Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

Structure

One of the things about any kind of work I create that always bugs me is structure. Only with songs do I get less hassled, because the words give the thing a kind of structure. Even then, there’s the concern that the song maybe doesn’t have any sort of climax, or anything to hold it together musically.
When it comes to straight piano pieces, however, I find structure not at all straightforward. I suppose the problem in part is that each piece has its own structure, or has a structure similar to the old classical models, but doesn’t necessarily follow them to the T.
Structure has been drummed into our creative heads as something that the rest of the thing builds on, but with music I find that more often than not the structure comes out of the work I do on the piece. Sometimes that works fine; sometimes not.
It’s even worse when it comes to writing something with words, like a novel. No matter how I work out outlines and plan and dig and delve into what each scene means and where it fits, the structure as a whole still seems like a scaffolding that’s continually about to fall down. I wouldn’t trust any workers on it, that’s for sure!
Perhaps the problem is that structure is fine, but like editing, it isn’t something that should take priority. Once you’ve written the thing, you have to look it over and see whether it holds together. If it does and the structure doesn’t appear to be quite like anything else around, then maybe you’ve inadvertently created a new structure. Just don’t try and give it a name, or set out its requirements. There’s every possibility you’ll never use that particular structure again.
No doubt the pundits will disagree with me. Three Acts, we’re told, when it comes to screenplays and novels. (Even though the novels that they quote don’t in fact seem to fit comfortably into anything like the structure they’re proclaiming.) Form, when it comes to music, and the more classical the better. Form when it comes to poetry, and you’d better be able to identify it.
But poems tend to write themselves often, sometimes in a formal way, sometimes not. Music starts with ideas, with rhythms, with faint tissues of somethings that eventually work themselves into a bigger shape. And novels often start out in the middle and work backwards and forwards until you’ve discovered where they really ought to start and finish.
Certainly I appreciate shape; I appreciate form in poetry more than total looseness; I appreciate form in music. But proclaiming that the old forms can’t be surmounted by new forms (which may seem to have less shape when put up against the old) is just traditionalism. What did Tevye say? Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions our lives would be as shaky as, as... as a fiddler on the roof! But he came to realise that traditions don’t last forever, and the fiddler seemed to manage to play up on the roof in spite of shakiness.
All this is a very long preamble to some comments I came across today on structure:

"There was a structure there for sure, but it was composed very non-linearly. I think the structure started to really come together towards the end. We started feeling like, 'Ok, this is what it is!' The early part of the film kind of discombobulates you… for twenty-two minutes into the film there’s no narrative. It just bounces around, you’re in New York, you’re in Nashville, you’re in San Francisco, you’re in Portland, it just shakes your head around and then the narrative hits at twenty minutes. It’s actually a four-act structure. Which is totally not the way you’re supposed to do it… and it totally works.
Aaron Rose, the director of an independent film called "Beautiful Losers," in an interview on The Filmlot.