Getting Your Hands on the Mr Burns A Post Electric Play Script
The play is Tom Stoppard's 1996 work where the characters wake up in a museum after a post-apocalyptic event, and they survive by reciting lines from pop culture — mostly Simpsons episodes, along with old radio shows, films, and other media. The script is unusual because it's built entirely from existing quoted material. That makes finding a ready-made script both easier and harder than a normal play.
For a long time, the official play script was only available through Samuel French and other major drama publishers. You could order it, but it wasn't cheap. Over the years, several full-text versions have circulated on educational and theater forums. When I was putting on a workshop production a few years back, I tracked down what I thought was the complete text. It turned out to be missing about twenty minutes of the Act Two montage sequences. The missing pieces were the longer recitations of "King Kong" and some of the deeper Simpsons callbacks that tie the ending together. I ended up cross-referencing three different fan-circulated copies plus the published score to fill the gaps. The workaround was straightforward: I took the Samuel French printed edition and used it as my master text, then swapped in the missing sections from a second source that had been typed up from a performance at the Royal Court. It took an afternoon of side-by-side comparison. If you want the authoritative version, the Samuel French (now part of Dramatists Play Service) printing is what most professional theaters use. It's the one that clears performance rights. Everything else is unofficial. There are PDFs floating around on theater message boards and academic sites, but they're transcription attempts or excerpt collections. For a staged reading or educational performance, many groups have used those, but you'd need to work out the licensing separately, and some schools and community theaters skip the formal process and just run it as a classroom exercise under a broader performing rights arrangement. What makes this script different from almost any other modern play is the quotation method. Stoppard doesn't write dialogue in the traditional sense. The actors are performing lines that already exist, assembled into a new narrative arc. The "script" is really a curated compilation of public domain and licensed quotations stitched together with minimal connective tissue written by Stoppard himself.
I ran into a specific problem when someone asked me to help rehearse the final act. The cast kept tripping over the transition between the Simpsons material and the older radio excerpts. The published script marks these shifts, but it doesn't always give clear stage directions about how the characters move from one tonal register to another. The workaround I settled on was to print the script with color-coded tabs — green for Simpsons references, yellow for radio drama quotes, orange for film lines, and white for Stoppard's own narration. That let the director block the scene as a kind of shifting cultural memory, which is exactly what the play is about, rather than treating it as a straight dialogue scene. It also made rehearsal scheduling faster because we could isolate blocks of text by source and work them in chunks instead of trying to learn everything at once. The legal side is the thing people usually get wrong. Even though large portions of the text are quotations from existing media, that doesn't mean the script is free to perform anywhere. Stoppard's arrangement is his own copyrighted work, and the individual source materials carry their own rights. If you're doing it in a school setting, check with your performing rights organization. If you're a regional theater, you need a license from the playwrights' agency. I've seen groups try to argue that quoting a cartoon makes it fair game. It doesn't work that way in practice. One counter-intuitive thing about this script is that actors who come from a classical theater background often struggle with it more than people used to screen acting. The text requires a very specific kind of detached recitation. The characters aren't expressing their own emotions so much as they're channeling voices from a dead culture. Directors who push the performers toward naturalistic emotional beats tend to flatten the whole piece. The play works best when the delivery has a kind of ritual quality — like the characters are performing a ceremony rather than having a conversation.
Another pitfall I've noticed is the pacing. The middle section can drag if you don't treat the recitation sequences as rising action. The text itself doesn't build tension the way a normal plot does. The tension comes from the audience recognizing the fragments and understanding what's being lost. I've directed versions where we cut roughly a third of the montage material to keep momentum, and honestly it worked better than the full text in most cases. The published script runs about two and a half hours, which is long for a room full of people listening to quoted dialogue. A tight two-hour cut usually preserves the arc without exhausting the audience. For the script itself, my recommendation is to get the Samuel French edition if you can. It's the cleanest text with accurate attribution. If you're on a budget, look for the Faber & Faber paperback, which has the full play and includes some useful staging notes. Avoid the scanned PDFs that circulate on file-sharing sites unless you're just reading it for study. The OCR quality on those is usually bad enough to cause pronunciation errors during rehearsal, and you'll waste time correcting them. If you need it right now and can't wait for a publisher order, there are legitimate academic databases where the full text is accessible. JSTOR and some university library systems carry the published version under their performing arts collections. It's not a download, but it's a legal way to read it if you have campus access. For actual performance preparation, you'll still want a printed copy for the cast.
Get the Full Details
