ABSTRACT
Playwriting offers a practical guide to the creation of text for live performance. It contains a wealth of exercises for amateur and professional playwrights. Usable in a range of contexts, the book works as:
- a step-by-step guide to the creation of an individual play
- a handy resource for a teacher or workshop leader
- a stimulus for the group-devised play.
The result of Noël Greig's thirty years' experience as a playwright, actor, director and teacher, Playwriting is the ideal handbook for anyone who engages with playwriting and is ultimately concerned with creating a story and bringing it to life on the stage.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|1 pages
Getting going and warming up
Actors begin rehearsals with a physical and vocal warm-up. This helps them to clear the body and the mind of daily distractions and tensions, focus them on the space they are in and prepare them for the task in hand. Writers also need strategies to clear themselves of the clutter and access the open channel
part |1 pages
Part three – thinking about your life
chapter |7 pages
FINDING THE STORY Exercise 24 Everyday stories
Definition of ‘story’: ‘in the every day sense, any narrative or tale recount- ing a series of events’. A good test of good story is to see if it can be ‘boiled down’ to the essence of what it recounts. Some examples: Two young people from warring families fall in love, everything is against them, their attempts to make it right fail, they die Participants: Individual (24 hours)
chapter |11 pages
Exercise 29 Place-association dialogue
Participants: All groups, individual (5–8 minutes)
chapter |3 pages
Exercise 38 Writing is . . .
Participants: All groups, individual (1 minute) Participants: All groups, individual (3–5 minutes)
chapter |9 pages
TACKLING THE ISSUE Exercise 43 The context of the project
In the following work we will look at how a seemingly most limiting learning-area can be the stimulus for an original work for performance in the educational context. You can use it in a number of ways: As a stimulus for writing a play of your own. As a stimulus for writing a play as a group, e.g., your class. Participants: All groups, individual Fiction 1. The commission
chapter 4|26 pages
Building a character
In Chapter 1 we looked at ways in which fictional characters can be developed from material that is instantly available to us in daily life. We began to look at the components of what we mean by ‘character’: inner- and outer-life, personal history, characteristics, etc. Now we will create a fully rounded character, whose story will contain the seeds of a full dramatic narrative.
chapter 5|1 pages
Finding the story 87
As we have begun to discover, a story is an artificially constructed sequence of events that are rooted in the actions of the main character(s), or prota- meaning ‘combatant’. So our protagonist is our ‘first combatant’, the one
chapter |9 pages
Exercise 84 The conflict between the conscious and the unconscious
Participants: All groups, individual
part |2 pages
Part three – story model and issue
chapter 6|2 pages
Location
If you are an individual writer or a collaborative/devising group writing for a conventional theatre-performance, you will be thinking about the loca- tion(s) that the story takes place in. There are many opinions about how much information and detail the writer needs to supply for the director, designer, lighting designer and sound-artist in order to realise the physical
chapter |10 pages
LOCATION AS CHARACTER Exercise 89 A declaration of love
Location and setting spell out certain ‘rules’, or conventions of behaviour, that will operate on the characters, just as they do in life. If I wish I do it. Participants: All groups, individual
chapter 7|1 pages
The individual voice
The quote is not from a play, but is the opening line from a story by the
chapter |1 pages
LANGUAGE AS MUSIC
We have already talked about how any good actor will instinctively take logue are fresh and original. They will be interested in plot, character- development, etc., but their actor’s imagination will be primarily engaged with the words you have chosen for them to speak. You may be writing in
chapter |2 pages
Exercise 104 Street, pub, playground
Participants: All groups, individual (15–20 minutes)
chapter |1 pages
THE HAIKU
Finally, here is an exercise that you can use at any stage of the writing process, but which is particularly useful when you are working on draft two. This is when – as we have seen – you want to be clear on the follow- ing points: what is the scene, act or play really about, really saying, really doing? What is the heart and essence of it?
chapter 9|5 pages
Performance projects
Much of the work in this book can feed into the creation of large-scale performance projects and devised work: school, college, community, etc. Exercises 11–13 can for example, as we have seen, culminate with the pre- sentation of group-written poems. These could be developed further, with the addition of music, movement, costume, etc. I have seen material from
chapter |2 pages
Appendix A: Adapting the work to the context
When I first started leading writing workshops, I had had no formal training as a teacher, mentor or workshop-leader. All I knew was – through having worked for years as actor, director and playwright – that there were certain useful underlying principles as to ‘how stories are made’, and that these
chapter |2 pages
Appendix B: Leading the process
This book is for the individual writer and for groups engaged with creating texts for performance. It is also for people who are leading the writing process, be it the teacher in the class, the workshop leader, the individual writer’s mentor, the visiting tutor, the one-to-one dramaturge, or the
chapter |1 pages
WORKING AS A GROUP A METHOD FOR STRUCTURED FEEDBACK
Unless we are engaging in a group activity that has clear traditions, strict rules and an enemy (football, the army), we have a bit of a tendency to find collaborative work problematic. That is a generalisation of course, but . . . . Having observed and led many groups of people who have come together in a creative context, I note that there is a certain urge to push
chapter |2 pages
REVEAL YOURSELF
I have talked a little about the role of the teacher/mentor/workshop leader and what that has meant to me in my work as a theatre practitioner. What I have not mentioned fully, though have alluded to, is my belief that a cru- cial aspect of teaching is to include some appropriate level of revealing of yourself to those you are leading.
