A useful, how-to guide for staging any play

A practical handbook for directors, producers, local community groups, youth theatres, amateur players, universities and colleges, students of Community Theatre/Theatre Studies and others wanting to stage a successful community play.

Drawing on a wealth of personal accounts, and useful historical background information, How To Put On A Community Play is full of detailed advice concerning the preparation, planning and execution required to achieve success.

Including essential tips on:

casting

the rehearsal process

administrative hurdles

technical headaches that must be overcome

This is an invaluable guide to the myriad tasks and decisions facing any community play organiser.

About the author

Sarah Burton has written and produced five community plays, one of which became the longest-running community play in Britain. She teaches creative writing and has taught undergraduate courses in the Theatre Studies Department at the Royal Holloway and in the English Department at Goldsmiths. She was for many years a television drama script editor and also read and reported on prose submissions for Eastern Arts’ Write Lines scheme. Sarah is also on the board of tutors for the University of Oxford’s Department for Continuing Education, having completed with credit their course in Effective Online Tutoring. She has published two non-fiction titles for adults: Impostors: Six Kinds of Liar (Viking hardback, 2000; Penguin paperback, 2001) and A Double Life: a Biography of Charles and Mary Lamb (Viking hardback 2003; Penguin paperback 2004). Impostors has been translated into four languages and A Double Life was short-listed for the Mind Book of the Year. She has also written extensively for BBC History Magazine and reviews books (fiction and non-fiction) for the Times, Spectator, Guardian and Independent. Her first children’s book was The Miracle in Bethlehem: A Storyteller’s Tale (Floris paperback, 2008) and she has contributed a short story to the Wow! Anthology (Scholastic, 2008). She recently completed a second children’s book and a novel for adults.

Sarah Burton

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