The course is designed to teach the technical and theoretical skills of script analysis for both play and screenplay. It offers general guidelines for reading and thinking about plays and screenplays so that the basic components of the characters and the relationship among them can be understood.

The first half of the semester will focus on two selected plays by formalist approach. Students will learn how to search for playable dramatic values that reveal a central unifying pattern, which informs or shapes a play from the inside and coordinates all of its parts. With script analysis in practice, students will find the approach feasible in analysing its structure and key twists, and the themes and story developments and how the roles should be acted for the story telling.

The second half of the course will focus on adaptation into a screenplay. Students will practice reading the screenplay through the eyes of the screenwriter, the director, the actors, the crew players, and the scholars/critics. The screenplay will be suggested as a narrative text, with script analysis in practice, students will explore its creative and dramatic underpinnings, from which directors and actors should develop and exercise creative grasps for shot design and performance.

The selected play and screened play should be from two different cultural domains and eras.