Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays

anyone into theatre should read this!

Succinct, useful and full of examples. Although it's very much a directorial approach, it is essential for the actor. For students who are bored with plays as literature, this restores plays to playing. It's brief yet leaves out little. Seems expensive for its brevity, however.

Arrived prompty and in the quality it was advertised as. No problems.

As someone who's done a masters in screenwriting and now in the middle of a PhD, I've read many of the screenwriting manuals out there and this is one of the best. It's a quick but pithy read. Much of what is recommended in this book (in 1983) is simply repeated by many others over the following two decades, but they do it less succinctly. Although targeted at playwrights, most of the content is equally applicable to screenwriting. The basic premise of the book, to work backwards rather than forwards through your script when rethinking/rewriting it, seems simple but is very powerful advice. No apprentice screenwriter sholud be without this in their library.

David Ball's Backwards & Forwards is the single most important book you need to understand any dramatic work. While it is a 'must-read' for any student of theater and is widely taught, it really has immense value for anyone who enjoys any dramatic narrative and even has value for writers or readers of any sort. Like David himself with whom I had the great pleasure of studying, the text is straightforward and clever. He pads nothing, gets right to the point and boy, does he hit the mark.