Dramaturgy as skill, function, and verb

Dramaturgy is a job perennially in search of a description. When the managers of the National Theatre of Hamburg hired G. E. Lessing in 1767, they envisioned him as an educator, a public relations coordinator, a playwright, an in-house critic, and the organizer of German national drama. Only a month after his appointment, Lessing was already writing to his brother, Karl, about the territorial squabbles at the theatre that would plague his two years as the first officially engaged dramaturg: “There is disagreement among the directorate, and no one knows who is cook and who is waiter.” ¹ In a memo to Laurence Olivier written nearly two centuries later, Kenneth Tynan, the “literary manager” at the English National Theatre, assembled a list of 13 tasks that he and his assistant performed to clarify their myriad duties for an uncomprehending board of directors, from “[t]ravelling to see plays, meet authors and directors, deliver speeches, take part in debates, in London and abroad” to “[p]reventing the Wrong plays from being chosen – as far as possible.” ²