How to Play Your Best Golf is the essential golf handbook to help any golfer understand and improve their game.In this guide, highly respected pro golfer Nick O’Hern takes you through the strategies to golfing success. He reveals the key secrets of professional golfers, discusses how playing to your strengths can yield a better result, and describes all the tactics you can use to score, from course strategy and club selection to pre-game preparation and ha...

For over two decades, Stephen Jeffreys's remarkable series of workshops attracted writers from all over the world and shaped the ideas of many of today's leading playwrights and theatre-makers. Now, with this inspiring, highly practical book, you too can learn from these acclaimed Masterclasses.Playwriting reveals the various invisible frameworks and mechanisms that are at the heart of each and every successful play. Drawing on a huge range of sources, it deconstructs play...

A two-play dramatisation of Philip Pullman's extraordinary award-winning fantasy trilogy, first seen at the National Theatre.His Dark Materials takes us on a thrilling journey through worlds familiar and unknown. For Lyra and Will, its two central characters, it's a coming of age and a transforming spiritual experience. Their great quest demands a savage struggle against the most dangerous of enemies. They encounter fantastical creatures in parallel worlds – rebellious ang...

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.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...

Actioning – and How to Do It is the indispensable companion to a vital component in every actor's toolkit.Actioning is one of the most widely used rehearsal techniques for actors. It helps bring clarity to every moment or thought in the text, energising rehearsals and bringing performances to life.Actioning will enable you to discover and unlock newfound energy, range, variety and clarity of body and voice, by:Interrogating the text and making initial...

A vital companion for actors in rehearsal - a thesaurus of action-words to revitalise performance, with a foreword by Terry Johnson.Finding the right action is an essential part of the process of preparation for the actor. Using this thesaurus of active verbs, the actor can refine the action-word until s/he hits exactly the right one to help make the action come alive. The method of 'actioning' is widely used in rehearsal rooms, but has never before been set down in a systematic an...

'There is no acting, only reacting to the space.'In his bestselling book The Actor and the Target, Declan Donnellan laid out a fresh and radical approach to acting that has inspired actors around the world.Now, in The Actor and the Space, he develops and extends those ideas, exploring that most profound source of vitality in life as well as performance: the space around us.Tackling fundamental questions that face any actor – What makes per...

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little PriceFederico García Lorca's extraordinarily powerful drama, the last he wrote before his assassination, explores the darkness at the heart of repression.When Bernarda's husband dies, she locks all the doors and windows. She tells her grown-up daughters to sew and be silent. 'There are eight years of mourning ahead of us. While it lasts not even the wind will get into this house.' But locks ...

'I know you're there… Miranda? Miranda!'On a summer's day in 1900, three Australian schoolgirls on a picnic expedition to the remote Hanging Rock abscond from their group. They are last seen heading towards the beckoning Rock…In Tom Wright's chilling adaptation of Joan Lindsay's classic novel, five performers struggle to solve the mystery of the missing girls and their teacher. Euphoria and terror reverberate throughout the community, as the potential for history t...

A top-ranking director sets out his rehearsal techniques in this invaluable handbook for actors and directors.Mike Alfreds' Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theatre, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital masterclass for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive - both in rehearsal an...

This encouraging, no-nonsense guide walks you through the whole process of applying for drama school – including doing your initial research, selecting the right school for you, choosing and preparing your audition pieces, nailing the audition and dealing with recalls.This revised and updated edition incorporates recent changes to the application process such as online auditions, ensuring you have the most up-to-date information.Perfect for any aspiring actor, as well as an...

'I sit on the loo and think about all the people I can have sex with now. I'm not obsessed with sex. I just can't stop thinking about it.'The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life.Phoebe Waller-Bridge's debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. Fleabag premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for t...