games to writing stories – whilst you create the initial conditions you just never know where they’re going to end up because there’s more people than one storyteller creating the narrative and so there’s more potentials than you alone are capable of creating. And so it was with the play I went to see; it was created by one person, so the completely left-field events of a collaborative creation method like playing a game simply aren’t going to appear. It’s a story, the potential events of the story are going to collapse during the telling of it as hurdles to their relationship are met and overcome and at the end, barring aliens or zombies her boyfriend is going to turn up or he isn’t. Telling me the story was poignant just ticked me off.
Anyway, Christiene sits on the platform of Gare du Nord and talks of dodging German patrols during the occupation and sneaking illegal foods and all that surviving-during-wartime stuff, and then her problems with the post-occupation bureaucracy and how she had to overcome endless delays and barriers to getting a visa to England and then, at the end, sitting on the platform, she told how she’d done everything she could but there were no tickets left on the only day her visa was valid for. The ending was indeed poignant. She couldn’t get to England to her wedding.
Except… to my great surprise the play was based on a true story, not a created narrative where the rules of storytelling have to apply. A passing soldier, touched by her tale gave her his ticket to England, so she got there in the end. Apparently the tale was one of those ‘happy ending in wartime’ stories that the papers love and it made it into the Paris papers of the time. She travelled to England, married her boyfriend, and lived a long and happy life into her nineties, dictating a lengthy reminiscence about the events of her youth shortly before she died. It was a useful reminder that no matter what the rules of writing stories, real life doesn’t have to obey them at all; and that in real life, happy endings can be poignant as well.
*Okay, you could have her abducted by aliens or there might be an outbreak of zombies, but if you don’t want your audience to think you’re a proper wanker you probably won’t do that. Instead, like I say, he shows up or he doesn’t. And calling your tale ‘poignant’ narrows down your options still further.
**I’m pretty proud of that one, though I say so myself.
