National Theatre organizes five-day workshop for playwrights

The National Theatre of Ghana has commenced a five-day playwriting workshop for playwrights aimed at giving practical training in improving their art in the dramatic and literary world.

The workshop, which commenced on February 17, 2020, and would end on Saturday, February 22, 2020, includes a theatre reading, acting and directing workshops.

Madam Amy Appiah Frimpong, Executive Director of the National Theatre of Ghana, said the workshop intended to refresh playwrights with existing styles and equip them with new techniques that would enhance their plays emotionally and the psychological development of their audience.

Ms Frimpong said the acting workshop would take the participants through how to become a good actor, the various styles of acting, script analyses and the relationship between characters.

“The directing workshop is also meant to improve the director’s position as an artiste-leader who is responsible for the play and all the other aspects of drama production,” she added.

She said the event came about from conversations between the National Theatre and the Network of African-American and African playwrights who had been organising such programmes in the diaspora.

Professor Femi Osofisan, a playwright and lecturer, who was a facilitator, said plays were a link that connected society to reality, adding that, “in playwriting, we explore shared identity among societies.”

He said the theatre had impacted on people’s lives and was a medium for telling one’s story to the outside world as well as portrayed one’s identity to the world.

He bemoaned the low interest of drama by most people, particularly the youth, and called on them to find theatre works as a platform for national identity and growth.

He expressed the hope that the training would explore innovations and new learnings in the literary world.

The event was facilitator by Professor Osafisan and two other playwrights and dramatists, Carlyle Brown and Chuck Mike, both Africans in the diaspora.

The participants comprised twenty playwrights who were shortlisted from the application for participation.