Dramatic Character in an Age of Digital Reproduction

When I’m teaching playwriting there’s usually a bit where we talk about character. Now here’s the thing: I tend not to think about character separate from the play. What I mean by that is that I might well draw a diagram of the structure or describe for my own satisfaction the backstory on a separate document, but I’ll rarely do anything like that for character. In this, I’m pretty Aristotelian: character isn’t what you send people into the story with, it’s what they come out of the story with.

I’ve stolen an image to describe what character is not from David Harrower: it’s the ‘Mr Potato Head Theory of Character’. That is, there is an idea some people have that to give a character depth, or make them more rounded, you stick facts on them: give them an eccentric hobby, or a peculiar catchphrase, or some speech defect, or a limp, or a fashion error. It’s the Mr Potato Head Theory because it implies that you can individualise your characters by sticking odd things onto them until they look freakish enough that they won’t be confused with anyone else. It doesn’t work, obviously, because they just end up being remote figures, actually lacking in individuality, because they’re really just receptacles for a whole basket of tics and quirks.

I’ve slightly revised this view due to a recent experience. I’m writing a play that exists entirely online, mainly through social media, specifically Twitter. To create the characters for this play we - the co-author Daniel Bye and I - set up a number of extra Twitter accounts in new names. We’ve got around ten each. To set up a Twitter account is a simple thing. You need to have an email account and you need to think of your Twitter name. Once you’ve done that, Twitter takes you through a simple process of creating your biog, encouraging you to follow a few people, and that’s it.

Twitter is not a place where it’s easy to create a deep sense of character. You get - as everyone knows - 140 characters per tweet. It’s a place for the aperçu, the one-liner, the observation, or the pun. And you can only accumulate a sense of character over a great many of those, and then only really in the moments where the wit falters and something else comes through.

But where you can get a sudden immersive rush of ‘character’ is through who you follow. When you set up the account, Twitter encourages you, as I said, to follow people, but it conveniently groups people into topics. So when I set up some of the characters and had little more than a name and a function in the story, I went a bit Mr Potato Head: okay, maybe he’s into classical music, so I’ll follow a load of classical music feeds. Maybe she’s a fan of Arsenal, so she can follow loads of fan and news feeds. Usually, I put two or three of these together: so she likes local politics, Arsenal, and prog rock. Very Mr Potato Head.

What this means is that when I call up their Twitter timeline, I suddenly get an intense burst of what it might be like to inhabit that set of interests. Suddenly I’ve got people talking about these things, a wealth of language and references and a style and attitude towards these things; there are links to websites and photos; there are jokes and pearly wisdoms. And because most of them have two or three of these interests, I get that interesting textural clash, where @Arsenal’s ‘Thomas Vermaelen admits it is a relief to be playing consistently again after missing most of last season - arsenal.com/news/news-arch…’ is followed immediately by  @MrHarryCole’s ‘RT @nicholaswatt: No 10 declines to comment on allegations about Jeremy Hunt. 'We are not providing a running commentary' <- told ya’ which in turn gives way to @StuartAndrewMP’s ‘Attending the Disability Group APPG meeting to hear DWP Minister, Maria Miller to hear about changes to DLA’. What this means is that it’s not just the contents that I’m negotiating, it’s imagining what sort of person would negotiate between these different things.

It is a bit Potato Head, but it’s like not just plugging in the eyes and ears but also suddenly being given what they see and hear. It’s a very interesting experience where you get to put yourself in someone’s digital shoes. It may seem like a rather artificial thing, but, hey, quite a lot of my time, my actual lived experience, takes place in front of Twitter. It’s quite a thing to experience what it would be like to be someone else in front of Twitter, especially when one of my (@danrebellato) tweets sails by and I see its flimsiness, its superficiality against the intense political wonking and the extended goonerism. I’ve found myself since wondering how someone would feel if they got access to my Twitter feed, how they’d do at being me.

This prompts me then to wonder whether we currently experience our personalities most sharply in social media. No, let me say hastily, of course we don’t; we experience ourselves most sharply in the way we love and maintain friendships and the way we fear and react and cry and think about the world. But Facebook and Twitter do require you to force your personality through tiny holes and some people reveal a lot about themselves by the way they navigate these tiny holes - and they do so in a rather theatrical way. Just as the stage places an intense magnifying frame around the things people do and say, so do the minimal spaces of the status update. It’s interesting how quickly people can reveal themselves to be smart, well-informed, and witty or vulgar, ignorant, or self-regarding. And I can say for myself that I’ve discovered things about myself through Twitter; there’s a sort of phantom version of yourself that you dangle, like a seductress’s leg, to the passing trade,  which is both rather like you and not particularly like you, which is, after all, how I feel a lot of the time: not like me, or, to put it in less essentialist terms, I feel I am, like The Fall, always different, always the same.

So I guess I’m wondering if, In a sense, our experience of ourselves, in an age of digital reproduction, is becoming more dramaturgical.