‘A note for you, sir.’
‘A note for me, Jeeves?’
‘A note for you, sir.’
‘From whom, Jeeves?’
‘From Miss Bassett, sir.’
‘From whom, Jeeves?’
‘From Miss Bassett, sir.’
‘From Miss Bassett, Jeeves?’
‘From Miss Bassett, sir.’
At this point, Aunt Dahlia, who had taken one nibble at her whatever-it-was-on-toast and laid it down, begged us – a little fretfully, I thought – for heaven’s sake to cut out the cross-talk vaudeville stuff, as she had enough to bear already without having to listen to us do our imitation of the Two Macs.
A long quote, but P. G. Wodehouse is easy on the old brainpan. Right Ho, Jeeves, 1934, Ch. 20. Were the Two Macs an act or a bit? I am wandering back to the subject of dialogue, of speech.
We are awash in imagined talk. Television and screen writing is mostly talk, although the finished product may well be mostly something else. First person novels are often simulations of speech, strangely unending one-sided conversations. Plays are often nothing but speech. If I complain that Middlemarch has too much dialogue, when in another sense it has little, what can I make of Uncle Vanya or Glengarry Glen Ross?
Great talk in a great play by a great writer – there is a wonderful mystery. The author must successfully imagine and differentiate the speech of his characters, yet somehow maintain a consistent voice. Iago sounds like Iago and Othello like Othello, yet both sound like Shakespeare. A good trick.
One solution to the puzzle is that great dialogue writers abandon the notion that speech should be smooth or realistic or natural. Great dialogue is so often mannered, eccentric, labored, even bizarre. Meine Frau discovered the complete Glengarry Glenn Ross (1984) online. Start anywhere - start at the beginning (warning: one may stumble across a bit of profanity here and there):
LEVENE: John...John...John. Okay. John.
John. Look:
(pause)
And pretty soon the Mametian cross-talk vaudeville gets going, clumsy and weird and obviously, just looking at the page, unactable. The amazing thing is how quickly a reader or listener can be lulled into the pleasant fantasy that this strange talk is in fact realistic and smooth and so on.
AARONOW: Why?
ROMA: They're inured to it.
AARONOW: You think so?
ROMA: Yes.
The playwright has the enormous advantage of professional actors who can do all sorts of surprising things with even the flattest dialogue. I wish you could hear what David Pasquesi did with the word “inured” in the 2002 Steppenwolf production; he made it sound like it he had just learned it, like it had just turned up on his word-a-day calendar and he was testing it out. The fiction writer is stuck with the sleepy and unimaginative reader. I do my best with Uncle Vanya, but the actors in Vanya on 42nd Street do better.
Still, what am I doing with fiction that I am not doing with a play? I imagine voices, clothes, rooms, movement. Or I omit much of this – I leave the background and blocking just as gray and blurry as the author typically does. But I cannot omit the voices, can I? I always have to work with the author on those voices. I have to be the actor, I have to play Darcy and Elizabeth and Heathcliff and Dorothea Brooke and, I don’t know, Papa Moomintroll and young Laura Ingalls and both Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. What a fine challenge for an actor. What a mystery.
