Summary
“Reading a play”, Strindberg (2007: 133) writes in his Memorandum to the Members of the Intimate Theatre 1908,
is almost like reading a score. It is a difficult art, and I don't know many people who can do it although many say they can. The very arrangement of the text, where the eyes have to wander from the name of the speaker to his speech, demands close attention. The seemingly uninteresting exposition has to be struggled through and carefully recorded in one's memory, since it contains the warp by which the weft is set up. The action noted within the stage directions also delays and distracts one. Even to this day when I read Shakespeare, I have to pencil in notes to keep the characters and particularly the numerous minor characters straight, and I have to go back constantly to the list of characters and return to the first act to see what the characters said there. You have to read a play at least twice to have it clearly in mind, and in order to be able to assign the roles you have to grind away at it several times.
To read a play may be difficult. To see a play is in some ways easier, in other ways more difficult in the sense that the spectator constantly is confronted with such a wealth of more or less simultaneous impressions that he or she only finds time to grasp some of them. In a stage performance the eye wanders from the speaker to the listener(s), from faces to costumes, from scenery to properties.
While the reader can turn back to the beginning of his text, read bits of it anew, look up difficult words etc., the spectator who must adjust to the dynamic audiovisual flow, has no such possibility. And while the reader experiences the drama text in isolation, the spectator experiences it as part of a collective, the theatre audience. Our experience of the world around us occurs via our five sensations. The text can communicate all these directly, a performance can normally do so only with regard to sight and hearing. The other three sensations can be communicated only indirectly, via the dialogue.
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- Drama as Text and PerformanceStrindberg's and Bergman's Miss Julie, pp. 121 - 125Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2012