A Brief Overview

Drama finds its origins in religious ritual and celebration, pagents, festivals and processions. Its uniqueness of making immediate and concrete things revered from a distance opened it to charges of 'magic', 'blasphemy' or 'sacrilege.' As a result drama was subjected to a deep suspicion from which in general, other 'art forms' have been protected.

Jonah Barish (1969) points out that the very language used in drama, is embedded with common usage of metaphors often associated with disapproval as a behavioural mode i.e words and phrases such as 'melodramatic', 'stagy' 'theatrical' 'putting on act,' 'making a spectacle of oneself,' 'making a scene.'

The Medieval church was divided as to whether there was impropriety in the mimetic representation of holy personages on stage. One 11th century Latin drama Rouen Pastores, avoided this problem by having a cut out figure of the Virgin Mary in the stable scene whilst other parts were played by real people. In time however, this disapproval of drama changed as more people began to view it as a 'game' rather than a sacrilegious act.

These types of dramas were given the generic term of ludus (play) which carried overtones of pastime, merriment and revelling. Actors were seen to 'play' rather than act or perform - they did not as we would say today, 'stage' a performance but rather they 'played' a performance.

This medieval notion of drama as 'play' is crucial in understanding the essence of drama but we must challenge ourselves to think beyond drama as simply a game. Indeed drama has many faces in which the game may be played ranging from simplistic role playing to the challenge of performance modes.

 

Defining the dramatic world

In playing the game of drama we can enter into a spectrum of theatrical and dramatic genres. Improvisation is a different way of 'playing' than if we go to the theatre and become observers of a dramatic presentation but both share commonalities.

In both instances we are asked to submit ourselves to a self contained imaginative universe, a dramatic 'elsewhere'.

In role playing activities, we step into the shoes of someone else, suspend disbelief and build an imaginary framework which we negotiate usually as a group.

In theatre, the imaginary world is made manifest before our eyes through the human presence of actors.

These 'worlds', purposes and structures are created and sustained primarily by the words and actions of the participants and carry within them the potential for further development and articulation. (O'Neill 1995)

Both theatre and process drama depend on the acceptance of an illusory world - a closed, conventional and imaginary world that exists in the contract and conspiracy between audience and actors. Both require participants to engage in active make believe with regard to objects, actions and situations.

They occur within their own frontiers of time and space; they involve the adoption of roles, demand a degree of interaction are set apart from the reality of everyday life. They are temporary worlds existing within the everyday world and are dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

Once these worlds have been generated, they persist as creations of the mind and treasures of the memory.

In the theatre, the task for the dramatist is to alter our customary orientation to both time and space and locate us in an alternative, the dramatic elsewhere. (O'Neill 1995)

 

Consider the following piece of script:

Barnardo: Who's there?

Francisco: Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

Bernardo: Long live the King!

Francisco: Bernardo?

Bernardo: He.

Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.

Barnardo: 'Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to bed, Francisco.

In this piece from Hamlet we see the way Shakespeare sets the world of drama in motion. The elements used are darkness, secrecy, watchfulness, anticipation: to establish a sense of place, the mood of suspicion and depression, the tension of the roles and human relationships shared by the characters and the existence of a King.

We find ourselves in the world before we learn any more of its details through direct exposition.

From the moment the play begins we are invited to speculate, make assumptions and develop expectations about the world unfolding in front of us; Hamlet is a play about a series of increasingly intense dramatic moments and emotional states including this one which transports us to the windswept battlements of Elsinore - our dramatic world.

At the beginning of every play the audience is working harder than the actors trying to seize hints, grasp at clues, asking questions, speculating about relationships.

 

The rules of the game

• The dramatic world cannot happen without the agreement to suspend disbelief - to agree to complicity in the creation of that world.

• Children's games and play are excellent examples of encounters which depend on the participants willingness to supsend disbelief - cops and robbers, doctors and nurses, knights and queens and so on - all of these are essentially social and interactive relationships.

• In conventional theatre, the script provides actors with information about the kind of world they are creating and they display their understanding and agreement to build such a world by the coherence of the style they adopt. (O'Neill 1995)

• This works through the application of internal and external rules and conventions and it is these in turn which establish and control the development of the dramatic world in both theatre and improvisation.

• There is an immediate demand on the participants to act against an impulse to reject the imagined world.

• Drama whether scripted, devised or improvised, is a way of thinking about life. The characters, situations, events and issues that are created and explored within the dramatic world reflect and illuminate the real world.

• It is an art form that generates and embodies significant meanings and raises questions. Every dramatic act is an act of discovery and our acknowledgment of our humanity and community, first in the drama world and then in the real world.

(Reference - O'Neill, C. (1995). DramaWorlds, Heinemann: Portsmouth NH)