ABSTRACT
The experiences offered by a dramatic text are as diverse and as demanding as those offered by poetry or a novel that dramatic critics tend to divide themselves into two armed camps, those who see a play as verbal construct and those who think of it exclusively in terms of its theatrical possibilities. This chapter argues that great drama has precisely the effect of presenting the action which keeps ‘the spectator’s intellect free and mobile’ through shifting and dialectical viewpoints. One modern dramatist who expressed strong views on the nature of the dramatic experience, as he saw it in the theatre of his day and as he hoped it might be in the theatre of the future, was Bertold Brecht. Writing within a tradition of modern drama which was inaugurated by Pirandello, Tom Stoppard disconcertingly juggles with levels of reality so that even the audience is never sure what it is seeing, or what it is being asked to feel.
