Editing Writer (section)

====Playwright====
[[File:FF The Tempest title.jpg|thumb|Title page of [[William Shakespeare|Shakespeare]]'s ''[[The Tempest]]'' from the 1623 [[First Folio]]]]
{{Main|Playwright}}

A playwright writes plays which may or may not be performed on a stage by actors. A play's narrative is driven by dialogue. Like novelists, playwrights usually explore a theme by showing how people respond to a set of circumstances. As writers, playwrights must make the language and the dialogue succeed in terms of the characters who speak the lines as well as in the play as a whole. Since most plays are performed, rather than read privately, the playwright has to produce a text that works in spoken form and can also hold an audience's attention over the period of the performance. Plays tell "a story the audience should care about", so writers have to cut anything that worked against that.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|url=https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/magazine/posts/2015/november/feature-mike-bartlett-kciii?fptd_mode=validation|title=Mike Bartlett on writing King Charles III|last=Bartlett|first=Mike|date=18 November 2015|website=Sydney Theatre Company Magazine|publisher=Sydney Theatre Company|access-date=6 April 2016}}</ref> Plays may be written in prose or verse. Shakespeare wrote plays in [[iambic pentameter]] as does [[Mike Bartlett (playwright)|Mike Bartlett]] in his play ''King Charles III'' (2014).<ref name=":0" />

Playwrights also adapt or re-write other works, such as plays written earlier or literary works originally in another genre. Famous playwrights such as [[Henrik Ibsen]] or [[Anton Chekhov]] have had their works adapted several times. The plays of early Greek playwrights [[Sophocles]], [[Euripides]], and [[Aeschylus]] are still performed. Adaptations of a playwright's work may be honest to the original or creatively interpreted. If the writers' purpose in re-writing the play is to make a film, they will have to prepare a screenplay. Shakespeare's plays, for example, while still regularly performed in the original form, are often adapted and abridged, especially for the [[filmmaking|cinema]]. An example of a creative modern adaptation of a play that nonetheless used the original writer's words, is [[Baz Luhrmann]]'s version of ''[[Romeo and Juliet]]''. The amendment of the name to ''[[Romeo + Juliet]]'' indicates to the audience that the version will be different from the original. [[Tom Stoppard]]'s play ''[[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]]'' is a play inspired by Shakespeare's ''[[Hamlet]]'' that takes two of Shakespeare's most minor characters and creates a new play in which they are the protagonists.

{{Quotation|'''''Player''''': ''It's what the actors do best. They have to exploit whatever talent is given to them, and their talent is dying. They can die heroically, comically, ironically, slowly, suddenly, disgustingly, charmingly or from a great height.''<br />[[Tom Stoppard]], [[Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead]] (Act Two)<ref name=Stoppard>{{cite book|last=Stopppard|first=Tom|title=Rosencrantz and Guildentern Are Dead|year=1967|publisher=Faber and Faber|isbn=0-571-08182-7|page=75}}</ref>}}