Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

25.1 The page and the stage
Unit 25 Ways of reading drama
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

There are two basic ways of reading plays, based on two different conceptions of what a play is: a play may be conceived of as a dramatic performance or as a dramatic text (a piece of dramatic literature published in a book). For most actors, directors, theatre-goers, theatre critics, teachers and students of theatre studies, along with many teachers in university departments of literature, a play is something that takes place on a stage rather than on a page. Teachers of drama tend to see the printed text of a play as merely a preliminary script or set of guidelines that contributes just one element to the total living performance of the play on stage. Teachers of literature in universities similarly assume that their students need at least to try to imagine how a dramatic text’s meanings and effects might be realized on stage. (See Unit 26, Literature in performance.)

From this point of view, reading the text of a play is quite different from reading a novel or a poem. In their student textbook Studying Plays(1998), for example, Mick Wallis and Simon Shepherd start out by saying:

For many of us the business of reading a play is rather unsatisfactory because we continually have the sense that what we are looking at is only words on a page and that those words have yet to come alive in the mouths of real human beings standing on a stage. It is much more pleasant and satisfying to read a good novel, because the novel is designed to be words on a page. Open a novel and you’ve got everything you need in front of you; open a playtext and you have to start imagining the things that aren’t there - how it might look and sound, how an audience might react.

(1998, p. 1)

The notion that we need to analyse the play on the stage rather than on the page is quite compatible with some of the ways of reading developed in the present book, where we have extended the notion of reading to include not only the reading of written texts, but also the analysis of speech, songs, advertisements, films and TV, and so on. This extended notion of reading makes it perfectly possible to talk about ’reading’ the products of the performative arts, such as stand-up comedy, dance or dramatic performance. Yet there are problems with the basic assumption that dramatic texts are incomplete objects that can only be made complete by being turned into theatrical texts on the stage. In this unit, we want to concentrate on exploring ways of reading dramatic texts as fully readable texts in their own right. In other words, we want to demonstrate that dramatic texts, for the most part, are as readable as novels or poems. Most of the time, we will suggest, reading dramatic texts involves employing and adapting the general reading skills and strategies developed in the present book.