Standard modules

Experience through language

Close study of text

Texts and society

Standard Module B: Close study of text

Some notes on what to look for in drama texts

Drama text can be read like other literary forms, but it must be remembered that drama is written principally for performance.

It is most likely that:

• description will be incidental to the development of character and plot

• its stories will be developed to produce sustained scenes in one time and place

• characters will be distinguished by their speech and appearance

• action will begin immediately the performance begins

• dialogue will be realistic

• conflict will be open and visible

Some principles:

1. The German philosopher, Goethe, asked three basic questions for evaluating a performance:

• What is the composer trying to do?
• How well has the composer done it?
• Was it worth doing?

2. Remember that art is life reflected by or reflected through a personality - the composer. Reality and realism are not the same thing: Reality is life, real life; realism is an illusion of life. A performance will give you an illusion of life.
3. Art consists of three elements:

• substance
• form and
• technique

4. The purpose of art is to give pleasure and to present a view of life through the communication of the composer's thought, ideas and feelings to the audience.
5. The theatre is a medium in which there is a synthesis of the arts. There are five areas to consider:

• the play
• the performers
• the technicians
• the director, and
• the audience.

6. Theatre is an interaction between the theatre and the audience. The theatre has an obligation to its audience, just as the audience has an obligation to the theatre.

     The theatre's obligations to its audience are:

• to appeal to the audience rather than the individual
• to move the audience emotionally
• to give the audience more of life than the audience can expect to live
• to seem real
• to present illusion that is a truthful and believable picture of life

     The audience's obligations to the theatre are:

• to view a performance with their imagination engaged

• to recognises their own personal prejudices

• to observe and evaluate the contribution of all the participants in the performance

• to allow each participant to express themselves as they see appropriate

• to ask Goethe's three questions

 Drama and the three elements of art:

1. Drama and substance:

• What story is the composer tell us, the audience?
• What is the composer's overriding message or theme?
• What is the composer trying to make us feel and/or understand?

2. Drama and form , for example:

• tragedy
• melodrama
• comedy
• farce, etc

3. Drama and technique, for example:

• theme and aesthetic style
• structure, including rhythm, tempo and pace
• strategy and tactics eg stage movements, stage business, stage groupings
• moral or immoral in the representation of life
• literary or theatrical or journalistic