Chapter 3

1. Chapter 3 • The Playscript • Watch the 3 film clips • Hamlet, the Russian film • A Doll’s House • Contemporary Legend Theatre’s Waiting for Godot, The Drunken Beauty, and Farewell My Concubine

2. Hamlet • 影片連結

3. A Doll’s House • 影片連結

4. Waiting for Godot • 影片連結 part1 • 影片連結part2

5. The Drunken Beauty • 影片連結

6. Farewell My Concubine • 影片連結

7. On reading a Play • The playscript is both the typical starting point for a theatrical production and the most common residue of production • Learning to read, understand, and fill out the script (wither in the mind or on the stage) is essential if the power of a play is to be fully realized. • Because all writers do not express themselves in the same form, all written works cannot be read in the same way.

8. On reading a Play (cont’d) • To read a play adequately, we must adjust our minds to the dramatic form. • A play is distinctive in part because it is made up primarily of dialogue constructed with great care to convey its intentions and to create the sense of spontaneous speech by characters involved in a developing action. • A play is both a highly controlled structure and a simulated reflection of human experience. • Not only must readers see and understand what is explicitly said and done, but also they must be aware of all that is implied.

9. Dramatic action • Broadly speaking, a play is (as the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in his Poetics) a representation of human beings “in action”. • Rather, he was concerned not only with what characters do but also with why they do it. • Francis Fergusson, a 20th century American critic, has argued that a dramatic action build through three steps: purpose, passion, and perception.

10. Dramatic action(cont’d) • By purpose he means awareness of some desire or goal. • By passion he means the strength of desire or suffering that makes characters act to fulfill their goals, along with the emotional turmoil they undergo while doing so. • And by perception he means the understanding that eventually comes from the struggle.

11. Dramatic action(cont’d) • Ibsen’s A Doll’s house (in chapter 6) • Aristotle stated that a dramatic action should have a beginning , middle, and end. • Effective dramatic action • deliberately shaped or organized to reveal its purpose and goal and to evoke from the audience specific responses (pity, fear, laughter, ridicule, and so on) • in addition to having purpose, must also have variety (in story, characterization, idea, mood, spectacle) to avoid monotony. • engages and maintains interest. • internally consistent.

12. Dramatic action(cont’d) • For example, when during the opening speech of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano the clock strikes seventeen times and a character announces that it is nine o’clock, we are warned that in this play we should be prepared for things to deviate from normal modes of perception – and they do. • It is consistency within the framework of the particular play, not whether the events would have happened this way in real life, which leads us to accept events in drama as believable.