Theatre and Drama Theory

RELATED TERMS: Epic theatre – Brecht; Deixis and Deictic Acts; Performance and Performativity; Theatre of Cruelty – Artaud; Tragic Theatre – Aristotle 

“What is the real thing? The question is an ideal subject for the stage, where the actual and the illusory constantly shadowbox.” (Clapp, 2024)

The ‘as if’ and the ‘what if’ at the heart of theatre, drama and narrative are all important notions for design practices and the reception of designs as elements of everyday practices and material public discourse.

Keir Elam (1980) makes a distinction between ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’. He takes ‘theatre’ to refer here to the complex of phenomena associated with the performer-audience transaction, with the production and communication of meaning in the performance itself and with the systems underlying it. By ‘drama’, on the other hand, he means that mode of fiction designed for stage representation and constructed according to particular ‘dramatic’ conventions. The epithet ‘theatrical’, then, is limited to what takes place between and among performers and spectators, while the epithet ‘dramatic’ indicates the network of factors relating to the represented fiction.

Both ‘theatre’, in the context of environment-people interactions, and ‘drama’, in the context of narrative-people interactions, are relevant for design practices. The distinction between ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ highlights the difference in levels of deictic act involved in theatre, and thus the different levels of deixis in the designed entity, Brandt (2016) frames the distinction between theatre and drama in terms of cascades of deixis.

Brandt notes that, in theatre, the first instance is the framing deixis of theatricality: ‘I am now acting [‘performing’], and not behaving naturally [being-myself]’. The second instance is the narrative deixis: ‘I am now playing the role of character Y in the story X’. The third instance is the aesthetic deixis: ‘I am shaping this character-role in a certain way and signing [authorising] this version as ‘this way’ of playing it here-now’. Each instance of deixis opens a learning process, in which one gradually learns to perceive and interpret the finer details of performing, narrating and versioning, while inter-relating them to unfold a more fully developed understanding of the theatrical, dramatic, story event.

Brandt’s framing deixis relates to Elam’s ‘theatre’. The other two, narrative and aesthetic deixis, relate to Elam’s ‘drama’

For a discussion of the relationship between contemporary European philosophy and theatre, see Bayly (2002, 2011).

References

Bayly, S. (2002) A Pathognomy of performance. [PhD thesis]. University of Surrey. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/2288588/A_Pathognomy_of_Performance_Theatre_Performance_and_the_Ethics_of_Interruption_2002thesis_version?email_work_card=view-paper (Accessed: 11 May 2021).

Bayly, S. (2011) A Pathognomy of performance. Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brandt, P. A. (2016) ‘Deixis – a semiotic mystery: Enunciation and reference’, Cognitive Semiotics, 9(1), pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1515/cogsem-2016-0001

Clapp, S. (2024). A Spectre calls. The Observer [print edition], 8 September, The New Review, p.31.

Elam, K. (1980) The Semiotics of theatre and drama. London, UK: Routledge.