ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks evidence of instances where musicality has been a particularly central consideration and driver in the process of writing a text for theatrical performance rather than a by-product or afterthought. It shows how musicalization in playwriting often includes a problematization, celebration or interrogation of voice, both for the actors in the rehearsal and performance process and the audience in watching and hearing the result. The chapter explains a range of different relationships and encounters between playwrights and musicality: as a poetic and philosophical notion, concrete condition and guidance for writing, metaphor for different dramaturgical approaches, and blueprint for new micro- and macrostructures of dramatic composition. It focuses on the influence of improvisational techniques in theatre which are derived from or are related to music, and how some of these techniques have been incorporated into or adopted for processes of devising, writing or performing theatre.
