'The Good Son' (working title): a new play commissioned by the National Theatre Studio, with reflective appendix on contemporary playwriting.

这个研究项目主要包括一个原创的长篇戏剧的写作和发展，由国家剧院工作室的八周附件促进。在此期间，我将通过阅读、研讨会和批评反馈，与内部演员、导演和戏剧师合作，磨练和改进剧本。在这个过程中，我将重写和润色剧本，导致一个完整的和充分实现的剧本。此外，我打算对这种创造性实践中产生的问题进行批判性的审查，并将这些问题与更广泛的当代剧本创作领域和围绕它的学术辩论联系起来。这个项目的创作目标是写一部既抒情又实验性的戏剧，以处理平凡的事情。这部戏剧试图解决信仰、精神空虚和失落的问题，涉及其环境的“语言和精神贫乏”，这种环境在戏剧的新写作中很少有代表——即英格兰南部中下层阶级的普通世界。该剧以圣诞节为背景，从1997年到2007年发生的事件，从地点和时间的角度审视了作者自己的家。一个失去儿子的人必须面对自己的罪恶感；一个误入歧途的儿子必须回家承担责任；另一个走失的儿子拿着钥匙，做成一个圣诞“愿望盒”，人们把他们的愿望寄进去。圣诞节的场景让人想起失去的童年和失去的信仰，祈祷变成了愿望；它还唤起了我们猖獗的消费主义与精神需求的碰撞，同时提供了一个充满幽默和丰富人性弱点的戏剧性背景。因此，研究过程的第一部分是通过剧本创作的创造性实践，探索和发现这些主题的引人注目的戏剧形式，一种既能结合现实主义的叙事驱动力，又能结合非线性戏剧结构的灵活性的形式。这种形式的非线性是为了使戏剧在必要时能够打破线性时间顺序，以支持联想的诗意逻辑；记忆、梦想和情感意义的扭曲逻辑。我们的目标是找到一种形式，既能满足一般来说是亚里士多德家庭和复仇剧的叙事要求，又能捕捉到意识本身的碎片流和漂移。研究过程的第二部分是反思这种创作实践所产生的见解和戏剧问题：诸如当代剧作家如何创造出一种戏剧形式来体现一个社区的“语言和精神贫困”，同时矛盾地创造出戏剧丰富和充满活力的语言、结构和内容。这个过程第二部分的目的是写一篇分析性和批判性的文章，将这些研究问题与更广泛的当代戏剧写作领域联系起来。我希望这一分析能够通过在具有国际地位的相关期刊上发表，从而对学术辩论做出引人注目的原创性贡献，从而尽可能广泛地接触学术研究界。因此，整个项目的一个关键目标是在专业创意实践和学术话语之间建立联系；将知识从前者转移到后者，反之亦然；并探讨从这两个互补但经常相互不理解的努力领域之间的对话中可以获得什么。

This research project consists primarily of the writing and development of an original full-length play, facilitated by an eight-week attachment to the National Theatre Studio. During this time I shall hone and improve the script by collaborating with in-house actors, directors and dramaturgs through readings, workshops and critical feedback. In the light of this process I shall rewrite and polish the script, resulting in a finished and fully realized script. Further to that it is my intention to write a critical examination of the issues arising from this creative practice, and relate these to the wider field of contemporary playwriting and the academic debate surrounding it. The creative aim of this project is to write a play that is both lyrical and experimental in its treatment of the resoundingly ordinary. The play seeks to address questions of belief, spiritual emptiness and loss, engaging with the 'linguistic and spiritual impoverishment' of its milieu, a milieu rarely represented in new writing for the theatre - that of the ordinary world of the lower middle classes in the South of England. Set at Christmastime, with events covering the period from 1997 to 2007, the play is an examination of the author's own home, in terms both of place and time. A man who has lost his son must come to terms with with his guilt; an errant son must come home and take on responsibility; and another lost son holds the key, in the form of a Christmas 'wish-box', into which people post their wishes. The Christmas setting evokes lost childhood and lost belief, in which the prayer has decayed into the wish; it evokes also the collision of our rampant consumerism with spiritual need, whilst providing a dramatic setting that is potentially ripe with humour and rich in human foible. Thus the first part of the research process is to explore and discover, via the creative practice of playwriting, a compelling dramatic form for these themes, a form that can combine both the narrative drive of realism, and the flexibility of non-linear theatrical structures. This non-linearity of form is to enable the play, when necessary, to explode linear chronology in favour of the poetic logic of association; the skewed logic of memory, dream and emotional significance. The objective is to find a form that can both satisfy the narrative demands of a play that generically is an Aristotelian family and revenge drama, while also capturing something of the splintering flow and drift of consciousness itself. The second part of the research process is to reflect on the insights and dramaturcal problems arising from this creative practice: problems such as how the contemporary playwright can carve out a dramatic form to embody a community's 'linguistic and spiritual impoverishment' while paradoxically creating language, structure and content that is theatrically rich and vibrant. The aim in this second part of the process is to write an analytical and critical article relating these research questions to the wider field of contemporary playwriting. It is my hope that this analysis may make a striking and original contribution to academic debate through publication in a relevant journal of international standing, thereby gaining access to as wide a cross-section of the academic research community as possible. A key objective of the entire project, therefore, is to forge a link between professional creative practice and academic discourse; to transfer knowledge from the former to the latter, and vice versa; and to explore what can be gained from dialogue between these two complementary, but frequently mutually incomprehending, areas of endeavour.