This is the second student facing article designed for A-Level and university students of English literature considering performance for the first time. Let me know if it’s helpful in your teaching/ learning!

Originally published in English Review, 36.4 (2026).

From page to stage

Hannah Greenstreet considers the translation from page to stage involved in theatre productions, with examples from A Streetcar Named Desire and Othello.

In the ‘Reading Drama’ article published in the September 2024 issue of English Review, I suggested that reading plays always involves an act of imagination to take it from words on a page to three-dimensional performance. A script contains clues and invitations for how it might be performed. Directors translate these clues from page to stage, emphasising some and de-emphasising others.

The script of a play and the resulting production are therefore interdependent. Catherine Love suggests,

In one sense, it is performance – or at least its possibility – which defines a theatre text as a theatre text.  Were there not these elements beyond its control, there would be nothing to distinguish drama from any other literary category. […] At the same time, however, the bodies and objects on stage partly depend on something external to which they refer: the text. (2023: 25-26)

Theatrical productions offer a particular interpretation of a play at a particular place and time, which can then shed new light on how you read the play. This article considers the dialogue between script and theatrical production, zooming in on two aspects: firstly, set design and costume; secondly, how plays imagine their audiences. While the article focuses on two example productions, these ideas are applicable to many other plays too.

Set design and costume

The set designer and costume designer are key to creating the visual world of plays onstage. Some playwrights give very little indication of setting through stage directions. For instance, in Shakespeare’s plays it is the dialogue rather than stage directions that does most of the work in creating a sense of setting. In the Prologue to Henry V, the Chorus talks about the difficulty of conjuring up ‘the vasty fields of France’ on the stage (13). He entreats the audience to ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them/ Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth’ (27-28). In so doing, he enlists the cooperation of the audience to imagine great battles and thousands of soldiers and horses on the Globe’s bare stage for the rest of the play.

In contrast, Tennessee Williams is known for his detailed, almost novelistic stage directions. In the Preface to The Glass Menagerie, Williams sets out his vision of ‘plastic theatre’, a style of theatre that moves beyond realism to express truth through expressionism. As Alice Griffin writes, ‘He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects—all the elements of staging—must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language’ (1995: 22).

Set design in Streetcar

The opening stage directions of A Streetcar Named Desire conjure up a complete social world: a cramped tenement in the ironically named ‘Elysian Fields’ (heavenly fields) in New Orleans. The description is both very precise – ‘white frame, weathered grey’ houses with ‘rickety outside stairs’ – and lyrical – the ‘tender blue’ sky that ‘gracefully attenuates the atmosphere of decay’ (Act 1 Scene 1). Williams also uses music to capture a sense of place, the ‘Blues Piano’ theme suggesting the racial diversity of the neighbourhood. The first few lines of dialogue between several minor characters makes the setting seem busy and noisy, full of life.

Benedict Andrews’ 2014 production at the Young Vic emphasised the claustrophobia of the play through Magda Willi’s set design. The characters are living on top of each other, with only a gauze curtain separating the two rooms. The production is staged in the round, putting the characters in a petri dish to be scrutinised by the audience. Through a revolving stage, the production encourages the audience to see the action of this complicated play from multiple perspectives rather than following the journey of a single protagonist.

Blanche arrives into this world like a fish out of water, bringing with her a (misplaced) sense of grandeur from her upper-class upbringing. Her difference from the other characters is marked by her costumes. In the Young Vic production, Gillian Anderson as Blanche arrives onstage in a neat cream dress and jacket. When Blanche is introduced, Williams writes ‘Her delicate beauty must avoid a strong light’ (Act 1 Scene 1). Victoria Behr’s costume designs translate this lyrical stage direction into something physical, capturing a character who is desperate to impress with her appearance but fears she may be past her prime. As Blanche’s grip on reality loosens towards the end of the play, Anderson is dressed in a pink princess dress with billowing skirts and smudges lipstick across her mouth. She looks like a bedraggled Barbie doll, imprisoned by the performance of femininity she is so desperate to keep up. This costume, which is not indicated in Williams script, suggests how design choices can add additional meanings to a production that bring out a play’s themes.

Audience

The presence of a live audience is a crucial part of what makes theatre theatrical. However, it can be challenging to think about the role of the audience from reading the script alone. Plays offer invitations to their audiences through their scripts. This could be as simple as inviting the audience to sit and watch the play quietly, a set of expected behaviours that characterises what Kirsty Sedgman calls the ‘theatre contract’ (2018: 11). Or the play might demand that the audience take a more active role. For example, in a pantomime, audience members are encouraged to boo and hiss the villains. Some immersive theatre even gets the audience to move around the space and interact with the actors. For instance, in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, a loose adaptation of Macbeth, masked audience members roamed around a large warehouse, catching snippets of the action.

Shakespeare’s plays can have a strikingly direct relationship with their audience as most were originally written to be performed in the outdoor Globe theatre. As well as seated audience members, the Globe had space for ‘groundlings’, who could pay 1 penny to stand in the yard and watch the show. As in the Globe theatre today, these audience members were very close to the stage, allowing for direct engagement between the performers and the audience members.

Audience engagement in Othello

Plays can also communicate directly with audience members through prologues and asides. In Othello, Iago has frequent asides to the audience, letting us in on his scheme to take revenge on the general. Iago’s famous soliloquy that begins ‘And what says he that says I play the villain’ (II.3.356) captures his twisted sense of morality. He starts off defending himself for giving Cassio ‘free […] honest’ advice. Then, in an exuberantly rhetorical reversal, he declares ‘Divinity of hell!/ When devils will the blackest sins put on,/ They do suggest at first with heavenly shows/ As I do now’ (II.3.370-372). Iago’s use of juxtaposition anticipates the twisted way in which he will use Desdemona’s kind heartedness against her. His self-awareness makes Iago a fascinating character, constantly aware of the roles he is playing to get what he wants.

The charisma of Iago can lead to an unbalancing in the play whereby the audience are more invested in Iago than the supposed hero Othello. Ian McKellan, who played Iago in a production in 1989 at the Royal Shakespeare Company, recalled that the actor who played Othello ‘accused me of trying to get the audience on my side against him. I explained that I didn’t need to try – Shakespeare had organised it so that the villain’s part should be the portal into the action’ (quoted in Purcell 2022: 224). Given Iago’s racism and cruelty, having him be the audience’s ‘portal into the action’ is potentially problematic unless the audience is encouraged to react critically to him.

Iqbal Khan’s production of Othello at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015 critically undercut the racist insults within the script by casting Black actor Lucian Msamati as Iago to Hugh Quarshie’s Othello. This resulted in a complex and layered production. However, Clare Brennan noted in her review that ‘This is Iago’s show’, with the final image of the production ‘him kneeling amid the desolation, head thrown back in laughter’ (2015). Iago famously refuses to give a motivation for his crimes at the end of the play, suggesting that the performance is still on his terms.

Conclusion

This article has suggested two further aspects of staging to consider when writing about drama. While scripts can offer invitations to the audience and give clues about the playwright’s vision of the staging, watching productions – either recorded or in person – can add extra resonances and yield new insights. Taking a play from page to stage is an act of creative interpretation, which can, in turn, reveal much about the play itself.

Dr Hannah Greenstreet is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Liverpool. She completed her DPhil in English at the University of Oxford.

Resources

Brennan, C. (2015) ‘Othello review – convincing and moving’, Guardian, 21 June. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jun/21/othello-rsc-stratford-upon-avon-iqbal-khan-review

Griffin, A. (1999) Understanding Tennessee Williams. University of South Carolina Press.

Love, C. (2023) Text and Performance in Contemporary British Theatre.

Purcell, S. (2022) ‘Playing with the Audience in Othello’, in Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England, ed. by S. Smith and E. Whipday, pp. 223-241.

Sedgman, K. (2018) The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing and the Live Performance Experience. Palgrave Macmillan.