| A Look-back and Guide |
Theatre Writer Book |
| Playwrights , Theatre of Europe & USA , October 8, 2025 |
Some good words from dramatists:Chekhov: “It is not the business of writers to accuse or to prosecute. We have enough accusers, prosecutors and gendarmes without them.” David Hare: “Playwrights don't get out much” Joe Penhall: “One of the key components to characterisation is paradox.” Arthur Miller: “The playwright who conceives of performance as a fierce moral cockpit; we could do with more of his kind.” Steve Gooch “Your script will be moving bodies around, bodies with their own stage reality.” More Gooch: “A first play in production and “the impression of having arrived can be illusory for a playwright.” Of the playwright flushed with hope who gives up the day job, only to find his next play rejected,..nothing is sadder.” W B Yeats: “The Abbey Theatre was founded “to speak the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland. We do not desire propagandist plays, nor plays written mainly to serve some obvious moral purpose.” The books: October 9 2025: Caroline Jester & Caridad Svich “Fifty Playwrights on Their Craft” “We are “wrights” not “writers”. We have wrought our plays, not written them, like a shipwright has wrought a ship or a cartwright a cart. Our work is to shape or make a piece of theatre, not to write down words. It's also key that we are making plays; we are making playthings. Our work is to create play and the energy and anarchy and disorder and creativity that play incorporates.” * * * * July 30 2019: Stephen Jeffreys “Playwriting: Structure, Character, How and What to Write” “Stephen Jeffreys (1950-2018) is best known for “the Libertine” but “Valued Friends” is stronger. His career in theatre was long and fertile, including decades of masterclasses on the craft of the playwright. The tributes that he was given last year have few equals. “What Stephen Jeffreys doesn't know about playwriting isn't worth knowing” from Stephen Daldry. From Simon Stephens “Stephen Jeffreys is as important a teacher as he is brilliant a writer… Without him, I wouldn't have been able to write the plays that I have written” * * * * 09 December 2018: Hazel Walford Davies “Now You're Talking” “Dic Edwards recalls that the BBC once wanted to enliven drama. His choice of subject, narcotics in the Valleys, was not wanted. Frank Vickery puts in a reminder that he was translated into Welsh, Gaelic, Spanish, Frisian. An earlier cohort of dramatists went out into the world. Mark Jenkins was performed in the Sidney Opera House. “Unexpected elements of biography appear. Greg Cullen spent a year and a half in Angola in the employ of a company that flew Hercules transport planes. Gary Owen spent a period in Jutland. Chapel is supposed to be a source for culture, in music at least. For Sion Eirian religion is the opposite of morality. “What I found in that upbringing as the son of a minister...was that it stultified anything creative...the writing was more to do with what I escaped from.” * * * * 27 June 2018: Peggy Ramsay “Peggy to Her Playwrights” “The correspondence reveals the sheer pace of a life at the centre of theatre's business. The schedule recorded for 2nd October 1968 covers a dress rehearsal of a client's play, a five minute gap for a 10:30 showing of another author's play. “Television was Work”, Simon Callow wrote in “Love Is Where It Falls”. The day includes a Gandhi prayer meeting and another TV play. The next is scheduled for lawyers, yet more TV drama before a weekend in Brighton loaded with scripts to be read. “The leading quality that pulses through the letters is enthusiasm. 5th May 1967 she sees “Dingo” in Bristol and writes: “I was tremendously moved by it.” To the Head of Plays at the BBC 25th August 1969: “I know that Arden has the finest writing talent in England [sic] today and possibly in the English speaking world.” Her stance towards her clients, 22nd September 1969, is generosity. The agent's due to the playwright is simple- “to foster talent.” * * * * 31 May 2018: David Edgar “How Plays Work” “The eight brisk chapters are thematic: audiences, actions, characters, genre, structure, scenes, devices, endings. The theatre he draws on for illustration vaults the centuries. How Etherege, Goldsmith and Sheridan did what they did is still valid for today. But classics are outnumbered by dramatists of now: Crimp, Eldridge, Griffiths, Keatley, Lavery, Nichols, Penhall, Ravenhill, Shaffer, Shinn, Roy Williams are just a sample. Edgar writes a lot of theatre but manifestly sees a lot too. “Critics' voices are used sparingly in “How Plays Work.” But he cites David Lodge, Michelene Wandor, Jonathan Culler where they are needed. Eric Bentley says all that need be said on the making of dialogue. Properly made dialogue serves four purposes simultaneously. Edgar, like Bentley, is a writer of tautness, his longest chapter being “Devices.” In his terminology “devices are mechanisms for conveying dramatic meaning within scenes...the device goes to the very heart of what theatre is.” The examples of practice that follow take in Rattigan, Shakespeare, Churchill, Pinter, Friel.” * * * * 27 March 2018: John Harding “Shelagh Delaney” “Most first writing for theatre involves the playwright working their way through their admirations. With Shelagh Delaney it was the opposite. At the Opera House in Manchester she saw Terence Rattigan's “Variation on a Theme” and disliked it, thinking she could do better. The result, written in a matter of days, was sent to the Theatre Workshop in Stratford East. Gerry Raffles said of “A Taste of Honey”: “Quite apart from its meaty content, we believe we have found a real dramatist.” In the ever competitive atmosphere between the two innovating theatres the production programme took a swipe at the Royal Court. Their dramatist was the “the antithesis of London's angry young men. She knows what she is angry about.” * * * * 01 December 2017: Shakespeare around the world: Andrew Dickson “Worlds Elsewhere” “Dickson moves to Weimar, the high Olympus of German culture. Schlegel's peerless translation yoked Will of Stratford across the North Sea. Probing into the German Shakespeare Society Dickson quotes snippets of academic declaration from the past. Hermann Ulrici: “we want to de-Anglicise the English Shakespeare. We want to Germanise him.” Karl Fulda: “we have an undeniable right to call him ours, because we have made him thanks to German industry, German spirit and German scholarship.” Nationalism took its short-lived deadly descent into hell and took Shakespeare with it. In 1936 Professor Hans Gǔnther's reading of Shakespeare had turned him into a full-blown eugenicist.” * * * * 15 August 2016: Anthony Minghella: “Minghella on Minghella” “The only theory that I have about acting is that there's a space to work in, and the more of the space I occupy, the less space there is for the actor. So one of the things I try to do is reduce the amount of space that I take up, when I'm working with them, so that they feel that they can move into it. At the same time, there has to be a perimeter around that space so that they feel they can jump into the space without falling over.” “I'm looking for an unabashed scrutiny of the heart, not apologising for it but yielding to it.” * * * * 21 June 2016 : John Lahr “Joy Ride” “The fifty pages on August Wilson are definitive. They are also timely in that a whole new audience has had opportunity to see Dominic Cooke’s award-scooping revival of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” The description of Wilson’s Pittsburgh schooldays as the only black student in a Christian Brothers institution is remorseless. Lahr’s essay is taken from personal encounter. The writer’s mission is harsh “the African-American reclamation of “moral personality- of taking responsibility for one’s actions.” * * * * 22 January 2016: Mel Gussow “Conversations with Miller” “As in the plays Miller spins many a compelling line in conversation. On the maker's commitment- “for an artist to put his soul into a work of art, he can't act. It has to be for real.” On the crafting of the base material, the words themselves, he says “When I tried to write prose, it was the dialogue that became the most persuasive, and the descriptive parts the most laboured. I was aware of that, too. I think that's essentially why I became a playwright.” But the lines are only as good as their realisation. He remembers “the most single magical moment of my life in the theatre.” Lee J Cobb is grappling with Willy Loman. The process is gradual. “Kazan kept saying “he's finding it.” * * * * 15 December 2015: Tony Coult “About Friel: the Playwright and the Work” “Tony Coult's book, neither biography nor pure critical study, is divided in two parts. The first part encompasses “Friel's Roots” and “Friel's Life and Work”. The second, almost 100 pages, is called “Voices and Documents”. The result is a rich compendium of voices and perspectives. Its undercurrent is a meditative study on the relationship of author, nation and theatre.” * * * * 08 December 2015: David Hare “The Blue Touch Paper” “Hare was precociously successful in theatre. Becoming the Royal Court's literary manager at the age of twenty-one did not seem in any way remarkable or precocious. “No-one else wanted the job.” The three-day a week job paid £7.50. He met collaborators early. Snoo Wilson: “an eccentric and highly charged student...Snoo had a shock of unruly brown hair as if someone had just given him fifty volts”. In the era that Portable Theatre was formed it was one of “more than seven hundred theatre companies formed all over the UK- as if small-scale plays- confrontational, angry, direct- might somehow reach a gap in an audience's concerns that nothing else was filling.” * * * * 27 November 2015, 26 November 2015: John Lahr "Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh" “No playwright can survive critically decade on decade. Come the era of Grotowski, the Living Theatre, Ionescu and Life Magazine is writing “Williams is looking into the rearview mirror. Other playwrights have progressed: Williams has suffered an infantile regression.” In 1972 the same paper publishes an article on gay writers in concealment. Williams responds in the pages of the Village Voice: “I’ve nothing to conceal. Homosexuality isn’t the theme of my plays. They’re about all human relationships. I’ve never faked it.” Lahr adds that if Williams’ early goal was “the emancipation of desire and the celebration of the wild at heart” then the world of theatre had caught up with its trailblazer.” * * * * 18 June 2015: Stephen Unwin “the Complete Brecht Toolkit” “As a toolkit it is comprised of five sections. “In Context” tackles the life and the influences, intellectual and aesthetic. Unwin deflates the notion of his subject as ideologue on his first page. “A man with one theory is lost. He must have several, four, many!” declares Brecht. The influences on the voraciously reading young writer are manifold. His enthusiasm for Shakespeare is as great and as genuine as that for popular culture. Among the classics of the German theatre his preference goes to Kleist. Unwin links Azdak back to the corrupt Judge Adam of “the Broken Jug.” * * * * 17 June 2015: Stephen Parker “Bertolt Brecht” “Parker touches on Brechtian theory lightly but succinctly. He points out that Piscator preceded Brecht in the view that political theatre should discourage identification with character. The book’s richness of biographical detail shows that the forging of artistic originality is a process both gradual and multiple. In the 1920s Brecht is writing poetry virtually ever day. He is immersing himself in Kipling,Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson; although Parker does not mention it the same authors were crucial for the young Jorge Luis Borges, a continent away in distance but just a year apart in date of birth.” * * * * 15 June 2015: Clare Wallace “The Theatre of David Greig” “A late section of “the Theatre of David Greig” comprises eighteen pages of transcribed conversation between Greig and Clare Wallace. He touches on the geography of his audience. The Central Belt has a population larger than that of the whole of Wales yet the writer says of his audience “there is a group”, the number probably closer to the hundreds than the thousands. His “Dunsinane”, with all the profile of a RSC production, was seen by just eight hundred Scots. And the venues of Scotland do not have competition in the form of a nearby Bristol or Bath or day trips even to Barbican or Royal Court.” * * * * 20 May 2015: David Hare “Writing Left-Handed” “Hare writes that he does not come to prose as first choice. His choice of play-writing rests on an ability to write dialogue. “The theatre”, he says, is “the most subtle and complex way of addressing an audience he can find.” The downside can be terrible in “the minute agony of seeing plays fail in front of an audience.” But the upside compensates: “one of the great pleasures of writing for the theatre in this country is that the ideas you express can be taken so seriously and enter so smoothly into the currency of political discussion.” He sees the form as playing an exalted role: “A good play ventilates democracy.” * * * * 09 February 2015: Editors Tim Price & Kate Wasserberg: “Contemporary Welsh Plays” “Kate Wasserberg rightly sees “confidence and authenticity” in these plays. But she also writes of “Bruised” that it “barrels towards a heart-breaking revelation that would only be possible on a stage.” To read these plays is to be reminded that they were not created for tablet or paper but to be enacted as sound, light and movement. “Thus “Tonypandemonium” is inseparable from the brio and high energy of its Lopez-ian treatment. Matthew Trevannion’s heart-stopping climax revolves around a phrase “This stops tonight” and it is repeated seven times. The author also slips in a visual trick, a borrowing from “the Sixth Sense”, that is purely and only theatre.” * * * * 17 November 2014: Tim Price “Plays 1” “Price keeps his introduction crisp and to the point. It is thus filled with moments of sharp interest. But then he is an unreconstructed Aristotelian. Plot is indeed the first principle. A piece of paper on his wall reads “Make story your God.” He is acute on the craft. “Deifying story is something I try when I find I am enjoying writing too much.” He has learned to beware “the over-articulated emotion.” In a climate with an over-tendency toward a neo-Romantic notion of art as self-located and artistic identity as self-declarative, Price asserts the distance that is necessary between subject and object. “I am the vehicle for story, not the other way round. I take pride in my discipline and little else.” * * * * 26 November 2013: David Mamet: Ira Nadel “A Life in the Theatre” “Mamet has always done men, rougher than those of Neil Labute, less self-wondering than Miller. Richard Bean attributes his own drama career to his time in a Humberside industrial bakery. “I worked in so many parts of the city” Mamet is quoted here. “I sold real estate. I worked with carpets, I washed windows. I was a busboy and a waiter, I did retail sales, inventory. I worked in a truck factory, a canning factory.” * * * * 02 September 2013: Steve Gooch “Writing a Play” “Writing for theatre is craft and it is not the craft required for television. “Your script will be moving bodies around, bodies with their own stage reality.” At the time of his writing his view is that “the consequences of television writing on stage writing have been mainly disastrous.” He does not care for the focus on heightened naturalism that goes hand in hand with a snippety, bitty use of time and place. An early writer should learn the discipline. Constructing an action that requires a single set and elapses over no more than a few days is how to do it.” * * * * 22 December 2012, 21 December 2012: Stephen Sondheim “Look, I Made a Hat” “Theatre is collaboration and Sondheim is generous and revealing towards his collaborators. Admiration for writer James Lapine runs deep: “I came up with plots, while he came up with images…James was also the first (and only) writer I’ve worked with who thinks like a director”. He describes Richard Jones’ 1990 premiere in London of “Into the Woods”. It features a giant eyeball and a twenty-foot long finger: “Unlike revivals which are hybrids of the original source, and the director’s additions, this one was a complete reinvention.” When Declan Donnellan does “Sweeney Todd” for the National Theatre he gives it a new “whispered intensity.” * * * * 11 November 2012: Julian Woolford “How Musicals Work” “No-one is better suited than Julian Woolford to write this book. His experience marries the role of practitioner and explicator. His adaptation as a musical of “the Railway Children” has played in forty countries. He teaches at Goldsmiths College on Britain’s only degree course in the writing of musicals. “How Musicals Work” combines musical and lyrical analysis, dramatic theory, some exercises, a guide to legal and copyright matters and a rich selection of tales, both admiring and cautionary, from the industry.” 0 * * * * 09 December 2011, 07 December 2011: Stephen Sondheim “Finishing the Hat” “An early song from “Saturday Night” (1954) spurns the word “airplane” in favour of the archaic “aeroplane.” But then it is stressed to be sung as aer-oh-plane” rather than “aer-uh-plane.” “Mix”, written for, but cut, from “West Side Story”, contains too many uses of the letters “s” and “n”. The result makes “the Jets sound more like a radiator than a gang on the warpath.” In “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” the writer commits “the error of bring witty instead of comic.” “America” contains some lines that are “respectably sharp and crisp but some melt in the mouth as gracelessly as peanut butter and are impossible to comprehend.” * * * * 18 May 2011: Christopher Bigsby “Arthur Miller” “The second motif is the critical ire, centred in Miller’s native USA. Theatre, and new work, is ever-present even if intermittent. The plays of the second half of his life are subject to withering blasts of criticism. In 2003 the Mayor of Jerusalem makes a public speech declaring that Miller reached his artistic peak fifty years before. At the first night of “After the Fall” James Baldwin walks out. Noel Coward calls him “adolescent and sodden with self-pity.” Susan Sontag attacks the conflation of marital stress with public persecution. “Intellectual weak-mindedness… belaboured” she complains, “trite…wretched.” “Time Magazine calls “The Price” “a museum piece…slack, jangled and flat.” The playwright himself, in a later article, is declared “obsolete.” Martin Gottfried agrees. “The playwright has had his day.” On “Clara” and “I Can’t Remember Anything”, the pair of one-acters that constitute 1987’s “Danger: Memory”, Frank Rich writes they are “gray”, the writing “studied and ponderous.” * * * * 10 December 2009: Richard Eyre “Talking Theatre” USA “Eyre inevitably asks as to the influences and the answer is distinctive. “The Blues, as I see that as the best literature that Black Americans have. And rooted inside the Blues is a whole philosophical system at work.” Wilson had no dramatic model when he started. “I just more or less forged ahead with my own sense of what the story should be, or what the play should be.” “Eyre rightly distinguishes that the political is not the polemical. “That's not what I'm about” says Wilson. “I don't want to write a polemical play. I work as an artist and I have something I want to say as an artist. So for me the aesthetic statement is the most important important thing of the work.” * * * * 07 December 2009: Richard Eyre “Talking Theatre” playwrights “As for antecedents Harold Pinter: “I was very, very, very engaged with Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans, and the Jacobeans, from all my teens and all my youth and throughout my twenties. Webster left an enormous impression on me, and I read Shakespeare long before I read Beckett.” Peter Shaffer: “I don't think I had any playwright models at all, other than the great comedies, say of the eighteenth century. Sheridan was a model in a way.” * * * * 08 October 2009: Richard Eyre “Talking Theatre” directors and Brecht “William Gaskill, the most Brechtian of British directors, says the same. “I learned most of all the use of space, the sense of the empty stage, that everything on the stage should be essential, and there should be nothing unnecessary, which didn't mean it shouldn't be rich or colourful or vital.” * * * * 20 October 2008, 18 October 2008: Michael Frayn “Stage Directions” “The collection brings together the introductions to the published plays. These divide between the plays of his own authorship and the adaptations from Russia drama. These may be occasional pieces but they are not lightweight “Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events”, begins the essay on “Copenhagen”, “it's reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history.” There follows forty-five pages of historical, thematic and dramatic exegesis. No more need be said about his brain-box of a play.” * * * * 28 March 2008: David Hare “Obedience, Struggle and Revolt” “Playwrights don't get out much” he says in a speech. The key to understanding Hare is that he is a moralist, fiercely and unchangeably. We know thunderingly what he is against but like Orwell writing about Dickens it is not so clear what he is for. He does not like conservative government but he does not like his lot much either. “People are tired of being lectured...that there is no alternative to a cowardly Labour government. They know there is. It's a courageous Labour government.” But we have no idea what his ideas might be for courage in action.” |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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