The Nature of Drama

Abstract

There are almost as many definitions of drama as there are critics of it, but from some representative remarks we can establish the essential elements of the form. G. B. Tennyson says: ‘Drama is a story that people act out on a stage before spectators.’ Eric Bentley remarks: ‘The theatrical situation, reduced to a minimum, is that A impersonates B while C looks on.’ For Marjorie Boulton, a play ‘is not really a piece of literature for reading. A true play is three-dimensional; it is literature that walks and talks before our eyes’.¹ The crucial stresses are, again and again, on the theatricality of drama, that it is an art which requires performance on a stage for its full effect; that it involves real-life people pretending to be imagined people; and that it places particular emphasis on action, of a concentrated, often intense, kind. The primacy of action in drama is a product of the peculiarly physical nature of the form:

When we ask what it is that drama can do better than anything else, we find that plot and character can be done nearly as well in most respects, and in point of fulness and detail much better, by the novel or other narrative forms of writing, but that the drama being a visible show is incomparable for crises, for those sudden turns of action which the eye takes in at a glance before a word is spoken, with the double advantage of a thrill for the audience and a saving of space for the dramatist. These critical moments are its moments of triumph, and a born dramatist so contrives his plot that a number of these follow one another in an ascending scale of excitement.²