drama unit vocab

Staging

The whole process of realising a dramatic work for performance

Stage Space

Used to create an illusion of the setting the playwright wants to create.

Universal

That everyone can relate to the experience.

Juxtaposition

The skllful placing of elements side by side so that they illuminate each other by contrast. The elements can be words, concepts, or characters. It can be used in discussing poetry, prose, and drama.

Cross-dressing

This takes place when characters of one gender dress as the other. In Shakespeare’s day, all parts were played by men and boys, so a boy could be dressed as a girl who then disguises herself as a man. This reminds the audience of the complexities of human sexuality.

Mirroring

The reflection of one thing in another through symbols.

Bed Trick

The substitution of one actor for another, pretending to be someone else in bed in the dark.

Farce

A comedy full of exaggerated situations and improbable events; humor is often very physical.

Mistaken Identity

Where characters disguise themselves, pretend to be what they are not, act or put on a show and behave hypocritically.

Soliloquy

A dramatic convention where characters alone on stage speak their thoughts aloud to the audience.

Exposition

The early part of the play in which the audience receives background information about setting, events, characters and possibly themes, so that they understand what’s going on.

Denouement

Comes from a French word which means ‘untying’ and is used in relation to unraveling or resolving the complexities of the plot

Act and Scene

These are divisions within a play to show change and development. An act is a larger Unit, a scene is a smaller part of an act. However, it should be noted that some recent playwrights do not use them at all.

scene.

Plot

The events that make up a story. The secondary stories are known as subplots, or, if they are very important, parallel plots.

Foreshadowing

A writer will sometimes give a hint of what is to come in the play or novel

Action

What is happening at any given moment in the story, what the people are doing (The plot is the completed series of actions making up the whole story.)

Irony of Situation

An event or occasion in which the outcome is very different from might have been expected. It is also seen in the novel

Distancing or Alienation Effect

A feature of some plays in which the familiar is made strange so that the audience sees characters and events differently and are surprised into thinking about them rather than simply identifying with or accepting them. The playwright Bertolt Brecht popularised the term, initially in German verfremdungseffekt

Characterisation

Literally ‘making a character’; the writer has chosen words and tones to create a particular effect

Stage Business

Activity with props (properties), that are employed for extra dramatic impact (notes, letters, cleaning materials, length of rubber hose)