First, four bespoke diagrams unpack Greig's method: the playmaking spine, a deck of his best practical exercises, the way a character is built from concentric worlds, and the engine that drives a story. Then every chapter, summarised faithfully and grouped into the book's movements.
Greig's book follows the whole arc of making a play. Each stage is a workshop with its own exercises — but the order matters: warming up loosens the channel between mind and page before any "real" writing begins, and the second draft is a structural audit, not an intuitive tidy-up.
An actor's warm-up for the writer. Memory, instant writing, dialogue games — get raw material onto the page first, then give the critical mind something to work on.
Distinguish subject matter (the action), theme (the universal concern) and issue (the territory between). Themes are usually discovered, not planned: "a play produces ideas, ideas do not produce a play."
Conjure, question, research and back-story a person built from concrete particulars — then ruthlessly discard what doesn't serve the play ("murder your babies").
Story = purposeful action led by a protagonist ("first combatant"), driven by change, subtext and the gap between conscious and unconscious wants. Location is an active character, not a backdrop.
Find the music in the words, then audit the draft: section it, action it, name its single underlying question. The one thing that can't be taught — voice — meets the most teachable craft of all: revision.
Scale the exercises into devised productions, twinning projects and school plays — and learn to lead a writing process so others can do the same.
The heart of the book is its exercises — most can be done alone or in a group, and almost all adapt across ages and contexts. Here is a curated hand of the most useful, suited by craft area. ● warm-up ● character ● story / location ● voice
Write without planning or censoring. The point is to defeat the blank page — produce first, edit later. Sister games: "Count and Write," "I am writing…"
Writing is an act of memory — not autobiography, but sensory impressions of the world. A group exercise that produces collectively written "I remember…" pieces.
Each speech must begin with the next letter of the alphabet. Constraint frees you from the fear of dialogue — no one really talks like Wilde or Beckett; good dialogue is artfully made to sound real.
Mine a name for buried history. Greig works his own — born Christmas Day 1944, sharing a birthday with Bogart and Jesus; surname from the outlawed MacGregor clan — to show how identity hides in a name.
Draw the figure, then separate physical description (outside) from thought and feeling (inside). Pair contradictory traits — "daft but wise" — because real people are made of contradictions.
Chart a life-journey across ten "postcards," then choose what to keep. Conjure a character from a checklist of specifics — their lack, need, secret, belief, wish and present moment.
Story comes from questions, not answers. What is his secret? What did he have for breakfast? Cascading questions — never answered too soon — generate dramatic potential.
Fan out from one issue through three rounds of branching questions (27+ in all) to surface hidden themes — turning a "dry subject" into a fresh story, "not a three-dimensional pamphlet."
Move a character through mountain, meadow, dark forest, busy street corner and prison cell — and watch location actively drive the plot: inspiring, advising, punishing, imprisoning.
Place characters in concentric circles around one shared event — C1 directly involved, C10 barely — to see how a single location-event ripples through many lives at once.
Write using words in strict alphabetical order. Constraint as liberation produces fresher imagery than open prompts — and the odd unforgettable line: "Education is dead and so are lots of elephants."
Describe a room while holding a strong emotion you never name. This is Pinter's pressure — rage and fear bubbling beneath mild dialogue, the "struggle for articulacy" that drives all speech.
A rounded character is built from concrete, observable facts — what they say of themselves and what others say of them (Masha's snuff, Willy Loman's arch-supports and 1928 red Chevy). Greig maps a back-story across five widening worlds. Most never reach the stage, but knowing them makes the character solid.
Thoughts, dreams, fears — and the secret the character carries.
Family and lovers — the people closest in.
Colleagues, neighbours, shopkeepers — everyday encounters.
Employers, police, religion — the systems that act on a life.
The concrete where and when that ground the whole.
A story is purposeful, forward-moving action led by a protagonist — from the Greek protos ("first") + agonistes ("combatant"). At its centre sits the First Major Turning Point: the conscious choice that shifts the status quo and kicks everything off. A nine-year-old called it "The Big Bit."
The structural engine of drama is the gap between what a protagonist says they want and what they secretly desire. Macbeth's expressed loyalty wars with his suppressed ambition; the play is a rising series of pressures that force this conflict into the open.
Change is the atom of drama — "never let a character leave a scene as they entered it" (David Hare). Subtext carries meaning beneath the words. Exposition is the ongoing "unpacking of the suitcase" of back-story. And want, conscious vs. unconscious, drives it all.
Greig keeps three layers distinct. Confusing them is how a play becomes a lecture; keeping them separate is how a "dry subject" becomes "a complex and fresh story, not a three-dimensional pamphlet."
The concrete action, fleshed out — what literally happens on stage. Romeo and Juliet: two young lovers from feuding families.
The large, abstract concern woven into the texture — never named outright. Macbeth's theme: "the journey of a man from honour to dishonour." Theme is the soil; story is rooted in it.
The topic linking action to theme — bullying, war, transport, health. Far from a constraint, an issue is a stimulus: Ibsen, Shaw and Baldwin all worked from one.
Scan an opening scene for significant words, group them by category, and the major themes emerge. The Seagull yields Death, Money, Love and Art; The Importance of Being Earnest yields Social Rank, Marriage and Consumption.
In the Transport Project, the humble bicycle becomes a research spine — materials, supply chains, the wheel-as-symbol. It yields the Singapore story: a Japanese soldier and a Malaysian orphan bonding over Wordsworth while mending a broken bike.
The second draft is a structural audit, not an intuitive pass — the same tools directors and actors use in rehearsal, turned on your own script. "We need to be able to see what is there before we proceed to what should be there."
Revisit the back-story suitcase, the five jobs of the opening scene, the protagonist's goals, the First Major Turning Point, and escalating conflict across five levels — inner, immediate, social, institutional, historical.
Break the play into units titled with strong active verbs ("The Owner lays down the law"); action every beat ("[I condemn] Time's up for that old tub") so the inner dynamic is explicit and flab becomes visible.
Every play rests on one major proposition or question — never stated aloud. Macbeth: "If we reject our better instincts to pursue earthly power, do we forfeit spiritual salvation?" Write it on a card; keep it in front of you.
See scenes as battleground squares, shifting triangles or bridges; stories as linear, circular, flashback, relay. Retell Little Red Riding Hood as rap, news report, Greek tragedy and teen comedy to find the genres you're already drawing on.
Because plays diagnose root causes and propose solutions (Shaw, Brecht, agitprop). If plays explore consequences for individuals within a given world (Coward, Chekhov). The richest plays hold both at once — Churchill, Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun.
Capture a whole play in seventeen syllables. Hamlet: "Prince / can't make up mind / pretends he's mad / takes action too late / whole court dies." If you can't distil it, you don't yet see it.
The appendices turn the writer into a workshop leader. Greig's hard-won discovery: the same menu of exercises works for any group, adjusted only for their language experience and life experience. The leader's real job is to build trust — and to protect the writer from bad feedback.
Offer every group exactly the same work; calibrate for vocabulary and for cultural horizons, then push the boundaries. Primary children plot "the murder of the boss" with the same insight as MA students discuss Macbeth's turning point — "they are both playwrights."
Opening the floor to general opinion invariably surfaces the negative. Replace it with structure: readers privately note images that stayed, three things they liked, three that interested them, three questions — then read aloud while the writer silently records. Repeated images are most diagnostic.
The graduated feedback ladder
Affirmation first. Build confidence before anything else — name what works.
Constructive addition. Offer what could be added or developed, never a flat dismissal.
Disagreement last. Only once trust is built. All feedback is free advice — to be used or discarded; the writer's instinct guides them.
Every part of the book, summarised faithfully. The coloured left edge marks the movement: ▌ foundations ▌ building blocks ▌ craft & revision ▌ leading others
Greig frames live theatre as a ritual of collective reflection — an occasion where private concerns become public and the invisible is made visible. Every form of performance, from a classroom scene to a national production, shares the same human function: bringing people together. He orients the reader to the book's structure and its wide audience, and addresses his Anglo-American reference canon head-on.
A comprehensive toolkit of warm-up exercises, organised around six craft areas: memory, instant writing, building a character, finding the story, dialogue, and theme/location. Like an actor's physical warm-up, it clears mental clutter and opens the channel between mind and page — and closes with a powerful argument that poetic command of language comes before character or story.
A short chapter distinguishing subject matter (the action), theme (the abstract, universal concern) and issue (the territory linking them). Themes are not stated explicitly but woven into texture — often emerging unconsciously as the writer builds story and character.
Situates issue-based theatre in a global tradition — Indian basti companies, Augusto Boal's Forum Theatre, the UK's Theatre-in-Education movement — arguing a social issue is a stimulus, not a constraint. Two extended project models show how to turn a narrow topic into rich, layered drama.
Guides the systematic construction of a rounded character, beginning from how established playwrights reveal character through specific, observable detail. A progressive series of exercises — conjure, question, research, back-story, postcards, cut — leads to the First Major Turning Point.
Lays out the foundational craft of dramatic narrative, from the Greek root of "protagonist" (first combatant) onward. Organised around four interlocking concepts — Change, Subtext, Exposition, and the tension between conscious and unconscious wants — with exercises building toward a full story model.
Argues that location is an active character, not mere background — shaping behaviour, generating story and carrying emotional weight. Three classic openings show that descriptions can range from rich to minimal as long as they are precise: particularity, paradoxically, creates universality.
The writer's unique way of placing and valuing words is the one element of craft that cannot be taught — only encouraged. Greig distinguishes language that merely advances plot from language that is compositional and musical, then drills voice through constraint-based exercises.
Treats revision as a systematic structural audit in four phases: reassess the big picture, dissect the text into active-verb units, find the play's single underlying question, then broaden through story-shapes, genre and story-types. The same tools used by directors and actors are turned on the draft.
Bridges individual craft and large-scale, group-devised performance. Many earlier exercises — especially from Chapter 1 — carry built-in structure and theme that can be expanded into school, college or community productions, illustrated by a substantial real-world "twinning" project.
A short, reflective piece on how Greig arrived at his facilitation philosophy through trial and error. Forced by time pressure to use the same exercises across wildly different groups, he discovered they work universally once two adjustments are made.
Practical, candid guidance for teachers, workshop leaders, mentors and dramaturges. Organised around working in schools, managing group dynamics, and the personal dimension of self-disclosure — with trust as the central thread throughout.