ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I argued that the dramatic work, whether encountered as text or performance, is a dynamic process. This process begins with a stretch of creative activity, one or more events in the course of which might be arbitrarily posited as the moment when the work comes into existence (i.e., when a playwright hands over a manuscript, when a printed text is published, when actors deliver a first performance). 1 This creative activity might be textual or, in the case, say, of improvised or workshopped theatre where the written form is introduced late in the course of things and sometimes only as a derivative documentary record of the theatrical event, it might be a performance or rehearsal. 2 In practice, however, these two seemingly distinct starting points often become inseparably blurred since playwrights rarely maintain fully independent artistic control over theatrical production, or in many situations even over textual production. Such texts and/or performances are then available for subsequent (inevitably non-identical) repetition in either medium. The identity of the work of dramatic art, by contrast, is not limited by a supposed originary moment of publication, either theatrical or textual, but continually constructed in response to production by users as varied as theatrical practitioners, spectators and readers, and publishers and editors. One can see a performance or read an edition or script, but a perception of that production as an instance of something else, or of two or more such productions as instances of the same and not separate work(s), depends on a process of narrative emplotment.
