How to Read a Play

Portada
Grove Press, 1999 - 113 páginas
How to Read a Play is an introductory guide to the art of translating the printed page of a play or screenplay into dramatic mental images; it has been a classic among actors, directors, and writers for the past twenty years. Now fully updated and revised, the books devotes a chapter exclusively to screenplays, noting the intrinsic differences between a screenplay and a playscript and thus bringing this invaluable classic up to date.How should we read stage directions? How can we imagine the theatrical impact of a sound effect? Of silence? What about the effect of colors, costumes, groupings, relative positions on the stage? Are characters sometimes saying something different from what their words say? In the course of answering these and many more questions, Hayman talks about the use of space, momentum, and suspense, the silence under the words, identity and character, irony and ambiguity, meaning and experience -- in short, all the elements that give life to the printed page as much as a musical performance does to a printed score. How to Read a Play is an essential guidebook to the art of drama.

Dentro del libro

Páginas seleccionadas

Contenido

The reader and the medium
13
Sound effects
19
Momentum and suspense
24
Not by words alone
31
Costume and identity
40
Identity and character
50
Irony and ambiguity
57
Mental theater
62
Silence
66
Meaning and experience
82
Photogenic action
97
Playreading as a pleasure
108
Key to extracts
111
Derechos de autor

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (1999)

Ronald Hayman was born in Bournemouth and grew up in a hotel there. After studying English at St Paul's and Trinity Hall in Cambridge, Hayman went to drama school in London. While there, he began working as an actor in repertory theatre and in television. Hayman's first play, The End of an Uncle, was produced in 1959. In 1967, after directing plays by Genet, Goldoni, and Brecht at the Arts Theatre, Stratford East and Welwyn Garden City, Hayman started writing books and broadcasting. Then, in his book Hitler and Geli, Hayman explored the remarkable, yet relatively obscure, story of the affair between Adolf Hitler and his young niece Geli Raubal, who died under mysterious circumstances. Some of Hayman's other works include exposes on Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller, and biographies of Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, the Marquis de Sade, and Tennessee Williams.

Información bibliográfica