"A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves"
About this Quote
There is a quiet indictment tucked inside Timothy West's line: the "conventional playwright" isn't just being clear, they're being bossy. West, an actor by trade, is defending the intelligence of performance against the tyranny of authorial explanation. When a script insists on telling you who someone "really is", it often flattens the character into a diagnosis. The audience stops watching a person and starts reading a label.
The intent feels actor-forward: protect ambiguity, protect behavior. On stage, characters rarely walk around with a neat self-concept; they collide with other people, contradict themselves, improvise their values in real time. West is pointing at the peculiar arrogance of writing that over-explains interiority - backstory monologues, on-the-nose motivations, tidy psychological summaries - as if humans come with a user manual. It's not that insight is bad; it's that certainty is suspicious. Great acting thrives on the gap between what a person believes about themselves and what their actions reveal.
The subtext is also a critique of "conventional" dramaturgy as a comfort machine. Explaining characters in advance reduces risk: it reassures the audience they are interpreting correctly, and it reassures the writer that the character won't escape the intended meaning. West argues for the opposite: scripts that let characters remain partially unknowable, so discovery can happen in the room, in the pauses, in the misread intentions.
Contextually, it lands as an actor's pushback against literary control. West is championing drama that trusts subtext over summary, and viewers who can tolerate not being spoon-fed.
The intent feels actor-forward: protect ambiguity, protect behavior. On stage, characters rarely walk around with a neat self-concept; they collide with other people, contradict themselves, improvise their values in real time. West is pointing at the peculiar arrogance of writing that over-explains interiority - backstory monologues, on-the-nose motivations, tidy psychological summaries - as if humans come with a user manual. It's not that insight is bad; it's that certainty is suspicious. Great acting thrives on the gap between what a person believes about themselves and what their actions reveal.
The subtext is also a critique of "conventional" dramaturgy as a comfort machine. Explaining characters in advance reduces risk: it reassures the audience they are interpreting correctly, and it reassures the writer that the character won't escape the intended meaning. West argues for the opposite: scripts that let characters remain partially unknowable, so discovery can happen in the room, in the pauses, in the misread intentions.
Contextually, it lands as an actor's pushback against literary control. West is championing drama that trusts subtext over summary, and viewers who can tolerate not being spoon-fed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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