The Old Vic’s 1960 production of Romeo and Juliet would, on this
understanding, be renaissance drama and post-war theatre. We can see
why this way of drawing the distinction is related to the previous one: in
both cases, drama emphasises formal elements such as plot and character,
whereas theatre emphasises performance. But what makes a performance
‘dramatic’ in the first sense goes well beyond the ‘dramatist’ in the
second: whereas the performers in The Old Vic’sRomeo and Julietare not a
necessary condition for the‘drama’in the second sense, they certainly are
for the‘drama’in thefirst.
A third and related difference is that‘drama’ has traditionally been
used to indicate a certain literary genre (along with‘epic’or‘lyric’). There
is a sense, then, that describing a play text or a performance as‘drama’
appeals to (primarily Western) literary norms and expectations–perhaps,
following the second distinction, with a concomitant emphasis on the
writtenword–which do not necessarily apply to theatre. Hence it isn’t
unusual, in academic discussions, to read of‘non-dramatic’ or‘postdra-
matic’theatre; and for this reason, many contemporary theatre theorists
and practitioners are keen to distance themselves from what they take to
be the traditional restrictions of ‘drama’, compared with the relative
openness of the term‘theatre’. But note that the term‘drama’can, in
some cases, be broader than the term‘theatre’. For our purposes, one
important example is that‘drama’also indicates a genre for television and
radio programming, typically denoting something bothfictional and ser-
ious;‘theatre’, on the other hand, can include performances which may
be neitherfictional nor serious, but excludes television programming. So
we can see that theatre and drama frequently overlap, but they do not have
to: a typical performance ofHamletmay be both theatre and drama; tele-
vision‘dramas’are not theatrical performances; and some theatrical per-
formances do not count as‘dramas’, on this understanding. On the terms
set out by any of these three overlapping distinctions, this book is about
philosophy and theatre; but much of the discussion also relates to drama.
Play text and theatrical performance
Plenty of theatrical performances, such as plays that are completely
improvised, don’t have corresponding play texts at all. Conversely, some
works of dramatic literature are not written to be performed (so-called
‘closet dramas’, like those of Seneca), even if they may be adapted for the
stage. So nobody would claim that every theatrical performance must
necessarily stand in some relation to a play text or vice versa. As we saw
in the discussion of the terms ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’, many writers on
theatre (and performance) seek to distance themselves from the association
between theatre and the‘play text’–partly because that association lends
What is theatre? 11