Playwrights Editing and Proofreading Services

You write "she crosses to the window, pauses, turns back". In rehearsal the director blocks it differently, the actor finds a better moment, and the window is on the other side because the set could not be built the way you imagined. None of this is a betrayal. A play is a set of instructions to people who will make hundreds of decisions you cannot make from a desk, and the script that works is the one that tells them what is fixed and leaves the rest alone.

We work on what playwrights write — full scripts and drafts, scenes and extracts for submissions, stage directions and their level of detail, character lists and casting notes, monologues and audition pieces, radio and audio drama scripts, applications to theatres, competitions and development schemes, treatments and pitches, rehearsal drafts and revisions, and the front matter that tells a company how the play is meant to work. Our editors work on the line between what you control and what you do not.

Stage directions are where new playwrights most often overreach, and the cost is not that directors ignore them — it is that a script dense with unplayable instruction reads as the work of someone who has not been in a rehearsal room. We work through scripts so directions state what must happen rather than how it should look, since "she does not answer" is a fact the scene depends on and "she looks away, hurt but trying to hide it" is an acting note in the wrong place; so anything genuinely fixed is unmistakable — the gun must be visible from the start, the two doors are structural, the lights go out on the word — because these are the things a company needs and they get lost among the decorative ones; so emotional states are removed from directions and put in the writing, given that a line that only works when performed a particular way is a line that needs rewriting; so the physical demands are honest about what they require of a production, as a script needing rain, a dog and a revolve is making a casting decision about which theatres can stage it; so the silences are marked deliberately and consistently, since pauses are one of the few timing instruments a script actually owns; and so directions written for a reader are distinguished from directions written for a company. Scripts prepared this way get read to the end by literary managers.

Everything you send us stays confidential, including unproduced scripts, submissions and works in development. We are editors rather than agents, directors or literary managers, and we offer no view on whether a play will be programmed. What we can do is separate what you are asking for from what you are hoping for.