1 Approaching plays

Most people's experience of plays will be through seeing them on stage, or on television or video. Or, thinking of drama in a more general sense, we might be avid watchers of TV soaps or films. But, as a student of literature, you are sitting at home with a book open in front of you. It contains the text of a play. What, then, are you to make of the words on the page before you? If the script you were examining was intended for a film or a TV play it would look different from the examples that follow, since these media focus more on the visual aspect, and the conventions or presentation for a film or TV script are different from those of a play script intended primarily for the stage. In this course, we shall be concentrating on play texts, but we shall also be offering some guidance for how to get the most out of watching a performance.

I shall shortly be looking at the three extracts in detail, but for now I should like to focus on the main differences between them. There are no stage directions in the extract I have chosen from Top Girls, which consists simply of short lines of dialogue exchanged between two characters. In fact, I have cheated a bit here and deliberately chosen a passage which gives speech only; when I give the longer extract for discussion you will see that Churchill does give some directions. But on the whole there are relatively few in this play, unlike A Doll's House, where Ibsen gives many instructions to do with setting, action and expression. In the example here, the speech seems almost secondary to the action, and there are clearly actors on stage (the children) for whom no dialogue is written, though they are not silent, and another actor appears who is silent for some time. Henry V's speech is written in blank verse, a poetic form consisting of unrhymed iambic pentameters that was generally used in drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in combination with prose dialogue. The play script, put together after the performance, contains no stage directions beyond indications of entrances, exits, fights and flourishes. Obviously techniques that are used for analysing poetry and other texts can be relevant in reading a speech like this, but what is important to remember is that it is being delivered by an actor, in costume, to other actors, and to an audience.

This is where a play text differs crucially from a poem, a novel or a short story – it is a text for performance. Poems and stories may be performed in the sense that they may be read aloud, and in that event the way that they are read is itself an interpretation, but a play text is specifically a text for performance, and therefore it is necessary to read it with attention to the way the words will be brought to full life on stage; the performance will need to make not just an aural but also a visual appeal. Another important difference between drama and prose fiction, however, lies in the absence (generally speaking) of a narrator. There are exceptions to be found, for instance in the chorus in Henry V and Romeo and Juliet, or, to take two more modern examples, in Peter Schaffer's Royal Hunt of the Sun, and Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. In a novel, the narrator, typically, will act as a guide and interpreter, shaping the narrative to give it a particular significance, evaluating character and commenting on the action. In particular, through the handling of point of view the narrator can direct the reader's sympathies. On stage, the play will be interpreted by the director and the actors, and the way in which the audience's sympathies are manipulated is less obvious; much will depend on the extent to which they can identify with one or more of the characters.