Writing Dialogue About Power: What Nina's Audition Scenes Teach Student Writers

Asked how to write dialogue that shows a power imbalance between characters, most students reach for confrontation — a shout, a threat, a monologue. The stronger answer is constraint: writing dialogue about power means deciding what each character is not free to say, then building scenes where that limit is felt. A recent Guardian-reviewed production of Nina at Battersea Arts Centre, in which women repeatedly audition for the role of Chekhov's aspiring actor under a needling director, demonstrates the toolkit: one repeated scenario, unspoken rules, escalating subtext and strategic silence. Every one of those tools transfers to a play or a short story.

One room, played on repeat

Caroline Williams's Nina, reviewed at Battersea Arts Centre in October 2026, runs on a ruthlessly simple premise. Women take turns auditioning for the role of Nina — the aspiring actor in Chekhov's The Seagull — in an experimental production staged by a director the reviewer calls Goran, a 'sombrely pretentious wunderkind' played by Rowan Polonski. The Guardian piece describes the result as a riveting series of horribly invasive auditions and names its subject plainly: men, power, and what women perform to survive the room. This article works from the published review rather than the full production text, so treat these as the reviewer's observations — but even at excerpt length, the structure is a craft lesson.

The structural choice worth stealing is repetition. Same room, same task, different women: the scenario never changes, so the only variable is how each character navigates the same pressure. That is what makes power visible, because a single scene can always be explained by personality, while a pattern of scenes can only be explained by the system producing it. For your own writing, resist spreading an imbalance across a whole plot; compress it into one situation replayed. Our first exercise: write a twelve-line audition, interview or family-dinner scene, then write it twice more with a different character in the weak position, changing nothing except their lines. Read all three aloud and mark the moment in each where the room's temperature shifts.

Unspoken rules and obedience phrases

The Guardian excerpt lists the rules the women follow, and they are worth quoting because none of them is spoken aloud in the scene: 'Smile. Introduce yourself. Say you're such a big fan. Now do whatever he tells you.' Notice the shape of that sequence. The instructions are tiny and procedural — smile, introduce yourself — while the compliance they demand is enormous. That gap is where a reader locates power: not in the words themselves but in the disproportion between what is asked and what is given. Obedience phrases work the same way. They sound like manners, admin or warmth, and they carry threat only by implication — which is exactly why the powerful character can plausibly deny that anything is wrong.

The review offers one more gift: Goran, we are told, is the type of director to dismiss the need for an intimacy coordinator while claiming credit for having one in the room. Craft-wise, this is a contradiction the weaker party must absorb without comment, and letting nobody on stage name it is the point. In your drafts, allow powerful characters to contradict themselves, to make small unfairnesses sound like generosity, and to go uncorrected inside the scene. Our second exercise: write a page in which a figure of authority gives five small instructions. The subordinate's replies must each be warmer and longer than the instruction deserves, and neither character may state the fear, the resentment or the rule. If you feel the urge to explain, cut the explanation and sharpen the compliance instead.

Escalating subtext and staged silence

Subtext escalates through context, not vocabulary. 'Say you're such a big fan' is merely awkward the first time we watch it happen; by the third or fourth audition, after we have seen what compliance costs, the same words arrive as a test. The technique is to keep the powerful character's language nearly constant and let accumulated context do the escalating — or to let the requests grow while the politeness never wavers. Silence belongs to the same family. A staged pause is the weaker character's only available move, the one line they are free to deliver. On the page, a beat before an answer is a sentence; in fiction, render it through what the character notices instead of says.

Use both tools with discipline. Mark pauses deliberately rather than decoratively: a silence earns its place only when the character had something specific to say and was not free to say it, and the reader can half-sense what that something is. Silence-as-mystery, where a character withholds for no reason the scene supports, reads as vagueness rather than power. Our third exercise: take a two-page argument and delete every second line spoken by the less powerful character, replacing each with a pause or a small physical action. If the power reading sharpens, the lines were noise; if it goes blurry, the deleted lines were carrying subtext your silences cannot hold, and you should restore the strongest one.

Moving it into your competition entry

The transfer differs by form. In prose, you have no stage directions, so power must live in dialogue tags, action beats and narration of what is withheld — though the narrator can do one thing a playwright cannot: state the rule outright, as in 'She had learned to smile first.' Use that sparingly, because a named rule stops being unspoken. In a play, the rule must be inferable from behaviour across repetitions, which is why Nina's structure is so instructive. In both forms, keep the powerful character's dialogue within plausible deniability: they should be able to claim, sounding sincere, that nothing improper happened. That deniability is what forces every other character — and the audience — to do the interpreting.

Before submitting a dialogue-heavy entry, run a short audit. Can a reader state your unspoken rule in one sentence, even though no character says it? Does at least one silence carry a specific unsaid line? Does the powerful character's language stay smaller than their control? Our fourth exercise is the rule audit itself: swap drafts with a peer, and each of you writes down the unspoken rule you inferred from the other's scene. If their sentence does not match your intent, the subtext is not yet on the page. And if you are entering a competition such as the Cosmopolitan Writing Award, remember that any AI assistance must be disclosed and the work must remain primarily your own — exercises like these are precisely the original craft decisions that should be yours.

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