Читать книгу Dark Voices Ring: Grade 12 Second Additional Language - Zakes Mda - Страница 5

Literature appears in different genres: prose (novels and short stories), poetry and drama (plays). Drama differs from the other genres in that living actors in costume tell the story by performing it on a stage for an audience.

For this reason the layout of a written play separates the words the actors speak (the primary text) from the information they or their director might need. Below the title you find the list of characters (the dramatis personae). Their names, in bold and capital letters, followed by a colon, down the left-hand column indicate who speaks the words opposite.

The playwright hopes to make sure that performances agree with how he pictures them, and so he or she will add guidelines, in italics, for the setting

•costumes

•lighting

•sound (music or noises)

and will include stage directions in italics, usually in brackets, that tell the actors

•when to appear on stage or leave (ENTER/EXIT)

•how they are feeling

•how to say their lines

•and, sometimes, where they should stand and who they are addressing.