Drama In Performance

Raymond Williams' reputation rests mainly on his contribution to literary and cultural studies, but he was also an important critic and theoretician in the field of drama. Drama in Performance, first published in 1954, pioneered a method of dramaturgical rather than literary-critical analysis of plays, locating dramatic texts in the conditions and conventions of their original performance and reading them to disclose their performance potentialities. This method, which anticipated such contemporary developments as performance analysis and the semiotics of drama, is here applied to representative texts from key periods of the history of drama: the Greek stage, the medieval theatre-in-the-round and pageant-wagon, the Elizabethan public playhouse, London commercial theatres from the Restoration to the late 19th century, the naturalist stage of the Moscow Art Theatre, 20th century experimental drama, and contemporary film.