Drama
Your text is a script
- A play studied as a written text is the script: the words the characters say, and every instruction printed around them.
- Two things follow, and both matter.
- Stage directions are the writer's language and can be quoted and analysed exactly like a sentence of a novel.
- A film version, or the production your class saw, is not your text. If a director cast an actor a certain way or set the play in the 1980s, that is the director's choice and not the playwright's.
- If you have only seen the play performed, work out what was in the script. Anything a different company could stage differently — costume, casting, set, music, the actor's tone — belongs to the production. Entrances, exits, who speaks, what the printed directions say and where the scenes break belong to the writer.
- Give act and scene rather than page numbers when you locate evidence, because scripts are printed in many editions.
Four resources a script has and a novel does not
- Stage directions. Setting, but more usefully what a character does while another character is talking. A direction is often the only place a play tells you what someone is thinking, and it does it without a word of interior access.
- Entrances and exits. Who is in the room; who has just left; who is absent when the news arrives; who is made to stay and listen. This is evidence that needs no quotation at all, which makes it the most reliable material you can carry into an exam.
- Silence and speech share. Who says nothing through a whole scene; who is given the last line before a blackout; whether a character's speeches get shorter as the play goes on.
- Act and scene divisions. The writer decides where the audience is allowed to stop watching, and what is placed either side of that gap.
Dialogue is action, not conversation
- Nobody in a play speaks in order to pass the time. Every line is doing something to the person who hears it: pressing, deflecting, conceding, warning, changing the subject.
- Ask of every line: what does this do to the other character? That question turns quotation into analysis, and it is the whole difference between retelling a scene and analysing one.
- Subtext is the gap between what a line says and what it means.
- The test: what would this character have said if they meant it straight? The distance between that sentence and the one printed is the subtext, and it is measurable.
- Deflection is the commonest form — answering a question with a fact about something else. A character who replies to an accusation by talking about a dripping tap has answered.
- What to look for in the exchange itself: interruptions; a question answered with a question; a character repeating another's word back at them; a topic dropped and not returned to; a pause printed in the script, which is the writer telling you the silence is the line.
- Speech length is pace, and pace is a written choice. A page of one-line exchanges runs fast; a long uninterrupted speech stops the play. Ask why the writer stopped it there.
- A soliloquy or monologue is the only interior access a play has, and it comes at a price: the audience is told and the other characters are not, so every scene afterwards is watched with information somebody on stage does not have.
Dramatic irony is a structural effect
- Dramatic irony is the audience knowing something a character does not.
- It is created by the order information is released, which makes it structural evidence, not a language feature. You can analyse it without quoting a single line — by saying when the audience was told and when the character finds out.
- Do not write that it "creates tension". Say what the audience is made to do: re-read an innocent line as a threat, watch the listener instead of the speaker, or wait through a scene for a collision they can already see.
- The gap is the writer's instrument. How long the audience is left holding the information decides whether the effect is suspense, dread or comedy.
Structure in a play
- Where the act breaks fall. An interval is a real silence of twenty minutes, and what the writer leaves the audience holding through it is a decision.
- What happens offstage. Deaths, decisions and journeys reported rather than shown. Ask what is gained by not showing it — a reported event is filtered through whoever reports it, so the audience receives an account rather than the thing.
- The last line of a scene is a weighted position, in the same way as the last line of a chapter, and there are far more of them.
- Repeated stage pictures. The same room with one fewer person in it; a character in the chair another character used to sit in. A repeated arrangement is a comparison the writer built and never has to state.
Worked Example
An extract written for this page, from an invented New Zealand play, The Long Paddock.
Act One, Scene Three. A kitchen, late. NGAIRE sits at the table with a folder open in front of her. She closes it as TAMA comes in, and keeps her hand flat on top of it.
TAMA: You're up.
NGAIRE: The tap's dripping again.
TAMA: I'll do it Saturday. (He fills a glass at the sink and drinks it standing there, with his back to her.) Robbie rang.
NGAIRE: Did he.
TAMA: He said you rang him first. (Pause.) Twice.
NGAIRE: The washer's about eighty cents.
TAMA: Ngaire.
NGAIRE: I'll get one when I'm in town.She stands, takes the folder with her, and goes out. TAMA turns round. The glass is still in his hand. He puts it in the sink, then takes it out again and puts it on the bench.
The question: Analyse how the writer used dialogue to reveal something a character will not say.
Step 1 — the opening direction sets up everything that follows. "She closes it as TAMA comes in, and keeps her hand flat on top of it." The audience is shown the folder and Tama is not, so from his first word the scene runs on dramatic irony. Nothing in the dialogue has to establish that Ngaire is hiding something, because the direction already did — which frees every line that follows to be about something else.
Step 2 — measure the deflection. Tama's first line, "You're up", is a question in the shape of a statement. Ngaire's reply is about plumbing. Applying the subtext test — what would she have said if she meant it straight? — the honest answer is I couldn't sleep, and you know why. The distance between that and "The tap's dripping again" is the whole scene.
Step 3 — the deflection is a pattern, and the pattern tightens. Ngaire deflects three times before she leaves, and each deflection goes further into the tap:
- "The tap's dripping again" — a new subject.
- "Did he." — a question printed with a full stop, so it refuses to be a question at all.
- "The washer's about eighty cents." — a price, offered in reply to the word "Twice."
The escalation is measurable. The more precise Tama's information becomes, the more precise her irrelevance becomes, until she is costing a washer against her own phone calls. Precision is her hiding place, and the writer makes the audience see it by putting a number on each side.
Step 4 — the printed pause. (Pause.) falls before "Twice." The writer has stopped the scene so that one word lands on its own. The silence is Tama deciding to say it, and it makes a single adverb the most weighted thing in the exchange.
Step 5 — the ending, which has no dialogue in it. Ngaire takes the folder out with her, so the object leaves the room still unexplained. Then: "He puts it in the sink, then takes it out again and puts it on the bench." A man doing something and undoing it. It is the only access to Tama's mind in the whole scene, it contains no words, and it says he has no idea what to do next.