DRAMATURGY
I consider myself very lucky to have had the chance to work with remarkable writers on the development of their plays, whether I have gone on to direct them or not.
Availability permitting, I offer a Pay What You Can script-reading service, drawing on my experience as a director of new plays and reader for playwrighting prizes to offer tailored support for your script.
I will always ask what you want from me as a reader, and will engage with your play with that in mind. I can offer support on form, structure, world-building, characterisation; and give advice on next steps both in terms of writing, and of placing your play within the context of the British theatre landscape.
I'm not a producer (so can't get your play on) and don't have all the answers (so won't tell you what to do), but I do love new plays and the people brave enough to write them, so hope that my thoughts might be useful. Email me here.
Lulu Raczka
Nothing; A Girl in School
Uniform (Walks Into A Bar)
Ed's dramaturgy is generous and kind, but always rigorous. He makes an effort to work out your aims and intentions for the piece and helps you get there, never imposing his own ideas. Whatever I'm working on, I'd always want his help.
TESTIMONIALS
Sam Steiner
Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons Lemons; You Stupid Darkness!
It's difficult to overstate the extent to which working with Ed has shaped my writing life. He manages to combine a wealth of knowledge, reading and expertise with a non-prescriptive sensitivity to the unique needs of this weird, amorphous thing that you're trying to usher towards life. He wants the play to be as full as possible - of ideas, of personality, of character, of feeling - and yet can help it along that path with utter clarity of thought.
Most importantly, Ed is an infectiously excitable man. He is completely unable to stop himself investing whole-heartedly in a piece he's working on. His notes don't feel like notes; they feel like opportunities. There are times when I've thought a play to be irredeemably broken only for Ed to set it completely alight again. You leave a meeting feeling more determined, more excited by and in love with the thing that you're making. And the thing it could become.
Marek Horn
Octopolis; Yellowfin
Ed's dramaturgy is egoless and without agenda. It is passionate and perceptive, astute and erudite. He is both sympathetic to the needs of the playwright and obsessive in his pursuit of the play's perfect self. He takes plays on their own terms, and understands implicitly how they might become more achieved versions of themselves.
He is able, with epigrammatic clarity, to help the playwrights he works with understand how they might better abide by their own rules, and he refrains from leaning on prescribed or prejudicial notions of what a play should 'be' or 'do.' The depth and breadth of his reading is peerless; his passion for plays and for theatre, unmatched.