ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a range of techniques which the playwrights used to create, in Bradley's words, the illusion of a world 'just outside the range of the audience's vision' by bringing it onstage in one way or another. It begins with an articulation of challenges and choices to be addressed by playwrights in regard to the creation of an overall fictional world in performance. There are of course further decisions for the playwright to make about precisely when information about offstage events is fed into the performance, and about the order in which the represented events are performed. Anthony Brennan, Onstage and Offstage Worlds, stresses the fundamental importance of the playwright's 'manipulation of the interrelationship between events onstage and those offstage'. One major factor influencing the playwrights' dramaturgical decision-making process is, as suggested above, the performability of a particular incident or event.
