Writing a Stage Play

Start quickly

It’s best to get into the action quickly with a strong dramatic hook. A slow start won’t have your audience rushing out after five minutes — but don’t let them get fidgety. The audience will expect the core issue behind the story to be revealed (or at least strongly hinted at) early on. If it isn’t, they might get confused and wonder if they’ve missed something. For example, going back to our earlier ‘Laura and Chad’ example we’d want to clearly establish early on that Jim is a bad egg, or at least that he appears to be.

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Will they get it in the back row?

It can be tough writing for a live audience. Television dramatists and screenwriters can rely on the camera being able to get up-close and reveal every raised eyebrow, whispered comment and secret smile, but this won’t work in a theatre. It’s no use having one of your characters wink knowingly at someone on stage because only the people in the first row are going to see it. When writing dialogue and directions ask yourself if the audience in the back row will be able to understand what’s going on.

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Establishing background and situation is also much harder. Let’s say your Act I, Scene I takes place in a living room. Jim, your protagonist, comes home from work and you want to establish that he has a job as a bus-driver. If you were writing for the screen you could get this across easily with shots of him at work behind the wheel, but how to do this on stage? You could have Jim walking on stage in his bus-driver uniform, but how many bus-drivers wear their uniform at home, and how many in the audience would recognise it for what it was? The people in the back row might think he was a security guard. 

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An alternative would be to establish Jim’s occupation with dialogue, but you’d have to think of ways Jim could discuss his job without sounding phoney. You don’t want his wife to come out with a line like: “Hello, Jim. How was it driving that bus today?”

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A better way of opening our story would be to set it in the aftermath of a dramatic event, such as a crash. If Jim comes home with a bandaged head it would be natural for his wife to ask what had happened. In this way we could learn about Jim without the conversation sounding contrived. However, this opening would have to be relevant to the main story. If an important aspect of  Jim’s character is that he’s a heavy drinker we might find out that he crashed the bus while he was drunk.

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Use curtain-lines

A ‘curtain-line’ is the cliffhanger that ends an act — typically it’s the last line spoken before the curtain comes down. The curtain-line introduces a question or dilemma that is resolved in the first scene of the next act. It keeps us interested and bridges the action between acts, letting it flow from one to the other.

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Let’s say we have a scene in a kitchen. A couple, the parents of two children, are arguing. At the climax of the argument we learn that one of their two children is adopted. This is the curtain line — the couple storm out and the scene is ended. The next scene starts when the two children (who have overheard their parents’ conversation) come into the kitchen and discuss this startling news — which one of them is the natural child?

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Despite being called curtain-lines, these don’t always have to consist of a line of dialogue. In some cases a curtain-line might be a dramatic entrance or exit, a gesture, an action, or even a sound-effect.

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Whatever they consist of, curtain lines should be as dramatic as possible (though without being more dramatic than the final climax). In an ideal situation everything that’s happened during an act should have been building up towards its curtain-line.

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Write for any stage

Your play will have a better chance of being produced if it can be adapted to fit any performance area. Every playwright hopes their creation will be performed by a prestigious theatre company on a fully-equipped stage, but there’s every chance it will get its first airing in a community hall. Keep your play as simple as possible in terms of props, scenery and lighting effects. The less complicated it is the better the chances it will find a home.

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Write for a small cast

Many touring theatre companies have a relatively small cast so it will help your chances if you limit the number of characters in your script.

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As you plan your story keep the number of characters to a minimum and keep asking yourself how a small cast would go about staging it. A useful exercise is to write for a baseline cast of four (perhaps two men and two women) then see how many characters your actors could realistically take on. For example, if you have four principal characters and in one scene they’re all sitting round a restaurant table with a waiter taking their order, then you’re obviously going to need an extra person to play the waiter. So now your minimum cast has grown to five...

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Within your script you’ll also have to make allowances for any multiple role playing and allow time for costume changes by leaving a gap between exits and entrances — if the actor playing Lord Walter exits stage-left you’ll have to give him a few moments if he has to change his clothes, stick on a beard and wig, and reappear stage-right as Crippen the Gardener.

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The more characters you introduce, and the more you have on stage at any one time, the greater the potential problems a small theatre company will face.

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Write a synopsis

To save time some theatre producers prefer to read a story synopsis before tackling the script itself. A synopsis should outline your story in full but shouldn’t be longer than one side of paper. Even if a theatre company doesn’t ask for a synopsis it’s a good idea to include one with your completed script. If your script starts off slowly a reader might give up on it after a few pages, but if there’s a synopsis to show them how the story develops it could encourage them to persevere.