Dramaturgy

Dramaturgy - a word no sooner said than immediately seems to slip our grasp. And yet it is a word that seems strangely familiar too. It should be, for it is a concept we are intuitively aware. It is the difference between a good story told well, and well, just a story.  We are all familiar with the non-linear narrative which is an example of temporal dramaturgy: the telling of the drama is re-ordered for the optimal effect of tension. That there is dramaturgy – the curation of effect: a mode of looking. 

Dramaturgy is exciting – it provides multiple ways of telling the same story. We’ve all seen theatre that was ‘solid’: beginning, middle and end but lacking the itness of the thing: we find ourselves in a semi-awake state wondering if someone saw our head ‘bob’. Dramaturgy is the tool that makes the performance come alive, resonate, illuminating the stage, its pulsating electricity mainlining directly into our heads and, as a result, we emerge into the night air ever so slightly altered. It’s that good, that simple, that effective. 

As a founding member of Stark Theatre, I had engaged with methods of storytelling without ever knowing what dramaturgy was. This changed when I enrolled at the University of Glasgow to study an MLitt in Playwriting & Dramaturgy in 2015.  Two polar opposites: academia and theatre practice with me somewhere in between and so I came to understand dramaturgy as a concept - and ever since I’ve been hooked. I’ve written six plays, three of which have been performed. My first original play Hollow had very little dramaturgy in the text. Dramaturgy was added for the performance. It worked well but there was certainly a retrofit aspect to it. My first staged play, A Journey Around My Room, was an appropriation of existing material which already contained aspects of embedded dramaturgy. So, it wasn’t until I sat down to write my third play They’ll Get You Now You’re Gone that dramaturgy was so completely woven throughout the text. It worked excellently well when performed, providing a conceptual story with unexpected accessibility. 

Since then, I have written three more plays each containing different forms of dramaturgy. And so, this website has been dramaturgically conceived to allow ideas to flourish both for me as a dramaturg and hopefully for you as an audience member.