Drama
A play is a score, not a novel. The best answers keep asking what an audience in a theatre would see, hear and know.
Text and performance
A play exists twice: as words on a page and as an event in a theatre. Examiners consistently reward candidates who remember the second.
This does not require you to have seen a production. It requires you to keep asking a set of questions that a reader of a novel never has to ask.
- Who is on stage, and who is absent? A silent presence changes every line spoken.
- What does the audience know that a character does not? Dramatic irony charges every subsequent line.
- What is physically done? An object handed over, a letter burned, a door closed. Stage action makes arguments that dialogue does not have to state.
- Where does the scene, act or play end? Endings are chosen. Ask what the audience is left holding.
- How long is a speech? A character allowed forty lines and one allowed four are being treated very differently by the dramatist.
Structure
Structural argument is the surest way to lift a drama answer, and it is the thing most candidates never attempt.
Ask how the play is built. Where is its midpoint, and what happens there? Which scenes are placed next to each other, and does the juxtaposition comment on either? Is there a pattern of scenes — public alternating with private, for instance — and what does that pattern do?
A play that places a comic scene immediately after a death is not lightening the mood. It is arguing something about the relation between the two, and saying what that argument is will always be rewarded.
Terms to use precisely
- Dramatic irony
- The audience knows what a character does not.
- Example: Do not stop at naming it. Say what it makes the audience feel, and what the dramatist gains from producing that feeling at that moment.
- Soliloquy and aside
- Direct access to a mind; a remark heard only by the audience.
- Example: Ask whether the soliloquy is honest. A character alone may still be deceiving themselves.
- Exposition
- How the necessary background reaches the audience.
- Example: Clumsy exposition is a fault; skilful exposition — information delivered while something else is happening — is worth praising specifically.
- Peripeteia
- A reversal of fortune or situation.
- Example: Locate it exactly. Much of a tragedy's meaning depends on what causes the reversal and whether the character sees it coming.
- Catharsis
- The purging of pity and fear that tragedy is traditionally said to produce.
- Example: Use it only if you can say something about how this play produces it, or fails or refuses to.
- Stagecraft
- The dramatist's use of the physical resources of the theatre — space, movement, entrances, properties, light, silence.
- Example: Stage directions are part of the text and may be quoted.
- Subtext
- What is meant but not said.
- Example: Look for characters who answer a question with another question, change the subject, or fall silent.
- Register and idiolect
- How individual characters speak differently from one another.
- Example: A character whose vocabulary changes across a play is being shown to change.
Two habits examiners reward
- **Write the audience, not the reader.** It signals immediately that you understand the form.
- Consider alternatives in staging. A production that plays this scene with the two characters at opposite ends of the stage would emphasise… This shows you understand that a play's meaning is realised, not fixed, and it is one of the clearest marks of an advanced answer.