Lajos Egri examines a play from the inside out, starting with the heart of any drama: its characters. For it is people - their private natures and their inter-relationships - that move a story and give it life. All good dramatic writing depends upon an understanding of human motives.
Why do people act as they do? What forces transform a coward into a hero, a hero into a coward? What is it that Romeo does early in Shakespeare''s play that makes his later suicide seem inevitable? Why must Nora leave her husband at the end of A Doll''s House? These are a few of the fascinating problems which Egri analyzes.
He shows how it is essential for the author to have a basic premise - a thesis, demonstrated in terms of human behaviour - and to develop his dramatic conflict on the basis of that behaviour. Premise, character, conflict: this is Egri''s ABC. His book is a direct, jargon-free approach to the problem of achieving truth in a literary creation.
Format |
Häftad |
Omfång |
320 sidor |
Språk |
Engelska |
Förlag |
Simon & Schuster |
Utgivningsdatum |
2004-05-17 |
ISBN |
9780671213329 |