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    The Secret Life of Plays
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    The Secret Life of Plays
    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of Plays
    Ebook255 pages5 hours

    The Secret Life of Plays

    By Steve Waters

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A guide to the hidden workings of plays and the trade secrets that govern their writing - by the acclaimed playwright Steve Waters.

    Drawing on a wide range of drama, both historical and modern, Waters takes the reader through the key elements of dramatic writing - scenes, acts, space, time, characters, language and images - to show how a play is more than the sum of its parts, with as much inner vitality as a living organism.

    Almost uniquely amongst accounts of playwriting, Waters' book looks at the ways in which good plays move their audiences, generating powerful emotional responses that often defy conventional analysis.

    The Secret Life of Plays is for playwrights at any stage of their career, and will inspire and inform drama students as well as working actors and directors. Most of all it is for anyone who has ever laughed or cried in the theatre - and wants to know why.

    'Thrilling... crammed with good, old-fashioned close reading of a diverse range of plays, which means that although Waters does primarily address those who write for the theatre, he does not forget those who like watching and reading it' TLS

    'Essential for aspiring playwrights' Whatsonstage.com

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNick Hern Books
    Release dateMay 16, 2013
    ISBN9781780011974
    Unavailable
    The Secret Life of Plays
    Author

    Steve Waters

    Steve Waters’ plays include Limehouse (Donmar Warehouse; Temple (Donmar Warehouse); Why Can’t We Live Together? (Menagerie Theatre/Soho/Theatre503); Europa, as co-author (Birmingham Repertory Theatre/Dresden State Theatre/Teatr Polski Bydgoszcz/Zagreb Youth Theatre); Ignorance/Jahiliyyah (Hampstead Downstairs); Little Platoons, The Contingency Plan, Capernaum (part of Sixty-Six Books; Bush, London); Fast Labour (Hampstead, in association with West Yorkshire Playhouse); Out of Your Knowledge (Menagerie Theatre/Pleasance, Edinburgh/East Anglian tour); World Music (Sheffield Crucible, and subsequent transfer to the Donmar Warehouse); The Unthinkable (Sheffield Crucible); English Journeys, After the Gods (Hampstead); a translation/adaptation of a new play by Philippe Minyana, Habitats (Gate, London/ Tron, Glasgow); Flight Without End (LAMDA). Writing for television and radio includes Safe House (BBC4), The Air Gap, The Moderniser (BBC Radio 4), Scribblers and Bretton Woods (BBC Radio 3). Steve ran the Birmingham MPhil in Playwriting between 2006 and 2011 and now runs the MA Creative Writing: Script at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Secret Life of Plays, also published by Nick Hern Books.

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