Drama: form, structure and stagecraft

Literature in English · WAEC and JAMB · SS2 and SS3

Drama is written to be performed, so every question is finally about effect on an audience. Candidates who treat a play like a novel, retelling the story, lose heavily; those who write about what the audience sees, hears and knows score well.

What you need to know

A play is divided into acts, and each act into scenes. A new scene normally marks a change of place or time, and a playwright who ends a scene abruptly is usually creating suspense or forcing a comparison with the scene that follows.
The standard shape runs exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. Exposition gives the audience the situation, rising action develops the conflict, the climax is the point of no return, falling action deals with the consequences, and the resolution or denouement settles the outcome.
Exposition has to be delivered without a narrator, so playwrights use two servants gossiping, a character returning after long absence, a letter read aloud or a messenger. When you spot one of these devices, say what information it smuggles in and how naturally it does so.
Every play turns on a central conflict, and you should be able to state it in one sentence. The usual types are person against person, person against self, person against society and person against fate or the gods, and many plays run two of these at once.
A soliloquy is a speech delivered by a character alone on stage, thinking aloud. Its dramatic value is access: the audience hears the truth of a character's mind, including what he would never say to another character, so soliloquies are where motive is revealed.
An aside is a short remark delivered to the audience, or to one character, which the others on stage are taken not to hear. It is used to expose hypocrisy, to let the audience in on a plan, or for comedy, and it builds complicity between character and audience.
Dramatic irony is the gap between what the audience knows and what a character knows. It is the strongest tension device in drama, because the audience watches a character walk into danger they cannot see, and the resulting feeling is pity mixed with dread.
Classical tragedy follows a protagonist of high standing whose downfall comes through hamartia, the tragic flaw, often hubris or overweening pride. The reversal of fortune is peripeteia, the moment of self-knowledge is anagnorisis, and the audience's release of pity and fear at the end is catharsis.
Comedy moves the other way: it begins in confusion and ends in order restored, commonly with reconciliation or marriage. Its machinery is mistaken identity, disguise, misunderstanding, exaggerated character types and satire aimed at a social vice.
Tragicomedy mixes the two, and modern drama often replaces the noble hero with an ordinary person destroyed by society or by his own smallness. When writing about a modern play, do not force the classical tragic pattern onto it; test whether it fits and say where it does not.
Stagecraft is everything the audience perceives besides the words: set, lighting, costume, props, music, silence, entrances and exits. A prop that reappears becomes a symbol, and a character left alone on a darkening stage is being commented on without a word being spoken.
Much African drama uses a chorus, a narrator figure, drumming, dance, masquerade and direct address to the audience, drawn from festival and oral performance. These are not decoration; they carry judgement, compress time, and bind the audience into the community of the play.
Characterisation in drama happens only through speech and action, since there is no narrator to tell us what anyone is like. Judge a character by what he says, how he says it, what he does, what others say about him, and the difference between the three.
Know the functional roles: the protagonist drives the action, the antagonist opposes, and a foil is a character whose contrasting qualities throw the protagonist's into relief. Naming a foil correctly and showing the contrast is a reliable way to earn analysis marks.

Key terms

Soliloquy: A speech in which a character alone on stage speaks his thoughts aloud for the audience to hear.
Aside: A brief remark spoken to the audience or to one character which the other characters on stage are assumed not to hear.
Dramatic irony: The situation in which the audience knows something important that a character on stage does not.
Hamartia: The error of judgement or flaw of character that brings about a tragic hero's downfall.
Denouement: The final part of a play in which the complications are unravelled and the outcome is settled.
Foil: A character whose qualities contrast with another's and so highlight them.
Catharsis: The purging of pity and fear that an audience experiences at the end of a tragedy.

Worked examples

In a scene, a chief promises protection to a visitor while the audience has already watched him arrange the visitor's arrest. Identify the device, explain its effect on the audience, and say how a candidate should write about it.

Identify the knowledge gap: the audience knows about the arrest, the visitor does not, so this is dramatic irony.
Separate it from verbal irony. The chief's words are a lie rather than a deliberate opposite meant to be understood, so the irony lies in the audience's superior knowledge, not in the phrasing.
State the effect on the audience: every promise of safety now sounds like a threat, so tension rises on lines that would otherwise be reassuring.
State the effect on character: the audience reads the chief as a hypocrite before any other character does, which shapes judgement of him for the rest of the play.
Write it up in the order device, moment, effect, keeping the focus on the audience rather than retelling the plot.

Answer: The device is dramatic irony. Because the audience has already seen the arrest arranged, the chief's assurances of protection become menacing rather than comforting, which tightens tension and fixes him as a hypocrite well before the other characters discover it.

Plan an answer to: discuss the dramatic significance of soliloquy in a tragedy you have studied.

Unpack the task word. Discuss the dramatic significance means say what the soliloquies do for the play, not list them.
Choose three or four soliloquies spread across the play so you can show development rather than repetition.
Assign each one a function: the first reveals a motive hidden from other characters, the second shows the hero arguing with himself and so creates sympathy, the third marks the point of no return.
Add one paragraph on the audience relationship: soliloquy makes the audience a confidant, which is why dramatic irony works so strongly in the scenes that follow.
Write a thesis sentence before you begin, for example that the soliloquies chart the hero's descent from doubt into certainty and make the audience complicit in it.
Close by returning to the words dramatic significance, stating what the play would lose if the soliloquies were cut.

Answer: A four-paragraph plan: thesis on what the soliloquies collectively achieve, then one paragraph each on revelation of motive, inner conflict and sympathy, the turning point, and the audience as confidant, closing with what the play would lose without them.

The mistake to avoid

Retelling the story. The commonest drama script in the examination hall is a careful summary of the plot with a sentence of comment at the end, and it scores in the lowest band however accurate it is. The second error is confusing the aside with the soliloquy: the soliloquy is a longer speech by a character who is alone, the aside is a brief remark while others are present.

In the exam

Write about the audience in nearly every paragraph, using phrases such as the audience sees, the audience already knows, the audience is left watching, because that keeps you analysing rather than narrating. Always name the act and scene, or at least the point in the play, when you refer to an incident, and state the central conflict early so that every later paragraph can be tied back to it.