Communication in Drama: A Pragmatic Approach

Is communication in drama definable? Difficult to say? Why? Communication in drama is tough to tap but not impossible to explore. It’s certainly describable, if not definable. It is dynamic and not static. The written word and the performed word have their own ‘say’ and ‘play’ in the overall process of communication. As drama has a lot of communication pertaining to socio-cultural, literary and theatrical areas and the variety of communicators like the playwright, the actors and the technicians, a drama has a complex operation of communication. Hence, defining it like a static structure—with all of its intricacies—seems to be an unjustifiable notion. On the other hand, it’s possible rather to describe the communicational operation in drama. Drama is composed of verbal and non-verbal play of communication creatively operated by human mind. It keeps the process of communication always open-ended for new possibilities. This is more so, when a play is performed in the theatre. The transformation of a script into a theatrical performance processess and transforms the message in several creative ways. It's always interesting and challenging too to interpret the synchronized play of the social, literary, theatrical, and many other components in the multivalent contexts of drama. This is where drama differs from real life. As a dramatist uses his creative ‘say’ to compose his communication, the director uses his creative ‘play’ to perform it. That’s the reason why the distinctive mechanisms of composition and performance require a suitably distinctive analytical model for a study of this kind. Though there are certain previously existing models of communication, they are evolved to analyse real-life communication and do not cater to the analytical requirements of dramatic communication. Hence, considering the need, a new model is produced in this book. At the initial stage, the hypothetical form of the new model is authenticated by assessing it against the existing models in pragmatics. Accommodating certain essential elements from the existing models and by adding some new elements, the new model is deviced. The model is further used to analyse some major works in Indian English drama. In a nutshell, it’s a fresh pragmatic perspective on communication in drama.