Introduction

Abstract

What are the prospects for a’ semiotics of writing for the stage’ and how might we justify such a project in the 1990s? After all, it now seems that the fervour that marked early structural semiotic projects has disappeared, taking with it the aspiration and the belief in itself, fundamental motor of any intellectual project. More than ten years of growing contestation of the semiotic project itself seems to have vanquished many of its practitioners, who have come to doubt its espoused rationale, and to see with new alarm its ‘hidden agendas’ apparently aspiring to categorise and control through practices of division, inclusion and exclusion. The new suspicion of semiotics’ methodologies and sites of practice, together with the new hesitation (characteristic of wider fields of intellectual practice) to construct models or to pursue globalising (or ‘totalising’) projects, conspire to render the focus of and the proposals for a ‘dramatic semiology’ academically and intellectually unfashionable as well as unsound. Today such a project seems — even to some earlier enthusiasts — to have had ‘nothing to do with theatre itself’; its ugly duckling, loved only by its semiological progenitors but not by the world of theatre practice itself (Elam, 1989). The practitioner’s traditional jibe that people with talent do, while the talentless merely talk about doing, was redirected in the 1970s and 1980s from the critic to the semiotician.