Overview
Drawing on key practitioners, including Jacques Lecoq, Joan Littlewood, Peter Brook and Simon McBurney, The Active Text
offers a complete approach to working with a scripted play, leading the
reader through a process of active exploration and experimentation that
includes:
- Uncovering a play’s internal dynamics
- Using improvisation and theatre games
- Exploiting the languages of the body
- Getting inside the words that are spoken (as well as those that aren’t!)
- Discovering image structures
- Understanding the impact on the audience
Throughout the book, the author draws on a core selection of
well-known texts (from Sophocles and Shakespeare to Brecht, Arthur
Miller, Steven Berkoff and Sarah Kane), showing how an active approach
to text can challenge assumptions about even the most familiar of plays.
Packed with theatre games, improvisation exercises and rehearsal techniques, The Active Text is
an inspirational guide for performers, directors, students and
teachers. It will revitalise work in the rehearsal room, workshop or
classroom – anywhere that dramatic text needs to be brought to life.