buildings.^24 Plays are adapted asfilms and vice versa, used as the basis for
operas, as inspiration for dance performances. We don’t need to think of
theatre as separate and completely independent from all of these things.
Theatre and drama
At this point, it may be helpful to say something about‘theatre’ and
‘drama’–two words that are frequently used interchangeably.‘Drama’,
like‘theatre’, comes from the Greek (an‘action’or‘doing’). Like theatre,
the range of things that may be referred to by drama is enormous. This
means that aggressively policing some purportedly unique distinction
between the two of them would probably be a waste of time. None-
theless, some differences should be addressed; we’ll look at three related
but different ways of drawing the distinction.
A good way into thinking about thefirst difference comes from con-
sidering the corresponding adjectives,‘theatrical’and‘dramatic’, both of
which can be applied to real-world incidents but with different meanings.
Suppose there is afire in my neighbour’s house and the emergency ser-
vices are called in to rescue her: if I call the rescue operation‘dramatic’,
I might mean it was tense or daring; but if I call it‘theatrical’, I probably
mean that the rescuers were showing off or unnecessarily making a spec-
tacle of it. Following this, one might think that‘drama’suggests some-
thing to do with a plot or the internal development of an action: a
dramatic incident is one in which events unfold over time in a particular
way.‘Theatre’, on the other hand, puts the emphasis on the combination
of location, performer and spectator discussed above–for theatre, then,
one doesn’t need a coherent narrative or the unfolding of events in a
particular way. One example of the latter might be Peter Brook’s sug-
gestion (quoted above) that the man walking across the‘bare stage’would
be an act of theatre; it’s not clear that this would necessarily count as
‘dramatic’in the sense that we are discussing.
If ‘drama’ suggests something about the narrative or unfolding of
events, then it might also emphasise the creator or‘dramatist’ of the
narrative more than it emphasises the performers; whereas if theatre
emphasises the spectacle, then it might place more emphasis on the per-
formers. This explains why theatre historians often refer to the‘drama’of
a certain period to mean those plays that were written (or, generally,
created) during that time; the‘theatre’of the period would refer to what
was performed–including, of course, plays from a much earlier period.
So, if a theatre historian speaks of‘post-war British drama’, she may be
speaking of playwrights like John Osborne, John Arden and Harold
Pinter, whereas‘post-war British theatre’might suggest a focus on thea-
tres and companies like the Old Vic or the Stratford Festival Company.^25
10 What is theatre?