The Dramatic Text

There exists a long-standing debate on whether a dramatic text is complete as a work of literature and can be studied as such independently of its potential instantiation on stage (see Burton, 1980; Hermann, 1995; Culpeper et al, 1998;

Mandala, 2007) or is a text that can only fully realise meaning within the context of the complete performance (see Bassnett-McGuire, 1985; Edgar, 2009; Limon, 2010; Rozik, 2010) and in the presence of the audience (see

Schechner, 2002; Fischer-Lichte, 2008; Marinetti, 2013a; Johnston, 2013).

Nonetheless, almost all plays are written to be performed (Short, 1998:6) with the exception of ‘closet dramas’, classified as strictly literary and not intended for performance (see Pavis, 1998; Short,1998; Straznicky, 1998).

Similarly, almost all theatre productions begin with some form of written or dramatic text, with the exception of improvised theatre and some types of devised theatre. Sometimes the dramatic text is realised on stage in its entirety, sometimes it is edited to shorten (as Shakespeare’s plays almost always are) or to highlight or foreground particular themes, or sometimes used as a point of departure, fragmented and remoulded, as in the case of

RashDash’s 2018 production Three Sisters, after Chekhov, in which all the male characters are excised from the text, and only small sections of the sisters’

dialogue retained, with contemporary dialogue, and original songs with lyrics inspired by Chekhov’s text, added.

For the purposes of this study, I will first discuss the dramatic text, before moving on to discuss its location in and relationship with the theatrical text, since the theatre audience’s interface is with the finished live performance, and it is the theatrical context in which the SLI delivers the rendition.

Dramatic dialogue (accounting for its historical context) is a representation of spontaneous everyday talk (although not exclusively as we find

announcements, speeches, rituals and so on presented in performances also).

The essential feature of dramatic dialogue, however, is that it is not meant for the fictional interactants in the drama, but for a third party - the spectator.

Rozik (2010:136) describes theatre as functioning on two axes: the fictional character-character axis of interaction, and the theatrical stage-audience axis of communication, and as such, dialogue operates differently on the fictional interactants on stage, and on the audience. In this way, dramatic dialogue

‘multitasks’ (Edgar, 2009:156); it is carefully crafted to efficiently provide the audience with specific information about the drama’s spatial-temporal context, situation, characters, and plot; the dialogue may elaborate the situation,

function proactively to move the plot along, or retroactively to reinforce

preceding events. Not only what the characters say, but also how they participate in the dialogue, their turn taking, interactional patterns, who dominates the exchange, and so forth, are all signifiers providing information for the audience; ’the apparent meaning is not the essential one, but is only a symbol for a hidden meaning […] [dramatic dialogue] is really saying something and meaning something else’ (Southern, 1979:24).

2.4.1.1 Turn-taking

Dialogue is constructed in turns that invite a response, either spoken or performed, from the receiver character (Wallis and Shepherd, 2002:52) and all exchanges are structured to lead the audience through the development of the drama.

The characters’ conversational patterns, length of turn, and combinations of short and long turns, interruptions and overlaps, give energy and rhythm to a scene, and define character and relationships between interlocutors (Short, 1998; Wallis and Shepherd, 2002). An over-long turn, for example, (perhaps indicating that the speaker is boring or verbose) may be brought into focus by a very short, sharp, contrasting turn, known as the drop line, in response (Edgar, 2009).

The scripted silence (most notably in the work of playwright Harold Pinter) has a dramatic function: when indicating a character’s inability or refusal to

communicate, for example, the silence can stand for a line of dialogue or an action (see Esslin, 1982; Stucky, 1994; Edgar, 2009). Playwright Caryl

Churchill’s post-1979 plays feature characters regularly interrupting each other’s dialogue, and extended overlaps of talk, as a way of shaping the dialogue to create particular rhythms and effects (Ivanchenko, 2007; Edgar, 2009). How the interpreter negotiates these recognisably ‘spoken’

conversational patterns will be considered further in 2.7.3 of this chapter and again in 5.3.2.

2.4.1.2 Stage directions

Further instructions for the theatre-maker, and an additional indication that the dramatic text is written for performance, however, is the inclusion of stage directions, which, whilst often presented separately from the dialogue, may also be implicit and contained within the dialogue. Wallis and Shepherd (2002:106) cite the example of Middleton’s (c1621) Women Beware Women, which guides the activity of the actors:

Duke: Prithee tremble not.

I feel thy breast shake like a turtle [dove] panting Under a loving hand that makes much on’t’.

(Middleton, Women Beware Women, c1621/1975: 2.2., 320-2) Explicit stage directions may also provide the setting for the drama, and guidance for the set, lighting or costume designers of the production. The following examples are from dramatic texts, written over a century apart:

Act One

A large drawing room, handsomely and tastefully furnished; decorated in dark colours […] all around the drawing room bunches of flowers stand in vases and glasses […] Morning light. The sun shines in through the French windows.

(Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, 1890/2002:1) Part One

A dimly-lit squat, known to its inhabitants as HQ. A chaotic landscape of necessary junk. No-one home.

(Goode, Jubilee, 2017:9)

They may also describe mimetic activity, and provide clues to characters and their relationships, the psychodynamics of the moment (see Aston and Savona, 1998):

Hedda sits on the corner of the sofa. Brack puts his coat over the back of the nearest chair and seats himself, keeping his hat in his hand. Short pause.

They stare at each other.

(Ibsen, Hedda Gabler, 1890/2002:36)

AMYL mimes to a souped-up version of ‘Rule Britannia’, goose-stepping across the stage. It’s like Nigel Farage’s wettest ever dream, Brexit remixed as loveless Burlesque. The sounds of war and football crowds drench the soundtrack.

BORGIA is rapt; BOD is appalled but fascinated.

(Goode, Jubilee, 2017:31)

To an extent, then, the dramatic text limits the director’s options (Mandala, 2007) in terms of characters, what they say, the setting and the progression of events, and guides the construction of the theatrical work. As illustrated by the previous example of RashDash’s (2018) Three Sisters After Chekov however, the dramatic text is not entirely prescriptive; Wallis and Shepherd (2002:2-3) note that the dramatic text contains only ‘an implied production’, and provides considerable scope for the visualisation of its staging. Thus, dependent on the historical, cultural, social and political context of the reader, director or creators of the theatre, interpretations of the dramatic text are never the same (Pavis 1998:65); a theatre interpreter in her career, may be required to interpret two different productions of the same play, yet she can not rely on the first rendition to create the second, as each production is re-interpreted and re-imagined by the producing company.

2.4.1.3 Plot and Action (what happens)

Earlier in this section it was noted that one of the functions of dramatic dialogue is to reveal plot, and this is achieved by its careful structuring to strategically withhold and release information (Armes, 1994). It is helpful to discuss the notion of plot at this juncture: the very minimum we would expect of the Deaf theatre audience is to be able to follow the plot development of the drama, and it is the articulations of the plot that form the basis for the

segmentation of the corpus for analysis.

The notion of a drama having a plot structure is over two thousand years old.

Aristotle (c.335BC/1996) defines plot as a connected series of events in which one follows on from another as a necessary consequence. The events are also

self-contained; the first event is self-explanatory in some way and the last event is a definite end. He elaborates by asserting that the structure should be determinate in that ‘the transposition or removal of any section dislocates and changes the whole. If the presence or absence of something has no discernible effect, it is not a part of the whole’ (Aristotle, c.335BC/1996:15). This notion prevails still today; Hodge (1988:34) defines plot as ‘the sequential

arrangement of the conflict incidents that compose the action’, and Armes (1994:16-17) ‘the outer arrangement of events’ (see also Pickering, 2005).

These definitions, however introduce two more terms pertinent to the present discussion: ‘action’ and ‘event’.

Armes (1994:16-17) defines action as ‘the inner sense of coherent time, space and meaning’ (see also Hodge, 1998; Pavis, 1998). The action must not be confused with an action, however. Mamet (1986:125) stresses that a play is about ‘the actions of its characters’; the (dramatic) action is effected by the characters’ (individual) actions (Hodge, 1998:44).

Actions are defined according to the branch of philosophy known as the theory of action (see Anscombe, 1957; Davidson, 1980; Hyman and Steward, 2004).

Five constitutive elements of an action are required: an agent, his or her intention in acting, the act or act-type produced, the modality of the action (manner and means), the setting (temporal, spatial and circumstantial). We can apply these requirements to dramatic actions also. The characters’ actions do not occur independently and in isolation from each other, however. Pfizer (1994:199) uses ‘action’ to refer to a single intentional action (an attempt to change the existing situation, and resulting in a new situation) by a character, and ‘action phase’ to refer to a number of small actions that combine to achieve a change in the situation. Wallis and Shepherd (2003:77) provide examples from King Lear: a single action would be Lear banishing Cordelia, and an action phase would be the division of the kingdom between his

daughters, including the banishing. The action, then - Lear’s journey from wilful king to enlightened father - is therefore composed (although not exclusively, as we shall see shortly) of character-driven actions and action phases. These are, Elam (2002:111) notes, recognisable to the audience as intentional and

influenced by the overall purpose of the character, but the drama does not necessarily reveal their connection or relevance, or fulfil their purpose immediately.

The dramatic action, as mentioned above, is not exclusively composed of characters’ actions (either independent or linked) because dramatic

occurrences first do not always alter the present situation (functioning rather to elaborate the situation, to reveal character, or generally contributing to the play’s discursive framework), and second do not always result from human agency.

Pfister proposes that events ‘occur either when human subjects are incapable of making a deliberate choice, or the situation does not allow for any

change’ (Pfister, 1994:200). Elam, on the other hand, argues that events are

‘happenings strictly beyond human volition’ (Elam, 2002:109), which would include dramatic incidences such as natural disasters, death by natural causes and such like. We can conclude, then, that events are occurrences necessary to the drama (either, as noted above, in terms of revealing or developing character, elaborating the situation, or making a contribution to the overall discourse of the play) that are not the result of an intentional act by a character.

It is the arrangement of these actions, action-sequences and events that constitute the plot. Particular plot structures also shape and identify types and genres of drama. Wallis and Shepherd (2002: 78-9) reference Eugène Scribe’s 1836 formula for a ‘well-made’ play:

exposition → development and complication → crisis → denouement → resolution

However, nowadays the ‘well-made’ play does not necessarily follow this structure. Schechner (1988) describes plays as having either closed, open or combination structures. The closed structure follows that of Scribe’s ‘well-made play’. The ‘open’ structure begins with a similar conflicted situation, which progresses with a series of events, none of which, however, have the effect of altering the initial situation, and therefore come to no resolution.

A typical example is that of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. There is no expository information about the characters or their situation, nor a climax or unravelling of a complication. The play consists of a cyclical series of events that ultimately changes nothing – at end of the play the characters Vladimir and Estragon are still waiting for something to happen. This is essentially what the play is about, so it is, for the audience, vital information for its understanding of the work.

Plays structured in this way allow the exploration or elaboration of a single given situation. Broadly, we can say that highly plot-driven plays guide the audience through the journeys of the characters, whereas more

event-determined plays invite the spectator to consider the situation the characters find themselves in.

The ‘combination’ structure combines both the closed and open structure;

Schechner uses Chekhov’s Three Sisters as an example. During the course of the play, although events occur that ought to alter the sisters’ situation (the youngest sister Irina’s suitor Tusenbach is killed in a duel, for example) in fact, the sisters at the end have still not moved to Moscow (which they discuss often and believe will improve their lives immeasurably).

Schechner’s models are not comprehensive, and particular forms and structures of theatre emerge from historical, political and cultural

circumstances. Brecht’s ‘montage’ structure, for example, presents scenes, introduced by actors and representing apparently autonomous events,

contribute to the overall ‘argument’ of the play (see Pavis, 1998:220; Wallis and Shepherd, 2002), and indeed individual plays have their own plot strategies.

Charlotte Keatley’s 1988 play My Mother Said I Never Should begins with a fantasy scene wherein all four female characters, although of different generations in the rest of the play, are represented as children, playing together on a piece of industrial wasteland. Throughout the play there are identifiable moments of exposition, complication and crisis, but this information is revealed in non-linear flashback/flash-forward sequences with the characters at their respective ages. The structure is episodic and the audience are given information out of sequence in order that they can piece together, jigsaw-like, the dramatic situation and its chronological development. Similarly, in Marcus Romer’s 2007 stage adaptation of Anne Cassidy’s novel Looking For JJ, the

character JJ functions as the narrator of her own story, presented in non-linear flash-back scenes, which lead to a climax of the crime JJ committed as a child. It functions almost as a detective drama (in which full exposition is withheld until the end), the structure strategically retaining and disclosing information in order to create suspense and anticipation.

Evidently the drama’s plot articulations and structure are chosen by the playwright, however it is not the case that its development is demonstrated solely through dialogue.