Form: Substance & Style

6pm, Monday 9th December 2024

What is form? Form is what your play is ‘like’. Put another way, what an audience experiences when they watch your play will derive from its form. Form is the style of your play, it’s the organisation of its action, it’s the language you write it in, it’s the pattern of scenes, it’s the rhythm of entrances and exits, and much more…

In fact, there’s nothing in your play that isn’t touched by form. But form isn’t just ornamentation or style: the form of your play will communicate what your play is about. Join playwright Dan Rebellato as he explores how you can make conscious, clear, informed decisions that bring substance and style together to create rich theatrical experiences.

Simply head to the homepage of this website www.writeaplay.co.uk at 6pm Monday 9th December to join – we will be taking questions from our online audience throughout! Don’t worry if you can’t make it live, the recorded workshop will be archived and made available on a webpage afterwards.

About Dan Rebellato

Dan Rebellato is a playwright, and his work for stage and radio includes Here’s What I Did With My Body One Day, Static, Chekhov in Hell, Cavalry, Emily Rising, Negative Signs of Progress, My Life Is A Series of People Saying Goodbye, You & Me, 7 Ghosts, Slow Air and Restless Dreams. His radio adaptation of Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend will be broadcast on Radio 4 in November 2024. He was lead writer on Radio 4’s epic, award-winning adaptation of Emile Zola’s 20-volume novel sequence under the title Emile Zola: Blood, Sex & Money. His how-to guide, Playwriting, has just been published by Bloomsbury and the National Theatre. He is also Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London and his books include 1956 and All That, Theatre & Globalization, The Suspect Culture Book, and Modern British Playwriting 2000-2009. He is co-editor of Contemporary European Theatre Directors, Contemporary European Playwrights, The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 and the Theatre & series for Palgrave.