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

25.6 Dramatic devices that are written into the dramatic text but only work on the stage
Unit 25 Ways of reading drama
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

We have been suggesting throughout this unit that most of the devices, techniques and conventions that are thought to characterize the dramatic performance of plays are also discernible to readers of dramatic texts. Such readers inevitably draw on their experience of seeing live theatre (or drama on TV or in films), but they also employ and modify the ways of reading that are used in reading novels and poems. However, having argued this, we also need to recognize that there are dramatic techniques and devices that are written into dramatic texts but that can only be fully effective in dramatic performance. Like some of the other devices we have looked at, these devices tend to shatter the illusion that a play is a slice of real life by foregrounding the techniques of theatrical performance itself. As such, they are predominantly used in antirealist drama - especially in the plays of the last fifty years or so that critique the naturalism/realism both of late nineteenth-century drama and of contemporary popular drama (as seen in mainstream films and TV soaps). The difference between these devices and the ones we have already looked at is that, while they are discernible to the reader (they are written into the dramatic text) they can only work for an audience seeing a stage performance.

25.6.1 Breaking the identity between actor and character

In naturalist or realist drama, the tendency is to disguise the difference between character and actor in order to make the overall play more ’realistic’. The casting process therefore involves choosing actors who appear appropriate for the part in terms of sex, age, racial identity and so on, and the acting process involves the actor trying to identify with the character (a process formalized in the techniques of ’method acting’ developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the turn of the twentieth century and enshrined in Hollywood cinema). Yet such assumptions have not always held in the history of the theatre. From ancient Greece up to the Renaissance, for example, there were no female actors and female roles had to be played by male actors (female actors did not appear on the English stage until after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660). Such cross-dressing was not written into the dramatic texts produced in these periods but was a social and theatrical convention. As such, it would not have appeared odd to audiences, who in any case were not necessarily looking for a ’realistic’ one-to-one relationship between actors and characters. Similarly, in staging Othello it is unlikely that Shakespeare’s company would have felt the need to get a Moorish actor to play Othello. (Until quite recently, it was commonplace for white actors to play Othello with blacked faces.) It has become the norm today, without violating the texts, for female actors to play Shakespeare’s female characters and for black actors to play Othello. However, in the ’postmodernist’ drama of the last fifty years or so there has been a tendency to include devices and techniques in dramatic texts that serve to expose and accentuate discrepancies between actors and characters.

25.6.2 Role doubling

One technique that serves to break the identification between actor and character (and between audience and character) is that of role doubling, or the ’practice of using one actor to play more than one part’ (Worthen, 2000, p. 1487). Prior to nineteenth-century naturalism it was probably quite common for an actor to play two or more parts for reasons of economy. In productions of the decidedly non-realist Peter Pan (first performed in 1904), it became customary for the same actor to play Mr Darling and Captain Hook - a practice that underlines the oedipal elements in the play. Yet these examples of role doubling were production decisions and were not written into scripts. In Brecht’s The Good Person of Setzuan (1943), by contrast, the text specifies that the same actor should play both the prostitute Shen Teh and her male ’cousin’, Shui Ta (a character she has herself invented, out of self defence, to be her alter ego). In this instance, role doubling is not simply a fashionable device used to spice up a production, but is written into the dramatic text itself and clearly relates to the play’s investigation of gender stereotypes, capitalism and the theatre itself.

Role doubling is now a fairly common technique in contemporary nonrealist drama, but it is most interesting when it is being used to dramatize the critical issues that the play is dealing with. An intriguing example can be found in Athol Fugard’s Valley Song (1996; published 1998), set in a small village in South Africa shortly after the end of apartheid. There are three characters in this play: a white South African man simply called ’The Author’; a coloured farmer in his seventies called Abraam Jonkers (also known as Buks); and Buks’s seventeen-year old granddaughter Veronika. However, only two actors are required because the dramatic text specifies that ’The role of the Author and Buks must be played by the same actor’ - a use of role doubling that has many resonances both within the play and in the post-apartheid world that the play addresses. ’The Author’ buys a derelict house that includes a farm with a piece of land, the cultivation of which has sustained Buks’s family over several generations. ’The Author’ and Buks are thus potentially in conflict with one another, and yet the fact that they are played by the same actor suggests both that there is some significant kinship between them (including a shared love of the land and of farming) and that the apartheid-era separation of people according to racial categories is beginning to break down. At the same time, however, the play suggests that some of the consequences of apartheid may take longer to disappear. The coloured characters in the play refer to ’The Author’ as ’Master’, and when he eventually acquires the farm he will become the ’master’ of the coloured family who have lived and worked on the farm for generations. The use of role doubling in Valley Song, then, contributes to the play’s exploration of the complexities of social, economic, interpersonal and inter-racial issues in post-apartheid South Africa. Yet, although role doubling is written into the dramatic text - in stage directions such as ’In the course of the song [’The Author’] moves into the character of Buks’ - its effects can only be fully experienced by an audience. While a reader of the dramatic text will tend to think of ’The Author’ and Buks as two entirely different characters, the audience is constantly reminded of the fact that there is a significant connection between them through witnessing the actor repeatedly switching from role to role.

25.6.3 Cross-dressing

Another device that serves to disassociate actors from characters is ’crossdressing’ - i.e. the practice of having male actors play female roles, or female actors playing male roles. As we have seen, cross-dressing was inevitable prior to 1660 when women were not allowed to appear on the stage. Since the early part of the twentieth century, however, cross-dressing has become another alienation device written into dramatic texts in order to highlight the issues that the play is exploring. A pioneering example is Brecht’s specifying that the female actor who plays the prostitute Shen Teh in The Good Person of Setzuan should also play her (invented) male cousin, Shui Ta. Like role doubling, crossdressing is a device that can be read in the dramatic text, but whose effect can only be fully experienced by watching the play in performance.

25.6.4 Directly addressing the audience

In realist and naturalist drama the pretence is that the audience is looking through a transparent fourth wall into the private lives of the characters. If a character were directly to address the audience, that pretence would be shattered. Thus, if a character soliloquizes, he or she is thought to be thinking aloud rather than addressing the audience. However, in the plays (and films) of the twentieth century that seek to shatter the realist illusion, the direct address to the audience (or camera) is often written into the text. Good examples of this can be seen in Fugard’s Valley Song.