PLAY ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION

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  INTRODUCTION

Play analysis and interpretation is an essential component of play direction and production. What a play says depends largely on the director’s analysis and interpretation of the script. In this unit, effort will be made to explain the concept of play analysis and interpretation and its significance in theatrical production.

3.1 The Concept of Play Analysis and Interpretation

The concept of play analysis and interpretation deals with a careful study and in depth evaluation of the play script in order to discover all that are there to be known about the play in terms of the meaning of the play, the play’s implicit activities and how the component parts of the play relate to one another. Play analysis is at the root of directing and acting. This is because as Heffner et al opine, “Knowing how to direct will be of little value if the director does not know what to direct” (31). This is equally applicable to the actor. He must know the desired effect he is to communicate to the audience.

Apart from a thorough examination of the play script, play analysis and interpretation benefits from studious research. The research areas include the historical background of the work, the traditions that have emerged in producing the play, and the period costumes and movements, (if it is an old play). Adelugba believes that research is equally necessary in a new play. The director must know “what is this new writer trying to say to us? What school of thought does he belong to?” He further argues and I think he is right, that “Every writer is likely to fit into some ideological mode or other – and this ideological mode would also be evident in how you start the production and how you go about making sure that the impact of the ideological message reaches out to the audience” (105). Research needs to be carried out on character, theme, plot, and so on. Information in all this can be obtained from books, and articles on the nature of drama, period history, costumes and movements. Because of the avalanche of materials, many renowned directors attest that they spend considerable time, sometimes many years, in order to find out all they could know about the play they intend to direct. “Meyerhold once said that with the ordinary script he had to deal with – a new Soviet piece, for example – he found six to eight weeks a sufficient time to prepare and rehearse the production. But, he added, he had been thinking about certain plays such as Gogol’s The Inspector General for years, during which he sets down notes, drew sketches, read commentaries and dreamed about the project. The same he said was true of his plan to direct Othello. (He never did). The project, he remarked, occupied his thoughts, for even a longer time than the Gogol play – for one does not improvise Shakespeare! Not, at any rate, in ‘respectful’ interpretation” (Clurman, 26). Meyerhold’s view above throws profound light on the tasking nature of play analysis and interpretation.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 1

What do you understand by play analysis and interpretation?

3.2 Process of Play Analysis and Interpretation

Play analysis and interpretation commences with the reading of the play. The first reading of the script should be quick and without interruption. The first reading of the text enables the director and even his associates, to have an overview of the play’s landscape in terms of the plot, the people in the play, the setting and the bone of contention or what the struggle in the play in all about. This overview of the play is often referred to by some directors as the “first impression”. According to Harold Clurman, the director “must regard the first two or three preliminary readings as first impressions” (24). Because of the conventional notion that first impression is often deceiving, Clurman further suggests that the director should read the script again and again. But the director does not need to read the script “in consecutive daily sessions”. In fact, he would do well if time permits to set it aside for a while after each reading and check on what he remembers of it. He might even try to forget it. He should let it work on him before he works on it” (24).

Reading a play is quite different from reading a novel. Usually, “the novelist supplies the reader with all kinds of descriptions and psychological analyses, telling the reader exactly what is going on in the minds and feeling of the people of the story” (Heffner et al, 343). The play director does not have this kind of advantage. Although some plays, especially modern one have stage directions, they merely give skeletal information on scenic environment and properties, attributes of character and certain limited action. Many plays do not have stage directions. The director must fill this missing link. He does so through analytical and interpretive inferences. The director should read the play “with a kinetic energy” (33). He should visualize sights and sounds, as well as the action in his mind’s eyes. This implies imaginative reading. According to Bernard Shaw, as cited by Clurman, “The director, having considered the play and decided to undertake the job of directing it, has no further concern with its literary merits or doctrine (if any)”. The director’s major task now is how “to translate the script’s words into the language of the stage where men and women of flesh and blood who move in three dimensions among real objects are to replace description” (24). The play first springs to life in our imagination and except the director possesses “vividness” of “visual imagination” (Boulton, 22), he may never come to terms with much of what the play says.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 2

Reading a play is different from reading a novel. Why?

3.3 Functions of Play Analysis and Interpretation

According to A. B. C. Duruaku, play analysis and interpretation “opens up the inherent meaning of the play which is the eventual basis of the production”. He further maintains that “the business of play production involves team work and if each person” is allowed to proceed “along his own thought or understanding of the play, there will be confusion. Every production aims at unity of effect. Duruaku is of the view that “unity of effect is only achievable when there is a common understanding of what the play means” (86). Therefore, play analysis and interpretation fosters a common understanding of the chosen meaning of the play. I say chosen meaning because as Bernard Beckerman rightly posits, “a play does not mean, it provokes meanings”

(166). To buttress this fact, Clurman notes:

We never see Shakespeare’s Hamlet onstage, only that of Walter Hampden, John Barrymore, John Gielgud, Nicol Willamson and so on and on. Shakespeare’s Hamlet exits solely in the book. A vast literary fraternity has argued for centuries what it connotes (39).

It follows, therefore, that what a play means depends on what the director chooses to emphasize, what best illuminates his creative spirit and energy.

Old scripts often have accumulated traditions of production. However, analysis and interpretation can help the director to “find fresh pathway into the heart of the text” (Brustein, 76), a pathway that has never been discovered nor walked by anybody. There is hardly any definitive analysis and interpretation of a play. Robert Browning is quoted by Robert Brustein to have said that once a play is released, “it becomes part of the atmosphere, open to interpretation by every body” and “who knows whose interpretation is correct?” (91). A good play, Brustein says, is always there to be confronted, to be reinterpreted, to be refreshed through the vision of a great director. In the process of analysis and interpretation, the director is at liberty to do whatever he wants with the script but he has to ensure that “what results is persuasive, enriching and consistently coherent in itself” (Clurman, 40).

Analysis helps to reveal implicit activities in the text. The script is not self-sufficient. It does not contain all there is in a play. It merely gives a sort of glimpse into the play’s actions and requirements. Through script analysis the director gains a fuller knowledge of what the play entails. Implicit activities include characters’ reactions, timing, and pause, in fact, every bit of action or event not explicitly explained by the text. For example, most plays do not tell us how characters communicate or react to one another by means of gestures. The choice and execution of gestural language is chiefly the duty of the director and the actor.Beckerman posits that analysis of a play should lead one to an understanding of what gesture is needed to express the action” (231).

Analysis and interpretation helps the director to articulate the three appeals or values of the theatre. These appeals include intellectual, emotional and aesthetic appeal or value. Intellectual appeal deals with the ethical construct of the play, the message which the play passes on to the audience. Emotional appeal refers to the passion which the play communicates, “the depth of feeling the audience would share with the character’s problems and dilemmas as well as the way the play determines their response to it (Duruaku, 87). Aristotle considers the role of tragedy from this direction. To him, tragedy is a kind of safety valve by means of which the dangerous emotions of pity and fear can be expunged from the human system. This is what the concept of catharsis is all about Aesthetic appeal deals with the beauty of the performance in terms of colour, language, movement, and scenic environment, in fact, the pleasure derived from sights and sounds of the play.

Through play analysis and interpretation, a lot is revealed to the director about the personalities of the characters. Character analysis enables the director to understand both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the characters, as well as characters” relationships. Characters can be analysed in terms of number, age, height, size, sex, major or minor. They can also be analysed in terms of their given circumstances, that is, socio-economic and cultural background, as well as their drives or motivations.

Through analysis, the director should be able to know whose play is it. The play as a whole is often propelled by the action of the protagonist, but each bit, moment or segment of the play often belongs to a character who is not necessarily the major character. A careful analysis and interpretation will reveal to the director, the pattern of ownership in the play.

Play analysis and interpretation helps the director to gain detailed information on the setting of the play. Apart from the stage directions, the director can acquire useful information on the play’s setting through the dialogue of the play, study of photographs and records of past productions.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 3

Discuss two functions of play analysis and interpretation.

3.4 Approaches to Play Analysis and Interpretation

There are no hard and fast rules about play analysis and interpretation. A play script can be studied in many ways because it can be an avenue of understanding period in the history of man, an age in the national life, social attitudes of a people at a given time, dominant ideas popular within certain periods or moral attitudes of a time and a people” (Heffner et al, 51). However, Heffner et al identify two most useful approaches of play analysis and interpretation. They are:

1. The study of drama in terms of its spirit or meaning

2. The study of drama in terms of its construction.

Although these methods are usually treated in isolation in critical discourses, the director must see them as two sides of a coin.

Every play is a comment of some sort on human life and condition. In recognition of this fact, Heffner et al aver that:

Whatever the initial reason for its composition, every play, even the most trivial, makes some statement about life and about human nature. That statement may be trite or platitudinous or it may be profound. Plays are interpretation of meaning of life and the nature of man. They are means through which human beings may come to realize the rich variety of human existence, human thought, human emotions and human nature (52).

So, one of the basic approaches to analysis and interpretation aims at hitting on the spirit of the play, its meaning or message.

To explicate the meaning of the play naturally “requires analysis, that is, the breaking down of the play into its part, in order to discover how it is put together and how it creates its effect” (55). This implies that the director must know the form or the structure of the play. Is it a tragedy or comedy? a farce or melodrama? Is it an historical play or a pastoral? Understanding the form of the play will enable the director to pattern his effect.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 4

List two approaches to script analysis and interpretation.

3.5 Useful Questions on Play Analysis and Interpretation

Heffner et al articulated useful questions that can help the director in the business of play analysis and interpretation. They are:

1. Why does the play arouse interest, sustain interest, and satisfy interest?

2. What kind of emotional effects does the play produce?

3. Is the effect dominantly serious, comic or a mixture of the two?

4. Which are the big scenes of the play, what is the nature of each, and what does each accomplish?

5. Is there a conflict in the play, what is its nature?

6. What is the nature of plot progression? What is the main question in the play?

7. How is the question answered?

8. What are the complications of the action?

9. What is the argument of the play?

10. What kinds of characters appear in the play?

11. What are the characters relations to each other?

12. Whose play is it?

13. What kind of world does the play create?

14. What are the apparent motives, drives, desires and decision of the chief characters?

15. What are the setting in which the action of the play occur?

16. Could the play be staged without settings?

17. Does the play have any moral message?

18. What important thought are prominent in the play?

19. How would you describe the whole story line of the action?

Many more questions can still be generated.

SELF ASSESSMENT EXERCISE 5

Who is the protagonist of a play?

4.0 CONCLUSION

We explained that play analysis and interpretation is an aspect of theatre direction which deals with a thorough and patient examination of the play text, in order to understand much of what the play can say. We maintained that through careful and imaginative analysis and study of the play, the director can find fresh pathway into the heart of the text, as well as gain insight into implicit activities inherent in the play script.

5.0 SUMMARY

In this unit, we specifically examined the concept of play analysis and interpretation, how to read a script, the functions of play analysis and interpretation, as well as the approaches of studying a dramatic text. We finally listed certain useful questions that can aid play analysis and interpretation.

6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT

Discuss one function of play analysis and interpretation.

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READINGS

Boulton, Majorie (1980). The Anatomy of Drama. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Beckerman, Bernard (1970). Dynamics of Drama. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Clurman, Harold (1974). On Directing. New York: Collier Books - Macmillan.

Dasylva, Ademola (2003). DapoAdelugba on Theatre Practice in Nigeria. Ibadan: Atlantis Books.

Duruaku, A. B. C. (1997). A Handbook on Drama and Theatre. Owerri: Colon Concepts.

Heffner, Hubert C., Samuel Selden and Hunton D. Sellman (1959). Modern Theatre Practice. New York: Appleton – Century- Crofts.

Marks, Jonathan (1999). “Robert Brustein on Auteurs, Authors, and

Actors”. In The Lively Art. Ed. Arthur Holmberg. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.