Working With Conor Mcpherson Plays One Nhb Modern Plays
Nick Hern Books released a collection of Conor McPherson plays under their Modern Plays banner, and if you're pulling scripts from this volume for a workshop, student production, or reading, there are a few practical things you need to know before you book a room and send out sides. The NHB Modern Plays series is the standard source for contemporary British and Irish drama in English-speaking theatre. McPherson's work sits comfortably inside it. The script format they use is industry-standard: character names centered, stage directions in italics, sparse formatting, no padding. You grab the book or the PDF, you open it, and you're ready to read. The text itself is clean. McPherson doesn't overwrite his stage directions, which is rare and helpful. What I've found after working through this material with companies is that the difficulty isn't in the formatting or the page count. It's in the rhythm. McPherson's dialogue has a very specific cadence, part Irish speech pattern, part deliberate silence, part dramatic pause. The NHB text shows the silences on the page but it's easy to rush through them when you're reading cold. I learned that the hard way during a staged reading where everyone was hitting their marks but missing the breath between lines. The scene collapsed. The fix was simple: we stopped treating it like a normal rehearsal and started marking the pauses explicitly, like beat sheets. Each character got a column for where the silence lives, not just where the next line starts. Took ten minutes. Changed everything.
There's also a technical catch that nobody mentions upfront. Several of McPherson's plays in this volume include atmospheric staging requirements that sound minor until you're actually mounting them. A phone ringing at exactly the right moment. A door that needs to stay slightly ajar. A specific lighting shift that isn't marked as a cue but is implied by the text. If you're doing a minimal production, you can simplify some of this, but I'd recommend tracking every environmental note in the script and deciding consciously whether to keep or drop each one. Don't accidentally drop a detail that holds the tension together because it looked optional on the page. I lost a whole act's momentum once by removing a lighting transition that the text clearly depended on. We caught it two days before dress. Another thing to watch for: McPherson's plays often feature small ensemble casts where each actor carries a disproportionate amount of dramatic weight. In rehearsal, it's tempting to distribute the emotional labor evenly. That doesn't work here. Some scenes are structured so that one character holds almost all the subtext while the other person plays comparatively straight. Letting both actors treat it as a balanced exchange flattens the conflict. I've seen directors fix this by having the "straight" performer stay genuinely present and reactive rather than trying to match energy, which keeps the tension alive without requiring equal dialogue time. If you're doing an amateur or educational production, make sure you have the proper performance license from Nick Hern Books before you publicize anything. The NHB Modern Plays volumes include scripts for private study and classroom use, but any public performance requires a license. It's straightforward to get, costs are reasonable, and doing it early saves you from pulling a show two weeks before opening. I've watched people skip this because they assumed a student production fell under fair use. It doesn't. The license fee for a small venue run is usually under a hundred pounds, and the application takes about five minutes online.
The PDF version from NHB is reliable but sometimes the kerning on older printings makes certain stage directions harder to parse quickly. If you're using it for prompt-copy work, I'd recommend importing the PDF into a word processor and adjusting the font to something like Arial or Helvetica at eleven points, then printing single-sided with wide margins. Takes twenty minutes and makes your prompt book significantly more usable than working from the raw PDF. McPherson's best-known plays in this collection include The Weir, The Ghost Train, and The Elephant Sense. Each one demands something slightly different from a production team. The Weir runs on atmosphere and ensemble chemistry. The Ghost Train leans harder on technical execution and comic timing. The Elephant Sense is smaller in cast but more emotionally demanding. Knowing which play you're working with and what it actually requires will save you from casting against the material, which is a mistake I see far more often than I'd like to admit. One final practical note: McPherson's plays work better with a slightly slower tempo than most modern scripts. Audiences don't need everything spelled out. The silences are doing work. If you're editing or cutting for time, be very selective about what you trim. The pauses are part of the architecture. Removing them doesn't shorten the play effectively, it just makes it feel thinner.
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