Authors Intentions

This question of intent has been rattling around in my head like moths banging at a window for the last few days, and refuses to settle down. There are many gaps between quill and script. Some are temporal, geographical, cultural and linguistic. Some gaps are bigger than others. But they all act as obstacles to understanding. Imagine I was an Ecuadorian about to stage a play at the Quito Dramatic Centre. It is an Australian script, and contains a reference to New Zealanders and sheep. What would I make of this? Though in Australia we can chuckle at this reference, as an Ecuadorian it is likely to make little sense to me. Artistic creations are intimately welded to their cultural environments, and if we are to decipher the text of a play, we need to be able to bridge those gaps somehow. jessmess and craig respectively note the imperatives of the day: "most playwrights probably don't think past the first staging of their play, and novelists past finishing the novel" and "[Shakespeare] was there, on the stage, creating the end product which would be viewed by a particular contemporary audience". These observations suggest to me the work of Stock, Aitken and Waterman (SAW) in the eighties, who wrote and produced a prodigious amount of music for the likes of Rick Astley, Kylie, Mel & Kim. I wonder what thoughts were uppermost in the minds of this song-writing team? Can we attribute to them a thirst for musical excellence? Or perhaps their predominant motivation was to achieve commercial success for those singers and themselves. Their material, like Shakespeare's, was drawn from the culture of the time and turned into highly successful pop tunes. What we can conclude is that SAW wrote and produced highly accessible material that resonated with the recording buying public of that time. I further conclude that that was their intention. I've never been a fan of SAW, and I viewed their music as shallow, blatantly commercial, and of limited artistic merit. But something happens when you take these songs out of their original setting. If you peel off the poppy commercial veneer and allow the lyrics to determine a musical approach (as opposed to the reverse - making a song fit the style of the time), you can get some amazing interpretations. So did SAW write their songs with this in mind, or were they solely interested in what would be commercially acceptable at the time? You may wonder what relevance songwriting has to directing plays . . . We can safely conclude that a playwright who created a play intended to do so . . . otherwise we would have no play. But can we know how they intended that play to be directed? Were they writing just for a specific audience, or did they have something more universal in mind? In many cases, the directing intention is obvious: here is a tragedy, here is a farce and so on. But it is not always clear what changes we can make because the world has changed. If we believe we should abide by the writer's intentions, how do we do that? Should we replicate the fly-by-the-seatedness of, say, Shakespeare, and replicate The Globe. Possibly we could do that, but it would be virtually incomprehensible if just because of the language of the time. Does a transformation of the material into current idiom represent an abuse of the of original intention? What would the writer think if we did this? We can make assumptions about what an acceptable transformation would be, but I've asserted before, these can only be assumptions unless the writer specifically tells us. That means a writer has to think beyond the immediacy of the play's premiere and consider what might happen many years into the future, and then send a message to those directors in that future. If they don't do that . . . then, as I've noted before, our interpretations are based only on assumptions.