Box office: 020 7978 7040
Great dialogue is the lifeblood of drama. It’s s so much more than just people speaking, it’s how your story progresses, how character relationships are formed and changed, how major themes are expressed, and how metaphor manifests in believable characters and their conversations. It can make an audience laugh, cry, storm out, feel seen, feel uneasy, keep them gripped or bore them to tears. It’s more than dialect, vocabulary, or line length, it’s the key to the whole thing; the difference between a good script and a great one. So how does it work?
Dates: Tuesday 18th & Tuesday 25th March 2025
Time: 7pm – 9:30pm
Running time of workshop: 2.5 hours – delivered online. Maximum class sizes are 16. A portion of spaces have been reserved for Share the Drama places.
Through exercises, discussions, and analysing some brilliant scripts, we’ll unearth what makes dialogue stumble or sing. The time will allow us to be granular in our exploration, with plenty of room to talk about our own writing and to be creative in response to what we learn from looking at the work of a wide range of writers, and get to the heart of how to create thrilling, authentic dialogue, avoiding speech which is wooden or heavy with clichés.
The first session will focus on dialogue as an expression of character, and how to translate compelling, complex characters into gripping speech, through looking at subtext, tactics, relationships, humour, and more – we’ll see how exciting dialogue springs from these key elements working together to create scenes which are compelling and entertaining.
In the second session, we’ll look at craft – techniques and approaches to make the most of your script through looking at scene structure, external pressures, power dynamics, and editing. This session will build on what is covered in the first session, taking the lessons we’ve learned there and giving you more practical tools to get to grips with the functions of dialogue more completely, allowing you to write it even more freely.
Thanks to our Share The Drama scheme, we want to make sure those of you who are struggling in the current climate can still take part in our Writers Programme. If you would like to book a Share The Drama place for the Writer’s Programme, please call our box office on 02079787040.
If you have any access requirements, you can let us know by contacting filling out the Google Form linked here or contacting Theatre503 via our Writers’ Programme email, writersprogramme@theatre503.com or by calling 02079787040. You can view what we currently are able to offer on our Accessibility page.
Isley Lynn
Isley won the Charles Wintour Most Promising Playwright Award at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2023 for The Swell, which was also nominated for Outstanding Achievement In An Affiliate Theatre at the 2024 Oliviers, as well as Best New Play, Best Director, and Best Production at the 2023 Off West End Awards. Their play Skin A Cat was awarded Pick Of The Year at Vault Festival 2016 and nominated for four Off West End Awards (Most Promising New Playwright - shortlist, Best New Play, Best Lead Female, Best Director) for its transfer as inaugural production at The Bunker, 2016, before touring nationally throughout 2018. Isley was the 2014 Script6 winner at The Space with Bright Nights, they received Special Commendation from the 2012 Soho Young Writers Award for Lomography, and they were twice named Champion of Literary Death Match (Norfolk and Norwich Festival, The Book Club London).
There are currently no news articles for this show!
