Director's Tool: The French Scene

Today we're looking at a script analysis tool called the French Scene. It's useful in both understanding the pacing and relationships of a play, and in developing rehearsal schedules-- who to call, how many pages they have together, and from that you can calculate how much time you should allot. For rehearsals, I typically allot four minutes of rehearsal time for each page of script. This is each time I return to a scene. Altogether, I'm likely to spend 75 hours in rehearsal before Tech, or about 40 minutes to a page. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, the French Scene....




You can find my French Scene diagram for The Woman in Black here: