An Approach to Play-Reading

Abstract

It is no longer axiomatic in drama departments that play-texts take priority over all other subjects of study. But that was the presiding assumption in the 1960s, when I first became anxious about what was meant by ‘reading a play’. Hugh Hunt, my professor at Manchester, brought to the job an uncomplicated belief that drama departments were distinct from English departments because they studied ‘plays in performance’, but the indistinctness of that distinction was already clear by the time the first cohort of students had graduated. That was when, fresh from postgraduate study in English, I arrived in Manchester to take up my first real job. Harold Pinter was the hottest property for up-to-date students, who were already finding Osborne and Wesker old-fashioned. During my first year, there were extramural undergraduate productions of The Dumb Waiter, A Slight Ache and The Lover, all underwritten by a conviction that the avant-garde was embodied in these enigmatic pieces. Beckett was reverently performed, too: Endgame, All That Fall, Come and Go. Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd, published in 1961, seemed to be dictating to the decade. Rather than challenging incomprehensibility, the student productions embraced it. Ionesco was an exotic drug, learned by heart in preparation for hastily mounted studio production. But when did the thinking take place? Since I had been allotted a course on contemporary drama (despite the fact that my research was in the nineteenth century), I had some catching up to do. It would be a good start, I reckoned, to read some plays in class. And that was where I discovered something I should have known.