Overview

'All you need to create theatre is actors with stories to tell and audiences to tell them to.'

It was with this burning conviction that Mike Alfreds formed Shared Experience Theatre Company in the 1970s. Through its landmark adaptations of classic texts, the company has redefined our expectations of stage adaptations, and in doing so has changed the way we think of theatre itself.

In Then What Happens?, Mike Alfreds makes the case for putting story and storytelling back at the heart of theatre. He explores the whole process of adapting for the stage, and investigates the particular techniques - many of them highly sophisticated - that actors require when performing 'story-theatre'. The book includes dozens of exercises and workshops exploring the practical aspects of creating story-theatre, from adapting the narrative and creating the dialogue to finding a physical vocabulary for performance. It draws on examples ranging from ancient myth, through the novels of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh, to more modern novels and short stories. Alfreds shows how each story demands its own particular set of dramatic choices, opening up endless possibilities for performance.

Then What Happens? - like the author's tremendously successful first book, Different Every Night - will be invaluable to directors and actors, to dramatists working in the field of adaptation, and to any theatregoer who has been moved by the power of an unfolding story to ask: 'Then what happens?'