The play off the stage: the writer-reader relationship in drama

Abstract

The writer-reader relationship in drama, with stage directions as part of the dramatic language, is much more complicated than that in other types of literature. The complication mainly comes from the fact that 'the reader' is a kind of collective term covering various types of individuals with different pragmatic roles, including the director, the stage producer, the setting designer, actors/actresses, the audience outside the theatre and ordinary readers. Thus, instead of a one-to-one process of communication between the writer and the reader, there are multiple parallel processes between the writer and various types of readers, with the same play text conveying different pragmatic meanings to different addressees. For instance, a play text is utilitarian in the theatrical circle but fictional in the literary circle, and what is imperative for one type of reader is purely descriptive and narrative for another. For various reasons, this area has so far received little critical attention. This article, from a pragmatic-stylistic perspective and with special reference to Eugène Ionesco's The Lesson, attempts to examine how the playwright's discourse strategies produce different effects on different types of readers.