ABSTRACT
Where semiotics has provided a way of seeing the dramatic text which furthers our understanding of how the text is made, it has also provided the key to unlocking theatre from literature; the ‘way to avoid imprisoning the theater in the text’ (Kaisergruber 1977: 169). However, once the dramatic text is freed from the constraints of the traditional tools of literary criticism and from its consequent confinement to literature, and is considered in its theatrical context, the difficulties of ‘reading’ increase. The difficulties are created by what Barthes identified as the polysemic nature of theatre, i.e. its ability to draw on a number of sign-systems which do not operate in a linear mode but in a complex and simultaneously operating network unfolding in time and space.
