Drama, like poetry and fiction, is an art of words. In drama, the language are mainly dialogue: people talking are the fundamental dramatic action. The talk may be interrupted by wordless activity sword-fighting, love scenes, silence but such activity will derive its significance from its script or context of dialogue.
If not, we're working with pantomime and not with drama. Generally speaking theory, however, the line between drama and the related arts is not too an easy task to draw. Film is even less literary than theater, and yet film scripts have already been published to be read. At what point of verbal artistry do they cease being scenario and production notes and become drama? Conversely, from what extent is the thought of drama included in Pirandello's "three boards and a passion" as a formula for theater?
Such questions are posed by the double part of dramatic language. As written words, drama is literature; as spoken words in a spectacle, it's theater. Dialogue may be performed directly, intact, but stage directions, however skillfully written, don't survive the transfer from script to stage.Dramacool
Their referents in performance speech manner, movement, costume, drama masks set, etc. - are creations of the theater rather than of literature. The truth that successful playwrights earn more income in the box office than in the bookstores is evidence that for most people the theatrical medium of drama masks and film acting takes precedence within the literary one and that they find reading a play a pallid substitute for seeing it.
As stage spectacle a play is intensely there a three-dimensional and audible progress of coherent, absorbing, physical action. 'While words are consecutive and reading can be an act in enough time dimension, seeing a play is an event of both time and space.
At anyone moment the spectator may be simultaneously alert to weather or time or of rich or shabby furniture, or of one character speaking, another listening, and someone crawling noiselessly toward the speaker with a knife between his teeth. The spatial concreteness and immediacy of staged drama enlist the attention of a larger set of the spectator's sensory responses, and achieve this more intensely, compared to purely imaginative evocations of printed play ever can.
Still, the favorite assumption that the theatrical medium of drama is primary may be challenged. Performance is no more the play compared to concert may be the symphony. Most plays, like symphonies have already been written to be performed, but the artistic construct exists complete in the written words, just since the melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and orchestration of the symphony "are" in the printed score. The only difference between a printed play and a printed musical composition in this respect is that for many of us it is easier to "see" and "hear" a play in the imagination than it's to "hear" the music in the read score.
