My First Play is a unique collection of pieces by playwrights, actors and theatre directors - all of them regular Nick Hern Books authors - in response to the simplest of briefs: write about your first play.
by Nick Hern
Candid, hilarious, and often sharply revealing, the resulting pieces - many of them written in the hurly-burly of work on a new production - combine to prove the power of theatre to entrance us, and hold us captive in its spell.
Included here are remarkable first-person accounts from many of our leading playwrights: Caryl Churchill performing Cinderella to her parents with a cast of dolls and stuffed animals; Howard Brenton pinching his first main character from a boy's comic; Jack Thorne having to become a thief to get his first play on; Conor McPherson still waiting to write his 'first play'.
There are also enthralling insights into the first steps in theatre of some of our principal actors and theatre directors: Antony Sher discovering theatre in Cape Town during the apartheid years; Dominic Cooke paying the price for using a real knife in performance; Harriet Walter's photographic recall of the annual outing to Peter Pan; Richard Eyre on an open-air performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream that descends into chaos.
Published to celebrate twenty-five years of Nick Hern Books, the royalties from the sale of this magical collection of sixty-six miniature autobiographies will be donated to the Theatre Section of the Writers' Guild.
Every purchase you make from the National Theatre Bookshop helps fund the vital work of the National Theatre. Whether that's putting new work on stages across the world or supporting our outreach and learning programmes, every purchase you make really does make a difference.
