RESPONDING TO DRAMA
Complete the following statements to consolidate your knowledge on Drama. Use the words in
the box (You must look up in the dictionary the ones you are not familiar with). Words may be
used more than once. The first letter for each word is provided in the blank.
DRAMATISTS – CHARACTERS – PLAYWRIGHT- THEATRE – WORDS –
AUDIENCE – STAGE – EFFECTS -LITERARY DEVICES – ACTORS – PROPS –
DIALOGUE – DESCRIPTION – DIRECTORS – WORDS -INTERPRETATION –
SCENE(S) – REFERENCES – STAGE DIRECTIONS – ACTIONS – ITALICS –
SCRIPT- PURPOSE – BRACKETS – FEATURES – PACE – TENSION – LOOK –
MOOD – HOW – SAY – VOLUME - THINKING OR FEELING
1. Plays are intended for performance on stage in front of an audience. This means that we
read plays differently from the way we read poems and prose fiction. Plays have their own
distinctive appearance when set out on the page on the book. Because plays are written
for performance, it is important that you practise reading the lines spoken by characters.
2. Writers of plays are referred to as dramatists. Another commonly used term is playwright.
3. Plays are intended as shared experiences in a theatre whereas novels are for personal
reading. Plays might last two hours or more while a long novel can take days to read.
4. In the theatre, the words on the page are brought to life. A large number of people have a
role in creating this theatrical experience for the audience.
Actors and directors will bring their own interpretation of how the dialogue on the page
should sound in performance. Decisions will be made about how the scenes of the play
should appear on stage: lightning, sound, music and props contribute to the overall
performance. (Props is the short term for “properties”, that is, items used in plays, such as
the bloody dagger in Macbeth).
5. Some of the key areas for study you will consider are the ways in which descriptions do
the following: begin plays, present characters, explore themes, and create settings and
mood, use language, use structure. You need to show that you can evaluate the choices
dramatists make and the effects they create.
6. Characters in drama will use metaphors and other forms of speech. Your job is not merely
to identify or describe literally devices used by writers. Analysis is a higher order skill than
mere description: you have to consider the effect of words chosen by the writers.
7. In critical response to drama, you need to: support your points by detailed references to
the play; analyse closely the effects of particular words; analyse closely the effects of
particular actions.
8. Stage directions provide information to directors, actors and others involved in bringing
the script to life on the stage. The stage directions appear in italics and are given within
brackets. It is one of the distinctive features of Drama texts.
9. The purpose of stage directions is to create a picture of what a script might look like on
stage, to give information about the following: volume of the characters’ voice; what the
characters look like; how the characters behave; how words should be spoken to create a
mood for the scene; lightning and appearance of the set.
10. In plays, writers present characters largely through what they say and also from what
other characters say about them. Prose fiction writers have greater flexibility, as they can
show readers what characters are thinking or feeling.
11. Dramatic conflict between characters can be found at the heart of the play. Such conflicts
help create tension and make a scene particularly dramatic.
12. Pace refer to how fast or slowly you read a particular line. It is worth spending some time
deciding how lines might be read, to identify the character’s feelings, their motivation for
acting or behaving as they do.
Quick recap: Responding to characters, themes, structure and language
As you study characters and themes in plays, consider the following questions:
ASPECTS OF CHARACTERIZATION
● What do stage directions reveal about the characters´ appearance and personal qualities?
● What impression do you form of the character from what they say and how they speak
and behave?
● In what ways does the character contrast with other characters?
● Is there a conflict between the character and other characters?
● Is there a conflict within the character?
ASPECTS OF THEME
● What do characters have to say about the issues of life?
ASPECTS OF STRUCTURE
● How effective is the opening of the play?
● How is the content within scenes organized for maximum dramatic impact?
● How does a particular extract fit into the wider context of the whole play?
● How are long speeches structured for dramatic impact?
ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE -consider carefully:
● Emphasis on particular words
● The changing tone of voice of characters
● the pace of delivering the lines
● Use of dramatic pauses
● Use of dialogue to create tension or build suspense
● Use of literary devices such as metaphors, onomatopoeia, rhetorical questions, imagery,
hyperbole, repeated phrases, pun on words, etc.
