Drama vs. Theatre: A Comparative Analysis

Posted on Feb 19, 2024 in Teaching & Education

Drama vs. Theatre: Drama is literature primarily written for theatrical performance, while theatre is the actual performance of the playtext.

Drama Combines Aspects of Literary Genres:

  • Narrative: fictional or factual
  • Commercial or literary
  • Common literary elements
  • Poetry: written in verse / includes poetic parts
  • Drama, mainly written to be performed

Three Major Characteristics of Drama/Theatre

  1. It has a direct, immediate impact
    • Advantages: Simultaneous impressions occur and performance can be more expressive than a reader’s imagination
    • Disadvantages: Ephemeral (performance)
  2. Drama/Theatre effectively commands the spectator’s attention
    • Advantage: The playwright’s power extends beyond words alone
    • Disadvantage: The materials one can use on stage are limited
  3. The experience of watching a play is communal
    • Advantage: Impact is intensified
    • Disadvantages: There is a need for brevity, swift movement of plot, and intermissions

Importance of Drama vs. Theatre:

  • Playtexts allow us to know masterpieces
  • Reading fosters further use of our imagination
  • Study at leisure
  • Review
  • Realize the original intent of the playwright without any interventions (director, actor, friend)

KEYWORDS AND CONCEPTS:

  • Play—>(change in time or space)
  • Act—>scene (change of characters)
  • Common literary components: plot, characters, and setting
  • Stage directions (director gives directions to the actor). Important for characterization
  • Suspension of disbelief, to cause the audience to momentarily forget that what they are seeing on the stage is happening for real
  • Alienation effect is the effect given by theatrical devices to the audience that what is happening is not real
  • Two kinds of communication if you attend Drama:
    • External communication. Between playwright and audience/reader
    • Internal communication: at the level of text and characters

LATE 19TH CENTURY:

  • The Well-made play was a typical 19th-century play structure
  • Melodrama is a sub-genre of tragedy
  • Realism
    • Exaggerated acting styles and artificial language disappear
    • Main aim: to show the problems of everyday life
    • Actual set pieces and props, faithful to life
    • Characters never speak to the audience

20th-century styles: Expressionism (Germany, 1910s):

  • To show the innermost thoughts and feelings of central characters
  • Protagonists in anguished conflict with the world
  • Usual dreamlike/nightmarish aspect of the representation