Plays You Should Read & The Follow On

Yesterday’s acting blog was about reading plays and learning to love language. In class this evening, whilst an actor worked on a piece of Shakespeare, I introduced the idea of End Stopping. Let’s not get into a debate about that right now, but it suddenly threw some light for us on the Mamet film piece from The Verdict that another student was doing. We found that the significant words in the end stopped verse in Shakespeare had comparable words in the script from The Verdict.

William H Macy often says that David Mamet writes in iambic pentameter, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to see a relationship between Shakespeare and Mamet’s work. But it does underline and support the need for a love of language, a passion for plays, which builds a sensitivity to scripts of all kinds and allows actors, young and old, an enhanced access to the plays they rehearse and perform.

Now, yesterday, I also mentioned a list of plays that I think you should read. In the spirit of this I’ve prepared a list of plays, but please please do not write telling me what should and shouldn’t be included. This is a representative sample to get people started, not a be all and end all.

In no order at all:

1) Antigone – Sophocles

2) Midsummer Night’s Dream – Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing is even more accessible if you want a simpler starting point)

3) Tartuffe – Moliere

4) School for Scandal – Richard Brindsley Sheridan

5) Ghosts – Henrik Ibsen

6) Miss Julie – August Strindberg

7) Uncle Vanya – Anton Chekhov

8) The Plough and the Stars – Sean O’Casey

9)  The Glass Menagerie – Tennessee Williams

10) Look Back in Anger – John Osborne

11) The Caretaker – Harold Pinter

12) Angels in America Part 1 – Tony Kushner

13) Oleanna – David Mamet

14) How I Learned to Drive – Paula Vogel

15) Fat Pig – Neil Labute

Happy Reading!