The Art of Dramatic Writing

Originally published in 1942 as How to Write a Play and revised in 1946, this nonfiction guide to dramatic writing presents a unified theory of playwriting built on three foundational elements: premise, character, and conflict. Its author, Lajos Egri, a Hungarian-born playwright, director, and writing teacher, draws on examples from classical and modern drama to argue that character is the single most important element in all forms of storytelling, a position that directly challenges Aristotle's influential claim that plot takes precedence.

Egri opens by establishing the concept of the "premise," his preferred term for what others have called theme, thesis, root idea, or driving force. He defines it as the proposition that guides an entire play, the seed from which all action grows. He identifies premises in canonical works: "Great love defies even death" (3) for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "Blind trust leads to destruction" (3) for King Lear, "Ruthless ambition leads to its own destruction" (4) for Macbeth, and "Jealousy destroys itself and the object of its love" (4) for Othello. He argues that every well-formulated premise contains three essential parts: a suggestion of character, a suggestion of conflict, and a suggestion of the play's conclusion. A premise such as "Frugality leads to waste" (7), for example, implies a frugal character, a conflict ("leads to"), and an ending ("waste"). Egri criticizes plays that attempt to sustain two premises or that operate with vague, formless ones. He insists that a playwright must sincerely believe in the chosen premise and must prove it through the play's action, though the premise should never be stated directly in dialogue.

The second major section addresses character. Egri argues that every human being possesses three dimensions: physiological (sex, age, height, appearance, defects, heredity), sociological (class, occupation, education, home life, religion, race, community standing), and psychological (sex life, ambition, frustrations, temperament, complexes, abilities). Without thorough knowledge of all three, a playwright cannot create a believable person. He cites Ibsen's own description of getting to know characters through multiple drafts and points to Hamlet as a model of tridimensionality, a character whose physical state, social background, and inner psychology are all visible in the text. Characters lacking any dimension, Egri contends, will be condemned as dull, unconvincing, or stock.

He then argues that environment is inseparable from character, demonstrating that even small changes in surroundings produce measurable changes in a person. He introduces dialectics, the philosophical method originating with the ancient Greeks in which truth emerges through the interplay of thesis (a proposition), antithesis (its contradiction), and synthesis (the resolution of the two), as the governing principle of character development. To illustrate, Egri constructs a detailed tridimensional study of a hypothetical young woman named Irene, showing how a girl from a respectable religious home could, through the interaction of her vanity, intolerance, shallow intellect, and physical attractiveness, end up in prostitution. He emphasizes that each trait is necessary to make her trajectory plausible.

Egri insists that character growth, the process of change under the impact of conflict, is the fundamental requirement of good dramatic writing. Any character who occupies the same position at a play's end as at its beginning signals bad writing. He demonstrates growth through Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, tracing how her irresponsibility changes to anxiety, fear, desperation, and finally an irrevocable decision to leave her husband. On the question of strength of will, Egri defines weakness not as passivity but as the inability to make a decision, analyzing Jeeter Lester of Tobacco Road as paradoxically one of the strongest characters in modern theater: Though inactive against starvation, Jeeter's tenacious clinging to tradition and ancestral land represents phenomenal strength in resistance.

Egri then addresses the debate of plot versus character, arguing definitively that character creates plot. He directly challenges Aristotle and critiques William Archer's claim that character-drawing is an innate talent that cannot be taught. He demonstrates his thesis through a thought experiment: The same scenario of a husband discovering his wife with a lover yields entirely different outcomes depending on whether the husband is a coward, a fighter, a cynic, or an imperturbable man. He uses A Doll's House as an extended case study, reconstructing Ibsen's likely creative process from the premise "Inequality of the sexes in marriage breeds unhappiness" (100) and showing how the characters of Helmer and Nora, once fully built, logically produce the forgery scenario as the only path consistent with both premise and character. He defines the pivotal character (protagonist) as the driving force of any play, distinguishes between aggressive and enduring types, and defines the antagonist as necessarily equal in strength to the protagonist. He introduces orchestration as the careful selection of contrasting character types, comparing it to musical composition, and explains the "unity of opposites" as a bond so strong between opposing characters that compromise is impossible.

The third major section addresses conflict. Egri identifies four types: static (produced by characters who cannot decide), jumping (produced by skipping transitional steps between emotional states), rising (the natural product of a clear premise and well-orchestrated characters), and foreshadowing (the promise of coming confrontation that creates tension from the opening moments). He devotes particular attention to rising conflict, analyzing passages from Ibsen's Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and Molière's Tartuffe to show how uncompromising characters generate escalating tension. He argues that transition, the process by which characters move naturally from one emotional state to another, is the connective tissue of dramatic writing, providing a schematic of transitional steps between friendship and murder and analyzing scenes from Ghosts and Tartuffe as models. He defines crisis as a turning point, climax as the culminating point of maximum intensity, and resolution as the aftermath, tracing multiple waves of each through A Doll's House. He also defines point of attack as the moment at which a play should begin, challenging Aristotle's dictum that every story must have a beginning, middle, and end by arguing that all great plays begin in the middle, after crucial events have already occurred.

The final section addresses general principles. Egri redefines exposition as a continuous process running throughout the entire play rather than a preliminary section. He presents principles of dialogue, advising playwrights to save words, sacrifice brilliance for character consistency, and let characters speak in the language of their own worlds. He defends experimentation while insisting that fundamental principles of character and conflict cannot be violated, defines melodrama as drama in which transition is faulty or absent, and frames art as, in microscopic form, the perfection of mankind and the universe. He concludes with a consolidated guide walking the reader through the sequential steps of playwriting from premise to conclusion, along with extensive lists of character traits as resources for generating ideas. Appendices contain detailed analyses of Tartuffe and Ghosts, synopses of Mourning Becomes Electra and Dinner at Eight, and practical guidance on marketing a play.