Drama, like poetry and fiction, is an art of words. In drama, what are mainly dialogue: people talking are the essential dramatic action. The talk might be interrupted by wordless activity sword-fighting, love scenes, silence but such activity will derive its significance from its script or context of dialogue.
If not, we're coping with pantomime and not with drama. In general theory, however, the line between drama and the related arts is not too an easy task to draw. Film is even less literary than theater, and yet film scripts have been published to be read. At what point of verbal artistry do they cease being scenario and production notes and become drama? Conversely, to what extent is the concept of drama included in Pirandello's "three boards and a passion" as a formula for theater?
Such questions are posed by the double aspect of dramatic language. As written words, drama is literature; as spoken words in a spectacle, it is theater. Dialogue could be performed directly, intact, but stage directions, however skillfully written, do not survive the transfer from script to stage.Dramacool
Their referents in performance speech manner, movement, costume, drama masks set, etc. - are creations of the theater rather than of literature. The fact successful playwrights earn more income in the box office than in the bookstores is evidence that for many people the theatrical medium of drama masks and film acting takes precedence over the literary one and which they find reading a play a pallid replacement seeing it.
As stage spectacle a play is intensely there a three-dimensional and audible progress of coherent, absorbing, physical action. 'While words are consecutive and reading is an act in enough time dimension, seeing a play is an event of both time and space.
At anybody moment the spectator might be simultaneously alert to weather or time of day or of rich or shabby furniture, or of one character speaking, another listening, and someone crawling noiselessly toward the speaker with a blade between his teeth. The spatial concreteness and immediacy of staged drama enlist the eye of a bigger set of the spectator's sensory responses, and do this more intensely, compared to the purely imaginative evocations of printed play ever can.
Still, the favorite assumption that the theatrical medium of drama is primary might be challenged. Performance is no longer the play compared to the concert is the symphony. Most plays, like symphonies have been written to be performed, however the artistic construct exists complete in the written words, just because the melody, harmony, rhythm, tempo, and orchestration of the symphony "are" in the printed score. The only real difference between a published play and a published musical composition in this respect is that for the majority of us it is simpler to "see" and "hear" a play in the imagination than it is to "hear" the music in the read score.