Wow! eBook
My First Play: An Anthology of Theatrical Beginnings
Author(s): Various (Author), Nick Hern
- Publisher: Nick Hern Books
- Publication Date: 4 July 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 176 pages
- ISBN-10: 184842339X
- ISBN-13: 9781848423398
Book Description
My First Play is a unique collection of pieces by playwrights, actors and theatre directors – all of them regular Nick Hern Books authors – in response to the simplest of briefs: write about your first play. Candid, hilarious, and often sharply revealing, the resulting pieces – many of them written in the hurly-burly of work on a new production – combine to prove the power of theatre to entrance us, and hold us captive in its spell. Included here are remarkable first-person accounts from many of our leading playwrights: Caryl Churchill performing Cinderella to her parents with a cast of dolls and stuffed animals; Howard Brenton pinching his first main character from a boy’s comic; Jack Thorne having to become a thief to get his first play on; Conor McPherson still waiting to write his ‘first play’. There are also enthralling insights into the first steps in theatre of some of our principal actors and theatre directors: Antony Sher discovering theatre in Cape Town during the apartheid years; Dominic Cooke paying the price for using a real knife in performance; Harriet Walter’s photographic recall of the annual outing to Peter Pan; Richard Eyre on an open-air performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that descends into chaos. Published to celebrate twenty-five years of Nick Hern Books, the royalties from the sale of this magical collection of sixty-six miniature autobiographies will be donated to the Theatre Section of the Writers’ Guild.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Upbeat and often witty sometimes poignant… it’s great fun, but you can also learn a lot from it about the educational process which eventually led, say, to David Edgar becoming a famous playwright and founder of the Birmingham play writing course, or to Gregory Doran becoming Director of the RSC or Anthony Sher becoming the extraordinary actor that he is… The book contains many references to the schools, teachers and youth theatres where many of these professionals caught the bug. It therefore serves as a timely reminder of the importance of drama and theatre in education in its widest sense. –thestage.com
Humorous, passionate and revealing… The story of a love affair… The discovery of theatre’s power lies at the heart of many of these pieces… A book about why people do theatre… packed with comical anecdotes and serious insights. –Times Literary Supplement
Upbeat and often witty sometimes poignant… it’s great fun, but you can also learn a lot from it about the educational process which eventually led, say, to David Edgar becoming a famous playwright and founder of the Birmingham play writing course, or to Gregory Doran becoming Director of the RSC or Anthony Sher becoming the extraordinary actor that he is… The book contains many references to the schools, teachers and youth theatres where many of these professionals caught the bug. It therefore serves as a timely reminder of the importance of drama and theatre in education in its widest sense. –thestage.com
