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How Plays Work David Edgar London: Nick Hern, 2009. 230 pp £10.99 paper
David Edgar's How Plays Work is full of fascinating insights, copiously illustrated, into the dramaturgical strategies by which plays achieve their effects on audiences. Edgar casts a wide net, including television, radio, and film scripts as well as plays for the theatre because, he says, "there is more in common between the dramatic media than is generally acknowledged" (xiv). His position is at once salutary and problematic: How Plays Work reminds us of what scripts share across dramatic media, but sometimes blurs the differences. The author's focus, however, is very much on the work of writers of scripts as creators of structure and dialogue rather than sources of the visual effects that differ according to medium. Edgar's emphasis can be explained by the book's genesis. How Plays Work originated in playwriting classes offered at the University of Birmingham and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and it is written from the standpoint of what is useful for beginning playwrights to know. But the book will appeal to playgoers (and moviegoers) interested in articulating more precisely their perceptions of how scenes and whole plays affect them. The dramatic theory that Edgar incorporates in his explanations is familiar, but many of his specific insights into how particular scenes work will prove useful in classes on dramatic literature as well as playwriting.
The book contains eight chapters: Audiences, Action, Character, Genre, Structure, Scenes, Devices, and Endings (a summary). Edgar's advice to playwrights is based on pragmatic experience and practical common sense. However free in form contemporary drama may appear to be, he asserts, playwrights still need to know the dramatic "rules" of various kinds, including generic and other conventions, because audiences are at least residually familiar with them based on their experience of other plays. Dramatists may fulfill or disrupt audience expectations, but they may not ignore them. In his chapter on Action, Edgar usefully distinguishes among action, plot, and story....