A play was a dramatic performance.

William Shakespeare was a famous playwright. The First Doctor assisted him in writing Hamlet between the first the first and second drafts. (PROSE: Byzantium!) In 1599, the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones saw his play Love's Labour's Lost performed at the Globe Theatre. They thwarted an attempt by the Carrionites to use the subsequent performance of Love's Labour's Won to free their brethren. The sequel was lost, with all copies of its script destroyed. (TV: The Shakespeare Code)

A mummers play differed from the typical scripted performance, instead being the product of oral tradition, passed on from one generation to the next. (AUDIO: Castle of Fear)

Juliette Vierge visited an insane asylum where she watched a play performed by the inmates. (PROSE: The Adventuress of Henrietta Street)

Plays were commonly staged at the Intergalactic Fringe Festival. Cymbelline Sharp became a prolific playwright in mere months, having 1,203 of her plays concurrently staged by the time the Twelfth Doctor and Bill Potts visited the Fringe. Gallifrey Falls No More, an accurate dramatisation of the last day of the Time War, proved her downfall, as it motivated the Doctor to discover she was using the psychic circuit inside the Mobile Audience Services Kiosks given to visitors to mine visitors' minds for inspiration for her plays. With his sonic screwdriver, he wiped all memories of her plays from everyone on the Fringe and requested that the plays be reviewed. She was deluged with confused, zero-star reviews and eventually banished from the planet. (AUDIO: War Stories)