5 - Reading the Stage: The Self-Reflexivity of the Texts

Summary

I see myself as a craftsman and not as a writer. To me, being a playwright is about seeing myself as a part of the process of a production. I write plays for the sheer pleasure of communicating through this dynamic medium

(Nair, 2001).

This is the whole point in the distinction between a playwright and a ‘writer’ using any other mode. The entire exercise of putting on paper the script of a play is only one of the many necessary ingredients in the genesis of a play, in the birth of drama. It is, perhaps, the beginning, but merely one element in the complete theatrical experience. Two distinct phenomena, though inter-related, can be seen here: the written text and the performance, the concepts of the stage and the page. If one is to prioritize the text in hierarchy, does the performance become redundant? And where would that place the audience? Theorists like Julian Hilton would leave out both audience and text in the consideration of performance:

…in the theatre any plot or action exists only in the moment of performance and has no stable meaning or identity outside of the performance process.… There is no single or necessary definition of what plot or action is, even in the case of a play with an authoritative source ‘text’, for every performance redefines, however marginally, the nature of the performed. The purpose of performing this becomes the one of generating an intensified experience for all who participate in it rather than the representation of some pre existing action or state of feeling according to some immanent ideal in its poetic textual source.

(Hilton: 7)