How to Read a Play: Script Analysis for Directors

✍ Scribed by Damon Kiely

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 217
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

How to Read a Play outlines the cruicial work required for a play before the first rehearsal, the first group reading or even the before the cast have met. Directors and dramaturgs must know how to analyze, understand and interpret a play or performance text if they hope to bring it to life on the stage.

This book provides a broad range of tools and methods that can be used when reading a text, including:

1. Lessons from the past. What can we learn from Aristotle, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Vakhtangov, Brecht and Harold Clurman? This section establishes the models and methods that underpin much of a director’s work today.
2. A survey of current practices in Western theatre. A combination of research, interviews and observation of practical work addresses the main stages in understanding a play, such as getting to know characters, sharing ideas, mapping the action and grappling with language.
3. A workbook, setting out twenty one ways of breaking down a play, from the general to the particular.

Contributions, reflections and interjections from a host of successful directors make this the ideal starting point for anyone who wants to direct a play, or even devise one of their own. This wide range of different approaches, options and techniques allows each reader to create their own brand of play analysis.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 Lessons from the Past
3 Survey of Current Practices
4 Reading a Play without a Script
5 Workbook Chapter
Appendices
APPENDIX 1
APPENDIX 2
APPENDIX 3
APPENDIX 4
APPENDIX 5
APPENDIX 6
APPENDIX 7
List of Interviews
Biographies of Interviewees
Bibliography
Index