From Page to Stage: Analysing and interpreting dialogue

Deborah O’Donoghue
Friday, March 1, 2019

Here you will find a series of workshop activities for GCSE and AS level, aimed at sharpening students’ tools for interpreting and performing written texts. One of my bugbears as a fiction writer, is dialogue marked with intrusive ‘speech tags’: ‘She shouted.’ ‘He bellowed.’ ‘I screeched.’ To avoid this, I tend to keep speech tags simple and I try to focus on using action between dialogue to convey how a character is feeling during a scene. Playwrights face a similar dilemma. Should they, like Tennessee Williams, provide detailed commentary, scene setting and stage directions for each line? Should they allow performers and directors more freedom of interpretation? And where freedom of interpretation is prioritised, what clues to performance does the dialogue alone give? Focusing on the preformative analysis of speech, the activities build students' skills and confidence, starting from short unscripted improv, through to simple dialogues and narrative scenes, to complex Shakespearean and Beckettian texts (and/or other texts of your choice). Students will go on a journey: from thinking about actions without words, to thinking about words without actions, and finally bringing the two together to interpret and portray meaning. Ideally an adaptable drama space should be used – one with enough room for group rehearsal and performance, as well as a whiteboard for some teacher-led input. Timings have been suggested but are adaptable to suit different classes.