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Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls

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Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls. Dramatic methods. Dramatic Language Dramatic Staging Dramatic Structure (see previous lect.). (a) Dramatic Language. The language of drama is a language that is performable (i.e. acted out before an audience)

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Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls

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  1. Summary Dramatic Methods in Top Girls

  2. Dramatic methods • Dramatic Language • Dramatic Staging • Dramatic Structure (see previous lect.)

  3. (a) Dramatic Language • The language of drama is a language that is performable (i.e. acted out before an audience) • Gestures, actions, use of props, social grouping and emotional states are implicitly present in dramatic language. • Different from non-dramatic poetry or prose

  4. Dramatic Language • Language use • Tone & attitude of women towards one another in establishing relations of power & solidarity • Overlapping dialogue • Different speech codes / registers to characterize class differences • Male/female styles of speech • Pronouns (‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’) • Naming – labels, terms of address • Expletives • Silences

  5. Subtext - draws on the cultural knowledge and assumptions shared by the audience for the purpose of demystifying them • Allusions (esp. in Act 1) • Irony • Humour – comic balances the tragic

  6. (b) Dramatic Staging • All female cast • Staged settings • Staged actions (e.g. movement, laughing & crying) • Costuming • Use of visual ‘absences’ (e.g. no physical presence of men, Marlene never seen in her own home)

  7. Brechtian technique of alienation - a defamiliarizing process in which the audience is constantly made aware that they are watching a play  the constructed-ness of role-playing - E.g. casting adults to play the roles of Angie & Kit; surreal act of conjuring dead women from the past • Doubling

  8. Symbolic significance of visual props & gestures: • Dressing (e.g. Angie’s dress in Act 2 & 3) • Drinking (e.g. wine, whiskey) • Tables (e.g. restaurant table set for dinner in Act 1, three desks in Act 2 Sc 3, kitchen table without dinner in Act 3)

  9. Distinctiveness of Churchill? • As feminist playwright • Concerned with woman’s struggle for autonomy in an unjust society • Consciousness-raising of sexual stereotypes & gender discrimination against women • But TG is a feminist play that is self-critical of the women’s movement • Critiques one style of feminism (bourgeois feminism) & contrasts it with another (socialist feminism)

  10. Experiments with dramatic form & structure • Breaks away from the structure & conventions of realism • Juxtaposition of the real & surreal (esp. in conjuring women role models from history & literature in Act 1); fragmented time & backward progression • All female cast with the reversal of sex roles to expose and satirise gender stereotyping • Overlapping dialogue – the ‘naturalness’ of speech that is constructed • Doubling

  11. Dramatic effects • Imagine the scene – how would the audience respond & by what dramatic methods? • Feelings evoked? - climatic or anti-climatic, distant or involved, empathetic or dispassionate • How does the scene develop our attitudes towards a particular character / situation / thematic issue in relation to the play as a whole?

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