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What are the basic skills you need to write a play? How is writing a play different from writing other fiction? If you’ve ever considered these questions, read on!

Know the artform

The best starting point is to see as much live theatre as possible. Notice what works on stage. Pay attention to the elements that make it work:

• actors

• lighting

• sets

• costumes

• music and sound effects

• audience responses

In live theatre, there is a real send of the here and now – the commitment made by the audience to engage with the actors and other artists. This is the magic of theatre. As actors will tell you, every performance is different, and that difference often comes from the reactions of the audience.

Consider the differences between plays and films. When you write a play is must be possible for the action to be performed on a stage in front of an audience. It’s true that some nineteenth-century melodramas staged shipwrecks and horse races, but in general it’s best to leave the big action scenes for the screen.

Read scripts. See how playwrights use the two types of texts in a script: dialogue and stage directions. Note that scripts are written in the present tense – a good reminder that plays are written to be performed, that they are essentially taking place ‘now’.

As you read scripts, you’ll see that there isn’t an authorial voice. Each character has their own voice. If there is a narrator, the narrator is a character, too. The story evolves through the characters: their words and actions, and how they interact with the world around them.

Characters

When you create your characters, spend time ‘fleshing them out’. Give them a back story, a personal history. Visualise them, including how they move. ‘Hear’ their voices, including the rhythm of their speech, their choice of words, their tone of voice. To help you with this, spend time observing people. Study their gestures, their body language, their posture and posturing, ways of laughing and ways of interacting with other people.

Effective characters ‘ring true’ to audiences. Believable characters are multi-dimensional. They have flaws and needs and desires and dreams and petty demands, feel love and pain and greed, think, feel and act as we expect people to. Remember that heroes have vices and villains have virtues. As you shape your characters, avoid making them ideal, use stereotypes sparingly, make them complex, not two-dimensional.

Stage directions

As young children, we learn to ‘read’ faces, body language, gestures and other non-verbal communication. People don’t say, ‘I’m angry!’, they stomp or slam doors. They don’t say, ‘I’m deeply hurt,’ they clam up, cry or curl up in a ball. We can interpret their actions.

Playwrights know that audiences read actions; that actions can be very powerful on stage. Show, don’t tell. Use stage directions to advance the plot and have your characters communicate their thoughts and feelings through their actions.

Other production elements are part of theatre ‘language’ too. Sets, props, costumes, lighting and sound all convey meaning. They can symbolise the core of a scene. Consider this example.

The scene is the hallway of a family home. We’ve just learned that the family’s son has been killed in a car accident. His father enters, devastated, and sees some soccer boots – boos which in an earlier scene had been the source of tension. ‘Ryan! Stop dumping your boots in the hall! Put them away – now!’ The father now clutches the boots, which symbolise all that he has lost.

Silence on stage is very powerful. It signifies a shift, when characters are processing thoughts and feelings. Silence focuses and audience. It also gives the audience time to process and to respond. Trust your audience to understand your subtext from the text and context, and give them time to do this.

Conflict

You’ve probably heard the saying that conflict is the essence of drama. So how do you build this into your script? First, create a main character – the protagonist – who desperately needs or wants something. This goal can be concrete or abstract: validation, money, love, success, freedom, peace, first place in a cupcake decorating competition.

Create obstacles for your character – other people, fate, even the character themselves can provide stumbling blocks. Desire + obstacle = conflict. In a short play, this needs to be established quickly.

Shaping a short script

The best short stories start as late into the plot as possible, address one essential conflict, concept or idea and end as quickly as possible. Short plays do, too. You don’t need much exposition. Trust your audience to fill in the gaps. Follow this basic structure:

• short exposition

• conflict

• further complication, conflict and crisis

• swift resolution

Keep your action to one setting if you can. Remember, that a change in time or place means a new scene. Some short plays have many scenes but keep these to a minimum if you can. Also limit the number of characters to only those who are essential to your narrative.

A team approach

A playwright doesn’t communicate directly with their audience. Other creative people with interpret your script to build a performance in the same way builders and tradespeople construct buildings from architects’ blueprints. Give your team creative freedom. Don’t overwrite stage directions or indicate how each and every line should be delivered.

You might even write collaboratively. You have an idea for a play and work with actors who improvise scenes.

Workshop your script

Scripts need to be ‘road tested’ Your dialogue might seem to flow as you sit and mutter at your computer but you must find out whether the dialogue works when you hand your script over to actors. You’ll probably find you’ve overwritten. Be prepared to trim and prune your work. You might also find that you need to give actors more time to change costumes or other practical issues. Welcome feedback and be prepared to draft and re-draft your script. It will all be worth it on opening night.

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The Formal can be staged very simply or with more complex production values. The stage directions in the script indicate ways to do this but are guidelines only. Feel free to interpret the script to suit your cast, performance space and resources.

Theatre is a collaborative process. This play calls for tight ensemble performances and swift scene changes.

Acting

This play is an out-and-out comedy but the cast must take their own characters very seriously. It’s the only way to play comedy. There are also moments of quiet pathos in the script. Allow your audiences to enjoy the light and shade of the play. And use the power of stillness and silence.

As you shape your own production, you will need to resolve some of the performance challenges. For example, in the script, the cast members playing Carla and Skye become puppets in Act 2 , with the Formal Fairies speaking for them. You may decide to have the actors who play Carla and Skye speak the lines, or indeed, you might cast male actors in these roles.

Costume

Costumes are important. There is a lot of rising tension in Act 1 about the Formal outfits, which much be honoured in Act 2. One moment where costume is critical is when Maz appears wearing a tuxedo. This raises questions about her sexuality and the nature of her relationship with Dee.

Music

There are several points in the script that call for music – it’s up to you to find apt pieces to use in your production. One approach is to use live musicians.

Scripts contain two forms of writing – stage directions and dialogue. From this basic information you need to develop concepts of how the play will be staged. A script is like the blueprint for a building – it’s not the final product.

There are many elements to taking a script from page to stage, and many people who contribute to the production of a play once the playwright has written the text. The director has an overall vision of the production and works with designers, performers and technicians to bring this vision to life.

When you read a script, you need to visualise what an audience will see and hear onstage. There can be a tendency to focus on dialogue when you read a script but much of the impact of a play comes from non-verbal elements.

Some of these are indicated in the stage directions. Others need to be created using clues in the script. These include set and costume design as well as lighting and sound. They also include the positioning and movement of actors on the stage, the pace of each scene and the use of stillness and silence.

Look at the opening of The Formal. There is no stage direction describing the way Glam enters, or her appearance. These visual elements are open to interpretation. There are clues, of course. Consider the direction ‘carrying a champagne glass’, What sort of character would enter like this? Not also that ‘she turns away from the audience to tidy herself up a bit.’ How messy is she? Why? What sort of tidying up does she do? As you start answering these questions, you start to form an impression of the character.

We build up our concepts of a character by what they say, what they do, how they look and how other characters react to them. We also use other pieces of information, such as their names. ‘Tatiana’, as a name, has different connotations from ‘Maz’, ‘Dee’ or ‘Skye’.

We as audience, constantly shape and refine our views of characters during a play, using information in the text, the context and the subtext. We empathise with some and are distanced from others. Much of the comedy in The Formal comes from watching the girls as they strive to survive the Formal. Find a moment that makes you laugh and work out the reason for your laughter.

These activities explore the script as the basis for a performance.

1. Improvise a scene that could have been included in The Formal between any two of the girls and / or mothers. You may, for example, devise a scene in which Maz bumps into Tatiana at a shoe shop.

2. Designing a production of The Formal involves a number of challenges. Imagine you are the costume designer for a production at your school. Design three costumes for Act 1 and three costumes for Act 2.

3. Discuss how you would design the set for the scene in the girls’ toilets.

4. There are a number of points in the script that call for music. Chose three of these moments and select appropriate music, justifying your choices.

5. Imagine you are going to direct a production of The Formal at your school. Prepare notes on any two of these characters so that you can brief your cast: Glam, Maz, Tatiana, Skye or Roz. Support your notes with evidence from the script.

6. Imagine there is a seventh Year 12 student to be written into a revised version of The Formal, different again from the six girls already in the script. Write a character description for this new character and prepare a monologue by this character that sums up their views about the Formal.

These activities and discussion topics are ways into the text of The Formal.

1. The script follows the progress of six Year 12 students and three of their mothers in the lead-up to the Formal. The play is a comedy but touches on a number of serious issues. Choose one of these issues and examine how it is explored in this text and in at least one related text.

2. There are a number of allusions to the works of William Shakespeare in The Formal. Examples include the Lady Macbeth cleansing mantra used by Skye and the closing speeches by Glam, Glitter and Tizz. Why do you think these are included? Choose one example to discuss in detail.

3. Each of the six girls approaches the Formal differently. Choose one of the girls and outline her attitude to the Formal before, during and after the big night. What changes, if any, does she undergo? What is her personal journey – her narrative arc?

4. The three mothers offer comic relief in The Formal. What else do these characters contribute to the script? Support your views with evidence from the text.

5. Is a Formal a modern rite of passage? What are the elements of a rite of passage? What functions does a Formal serve?

6. There are several monologues in The Formal. Choose two contrasting monologues and discuss what they contribute to the play as a whole.

How did you come to write The Formal?

The Formal started out as a short play. It grew! I had originally planned to include it in my first collection of short plays, Big Dramas. The temptation to expand it into a longer piece was irresistible.

I wrote separate scenes without having an overview of the plot, aside from the idea that I wanted to show all the chaos leading up to the Formal, then show the big night itself. I approached the local girls’ high school about the possibility of workshopping the script as I wrote it. Jill Bridgen, to whom I’m eternally grateful, saw it as a good opportunity for her Year 11 Drama class. I spent part of the first term with them, improvising scenes and analysing characters in Act 1. I then went away and wrote Act 2 and the Aftermath.

I met the class in February and handed them the finished script by Easter. The play took shape very quickly but the concepts and characters had been fermenting for a couple of years.

Why write about a Formal?

In its own way, I believe the Formal has become a rite of passage for adolescents, marking the end of their years as school students as the take their first steps into independent adulthood. This is how they see it, many of them. It has evolved since my own days at school, when the end-of-year school ball was seen as a slightly daggy and old-fashioned event – certainly much more low-key than today’s Formals.

There is so much drama and tension inherent in Formals – and so much comic potential. The awful thing is that for most people, Formals are anti-climactic. Months of planning, hundreds of dollars are invested in this one night, which ususally ends not with a bang but a whimper (and someone vomiting).

I wanted to use all of these ideas to explain the ways in which girls define themselves and the ways they behave under pressure – their mothers, too.

Why did you include the characters of Glam, Glitter and Tizz?

During the workshop process it became apparent that the script needed a character to guide the audience through some of the chaos. The idea of Formal Fairies appealed to me, with their Shakespearean overtones and their theatricality. Glam is quite Puck-like in some ways. It was also handy to have characters who could step in to become the ‘extras’ needed in some scenes. I like to write scripts that have interesting performance challenges for the whole cast, and the roles of Glam, Glitter and Tizz certainly offer challenges.

Why did you make The Formal an all-female script?

While some boys do get caught up in the Formal frenzy, it does seem to be a much bigger thing for girls. Their partners become accessories – almost literally – like shoes or handbags. I enjoyed ways of showing this on stage.

More seriously, I really wanted to focus on some of the issues faced by girls as they transition from school students to adults. And I wanted to write strong roles for females – especially as more girls than boys do Drama in most schools.

Where did you draw your ideas from?

I drew on my own adolescence and on my observations of the students I taught when I was a Drama teacher. When I was considering the setting for Act 2, at the Formal, for example, I remembered the Formals I had to help supervise. All the most dramatic and revealing action took place in the women’s toilets. I hasten to add that none of the characters are based on any one real person – they are all amalgams of girls and women I have known over the years. And yes, there are bits of me in every character, but I’m not telling you which bits of which ones!

Sue Murray