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Writing in Coffee Shops: Confessions of a Playwright
What makes someone a playwright?
How do their identities and ideas interweave and co-exist?
What permanent truths can we discern from examining existing texts?
How can we write theatre that encapsulates the contemporary moment?
How do we develop an idea from the embryonic impulse to a full and robust piece of theatre?
In this fresh, lively and often very funny book, playwright Ryan Craig makes a case for the vitality of playwriting in our contemporary world and offers a way into writing those plays.
From the very first moment of the process, as you sit in a coffee shop, staring at your 'laptop yawning open like some big, gormless mouth, the screen a flickering blank', to seeing your play staged and reviewed, the author takes you through the complete journey.
Drawing on his own experience of writing for theatres such as the National, Hampstead and Tricycle and Menier Chocolate Factory, TV drama scripts for BBC, ITV and Channel Four, radio plays and adaptation, as well as commercial theatre, the author explores what practical tools the dramatist can use to write plays that build bridges between us.
Full of practical advice for the aspiring - and practising - playwright, this book is also an important call-to-arms for playwrights everywhere, arguing for its necessity in the context of an increasingly fractured, distracted, disconnected world.
How do their identities and ideas interweave and co-exist?
What permanent truths can we discern from examining existing texts?
How can we write theatre that encapsulates the contemporary moment?
How do we develop an idea from the embryonic impulse to a full and robust piece of theatre?
In this fresh, lively and often very funny book, playwright Ryan Craig makes a case for the vitality of playwriting in our contemporary world and offers a way into writing those plays.
From the very first moment of the process, as you sit in a coffee shop, staring at your 'laptop yawning open like some big, gormless mouth, the screen a flickering blank', to seeing your play staged and reviewed, the author takes you through the complete journey.
Drawing on his own experience of writing for theatres such as the National, Hampstead and Tricycle and Menier Chocolate Factory, TV drama scripts for BBC, ITV and Channel Four, radio plays and adaptation, as well as commercial theatre, the author explores what practical tools the dramatist can use to write plays that build bridges between us.
Full of practical advice for the aspiring - and practising - playwright, this book is also an important call-to-arms for playwrights everywhere, arguing for its necessity in the context of an increasingly fractured, distracted, disconnected world.
136 pages, Paperback
Published February 11, 2021
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 9, 2022
A frustrating read. Occasional brilliant passages are drowning amidst self-indulgent and overly purple paragraphs. There is real insight here, but the book could really do with a ruthless editor.
I found myself disagreeing with the writer’s political points (the book is far more about politics and culture war than it is about writing in coffee shops). This is not a bad thing: I appreciate being challenged and do not only read writers I agree with. But one of the book’s fundamental messages seems to be at odds with the author’s attitudes. While appealing for theatre to be made accessible to a broader audience outside of the middle classes, Craig’s depiction of working class people throughout the book (unintentionally?) reveals his bias: it comes far easier to him to empathise with young, rich boys at Eton than it does a labourer or a barista. His writing about such figures seems to reveal an inability to see them as humans with rich internal lives – something that he espouses as crucial to the art of writing good drama.
Part memoir, part sociopolitical journalism, part drama writing textbook, part hagiography of the contemporary British theatre scene, the book doesn’t seem to decide what it wants to be.
I found myself disagreeing with the writer’s political points (the book is far more about politics and culture war than it is about writing in coffee shops). This is not a bad thing: I appreciate being challenged and do not only read writers I agree with. But one of the book’s fundamental messages seems to be at odds with the author’s attitudes. While appealing for theatre to be made accessible to a broader audience outside of the middle classes, Craig’s depiction of working class people throughout the book (unintentionally?) reveals his bias: it comes far easier to him to empathise with young, rich boys at Eton than it does a labourer or a barista. His writing about such figures seems to reveal an inability to see them as humans with rich internal lives – something that he espouses as crucial to the art of writing good drama.
Part memoir, part sociopolitical journalism, part drama writing textbook, part hagiography of the contemporary British theatre scene, the book doesn’t seem to decide what it wants to be.
Displaying 1 of 1 review