What Is Drama?

Drama is a genre of literature, in which the words are mainly dialogue. People talking is the basic dramatic action. Wordless activity may interrupt the talk, but it is the context of dialogue that gives significance to such activity. The essential quality of drama is interaction since it uses words to create action through the dialogue of characters talking to one another rather than to the reader. Thus, like a poem it is overheard rather than being addressed to a reader. And like a story, drama is concerned with plot and character. Like an essay, it is capable of being used to explore issues and propose ideas. Drama is a synonym for plays. We don’t see lots of plays, but we watch television and films. Drama is at once literary art and representational art. It is a special kind of fiction-- a fiction acted out rather than narrated. Plays are more public than poems and stories because they are written to be performed and witnessed. The text of a play is something like the score of a symphony, which is a finished work, yet only a potentiality until it is performed.

“Drama” comes from the Greek word “dran,” meaning “thing done,” “action,” or “deed.” It begins in the make-believe, in the play acting of children. Aristotle (384-322 BC), the first and still the single most important theorist of drama, called drama “imitated human action.” Professor J M. Manly saw three necessary elements in drama: (1) a story (2) told in action (3) by actors who impersonate the characters of the story. Though the origin of theater seems to be a riddle, “performing” or “acting” has been existing as a spontaneous action throughout human history. Ancient Egyptians and Persians held rites to commemorate birth, death, or renewal of soil. The dramatic form in those rites embodied the order of human life and echoed the rise and fall of the Nile. In ancient Greece epics about gods and men, attributed to Homer (between the 9th and 8th century BC), were sung by single musicians at first. but were later supplemented with dialogues and narrated through both singing and acting. Hundreds of years after Homer, Greeks started to have whole-day celebrations at theaters where men paid tribute to the gods in communal enactments of myths of redemptive sacrifice and orgiastic abandon.

There are three independent origins of drama. Drama began with pagan religious rites in Greece. It evolved from certain religious ceremonies. It is generally believed that Greek tragedy developed from certain Dionysian rites dealing with life and death, while Greek comedy arose from the Dionysian rites which dealt with the theme of fertility. And medieval drama came out of rites commemorating the birth and the resurrection of Christ. If tragedy is associated with death, comedy deals with love and sex. Satire became an element of comedy as early as the sixth century BC.

The word “tragedy” seems to mean a “goat-song,” and may reflect Dionysian death and resurrection ceremonies in which the goat was the sacrificial animal. Greek authors of tragedies were Aeschulus (525-456 BC), Sophocles (496-406 BC), and Euripides (480-406 BC). Tragedy is the dramatic kind that has been studied most frequently. It is the subject of Aristotle's Poetis and numerous works of later critics. Sophocles's Oedipus Rex is close to being the perfect exemplar of Aristotle's definition of tragedy. Tragedy describes the fall from prosperity to adversity of a great individual

because he has transgressed against the great moral principles which govern the universe. In his adversity he comes to understand himself and the situation, blessed with enlightenment even though he may be dying. Oedipus, prosperous and happy at the beginning of the play, believes that he can save his city, that he can control Fate. He did it once before, when he fled from Corinth to avoid carrying out the oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. But Oedipus is wrong, for Fate will carry the day. While traveling the unwittingly fulfills the oracle. Later, realizing the truth of his birth, he stabs out his eyes and goes into exile with his daughter Antegone as guide. At the end of the play he understands. His final appearance radiates a serene and dignified resignation to his destiny, an enlightenment gained at a terrible price.

Of a large quantity of Greek plays, some complete tragedies survived, such as Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Phoedra by Sophocles, Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, The Bacchae by Euripides, Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, and comedies such as Lysistrata by Aristoophanes.

Medieval drama in Western Europe, developed from the ritual of the Christian Church, became a new form about the ninth and following centuries. Then came mystery plays dramatizing familiar Biblical events, and morality plays, which flourished specially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and lived on into the Renaissance. On the medieval stage there was the anonymous morality drama Everyman at the end of 15th century. In the Renaissance English Theatre there were Shakespeare’s tragedies such as Othello, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and his comedies such as As You Like It, Twelfth Night. In the Neoclassical French Theatre Moliere's The Misanthrop was a comedy of manners. In modern to contemporary drama

there were dramatists like George Bernard Shaw (Irish), Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian), Anton Chekhov (Russian), who wrote realistic drama, August Strindberg (Swedish), who wrote naturalistic drama, and Bertolt Brecht(German) and Luigi Pirandello (Italian), who were famous for their experimental plays. The Theatre of the Absurd, which was centered in Paris, and which emerged into the European theatres in the years after the Second World War, was absorbed into the mainstream of development. Its most important exponents were Samuel Beckett (Irish), Eugene Ionesco (Rumanian), and Harold Pinter (English).

Most of the serious plays of the contemporary theatre have not tempted to be tragedies. One reason for this is that none of the value systems understandable by its audience provides a suitable framework for tragedy. Rather than focusing on man’s relation to a universal order of some kind, playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov, and others have turned to depicting man's life on this earth and the ways he finds to deal with it. In Chekhov's Three Sisters the Prozorovs watch helplessly while the forces of social and economic change destroy the lovely world of the past and replace it with a newer and uglier present. Death without enlightenment is the ending which waits patiently at the end of a road marked by failing powers and compromises with life. The concern is not with any of them as individuals, but as representatives of a class and a society that is dying. If the emphasis is on the society in Chekhov, in Ibsen, for example, the emphasis is on the individual.

Twice in the history of Europe, drama has sprung forth as a put of worship: when in ancient Greece, plays were performed on feast days, and when in the Christian Church of the Middle Ages, a play was introduced as an adjunct to the Easter mass with the enactment of the meeting between the three Marys and the angel at Jusus's empty tomb. The whole history of drama, then, is a distinct evolution away from religious celebration toward popular entertainment.

Drama as Performance

Unlike poetry and fiction, drama is theatre. What the dramatist writes is a performable script. Theatre is always more than mere language. Languages alone can be read, but true theatre can become manifest only in performance. So, a performance of drama is much more than just an art of words. The thoughtful efforts of perhaps a hundred people—actors, director, producer, stage designer, costumer, makeup artist, technicians-- have to go into a production. It is the joint product of many arts, of which

direction, acting, and stage design are the most important. Another difference between fiction and drama is that dramatic effects are stage effects. Plays appeal directly to our auditory and visionary senses. Characters exist directly before us in our own immediate field of experience. The dramatic experience, characterized by movement, directness, concreteness, is one of the urgent immediacy, of watching and listening to human destinies in the making, here and now, which the novelist or the poet can evoke only by being dramatic.

The audience of a play is a group of people seated together in a theatre. Watching a play is collective behavior; individuals become members of a community whose responses affect each other. They are also part of this actor-actor and audience-actor energy exchange. Performers and viewers affect each other into laughter and tears. The actor-audience rapport depends not only on the actors being skilled but also on the audience being perceptive. Professional actors feel more keenly inspired by a lively, appreciative audience than by a dull, lethargic one. A good audience, no doubt helps draw the best from performers on stage. The ties between audience and stage are the life of theatre. The unique dynamics between actor and audience is something unattainable in any other media. Contemporary theories of drama, beginning from the Brechtian “alienation” or “distancing,” lay emphasis on the role of audience. Cooperation or assistance from the audience has come to be regarded, by theorists such as Peter Brook, as the final step in the creative process of theatrical art.

Since the ultimate success of a play is found in the theatre, the playwright sometimes has to revise parts of his writings in accordance with the perspectives of the director he chooses for the production, such as in the case of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. Williams had to write a second version of Act Three as a compromise to Elia Kazan, who had successfully directed The Street Car Named Desire by the same playwright. Though Williams preferred the original version of Act Three as an artist, he was afraid to lose the interest of a powerful director, who was to bring success to the play and make it reach a larger audience. And the irony incidentally, was that it was the play with the second version of Act Three which became a Broadway hit and brought about a Pulitzer Prize.

Although each performance is unique, theatre is a kind of ritual, where the exact repetition of a series of action takes place and players repeat the dramatic sequence again and again. Even what precedes the performance goes through the routine procedure—selection of actors, audition, decision on the cast, section reading of the play, rehearsal, dress rehearsal, and finally the debut. The nature of the presentation of a play determines that once a performance begins, the point of view cannot be changed. We are sitting in the same seat in the same theatre during an entire performance of a play, looking always in the same direction at the same stage.

In addition, the plot needs to unfold more quickly than a novel. The action is often telescoped into extremely concentrated form. In Macbeth, the main character changes from loyal subject to king killer in the very first act. The protagonist attains his height in the middle of what seems to us to be the third of five acts (“Thou hast it now: King”), but he soon perceives that he is going downhill. In Othello, the hero’s rapturous love is transformed by Iago into murderous rage in less than two acts. Indeed, the word “dramatic” is often used in common speech as a synonym for “instance” or “concentrated” effect. There is a practical reason for this: in the theatre, we can only sit so long, and we can only pay attention so long. So plays have to be forceful and quick-moving, start to finish.