Transforming the relations between writer, text and reader, redefining the very meaning of the terms, it still conceives of all three in relation to words alone. Extending hypertext's principles of multi-directional linking and open structure to sounds and images, hypermedia takes its transformative effects still further. Here "text" becomes a fluid assemblage of words, sounds and images (both still and moving), while the definition of "writing" is expanded to include the manipulation of all three. And this too is a transformation that holds particular significance for the playwright and her script.  Arguably, theatre is the original synaesthetic medium, fusing word, gesture, image, light, space and sound to create the composite text that is a performance. Even the most conventional, word-bound script bears witness to theatre's hybrid nature in the form of stage directions. And those same stage directions - verbal descriptions of non-verbal elements - point to the difficulties facing a playwright who seeks to write with theatre's other languages too. What hypermedia offers is, literally, a way to do so, providing access to expressive vocabularies the playwright could previously only approximate (sound, image, movement), yet whose interplay is precisely the defining characteristic of her form.  The point is not that the technology allows me to become my own set, sound and lighting designer too. I'm not particularly interested in using hypermedia to simulate production effects, though that clearly could be an application. What does interest me is the possibility of a script conceived as a multimedia document, a hypertext whose resonance is as much sensual as verbal. I imagine creating a text for live performance that can exist only on-screen, an electronic script that uses colour, sound, still and animated images as well as words to do what good scripts have always done: evoke virtual worlds. And I imagine its publication (on CD-ROM, through the Internet), not as a record of a production past or to come, nor as a replacement for it, but as a new, interactive text form in its own right.  Hypermedia both enables and demands visions of this kind. It challenges the playwright who adopts it, whether literally as a writing tool or figuratively as a textual model, to rethink what a theatrical text should, and could, be. Above all, it forces her to reconsider the relationship between verbal and non- verbal elements: how they create theatrical meanings, how they work with and against each other. Thinking about theatre and hypermedia often seems to mean thinking about production applications, "effects". It could also mean re-thinking the most fundamental formal questions. How should we write for a medium where word, image, gesture and sound are equally primary? What could a text for such a medium look like? Even more importantly, what might it do?