Interventions into the Scenes of Conflict

Abstract

If the theatre performance which draws on dramatic writing were no longer required to be the faithful servant of a putative authorial intention and creativity, but perceived instead (in metaphoric terms derived from Chomskyian linguistics) to be generated by a text approached as its idealised ‘core’ (stable and resistant despite the vagaries of performance ’surface’), then it would be appropriate that analysis of the dramatico-theatrical text or performance event should borrow from modes of analysis derived from the fields of linguistics and literary and discourse analysis. After all, applied linguistics and discourse analysis have been trying to expand the parameters of notation and speculation within their fields, to include within their spectrum factors called ‘non-linguistic’ or ‘paralinguistic’ which might ‘flesh out’, and modify language use in the scenes of the social.