Drama, like poetry and fiction, is a skill of words. In drama, the language are mainly dialogue: people talking are the fundamental dramatic action. The talk may be interrupted by wordless activity sword-fighting, love scenes, silence but such activity will derive its significance from its script or context of dialogue.
If not, we're coping with pantomime and not with drama. In general theory, however, the line between drama and the related arts is not so simple to draw. Film is even less literary than theater, and yet film scripts have already been published to be read. At what point of verbal artistry do they cease being scenario and production notes and become drama? Conversely, from what extent is the thought of drama covered by Pirandello's "three boards and a passion" as a formula for theater?
Such questions are posed by the double aspect of dramatic language. As written words, drama is literature; as spoken words in a spectacle, it's theater. Dialogue may be performed directly, intact, but stage directions, however skillfully written, do not survive the transfer from script to stage.Dramacool
Their referents in performance speech manner, movement, costume, drama masks set, etc. - are creations of the theater rather than of literature. The fact that successful playwrights make more money in the box office than in the bookstores is evidence that for most of us the theatrical medium of drama masks and film acting takes precedence within the literary one and that they find reading a play a pallid replacement for seeing it.
As stage spectacle a play is intensely there a three-dimensional and audible progress of coherent, absorbing, physical action. 'While words are consecutive and reading is definitely an act in the full time dimension, seeing a play is an experience of both time and space.
At any one moment the spectator may be simultaneously conscious of weather or time of day or of rich or shabby furniture, or of one character speaking, another listening, and someone crawling noiselessly toward the speaker with a blade between his teeth. The spatial concreteness and immediacy of staged drama enlist the eye of a larger pair of the spectator's sensory responses, and do so more intensely, than the purely imaginative evocations of printed play ever can.
Still, the popular assumption that the theatrical medium of drama is primary may be challenged. Performance is forget about the play than the concert could be the symphony. Most plays, like symphonies have already been written to be performed, nevertheless the artistic construct exists complete in the written words, just whilst the melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and orchestration of the symphony "are" in the printed score. The only difference between a published play and a published musical composition in this respect is that for the majority of us it is simpler to "see" and "hear" a play in the imagination than it's to "hear" the music in the read score.