A new academic year rolls around. Rummaging on my computer for teaching materials made by my past self, I came across two articles I wrote aimed at A-Level/ first year university English literature students, introducing them to the study of drama. They are based on two questions I ask my students in our first classes of the year: What makes reading plays different from other forms of literature? What can we look for when we analyse plays in performance?

These two articles have emerged from my teaching on two of the first year modules on BA English with Drama at the University of Liverpool. They’ve come out of conversations with my wonderful colleagues and students, plus my own thoughts on what it means to study drama within a literature department but not (only) as literature. As the magazine I originally wrote them for (English Review) has now closed down, I thought I’d share them here in case they prove useful to others. The first one is below, the second one in another post.

Originally published in English Review (September 2024), pp. 33-35, http://www.hoddereducation.com/englishreview.

Reading drama

Hannah Greenstreet gives her top tips on analysing plays, with examples from A Doll’s House, Top Girls and King Lear.

Drama is distinct amongst literary forms as it is (almost always) written to be performed. Martin Meisel writes,

Reading plays has much in common with reading musical scores; and yet, what score is designed to be read, like a printed play, for enjoyment, as an end in itself? At the same time, like the musical score, the printed play exists as a manual or a blueprint for performance. It exists as a manual and as a representation, in its own right, of that which is to be performed […] reading plays in the fullest sense, then, means being able to read the dialogue and descriptions as a set of directions encoding, but also in a measure enacting, their own realization. (2007: 1)

Meisel hits upon the contradictory status of a script as a text: it is at once complete and incomplete. You can read a script on its own, but it will always be gesturing towards its performance. Therefore, reading plays involves an act of imagination, whether that is trying to visualise how the play would be realised onstage and or even putting yourself in the shoes of an imaginary audience member.

Drama is also often the product of collaboration, which can challenge conventional ideas about authorship. For instance, Shakespeare is thought to have collaborated with other writers on some of his plays, including Henry VI, Timon of Athens and Pericles. Moreover, productions of plays involve a process of collaboration between director, actors, playwright, designers and others, who all work together to make the play come to life in performance.

Theatre is a three-dimensional art form that makes meaning from the combination of many different theatrical devices, including text, the bodies and voices of the actors, lighting, stage design, etc. Therefore, when analysing drama, it is important to think about not just the words on the page but also how they have been and could be performed.

In what follows, we will zoom in on three plays to show how you can combine close reading of the words on the page with theatrical imagination and research into production history to enrich your interpretations. It is important to be specific in your interpretations, as theatrical devices function differently in different plays and time periods.

Character arc and stage action in A Doll’s House

Budding playwrights are often told that their central characters must develop over the course of a play to make the drama engaging to watch. Henrik Ibsen’s Nora is an excellent example of a character that develops in the face of obstacles. At the start of A Doll’s House (1898), Nora seems quite frivolous and silly, even childish. She enters the stage in a flutter, laden with parcels – Christmas presents for her children and husband Torvald. Torvald calls her pet names – ‘squirrel’, ‘squanderbird’ (Act 1) – which add to the impression of Nora as an expensive pet and help set up that she is bad with money.

Already in the first scene of the play, there are hints of the trouble to come: Nora hides the macaroons from Torvald, telling him, ‘You know I could never act against your wishes’ (Act 1). While the deception seems minor, it foreshadows the larger secret that she is keeping from Torvald: that she is in debt and forged her father’s signature on a loan to fund Torvald’s recovery from an illness. The bag of macaroons is a symbolic prop, the confectionery capturing the sweetness of Nora’s persona in the first scene but also temptation and concealment.

By the last scene of A Doll’s House, Nora declares to Torvald, ‘I’ve changed’ (Act 3). After Torvald has let her down by refusing to take responsibility for her debt, Nora speaks with newfound authority, asking her husband, ‘Does it occur to you that this is the first time we two, you and I, man and wife, have ever had a serious conversation?’ (Act 3). She refuses to be Torvald’s ‘doll-wife’ any longer (Act 3) and tells him she has decided to leave him and the children. The play ends with the stage direction, ‘The street door is slammed shut downstairs’ (Act 3), which suggests the momentousness of Nora’s decision and its finality. The ending of A Doll’s House had a profound impact on its original audience – so much so that Ibsen was pressured to write an alternative ending, in which Nora decided to stay with her family, for performance in Germany.

Multi-roling and casting in Top Girls

Casting can make a huge difference to audience’s experiences of a play. For instance, some playwrights write with specific actors in mind, such as Jez Butterworth writing the role of Johnny Rooster Byron for Mark Rylance in Jerusalem (2009). Multi-roling (having the same actor play multiple parts) can also generate additional layers of meaning. Caryl Churchill’s play, Top Girls (1982), has 16 characters. The first act is set at a fantastical dinner party with famous women from history and literature celebrating Marlene’s promotion to manager of Top Girls employment agency. Act two is mostly set in the employment agency, while act three reveals the sister, Joyce, and daughter, Angie, that Marlene left behind to pursue her career. In part to save on costs, the original production directed by Max Stafford Clark at the Royal Court Theatre in 1982 had 7 actors play the 16 characters and this doubling has been adopted by many productions of the play since.

Doubling can set up connections between characters played by the same actor. Stafford Clark’s production linked the characters Angie and Dull Gret by casting Carole Hayman in both roles. In the first act, Dull Gret, a character from Flemish folklore, speaks in monosyllables and single words until she bursts into a vivid, violent monologue recounting how she led an army of women into hell. Angie is described by Marlene at the end of Act 2 as ‘a bit thick […] a bit funny’. Both characters seem out of place in the glamorous world of business that Marlene represents.

By contrast, in his production of Top Girls at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre in 2023, Suba Das chose not to double any of the roles of Marlene, Angie and Joyce. This choice heightened the naturalism of the final act between these characters. Das reconceived the roles of Marlene, Angie and Joyce as Black women, setting their scenes in Liverpool. This gave a sharper focus to the microaggressions experienced by Marlene (played by Tala Gouveia) in the workplace and further highlighted the difficulties Angie would have faced getting a job in Liverpool in the 1980s.

Finally, in her 2019 production of Top Girls at the National Theatre, Lyndsey Turner did not double any of the roles. The cast of 18, coupled with Ian MacNeil’s vast set, which gave the impression of a widescreen TV, emphasised the play’s epic scope. However, reviewer Michael Billington criticised this casting choice for making it seem ‘as if we’re watching three separate plays’ (2019).

Verbal scene painting and stage directions in King Lear

While stage directions are a standard feature of modern plays, there is some critical debate about how many stage directions were written by the author – and how many added by editors – in early modern plays. Nevertheless, stage directions give important signals of how plays were performed and can give helpful indications of information such as exits and entrances and props. In addition to what we would normally consider stage directions (often written in italics or brackets and separate from the dialogue), Tiffany Stern talks about ‘the “implied” stage direction, embedded in the language […] which does not take stage direction form at all’ (2019: 189). These ‘implied’ stage directions are clues that we can find in the script to indicate how the playwright saw the scene being staged.

An excellent example of this is the scene between Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear (1607) by William Shakespeare. Gloucester has been blinded and is being led by his son, Edgar, who has disguised himself as ‘Poor Tom’. Through words alone, Edgar convinces Gloucester that they are climbing a high cliff. While Gloucester says, ‘Methinks the ground is even’ (4.6.2599), Edgar causes him to doubt his own senses with his descriptive prowess:

‘Come on, sir; here’s the place. Stand still. How fearful
And dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles.’ (4.6.2611-2614)

Edgar’s language gives a lurching sense of perspective, imagining the birds as small as beetles. His lines also conjure up a vivid sense of place, the cliffs of Dover, through word-painting. This word-painting was particularly important in the Globe theatre, which would not have had lavish backdrops. Here, the words are doing much of the work in scene setting and indicating action.

Edgar then adopts another character, shifting his way of speaking, to convince Gloucester that he did jump off the cliff but has been miraculously saved. In his recent play, Truth is a Dog Must to Kennel (2022), Tim Crouch uses this scene as example of theatre’s power to stimulate the audience’s imagination.

Conclusion

This article has zoomed in on three plays to model some ways of analysing theatre as a three-dimensional art form. As we have seen, reading drama goes beyond the text. We can bring both theatrical imagination and research into plays’ production histories to bear on interpreting drama. There are also clues to be found in the script that indicate potential performance, from stage directions to the construction of character to dialogue. Learning how to read these signs for yourself will make your reading of drama even richer.

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

Billington, M. (2019) ‘Top Girls review – Churchill’s study of bourgeois feminism gets an epic makeover’, Guardian, 4 April 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/apr/04/top-girls-review-caryl-churchill-revival-lyttelton-national-theatre

Lennard J. and M. Luckhurst (2002) The Drama Handbook: A Guide to Reading Plays, Oxford University Press.

Meisel, M. (2007) How Plays Work: Reading and Performance, Oxford University Press.

Stern, T. (2019) ‘Stage Directions’, in Book Parts, ed. by D. Duncan and A. Smyth, Oxford University Press.