TEXT
AND THEATRE
When
one deals with dramatic text one has to bear in mind that drama differs
considerably from poetry or narrative in that it is usually written the purpose
of being performed on stage. Although plays exist which were mainly written for
a reading audience, dramatic text are generally meant to be transformed into
another mode of representation medium : the theatre.
For
this reason, dramatic text even look different compared to poetic or narrative
texts. One distinguishes between the primary text, i.e, the main body of play
spoken by characters, and secondary texts, i.e, all all the texts ‘surrounding’
or accompanying the main text tittle, dramatic personae, scene descriptions,
stage direction for acting and speaking, etc. However, one also has to make a
cognitive effort to imagine all these features and interpret for oneselft.
Stage performances, on the other hand, are more or less ready-made
instantiations of all these details. In other words: at the theatre one is
presented with a version of the play which has already been interpreted by the
director, actors, costume designer, make-up artists and all the other member of
theatre staff, who bring the play to life. The difference, then, lies in
divergent forms of preception. While when actually see and hear actors play
certain characters on stage, we first decipher a text about them when reading a
play script and thn at best ‘see’ them in our mine’s eye and ‘hear’ their
imaginary voices. Put another way, stage performances offer a multi-sensory
access to plays and they can make use of multimedia elements such as music,
sound effects, lighting, stage props, etc, while reading is limited to the
visual perception and thus draws upon one primary medium: the play as texts,
and the following introduction to the analysis of drama is largely based on the
idea that plays are first and foremost written of the stage.
The
main features one can look at when analyzing drama are the following :
Information
flow, overall structure, space, time, characters, types of utterance in drama,
types of stage, dramatic sub-genres.
