When Freud wanted to describe the origins of trauma, he spoke of ‘the primal scene’. When a private tussle blows up in a public place we speak of ‘making a scene’. Criminals return to the ‘scene of the crime’. The concept of the scene has crossed over from theatre and shaped our deep structural sense of time and space. At a fundamental level, scenes correspond to the rhythm of lived experience. For life, like drama, is experienced as a sequence of time-limited, place-specific, purposeful scenes.
Think of an ordinary day: the fraught family breakfast with latecomers, offstage radio and the ticking clock of imminent appointments. The snatched encounter in the newsagent which suddenly expands as the retailer reveals some fragment of gossip that takes the moment beyond ritual. The idle chatter of commuters at the local train station. The drama of twenty minutes with a line manager or breaking bad news to a patient. The hectic badinage in the pub after hours. The tired pillow talk that precedes sleep.
Each event somehow finds its end, often through an exit or an entry, through some offstage imperative or onstage revelation. The moment passes, the business is dispatched, the choice is made, the Rubicon is crossed. Playwriting does not invent scenes, but rather it refines them into something more telling, more heightened, more moving – and more irreversible – than most of the scenes through which we live. And each scene in a play, like each cell in a body, is an embodiment of that play as a whole.
Consider the first scene of Hamlet. It is populated by marginal figures we’ll meet only once again, namely Barnardo, Francisco and Marcellus, alongside more crucial figures such as Horatio and of course the mute Ghost. Yet its first line is a question about identity which will reverberate throughout the entire play:
BARNARDO. Who’s there?
FRANCISCO. Nay answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
BARNARDO. Long live the king!
FRANCISCO. Barnardo?
BARNARDO. He.
FRANCISCO. You come most carefully upon your hour.
This confused encounter on the battlements before dawn, pregnant with false starts and curious rhythms, offers a model for the play to come, with its fitful progress, its lurchings from doubt to impulsive response. Even the fact that it is the guard, Francisco, who is challenged by his relief, Barnardo, proves a foretaste of the strange reversals and acts of usurpation that characterise the world of the play. Everything here suggests transition (the changing of the guard, the passage from night into day), and we are immediately attuned to the sense of dislocation that dominates the play.
These opening lines are so dense with meaning and action that they could almost amount to a scene in themselves – so why don’t they? What exactly are the basic requirements of a scene? In theatrical terms the smallest unit of action is a line or gesture, here manifest in Barnardo’s show-stopping challenge: ‘Who’s there?’ The unravelling of that initial gesture reveals a larger unit of action, a beat, which persists up until ‘You come most carefully...’ where the scene’s initial business is laid to rest. Directors often establish a further wordless beat before Barnardo’s lunge and Francisco’s riposte (not least out of kindness to Francisco, for this is pretty much the end of his night). Such beats stand midway in prominence and duration between a gesture (‘Who’s there?’) and a scene; but why is it only a beat and not in fact a scene? Once the sentinels have cemented their mutual allegiance, another beat becomes evident in the moment of rest that ensues. The pair lament the lot of the nightwatchman (‘For this relief much thanks’), assert comradeship and exchange facts, before the next crisis and beat, marked by the arrival of Marcellus and Horatio. Perhaps this next, longer beat is an unmarked scene? It isn’t either, and the reason why is telling: nothing substantive happens within the beat; or rather, nothing changes. The beats at the start of the scene represent local problems which are granted local solutions (e.g. ‘Who are you?’ – ‘I am your relief’). For a scene to emerge, larger, profounder and less soluble problems and changes need to occur.
Beats and gestures are unscientific terms, implicit in the action rather than defined in the form of a play. It’s only at the level of the scene that we find a convention marked and generally understood. So is a scene simply a break in the text on the page? Clearly this is something that is inflected by genre and theatrical form. Gallic dramaturgical tradition tends towards long, unfolding acts broken down into so-called ‘French scenes’ that mark the entry or exit of a character; according to that convention two scenes would be demarcated on Hamlet’s first page. But in English dramaturgy that model is rarely observed and a scene can be as long as an act or as short as a gesture. Here in Hamlet’s opening, as with the phrase ‘the scene is set’, the determining element is not character presence, but a combination of place and time: from midnight (‘’Tis now struck twelve’) until an accelerated dawn (‘But look, the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill’), up on the battlements. To that extent the scene still holds a kinship to its etymological origin in skene, which in Greek theatre alluded to the area above the orchestra or dancing place where the actions of protagonist and antagonist might take place.
Yet whether scenes begin and end with a coming and going, or a shift in time and space, something governs those transitions. For scenes, at bottom, are a form of action and an instance of change, even if that change is barely visible on the surface. Change is in itself an elusive term, but representing it is central to the art of playwriting. Even in Beckett’s works, which seem stubbornly changeless, the very quality of Vladimir and Estragon’s unrequited hope in Waiting for Godot or Winnie’s desperate optimism in Happy Days is transformed by the intractable world they inhabit – the leaf falls from the tree in Godot, the mound grows higher in Happy Days. The nature of the change might lie in the circumstances, but more often, and even then, it’s in the transformation of the characters; in Beckett, simply by seeing the play out, those characters acquire a kind of heroic status.
It’s worth considering what is substituted for conventional scenes in works that have been characterised as ‘post-dramatic’. In Sarah Kane’s Cleansed or the later plays of Martin Crimp, who dubs his scenes ‘scenarios’, the action often has a suspended, imagistic quality; but time, and therefore change, is still at work. The overture of voices on an answerphone at the opening of Crimp’s Attempts on her Life may seem to be merely fragments of text with no transformative quality, but hearing those voices seeking answers from the absent ‘Anne’, and finding none, provokes in us the gathering dread that all unanswered questions generate. Even if no one in the text changes, the audience is transformed.
Or think of the scene in Cleansed where the gruesome Tinker, head of a vaguely defined hybrid of university and concentration camp, forces Robin, one of his hapless inmates, to eat an entire box of chocolates. The stage directions are eloquently terse:
ROBIN eats the chocolate, choking on his tears.
When he has eaten it, TINKER tosses him another.
ROBIN eats it, sobbing.
TINKER throws him another.
ROBIN eats it.
TINKER throws him another.
ROBIN eats it.
TINKER throws him another.
ROBIN eats it.
[The sequence is repeated five more times.]
TINKER tosses him the last chocolate.
ROBIN retches. Then eats the chocolate.
What we seem to be watching is simply cruel repetition without change; but as the action unfolds in time, it shifts beyond cruelty into a mechanistic ritual that supersedes the torturer’s wishes – Robin, mouth full of Milk Tray, acquires a curious power through enduring his torment, even as he soils himself in the process.
There are several layers of change apparent in Hamlet’s opening scene – most obviously the changing of the guard – but the central shift lies in the changing of Horatio’s mind. He arrives sceptical about the visitation of the Ghost (as Marcellus says, ‘Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy’), his demeanour bespeaking his, and perhaps our, doubts (‘’Tush, tush, ’twill not appear’). But then occurs the inciting event of the scene, and indeed of the play – ‘Enter GHOST’. Horatio’s transformation is instant, as Barnardo notes: ‘How now Horatio? you tremble and look pale’. The overall story situation has not changed – the Ghost has walked and been witnessed before – but the transformation of Horatio underlines the true meaning of that event and nudges us towards the momentous events that await us – his new-found conviction leads him to connect this visitation to wider Danish turmoil (‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’). In fact, the Ghost appears a second time, and with its second manifestation we are in no doubt that this scene’s shifts prefigure wider convulsions, and a task is established for the scenes to come (Horatio: ‘Let us impart what we have seen tonight / Unto young Hamlet...’). Equally, that second haunting, which catches us out because the scene’s business seems to have been done, is an example of Shakespeare’s calculated irregularity – the scene exceeds its function, and appears more vivid as a consequence.
Creating conditions that provoke change is central to generating energy and momentum in plays. In a sense, a scene is a situation on the brink of becoming another one, a turning or tipping point; the severity of the resistance to that change determines its duration. So shocking is the presence of the Ghost that Horatio changes in an instant and the guards achieve their objective; it’s the quickest shift this play will offer us.
So something necessitates the arrivals and the exits or propels us forward in time or elsewhere in space, and that something takes place in the scene and determines its length. After the writings of Stanislavsky, this something is increasingly identified as a form of action, and the subdivisions of that action called ‘units of action’. And that action is usually a kind of transaction between the characters which advances or impedes their pursuit of a given objective. In the unfolding of those clashing objectives, the scene is a skirmish, the act a battle and the play is the war.
Put like this, the scene seems all too easy to fashion; surely it’s just a matter of the dramatist mapping out their scenes, nestling them within acts and hoping it all combines into a play. And there are very good plays that appear to be built entirely on that principle, centring on a figure with an unbrookable will, who meets obstacles of increasing magnitude and dazzles us with their capacity to outface them. Such plays (think of Richard III) offer us a representation of their protagonist’s life philosophy in their scenic DNA. The majority of Richard III’s scenes begin with Gloucester outlining his improbable objectives and daring us to doubt he’ll achieve them – and sure enough, until the concluding battle scene, rivals get dispatched, hostile women are seduced and power is steadily acquired. The result is a purity but monotony of tone, largely because, whilst the situations in the play may change, the characters don’t. Compare the superficially similar Macbeth for a much more offbeat and wrong-footing formulation of the same structure of action. Here all shifts in Macbeth’s circumstances yield profound character transformations. And how very different again is Hamlet, where so often the objective is obscure to the protagonist himself – even in the first, simple scene, we wait about five minutes for its narrative purpose to be revealed. Indeed, until the end of Act One, when Hamlet finally meets the Ghost, the central objective of the play is deferred, and even then rendered problematic – finding an objective is itself the objective of the opening forty minutes.
Three Types of Scene
For a scene to remain a scene rather than a short play, it must yield something partial and unresolved, opening a door onto what follows as much as closing it on what’s transpired. The most satisfying scenes create local transformations that detonate ever-larger movements beyond them. The duration, complexity and focus of any scene tell us an enormous amount about the nature of the story told.
To illustrate this, consider three sorts of scenes in three different plays by David Mamet. Mamet’s ear for the boundaries and power of scenes is hard to rival in modern theatre. In his plays, a scene is like a blow to the face, a landscape revealed by lightning. Yet the three plays I want to look at – Edmond (1982), Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) and Oleanna (1992) – offer radically different takes on the nature of the scene, which in turn reveal some useful principles for all scenes.
Edmond is a brief, punky parable about a walk on the wild side, in which the eponymous yet rather generalised central male character abandons his tame middle-class world for the mean streets of an unnamed city, clearly New York in the days before Rudy Giuliani. His mid-life quest degenerates into a panorama of racism, exploitation and crime, to which he in turn ultimately succumbs – thus he tries to engage the services of a prostitute, he meets a racist in a bar, he buys a knife, he picks up a waitress, he attempts to connect with her and ends up killing her, he goes to prison. To enact the disjointedness of his experiences at the level of structure, Mamet limits the duration of each scene, with one exception, to no more than five minutes. Each scene features Edmond with a new or occasionally returning character. Each scene takes place in a new setting. And, until the extended scene with a waitress he picks up, each scene centres on a commercial or financial transaction between strangers.
The second scene, ‘At Home’ – Mamet gives each one a pithy title – is typical of the whole. It depicts Edmond’s breakup with his wife and embarkation on a quest for the fulfilment that eludes him in everyday life. It might be possible to argue that Edmond enters the scene with a buried objective to begin this process of disentangling himself from all connection with that life – yet there’s little evidence of anything except dull acquiescence:
EDMOND and his WIFE are sitting in the living room. A pause.
WIFE. The girl broke the lamp. (Pause.)
EDMOND. Which lamp?
WIFE. The antique lamp.
EDMOND. In my room?
WIFE. Yes. (Pause.)
EDMOND. Huh.
WIFE. That lamp costs over two hundred and twenty dollars.
EDMOND (pause). Maybe we can get it fixed.
WIFE. We’re never going to get it fixed.
I think that’s the point...
I think that’s why she did it.
EDMOND. Yes. Alright – I’m going.
Pause. He gets up and starts out of the room.
WIFE. Will you bring me back some cigarettes?
EDMOND. I’m not coming back.
That’s it – the scene continues, but another type of play has begun to emerge. Admittedly, in the previous, cryptic, prologue-like scene, Edmond meets a fortune-teller whose diagnosis (‘you are unsure what your place is’) seems to pinpoint his malaise. But despite this, ‘At Home’ opens with a sustained image of inaction. The couple are seated, have presumably been seated for some time and might continue to remain there; they’re marooned in a beat not unlike the moment before the Ghost arrives. And for ten lines or so Edmond is still in habitual, browbeaten mode, offering dull responses to his wife. Her lament about the lamp seems to be the catalyst to the disproportionate reaction that ensues, perhaps because for Edmond it is all too typical of marital life. And there’s a real chance in the scene that the action might go no further than his feeble rejoinder of, ‘Maybe we can get it fixed’. But then the volcano erupts – Edmond gets out of his chair. Any director will attest to how difficult it is getting actors out of chairs, especially comfortable ones. But the energy of that gesture takes us instantly into a much more dangerous, unpredictable type of play.
In another writer’s hands (or in another Mamet play such as The Cryptogram) this scene might have stood for the entire play. After all, we are invited into a life about to be abandoned – should we not see its charms in the rear-view mirror, the temptations to abide there? These would in that case be the psychological obstacles in the scene to Edmond’s objective. Yet Mamet’s intentions are otherwise. His characters here inhabit a quasi-behaviourist universe where physical actions precede intentions, even create them; at a midpoint in the scene, which seemed set up to outline the dull, quotidian nature of Edmond’s world, he turns on his wife and subjects her to a litany of abuse. The velocity of this is almost comic (‘you don’t interest me spiritually or sexually’); the reaction equally ferocious (‘Why didn’t you leave then, you stupid shit!!’). From a scene that seemed to express inaction to one of almost melodramatic intensity, we are granted almost no transition time. The impact and heightening that ensues is almost elemental or expressionist; indeed the tempo of the play is reminiscent of a morality play such as Everyman in the suddenness with which both plays’ everyday worlds open up to admit a type of hell.
So there is no doubting the presence of change in the scene; what’s alarming is Mamet’s refusal to indicate its cause. In its shocking theatricality, the scene shares an aesthetic with some of the most striking plays of modern times (Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play Shopping and Fucking obeys a comparable logic). The scenes in Edmond (which, given its ferocity, is mercifully short) simply observe Edmond’s progress at its most intensely inhabited moments, with distractions pared away and other characters there simply to define him. His encounters are rendered with the barest of preliminaries, as we get to the core sexual or racial conflicts that lie barely concealed in urban life. But critical to this brevity is the mapping of power in the play. For Edmond’s nihilism makes him uniquely powerful, and drives each interaction forward. Given that, after this scene, his interactions are almost exclusively with strangers, his refusal to accept small talk, the proprieties of interaction or courtesy, grants each scene a stark dynamic: that of his will versus an often stunned or comparably aggressive obstacle. The play moves fast because Edmond is renouncing all social restraint. This is a world without subtext and where people are dispensable to each other.
Compare these hard sketches of scenes – gestural, as rapid as a blink – to the much more sustained ones in Glengarry Glen Ross, which stages the bitter internecine conflicts of a bunch of real-estate salesmen in Reagan’s America. The first half of the play is comprised of three scenes of about ten to fifteen minutes’ duration, all duologues between men (although the last, between kingpin salesman Richard Roma and mute client James Lingk, is essentially a monologue). Why are they so sustained compared with the short, staccato scenes in Edmond?
The first two scenes – firstly between ageing salesman Levene and his immediate superior Williamson, secondly between fellow salesmen Moss and Aaronow – are between men in a shared professional context, albeit driven by a particularly high level of desperation. In each case, unlike in Edmond’s world, these characters need each other; it isn’t possible (although Williamson tries to do so) to dismiss or refute the needs of the partner in dialogue. In this world everyone is linked by the imperative of achieving sales, even if that link is extremely fragile and easily revoked. Yet at the same time, this is a competitive universe on the brink of criminality – intentions must remain hidden until they have to be disclosed. Indeed we are given at least two masterclasses in deception (Scenes Two and Three); yet whilst Lingk is a silent and largely unworthy opponent, and Aaronow destined to fulfil his promise as dupe, the objective of the initiating character must remain obscure until the last possible minute. Once the real intent of the scene is out, the objective achieved, there is no dying fall – the scenes come to an abrupt halt, as at the end of Scene Two, which crisply concludes with Moss’s devastating pay-off to his victim Aaronow, ‘Because you listened.’
The scene between Moss and Aaronow at first appears to be nothing more than two guys in a restaurant bitching about their clients:
A booth at the restaurant. MOSS and AARONOW seated. After the meal.
MOSS. Polacks and deadbeats.
AARONOW....Polacks...
MOSS. Deadbeats all.
AARONOW....they hold on to their money...
MOSS. All of ’em. They, hey: it happens to us all.
AARONOW. Where am I going to work?
MOSS. You have to cheer up, George, you aren’t out yet.
AARONOW. I’m not
MOSS. You missed a fucking sale. Big deal. A deadbeat Polack.
The illusion of solidarity contrived here by Moss continues for some time as he stokes up Aaronow’s resentment of their employer. Rather as in the opening of the ‘At Home’ scene in Edmond, we are in what looks like an entertaining but inert, objectiveless situation – it’s after the meal, there seems no reason to hurry home, there’s no obvious agenda. Then comes the first turning point, rather like the emergence of the Ghost in Hamlet, as Moss seems to fly a kite of rebellion: ‘Someone should stand up and strike back’. This apparently vague intent is then narrowed down, with hilarious swiftness, to Moss’s next proposition: ‘Someone should rob the office’. A few beats later Aaronow comes out of his stupor and questions what is happening, only to be informed that he is now ‘an accessory before the fact’; that the deal he didn’t realise he was buying into has already degenerated into a rip-off. The impact of the scene lies precisely in the fact that we, like Aaronow, didn’t realise that there was an objective being pursued – we didn’t realise, in fact, that it was even a scene at all.
Here, as elsewhere in Glengarry, the scene’s ostensible action is a smokescreen; its true action lies in the protagonist breaking down all possible resistance to their buried objective.
The third sort of scene in Mamet’s work is apparent in Oleanna, which anatomises the disastrous attempt of liberal educationalist John to engage with the despair of his mediocre student Carol at her incapacity to thrive in Higher Education. To tell this story Mamet creates sustained encounters of about a forty-minute duration, which look rather more like acts than scenes. What, therefore, does it mean for a scene to swell to act length? In the great naturalist plays, short, episodic, freestanding scenes are avoided as they break the hold of real time and make the experience of the story fragmentary. Classic naturalist plays offer us instead an open field of time, where change seems to occur without any authorial manipulation. Yet even in these plays, as we shall see in the next chapter, their seemingly uninterrupted, symphonic acts carry within themselves numerous subdivisions and subplots. Oleanna might adopt that form, but as a two-hander its potential for orchestrating such internal changes is rather circumscribed.
Also, unlike the rich, detailed layering apparent in, for instance, the first act of Brian Friel’s Translations, where the world onstage and off is densely populated and steadily unfolded, Oleanna shares with our previous Mamet plays a starkness of presentation (its setting a non-descript campus room) and a relentlessness of focus (bar the choric interruptions of the telephone). Yet again, on close scrutiny it’s obvious why the short scenes of Edmond, or the longer yet equally pithy scenes of Glengarry, have expanded to ones that last up to forty minutes: this is a world hemmed in by tact, protocol and malfunctioning language, where saying even the simplest thing is immensely difficult. Whereas in the other plays Mamet has an unnamed yet monosyllabic need or a withheld yet ever-apparent objective driving the action, here Carol, the instigator of the scene, has a need so confused and inarticulate that it takes forty minutes to emerge, and even then will be entirely misunderstood.
This play, unlike Glengarry, does not take place in a ‘world of men’. Mamet throughout his work presents interaction between men and women as largely doomed to failure; but his real target here is the increasingly hermetic world of the academy, and the stultifying codes of political correctness. The scene/act then becomes driven not by Carol but by John’s initial attempts to remove Carol; and then his ultimate attempts to keep her in the room in order to convince her of the value of a liberal education. Yet Carol’s intractable inarticulacy becomes his obstacle, stripping away his habitual stratagems and forcing him to achieve a new kind of didactic intensity – which will be his undoing.
CAROL. I’m just trying, I’m just trying to...
JOHN....no, it will not do.
CAROL....what? What will... ?
JOHN. No. I see, I see what you, it... (He gestures to the papers.) but your work...
CAROL. I’m just: I sit in class I... (She holds up her notebook.) I take notes...
JOHN (simultaneously with ‘notes’). Yes. I understand. What I am trying to tell you is that some, some basic...
Much of the opening of the play consists of beats straining to become action; but the sheer dissonance of this dialogue of the deaf prevents change. The means the characters use to communicate with each other becomes a barrier to communication – language, here reduced to a wail of feedback. The opening ten minutes are an unbearable tease – through all the inarticulate flailing we sense a scene on the horizon, but have to endure Carol’s hyperventilation and John’s fractured authority chafing against each other. Compare this with ‘At Home’ from Edmond; had John been Edmond, the scene would have ended in seconds. In many respects the play works as a device to strip away John’s layers of civility until he ends up kicking Carol under the desk. In terms of action alone the scenes in Oleanna really needn’t be as long as an act – but the very fact that matter appropriate for a short scene plays out at such length exemplifies the friction Mamet is satirising.
In all these types of scenes there are common determinants of the duration of the scene:
The distribution of power
The more evenly distributed the balance of power, the harder it is to realise an objective, the more subtext comes into play, the longer the scene. Edmond’s indifference to his wife’s concerns permits a swift exit and so the scene is brief. Horatio, who is the object of the first scene, is of higher status than the guards, so he won’t be persuaded of the Ghost’s existence until he sees it for himself. The salesmen in Glengarry have apparently equal professional status, which masks real inequalities. And most complex of all is the kind of power Carol possesses over John, derived from his own self-image as a liberal who can educate anyone, as well as her status as a victim in a world of political correctness.
The clarity of the objective
In Hamlet, the objective – persuading Horatio of the Ghost’s reality – is not complex, but for it to be achieved the Guards must abandon their usual protocols and – above all – the Ghost must put in an appearance. In Edmond, most of the scenes are driven by clear, localised objectives which often accord with their environment. In Glengarry, the objectives are more illicit and require greater degrees of collaboration of the antagonist in the scene. In Oleanna, the obscurity of the objective itself becomes the core of the scene.
The social texture of the situation
This obviously relates to the first point but the nature of the world dictates how easy it is to get things done. In Hamlet, the very confusions at the heart of Denmark’s state hamper the action, as do martial protocols and the intimation that what is revealed might have potentially seditious implications. In Edmond the cheap, impersonal world of the city allows for fast, ugly yet realisable transactions. In Glengarry these transactions are more complicated and rely on psychological manipulation and exploitation – after all, here, unlike in Edmond, the protagonists are selling scams and schemes, which necessitates a degree of deviousness. In Oleanna, the sheer vexatiousness of a world in a state of chronic self-consciousness means that the simplest of gestures is almost impossible to achieve.
Equally, all scenes have a type of common, inner structure which mirrors the larger structure of the play. This again can be broken down:
Situation
The circumstances at the opening of the scene, which need to be deftly and swiftly evoked. In Edmond, ‘the girl broke the lamp’ takes us in one simple lament right into the heart of this world, this relationship, this malaise; or the anxious watch of Francisco, or indeed the apparently comradely meal shared by Moss and Aaronow; or John’s attempt to leave his office and dispatch some personal business at the end of a working day.
Transformation
At some point that balance or pre-existing relationship will be placed under stress in the scene – by new knowledge, new objectives, new circumstances: the arrival of Horatio and then the Ghost; Edmond’s sudden impulse to leave; Moss’s scheme to rob the boss; Carol’s desperate supplication. This will be the core concern of the scene.
Propulsion
Because a scene is not a play it does not achieve completion; even if the transformation promised is locally achieved, it cannot generate a complete equilibrium – change here generates new circumstances which necessitate further changes to come: Horatio’s new-found conviction impels him to acquaint Hamlet with the Ghost; Edmond’s departure generates questions about how he will fare with his new-found appetite for living; Aaronow’s apparent acceptance of his implication in the crime commits him to participate in it; Carol’s broken-off confession implies a new phase in her assault on John.
Scenes, then, are units of dramatic energy, the muscles that drive the play forward. In order to optimise their propulsion they need to be focused and populated in such a way as to serve the dynamic of the larger story. If the scene begins too early or too late, if it’s populated by too many or too few or ill-judged characters, the impact on the play will be disastrous. Every scene, no matter how seemingly disposable, affects the play’s trajectory. Imagine, for instance, that Hamlet didn’t begin with the scene on the battlements: it’s perfectly possible to begin the play at Scene Two, to go straight into the heart of Claudius’s Court, thereby reaching Hamlet much sooner; Horatio still brings news of the Ghost to him at the end of that scene, so there’s no apparent narrative loss. We don’t, in truth, need Barnardo, Marcellus or Francisco, and we only just need Horatio. Yet a moment’s contemplation reveals how the whole energy of the play would be fatally disrupted by such a cut. After Scene One, and the shock of the Ghost, we watch everything with a new vigilance; and after meeting those ill-treated, discontented watchmen and hearing rumours of the rottenness that might lie at the heart of Denmark, we are better placed to hear Hamlet’s lament as more than self-pity, and we are more likely to distrust the smooth running of the Court.
In the playwright’s choice of scenes lies their whole philosophy of life. For Mamet, the contested nature of every scene portrays life as a place of constant risk and conflict, marked by astonishing intensity. For Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet, every moment opens out into dizzying perspectives – from the personal to the metaphysical. Nothing marks out a playwright more than how they handle the scene, what they furnish it with. But the disposition and distribution of those scenes, the energy that jumps between them, is a larger question, and one that means we must now consider the act – for it is the act that turns the scene’s pulse into the play’s current of life.