Drama refers to the fictional representation of a story designed to be performed in front of an audience. From the theatre culture of ancient Greece, through Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen and Chekhov to Wilde, Beckett and Stoppard, via opera and musical theatre to the latest cinema release, drama has proved an enduringly popular and powerful way of documenting and reflecting human experience over thousands of years. As Edward Albee, author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, noted: ‘A play is fiction – and fiction is fact distilled into truth.’
The word drama derives from the Greek for ‘action’, while the performance of drama has been described in terms of a ‘play’ (with its connotations of a game) since antiquity. Early technical innovations in the presentation of drama included the construction of raked auditoria to assist viewing. More importantly, in the 6th century BCE a performer called Thespis introduced spoken dialogue into proceedings, marking himself out as the first ‘actor’ (it is in honour of him that today we still refer to Thespians). Then, in the 4th century BCE, Aristotle wrote his Poetics, a work of literary theory that explored differences in the form and content of various types of play. While his thoughts on comedy have not survived, his ideas about the nature of tragedy have proved timeless through his elucidation of concepts such as catharsis (the purging of the emotions) and hamartia (a fatal flaw in character).
The fundamentals of drama have changed little since they were established by the ancient Greeks. Their theatre is epitomized by the image of a pair of masks, one joyful and the other in anguish – and still drama may be considered the art of making ’em laugh and making ’em cry.
‘Action’
Athens was the focal point of ancient Greek drama, with the earliest plays, put on by the followers of Dionysus, telling tales from mythology via song (delivered by a chorus who typically wore masks) and dance. Soon there were regular festivals and competitions centred upon the three main dramatic genres: tragedy, comedy and the satyr play. Satyr plays were saucy romps featuring mythical half-man/half-goat characters, but Greece’s traditions in tragedy and comedy were to provide more lasting legacies. Among the most famous authors of tragedies – dramas dealing with unhappy events related to the downfall of a heroic character, along with grand themes including pride, love, greed and power – were the 5th-century-BCE authors Aeschylus, Sophocles (whose masterpiece was Oedipus Rex) and Euripides. Comedy, meanwhile, sought to satirize the foibles of the powerful and wealthy, with the genre’s leading exponents arguably Aristophanes and, later, Menander.
Eugène Ionesco, one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th century, considered that drama ‘lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.’ Alternatively, Sarah Bernhardt – a beloved actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – described theatre as ‘the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd.’