Book reviews: Teaching Playwriting by Paul Gardiner

Teaching Playwrighting is written by Paul Gardiner and is a book of useful exercises that would work well in any secondary drama classroom. The book opens with an explanation of how playwriting can offer students a voice and how teaching playwrighting can help students develop skills to find this voice. There is a handy summary at the end of each section comprised of bullet points that outline key points.

The book is accessible and easy to apply and use in practice. The second part opens with a chapter called ‘How to use this book’, which outlines the teacher’s role. This is the most significant and substantial part of the book, complete with detailed writing exercises. These well-developed tasks are ideal for busy teachers plans and prep.

However, it would have been even more helpful if there were more practical extension activities or ideas that teachers could use to practically explore some of the work created in the writing tasks. The practical ideas that are included – such as the bench improvisation in the ‘creating character’ chapter – are useful, well justified and explained in detail.

Some of the writing exercises could easily be adapted to be explored practically. For example, the writing exercise ‘Action and Environment’ in the chapter about generating action could quite easily begin with, ‘Explore the scene using all the actions implied by the situation’. This would create a nice link between the written work and practical exploration which happens so often in the drama classroom. I think by adapting some of these exercises it would make some of the written tasks more engaging for drama students and encourage them to continue to develop practical skills alongside the theory.

There is lots to enjoy in this book. It covers the development of characters and structure and more nuanced aspects of playwrighting such as incorporating symbols. It breaks down all these ideas and divides them in to well explained chapters which all include the easy to digest bullet points at the end. It would have practical applications in the classroom and would be a great starting point for a playwrighting scheme of work. It might benefit from a few more practical tasks to explore the written work, as there are many written tasks and exercises offered.