What's the Difference between Drama and Theatre
Highlights
- The implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art.
- There is, in any successful production of even the most uncontroversially play-like play, rather more going on onstage than just the words: there's an entire texture of sound, design and performance and, crucially, there's an audience responding to it.
- If drama is just about the writer, then it might as well stay on paper.
- Critic Hans-Thies Lehmann coined the term "post-dramatic theatre" to describe a shift in practice away from a hierarchical model, with the writer (usually a dead writer) at the apex and the director interpreting the writer's "intention".
- In the post-dramatic theatre, the place of the writer is less easily defined, with the creative emphasis equally existing in the contributions of other theatre-makers. Companies like Holland's Dood Pard are perhaps exemplary of this approach.
- But the term has also been applied to the writer-centric theatre of playwrights such as Sarah Kane or Howard Barker. Does this mean these writers are not dramatists?
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