![]() ![]() ![]() It’s gets you thinking about the nature of drama, theatre, and performance. I don’t believe the closet dramas of Byron or Shelley are unperformable, but it’s certainly interesting to approach plays that were specifically designed not to be performed. This is the nature of closet drama – plays which contend that their subject matter and delivery is so awe-inspiring that they become unperformable. I dress the actors, choose the cast, construct the lighting, and provide the soundtrack. It’s only recently, having read and relished the work of Mortimer Adler and Peter Brook that I started to alter how I approached plays.Īs I’ve been putting together my lecture series on Shakespeare, rather than rely on watching performances of the plays (of which I’ve seen a great deal of masterful ones), I’ve attempted to stage the play myself and put on a performance in my mind. In the same way that poetry should be read aloud, I believed that reading a play manuscript would deliver not even half the power of witnessing a performance. I used to hold the firm conviction that plays needed to be experienced in the theatre. Its essence is to be sought in the obvious fact that the poet who essays it is firm in the conviction that ‘the playhouse has no monopoly of the dramatic form. It is wrought solely for the reader in the library, without any regard for the demands of possible spectators in the auditorium. A closet drama is:Ī poem in dialogue, – a piece of literature, pure and simple, not contaminated by any subservience to the playhouse, the players or the playgoers. If you want to read some of these closet plays – and you should – check out some of these seminal representations of the form:īrander Matthews in the essay ‘The Legitimacy of the Closet-Drama’ defines it perfectly. ![]() They were written to remain on the page, performed only in the reader’s mind. These plays weren’t written with a view to be performed on the stage. In the early nineteenth-century, the tail-end of the Romantic era in literature, some of the finest poets in the English language turned their hands to writing plays. Most people don’t know about closet dramas, so let me tell you a little bit about them, then you tell me what you think. Buried in a tomb, ready to rise again from the dead. Perhaps what we need is the canon of modern-day playwrights returning to the closet dramas of the Romantic era. But I don’t believe that will actually refresh the form or delivery (though I’m open to being pleasantly surprised). We need a new expression of the theatrical.ĭrive-in opera with performers spaced two meters apart is an interesting start. We are not sculpting our performances to the times, and it’s been that way for a while. Reading Peter Brook’s marvellous The Empty Space, you get an overwhelming drive to refresh, reenergise, and pioneer anew in the theatre. That sucks when one of the reasons you’ve chosen to live in London is to increase your patronage of the theatre in hopes of learning the craft. The Stage reckons theatres won’t be back in business until 2021. I’ve been thinking a lot about theatre lately. ![]()
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