The word play can be many different things :

• to play is to do a sport or a game: Bob plays football. The children played in the garden.
• to play is also to use a musical instrument, or to use sounds on a cassette, etc: Bob plays the piano. Mary played the Abba CD.
• to play is also to be a theatre character: Mary played the role of Queen Elisabeth in the film.
• a play is also a piece of writing which we see at a theatre or on television, or hear on the radio. This page is about this sort of play.

Theatre plays

A play is a piece of writing (literature) which we see at a theatre or on television, or hear on the radio. Plays often show conversations between people, and we usually do not only read the play, but some people also read plays to understand them better.

The people who we see in a play are actors; in a theatre they stand on a stage so the people watching (the audience) can see them better. A director helps the actors to work better, or tells them how he wants the play to be.

Plays can be very interesting because we can understand them in different ways. When the writer - the playwright - makes the play, he can not say how the actors or director will use it. Sometimes the playwright is also the director or an actor: Molière, for example, was often an actor in his plays. But the director can change the play in different ways: the actors' clothes, the music, how people say things, how they move or what they hold. Modern directors can direct plays by Shakespeare, and these old plays seem modern now, too.

There are a lot of sorts of play, but there are six important sorts:

1. Tragedy - here the end is sad, because of bad luck, because the hero is not perfect, or because of the gods.
2. Comedy - here the end is happy. Some things in this sort of play are funny; it makes us laugh.
3. Domestic drama - here the play is about normal life, family and friends.
4. Tragicomedy - this play is both a tragedy and a comedy.
5. Melodrama - this sort of play often has a happy ending. In it there is a villain - a bad person - but the hero (and often a heroine) win. The emotions are very strong.
6. Symbolic - this sort of play is about ideas. The people in the play are not so important.

Dramatik | Play | Pièce de théâtre | Toneelstuk | מחזה | 戯曲 | Näytelmä | 剧本