Learning Outcomes:
• Develop confidence and ability within their own writing style.
• Yet also be able to explore a range of approaches and registers as regards writing for performance, in a variety of media, and a grasp of their contexts and underlying principles.
• Demonstrate a sound understanding of dramaturgical structure and function, within and across scenes.
• Be able to collaborate effectively in a creative environment, and to offer discerning support for the work of others.
• Have the capability to initiate creative and interpretative projects setting goals that are attainable and challenging.
• Have developed the confidence to see projects through to completion, and to expose them to audiences and critics.
• Have a strongly heightened sense of the need to make an audience care about what they are seeing.
• Develop the ability to be bold and original in creative problem-solving.
• Gain an understanding and respect for the diversity of creative approaches.
• Benefit from the supports provided for individual aspirations and the realization of dramatic concepts.
Indicative Module Content:
Seminars- Provisional:
Wk 1. The empty page. The empty space. The creative role of fear/excitement.
Classroom protocols: constructive criticism - how to be a productive "critic"
What’s worth saying?
15-minute writing exercise based on random allocation of 1 prop, 1 location and 2 characters. Evaluation of “promise”
Situation and concept – dramatic impetus and immanence.
Beginnings. Texts: Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard. Shelagh Stephenson, The Memory of Water .
For next week – verbatim discussion to be brought into class.
Wk 2. Where to begin?
Inspiration and perspiration. Sitting with the idea.
Phenomenological “waiting”, and beginning too soon.
Analysis of verbatim theatre exercise.
Limbering up: 15- minute writing exercise, "A strange thing happened in my town..."
The dramatic “hook”, and “holding the boards”.
Text: Excerpt from Ayckbourn: The Crafty Art of Playmaking plus You Tube clip.
For next week – altering the plan: deconstructing Ayckbourn’s Gameplan.
Wk 3. The primacy of Theme. How do you evaluate potential ideas?
Top-down (Aristotelan) and bottom-up (Dialogic) playwriting.
Governing premise, set and setting. The ties that bind.
Mental “modelling” – defeating expectation.
Text: Paula Vogel, How I Learned to Drive. Enda Walsh, Penelope
Exercise: creating a binding hypothetical.
Wk 4. “A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine” (Beckett, Company)
Does voice determine character, or character, voice?
Multivocality and the mediatised cacophony
Excerpts from Paul Castagno: New Playwriting Strategies.
Exercise: Broken frames – register, slang, argot, “over- and under-specification” –
the Wikipedia-based adaptation.
Pinter, The Caretaker, Caryl Churchill, Top Girls
Wk 5. Monologue – words in a void / dramatic pretext.
The narrated now, the edited self. New research on our “storied brains”
Video and Radio monologues
Rona Munro, David Mamet, Samuel Beckett
Creating and populating the offstage universe.
Task – to write a monologue for an actor - Charlie Hughes – to be performed after the break.
Wk 6. The word become flesh – bodies in space, delivery in time.
Students will work with the actor in front of their peers to direct their short monologue.
Intonation, sound and silence, body-language, tempo and tension.
Drama without words – Charlie Chaplin, The Lion.
Comedy: fear, disgust, embarrassment.
Empathy and mirror-neurons. The audience - quasi-participatory “acts” and “the bodymind”.
Wk 7. Reflection on monologue as a form
Conor McPherson, This Lime Tree Bower, Online examples.
The confessional voice. Creating intimacy, crafting identification.
The merits and demerits of using monologue in longer play structure – “hitting pause”.
Wk 8. Dialogue 1.
Scene-work.
What constitutes a scene – “beats” and arc.
Keeping the “super-objective” in mind – eyes on the prize.
The web of implication and intention. Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
New research on “mentalizing”.
My Dinner with Andre: Wallace Shawn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckK_UCajjM
Wk 9 Dialogue 2
Cliff-hangers – the need to know.
Ending the scene on a question
David Hare Page Eight (film) Stacey Gregg, Override
Exercise: writing “open”, dynamic scenes
Mutual incomprehension, cross-talk and stratagems.
Task: draft of 5-minute play idea.
Wk 10. Tighteners – “suspending” and suspense.
The dramatic control of Time. Marlowe’s Faustus
The remembered present. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Susan Hill, The Woman in Black, Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, and other excavatory riddles.
Tempo, rhythm, frequency.
The exposition trap.
Wk 11. Adaptation. The Woman in Black.
Sections from the novel, the stage-play and the film.
One-act plays – first reading/response session
Empathy. "Tighteners".
Writing is re-writing - the editing process
Creative discovery /self-mining
Kill your darlings
Wk 12. One-on-one response to short play draft.
Keeping the elements in focus – using blueprint from,
Smiley. S., Playwriting: The Structure of Action (2005)