The Playwright's Manifesto

"Too many playwrights have forgotten how to write with a genuinely theatrical voice, or perhaps they never learned? Since the advent of naturalism in the late 19th century, the focus of playwriting has been on representing a realistic view of human life to the extent that theatrical metaphor and symbol and gesture have got somewhat lost along the way. Today, a playwright is often more concerned with the inner, intra, and outer psychological conflicts of their characters than they are about the vast array of theatrical techniques at their disposal. They are obsessed with real people and real situations, instead of telling their stories in glorious three-dimensional theatricality. This book is a cry for the theatrical. The Playwright's Manifesto investigates and analyses the techniques of past playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare and asks what we can learn from them and how we can adapt these ideas in our present-day practice? Teaching through example, it examines the exciting theatrical ideas contained in the work of the new wave of women writers like Lucy Prebble, Alice Birch, Jasmine Lee-Jones, Phoebe Eclair-Powell, Clare Barron, Sarah Ruhl, and Ella Hickson. These are playwrights who take full advantage of theatre's strengths, writing plays that demand to be produced on the stage rather than in another medium; plays that break rules and try new things; plays that delight in their use of non-naturalistic form, image, and language; plays that paint vivid abstract pictures; plays that are big in imagination; plays that put the poetic before the prosaic; plays that engage our imagination and intelligence as well as our emotions. The time has come for playwrights to think theatrically again. To truly embrace the primal, imaginative thrill of a live theatre experience that does not pretend the audience is not there. This book will be a creative manifesto for the next generation of playwrights"--