Drama vs. Theatre

The playwright Edward Bond raised a few eyebrows recently by, among other things, dubbing Brecht "the playwright of Auschwitz". His argument was so patently absurd that I barely hiccuped. Instead, another statement caught my eye. Bond was speaking of a production of his play The Woman, which he directed at the National: "I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'." You could almost hear his disgust.

It seems that Bond has a very specialised definition of "theatre", one that comprehends the entire art form as, heaven forbid, a kind of meta-Tom Stoppard play. But his comment gave me pause, because this distinction between "drama" and "theatre" is one I've heard many times before, and almost always from writers.

The implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art. As Mrs O'Neill said of her husband, Eugene O'Neill was no mere playwright: he was a dramatist, and thus sat with the gods. Drama, we are given to understand, is Serious. Through the landscape of Drama stride the likes of Sophocles and Euripides and Shakespeare, lightning bolts of genius in each hand, their brows corrugated with Olympian thought.

An impressive picture, certainly, and one can see at once why a jobbing playwright might aspire to such divinity. But something inside me is irked by this picture. I love writers - why, some of them are my best friends - but it does seem rather self-serving. There is, in any successful production of even the most uncontroversially play-like play, rather more going on onstage than just the words: there's an entire texture of sound, design and performance and, crucially, there's an audience responding to it. If drama is just about the writer, then it might as well stay on paper.

If I'm in categorising mode, which is lamentably seldom for a critic, I think of theatre as the general noun, and of drama, like comedy, as a subset of theatre. Theatre has many mansions, and writers are resident only in some of them.

Critic Hans-Thies Lehmann coined the term "post-dramatic theatre" to describe a shift in practice away from a hierarchical model, with the writer (usually a dead writer) at the apex and the director interpreting the writer's "intention". As an aside, it's probably rather easy to know a writer's intention if he or she is dead and unable to argue: like Humpty Dumpty's vocabulary, it means just what you choose it to mean.

In the post-dramatic theatre, the place of the writer is less easily defined, with the creative emphasis equally existing in the contributions of other theatre-makers. Companies like Holland's Dood Pard are perhaps exemplary of this approach. But the term has also been applied to the writer-centric theatre of playwrights such as Sarah Kane or Howard Barker. Does this mean these writers are not dramatists?

After all, Shakespeare worked very much like Howard Barker, collaborating closely with his own company. And Shakespeare had jugglers and singers between the acts to keep the punters happy, which seems very unlike a divine dramatist. If Shakespeare is a dramatist, surely Barker is too? And if Barker is a dramatist, can he be post-dramatic? Or is Shakespeare himself suspiciously post-dramatic? What am I not getting here?

And returning to Bond: if drama isn't theatre, then what is it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2008/jan/09/whatsthedifferencebetweend