From Page to Stage: Exploring Writing for Performance with the Young Writers

Our most recent Young Writers workshop found many of the participants in unfamiliar territory as we began to explore the craft of writing for the stage. After introducing the theme, Sarah demonstrated a key difference between writing for the stage and other forms of writing. When we go to the theatre, the experience is similar to lighting a match. The match burns for a while, and then it goes out…the performance is over. For our first warm-up activity, we invited the writers to work in pairs. Each person had to hold a pose, and then we invited the group to guess what they might be doing. To enhance these scenes, we asked the participants to write two lines of dialogue between the characters, using words of just one syllable. Then we built on this – your next four lines of dialogue could have one 2-syllable word and one question. The element of physicality is a significant difference between writing for the stage and writing for the page. How actors use their bodies is as significant as what they are saying. We set up a scenario where two characters are in a room doing something. Character A wants to leave, and the other character has to stop them. They cannot be as specific as ‘Don’t go!’ I then introduced Mary Oliver’s poem ‘How I Go to The Woods’ and used this to inspire the beginning of a monologue. Your character needs to be somewhere urgently – where do they want to go? From this point, we explored the power of entrances, exits and the use of silence. It was wonderful to see the writers making use of the stage in our workspace and see them turn their skills to acting.