Drama, play and theatre

1You have already seen drama

Think of a grandmother telling a folk tale at night. When Bakame the hare speaks, her voice turns quick and sly; when Impyisi the hyena speaks, it turns slow and greedy, and she leans forward with hungry eyes. For those moments she is not only telling the story: she is acting it. Think too of intore dancers showing a warrior's pride, a class sketch on Parents' Day, or the radio drama Urunana, broadcast in Kinyarwanda since 1999, which listeners follow through voices and sound effects alone.

All of these use the tools of drama. In this unit you will learn the basic words of drama, the main types of play, the parts every play is built from, and how to step into a role yourself. In the next unit you will use all of it to compose and perform a sketch in Kinyarwanda.

Worked example: telling and showing

Here is the same moment presented in two ways.

In the story, a narrator tells you what happened. In the drama, nobody explains anything: performers pretend to be the characters, speak their words and do their actions, and you watch it happen in front of you. That difference is the heart of drama.

2Drama

Drama is the art of telling a story through action: performers take on the roles of characters and act out events, usually in front of an audience. The word comes from the Greek drâma, meaning "a deed" or "an act", from a verb meaning "I do". Drama is about doing.

Drama takes many forms:

• Stage plays, performed live in front of an audience.
• Radio drama, told only through voices, music and sound effects.
• Television and film drama, recorded and watched on a screen.
• Mime, in which the story is told only through movements of the body, without words.
• Musical theatre and opera, in which characters sing some or all of their words. Music and drama have been partners since ancient Greece, where plays included a chorus that sang and danced.
• Improvisation, in which performers make the scene up on the spot, without a written script.

3A play

A play is one particular piece of drama, with its own title, characters and story. Most plays are written down as a script: the text that gives every character's words and describes what they do. The person who writes a play is a playwright. Notice the spelling: wright is an old English word for a maker, as in shipwright, a builder of ships. A playwright is a play-maker.

Performers learn the words of the script, called their lines, and bring them to life. A play can be read, but it is written to be performed.

4Theatre

The word theatre has two meanings:

1. The art of performing live, in front of an audience that is in the same place at the same time.
2. The place where performances happen, usually a building with a stage and seats.

It comes from the Greek théatron, "a place for viewing", from a verb meaning "to watch". So drama is named after what the performers do, and theatre after what the audience does: it watches. Live theatre needs at least three things: performers, an audience and a space they share. A film is drama, but it is not live theatre, because the actors are not there with you.

5Performance spaces

The stage is the space where the performers act. What changes a performance most is where the audience sits around it. There are three main arrangements.

• Proscenium (end-on) stage: the audience sits on one side and watches through a frame called the proscenium arch, like looking at a picture. The hidden areas at the sides, where actors wait before they enter, are the wings. Most school halls work this way.
• Thrust stage: the stage pushes out into the audience, who sit on three sides.
• Theatre in the round: the audience surrounds the acting area on all sides. When a crowd forms a circle around dancers or a storyteller in a school compound, that is theatre in the round.

A performance can also use a found space: a place that was not built as a stage but becomes one for the day, such as a classroom, a market square or the shade of a big tree.

Practice