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126 awesome drama topics to inspire you.

November 10, 2021

As students of literature, you’re already aware drama portrays fictional and nonfictional events. It does this through the performance of written conversations or scripts of prose or poetry.

Drama can either be staged or performed as a film; it can even be broadcast on radios. These are all categorized as plays, and those who write them are called playwrights or dramatists, while those who perform on stage are referred to as thespians.

There are a series of drama topics since the drama was first performed in the days of Aristotle. Being long-standing, you may need creative and comprehensive dramatic topics for your research.

Good Drama Essay Guideline

Writing a top grade drama essay or writing assignment can become difficult. You should try your best and not leave it to the last minute, and dedicate enough time for editing. Here’s a brief guideline on the process of writing a good drama writing assignment:

Choose topic. Always try your best to choose a topic in which you have at least some interest in. If you choose a topic that is boring you will not have the energy and motivation to put in the work required to write a good essay. Also make sure your topic is not too general, but also not to narrow.
Research. After you have the topic, it is time to research and get some information and context on your topic. Begin by using the internet to find general information. Then begin to look into specific, credible sources which you can cite in your paper. Try your best to have varied types of sources (videos, articles, studies, books etc.).
Outline: Once you feel like you did enough research and are comfortable to begin, start with an outline. An outline is a very quick layout of your essay structure. This is where you put everything on your mind on paper, and then begin to organize and forming your paper. A good paper will always be well structure.
Writing: This is the main part. Once you have an outline you now must take some time and actually write everything out in draft. If you have a substantial outline and good research this part shouldn’t take very long.
Editing and proofreading: Finally, once you have written a first draft it is time to reread and edit. For the first draft, you shouldn’t strive to make it perfect, so there should be quite a lot of editing to do. It is important to leave a good amount of time for editing, because it is as important as actually writing. A high quality essay should go through a number of drafts before it is acceptable.

Drama is a very interesting topic. Drama is most times built on people’s tensions as it is used to keep them wondering what will happen next. For your theatre topics for research, you can consider these different informative, fun-filled and original research topics .

Theatre Research Paper Topics

As a university student, you may need to develop an awesome drama paper for your certificate. These are papers that talk about the basic features of theatre and its significance in society.

You may need to trace the history of theatre itself, as well as the trend of theatrical performances. You may also need to consider an in depth assessment of how theatre topics shaped the present. You can use these custom topics for your research:

Examine the role of women in medieval theater.
Examine the complexities in the history of European theatre.
Give a historical overview of the evolution of theatre from ancient Greece to the Mid 19th century.
Examine the influence of Aristotle on the drama of his time and after his time.
Account for the evolution of American drama.
Examine any three recorded theatrical performances of the 19th century of your choice and state the unifying factors.
Give a detailed overview of what ancient Greek theatre is all about.
Give a detailed review of how ancient Greek theater seems to be replicated today.
Examine the influence of Greek tragedy on the works of Shakespeare and his contemporary.
Redefine drama and theatre.
What distinguishes modern drama and pre-medieval drama?
Examine the significance of Antigone in Sophocles drama.
Examine the role of Canadian drama in the world.
Analyze the role of Bertold Brecht in drama.
Examine how the stylistics of Shakespeare negates that of Brecht.
Examine the differences between drama from the United Kingdom to that of Germany during the period of 14 to 18 centuries.
How has the medieval period Influenced Elizabethan drama?
What is the significance of Henrik Ibsen in Contemporary drama?
Examine the Differences between the stylistics of Bertold Brecht, Shakespeare, and Henrik Ibsen.
Examine what Greek comedy entails in comparison to the comedy of today.

Theatre History Research Topics

You may also require theatre essay topics for long research. These are historical topics that call for in depth research. As students, you can study the past to read more meanings to the present. In this section, you’ll find relevant topics to juxtapose the past and the present and how all these have influenced drama today. Consider:

Give a detailed analysis of the contemporary influences of The Wizard of Oz.
Examine the evolution and trends in horror movies.
Examine the evolution and trends of witchcraft movies.
How are emotions evoked in the drama of William Shakespeare?
Examine the subject of homosexual characters in a drama.
Examine the Influence of Greek drama in creating a symbol and perception of Jesus Christ.
Examine the stigma which Elizabethan actors were faced with
Account for the activities of William Blake.
What are the influences of George Orwell in the American drama Industry?
Compare and Contrast American drama and British drama.
Examine the role of symbols in Greek drama.
Analyze the significance of learning about the history and trend of drama.
Rationalize the role of Aristotle’s treatise on today’s drama.
Compare and contrast the Bollywood and Hollywood Industries.
Document the role of drama in the spread of racism before the end of slavery in America.
Examine the role of slaves in circus performances.
Examine any circus performance company of your choice and carefully detail their exploits.
Examine the evolution of tragic-comedy in drama.
Examine how the church has stopped drama before the 10th century.
Give an in depth overview of the complications in stage drama in a world dominated by films.

Theatre Essay Topics

As a college or university student, you may also need to create theatre essay topics for your classroom work. You may even need it for an assignment. Creating a good topic is essential to writing one of the best essays. You can consider any of these drama ideas for your essay:

Examine the life and times of Caryl Churchill.
What are the experiences of theatre houses with strict censorship?
Discuss the effects of the closing and reopening of American theatre houses throughout the centuries.
Account for the role of tragedy in Shakespeare’s books.
Account for the essence of “Squid Game” in the polarized world.
Account for the essence of “Squid Game” in demeaning humanity.
What are your reflections on the subject of realism?
Examine two plays of your choice and analyze them.
What do you think took Shakespeare’s plays to the global stage?
What is the influence of Spanish theatre on Latin American drama?
Examine the effects of globalization on theatre.
Examine the emergence of black actors on white-dominated stages.
What are the symbols in French theatre?
What are the reputable symbols of Italian theatre?
How has the Elizabethan theatre shaped drama today?
Criticize any performance of your choice.
Praise any performance of your choice.
Compare two or more performances of Macbeth by different themes: focus on their diction and costume.
Examine what a drama portfolio means.
Examine the distinguishing factors of modern theatres and Greek theatre.

Interesting Theatre History Topics

Interesting theatre history topics are topics that consider the fun and lighter part of the past in drama. These are topics that could border on present issues and how they relate to the last and past issues. For your comprehensive theatre historical research topics, you can consider the following:

How have social issues been challenged or discussed through drama?
Examine the significance of Dionysus on the history of drama.
Examine the myths in stage performances.
Examine the personages in Greek drama.
How does television drama share family virtues as expected in the UK?
What are the essential performance skills for a circus act?
What do you know about the adaptation of s cinematic performance to the screen?
Compare and contrast the relationship between acting and expression.
Examine the symbols in Chinese tragedy.
Critically examine the role of the depiction of disobedience in three Theban plays.
What is the usual pop culture which is frequent on television?
Examine the negro movement and its role in the drama.
How has theatre survived the restoration period?
Examine the role of drama in musical performances.
Evaluate the function of identity crisis in drama and acting.
Evaluate the metaphors and what they mean Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
Examine how Shakespeare’s plays exhibited chivalry.
Examine how Shakespeare’s plays exhibited the priority in royalty.
What are the philosophies of theatre that have shaped it today?
Examine the evolution of drama and its changing significance in society.

Musical Theatre Research Topics

As students of theater, you may also need drama ideas relating to musical theatre research topics. These are topics that talk about the musical performance of plays. There were many of these centuries ago. One of the most important is opera. You can examine the following traditions and genres for your theatre class homework or essay:

Examine the purpose and significance of comic opera.
Compare and contrast farsa and fasta teatrale operatic performances.
Comment on the use of lights in opera performances.
Comment on the use of curtains in opera performances.
Examine the technical skills required for. effective opera performances
Identify the role of pop culture in opera.
Comment on the life and times of any two sopranos of choir choice.
Examine what operetta means.
How does ballet fit into musical performances, and what is its essence?
Evaluate the significance of musical performances in enjoying the drama.

Drama Topics for School Students

You may also need drama topics for teenagers for your drama class. If you have enrolled in a drama class as a student, you can try out some of these scenes. These could be graphic and romantic scenes. Depending on the event in your school, you can secure your spot in the national drama team by acting any of the following:

Tennessee Williams and Lucy Bailey’s Baby Doll.
Act any scene of romance in Shakespeare’s plays.
Act any three scenes of compassion in Henrik Ibsen’s play.
Act any three scenes of valor in Shakespeare’s plays.
Build on a comedy scene in Shakespeare’s play and make it funnier in the contemporary understanding of fun.
Play the role of divorce couples arguing over the children and exhibit the mental stress on the children.
Act the roles of violence in settling Political scores.
Read any historical horror story and act three scenes on stage.
Make entertainment with Halloween masks.
Play a role where you manipulate people into your perverted desires.
Play a role of a president refusing to leave power.
Take any three scenes in “Lights Over Tesco Park” by Jack Bradfield and Poltergeist Theatre and perform them to the best of your ability.
Perform any German drama of your choice.
Engage in a musical performance.
Perform without saying words, only gestures.
Perform No Quarter by Polly Stenham.
Perform scenes about the consequences of drugs.
Perform scenes about the cruelty of sexual violence.
Perform scenes about the need for religion for social order.
Perform scenes about the Russian revolution.

Drama Thesis Topics

As students of drama, you may likewise need drama thesis topics for your project or paperwork. You can even need them for your essays. You can consider these awesome topics to create one of the most relevant pieces in the theory of drama. You can choose any of these custom and available topics:

Interrogate the growth of Latin American dramatic culture in the UK.
Discuss the growth of Hollywood in the world.
Discuss the growth and evolution of Bollywood in the world.
Examine the role of pornography in the industry.
Discuss the role of Canadian musical performances in the international space.
Examine how the standards in the industry have changed if any.
Elucidate how drama is used to advance feminist ideas.
Comment on science fiction and its falsity to reality.
Briefly examine any Hollywood thriller of your choice.
Examine the issues of sexual exploitation in Hollywood.
How was drama used as propaganda in the Soviet Union?
Examine how China used drama during the cultural revolution.
Examine the role of subtitles in helping non-language speakers relate to drama from any culture.
Examine how modern drama brings back terror and trauma through collective pain.
How has black lives matter influenced drama?
Comment on any two theatre or circus groups of your choice and why they haven’t stopped.

Running Late On Your Drama Writing?

With all these custom topics online, you can carefully carry out precise research for your drama paperwork or essay. You can also use these to create the best submission ever in your school.

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Drama Dissertation Topic Ideas – Based on the Latest Industry Trends

Published by Ellie Cross at December 29th, 2022 , Revised On May 31, 2024

Drama is one of the most extraordinary forms of communication. Besides being aesthetically pleasing, drama plays are also socially and ethically significant. Technological innovation and drama considerations also affect the drama business. Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental intuition involved in drama production through comprehensive research on theatre dissertation topics.

The Top Drama Dissertation Topics & Ideas For You

The development of Latin American plays in the UK: A challenge that has gone unmet.
The popularity of true wrongdoing portrayals and false wrongdoing fiction in French media in the interwar period. Discuss
Inquiry on the transition from dispersed arrangements to film
Youth perspectives in 21st-century Latin American cinema
Digital media, television, and embodied difference in the identity debate
Current Francophone Contact Zones: Language and Identity Politics
A Shifting Viewpoint: Analysing the New Greek Cinema
A Study of World Cinema on the Festival Circuit, Different Landscapes
The West as a Trope in the New Romanian Cinema, The Promised Land
An analysis of reproducing theatre in authentic outdoor situations
From the music corridor to the variety nights: popular performing venue in the past
Theatre’s estimate in an era of supported gravity: a personal investigation
With the flag in hand and roots in the ground: American Musical Theatre’s depiction of rural gender identity
African Dance and Its Essence: How Conventional Is It Today?
The theatre’s exploration of societal concerns and subjects
The role of spectacle in contemporary theatre
How the musical theatre of today has changed: Hammerstein and Rodgers
Tracing the evolution of theatre and Dionysus
Highlighting the evolution of spectacle across time?
Proving the connection between tragedy and ancient mythology
A look at how Shakespeare has improved drama
A critique of stage and screen performance in plays: examining the complex components
Performance abilities of stage actors: A review
Investigate in depth how expressiveness affects stage acting in a significant way
Establishing the connection between theatre and music
How has Greek tragedy altered the nature of theatre? A critique
A thorough examination of role-playing in group therapy
Vocabulary used in dramas based on the Holocaust
A review of radio drama as a source of entertainment and popular culture before the invention of television
An examination of creativity and appearance in a historical and contemporary play
Dramatic learning in the fundamentals: Examining logical, emotional, and expressive abilities
A discussion on drama and how it fosters imagination
Dramatic direction skill: Bringing stories to life
Blaxploitation and African American expression: The negative connotations attached to Elizabethan actors
Examining drama and the self-confidence mentality
Dramatic imagination: A critical examination
Dramatic changes in television and digital media. An extensive analysis
A theatrical examination of trauma and contemporary terror
An examination of several stylistic approaches to dynamic translation
An assessment of the key differences between a translation and a translation of the dialect
An analysis of the drama’s many characters’ roles
An examination of the role actor plays in creating new drama genres
An exploration of the neo-burlesque notion of negotiating exoticism
Examine software’s use to create interface metaphors and interactive dramaturgy in-depth
An in-depth analysis of Latin American theatre’s development in the UK
Is computer-generated action in plays the way of the future of theatre? An analysis
A discussion of the benefits of drama for those with learning difficulties
How can theatre support the growth of imagination? An evaluation
Does contemporary theatre follow advancements in the current social movement trends?
Has casting that is inclusive of all races and genders become a worthwhile discussion point in drama? An extensive analysis
An examination of how theatre performance has changed in a media-driven era
Examining the training programs for performers hoping to go from theatre to cinema
A study of overcoming the disconnect between the actor and the character
The use of playback theatre to analyse teenagers’ individual and dominant discourses
An investigation on how to improve performers’ ability to convey purpose and emotion
Does modern drama still have the ability to surprise viewers, or has it lost that ability due to present issues? A thorough examination
An analysis of street theatre and how it affects theatre for people
Is drama on the internet becoming more popular? Comprehensive research
In a “dance-based” physical drama performance, intended and perceived emotions were compared
An overview of how the drama’s make-believe universe was created
A descriptive study on the advancement of theatrical methods
An investigation on improvisation and artistic innovation in plays and theatre
Study the relationship between homosexuality and the drama industry
An analysis of the influence of theatre on adolescent culture
The Rise of Autobiographical Performance and the Blurring of Fact and Fiction
Theatrical Responses to the Refugee Crisis: Empathy, Advocacy, and Representation
Revival or Revision? Reimagining Classic Plays for the 21st Century Audience
The Global Pandemic’s Lasting Impact and How Theatre Responded to COVID-19
Theatre’s Role in Social Justice Movements
Exploring Physical Theatre’s Social Commentary
The Power of Drama to Educate and Empower
Participation of the Audience in Contemporary Performance
Interactive Storytelling Techniques in Theatre
Appropriation and Representation in Drama
Contemporary Adaptations of Shakespeare and Their Cultural Significance
The Role of the Playwright in Shaping Society
How to Use Technology to Enhance Live Performance
The Role of Online Theatre Reviews and Social Media
The Legacy of Black Lives Matter in Theatre
The Rise of One-Person Shows
Integrating Actors with Disabilities on Stage
Dramatising Personal Experiences of War and Conflict
Exploring the Art of Storytelling Through Manipulation
Building Theatre as a Catalyst for Social Cohesion
The Role of Costume Design in Shaping Narrative and Identity
Exploring the Synergy Between Set Design and Performance
Sound Design and its Impact on Emotional Response in Theatre Productions
Theatrical Responses to Mental Health Issues
Drama and the Development of Empathy
Exploring Sustainable Practices in Production Design
Examining Interdisciplinary Approaches in Theatre
Satire and Social Commentary on Stage
Responding to the Needs of Contemporary Theatre

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Our top-rated experts’ recommendations for drama dissertation topic ideas are listed above. Experts who proposed these drama dissertation topics are well equipped with the most recent knowledge, qualifications and subject expertise to explore your chosen topic and develop an original thesis paper on it.

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How to find drama dissertation topics based on the latest cultural trends.

To find drama dissertation topics based on cultural trends:

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Analyse popular plays, themes, and controversies.
Explore the intersection of drama and current cultural issues.
Consider diverse perspectives and identities.
Investigate digital and virtual performance trends.
Select a topic resonating with both drama and contemporary culture.

Drama and Theater Research Resources

Use the links below to jump directly to any section of this guide:

Drama and Theater Basics

The history of western drama, theater and the stage , from script to stage , dramatic works, actors, and playwrights , how to read and analyze dramatic works, resources for teaching drama and theater.

Dramatic literature and the performances that bring it to life have captivated the human imagination for centuries. People have gathered everywhere from the open-air theaters of ancient Athens to modern day high school auditoriums to encounter these works of art. The resources compiled here will help you bring those experiences into the home and classroom. Through this guide, you'll learn about the history of drama and theater, find links to archives of dramatic works, and read introductions on everything from stage terminology to early English playbooks.

The resources below will help you understand what drama and theater are, and explain why studying them is an important aspect of any arts education. In addition to dictionary and encyclopedia entries, you'll find resources that distinguish between different dramatic genres and introduce you to each one.

What is Drama and Why is it Unique?

Drama is the only form of literature that is written to be performed, typically by actors on a stage. The resources below will help you understand how "drama" is defined, and how it is different from other works of prose and poetry.

"Drama" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's entry includes a general definition of drama, as well as sections on dramatic history, genres of drama, and links to many additional external resources.

"Theater" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's entry on theater provides an introduction to the concept, as well as an explanation of the various types of theater. Reading this entry will help clarify what distinguishes drama from theater.

"Dramatic Literature" ( Encyclopedia Britannica )

This encyclopedia entry delves more deeply into the difference between drama and literature and how the two forms work together. What constitutes a play, and how does the text of a play differ from its performance?

"What is Drama?" (Victoria and Albert Museum)

The Victoria and Albert theater archive provides online access to numerous resources about the history of drama and performance, plus a large collection of data related to the topic.

"What's the Difference between Drama and Theater?" ( The Guardian )

This post from T he Guardian 's theater blog explores the difference between drama on the page and theater on the stage. It also introduces a third term: the "post-dramatic theater."

Genres of Drama and Theater

"List of Genres" (Drama Online)

Drama Online offers resources on many aspects of drama and theater, including a comprehensive and detailed list of dramatic genres. Each genre includes an explanation, as well as examples of works within that specific genre.

"Theater Practitioners and Genres" (The British Library)

The British Library's online collection includes resources on a number of different theatrical styles, including the "theater of cruelty" and the "theater of the absurd." It also includes links to interviews, clips, excerpts, and more.

"Types of Dramatic Literature" (Quizlet)

Quizlet's helpful study set contains dozens of flashcards on the main types of dramatic literature, including melodrama, farce, and satire.

In Our Time : "Tragedy" (BBC)

This podcast from the BBC focuses exclusively on the popular genre of tragedy, exploring its origins and its place within modern society.

Drama has been an important part of western culture since the early Greek and Roman empires. Over the centuries and across countless different societies and cultures, the purpose and prominence of dramatic literature has changed significantly. The resources in this section will help you understand those changes by focusing on particular periods in the history of drama.

Greek and Roman Drama

In ancient Greece and Rome, dramatic spectacle was often used to convey political views. Ancient Greek tragedy is also tied to the Aristotelian idea of "catharsis"—the purgation of powerful emotion through pity and fear. Many comedies and tragedies from this era, including those of Sophocles and Aeschylus, remain popular today. The resources below will help you understand classical theater.

"Theater of Ancient Rome" (Wikipedia)

The Wikipedia entry on the theater of Ancient Rome provides an overview of the characteristics of Roman tragedy and comedy, describes the physical spaces of the Roman theaters, and offers links for further exploration.

"Theater of Ancient Greece" (Wikipedia)

The Wikipedia entry on the theater of Ancient Greece is a good starting point for exploring the importance of drama and theater in Greek society. It includes a section on the masks worn in classical Greek theater.

Articles on Greek and Roman Drama (Theatrehistory.com)

Here, you'll find a collection of articles pertaining to both Greek and Roman drama, most of which are excerpted from Alfred Bates's 1906 book The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization.

The Drama: Its History, Literature and Influence on Civilization (Internet Archive)

You can download Alfred Bates's seminal book on drama in various formats courtesy of this Internet Archive page, including ePub, Kindle, and PDF.

"Greek and Roman Theater Glossary" (The Ancient Theatre Archive)

Here, you'll find a sampling of definitions pertaining to Greek and Roman drama. Clicking on each term will bring you to a page with more information and helpful images.

"Virtual Tour of Greek and Roman Theater" (The Ancient Theatre Archive)

Check out this "virtual reality" tour of various ancient Greek and Roman theaters. It includes information on the modern-day locations of the ruins, seating capacity, reconstructed floor plans, and a detailed history with external resources.

"Dr. J's Illustrated Greek Theater" ( Dr. J's Illustrated Guide to the Classical World )

This illustrated guide, part of a larger guide compiled by Dr. Janice Siegel, outlines the setup and layout of a typical theater in Ancient Greece.

Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama

This research project aims to study ancient Greek and Roman texts in performance in a wide variety of different media. The online database contains a broad range of information on dramatic performance.

Early Modern Drama

Few eras are better known for the quality of their dramatic art than Renaissance England. The theater flourished during the 16th– and 17th–century rules of Queen Elizabeth and King James VI, with plays by Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare drawing crowds by the hundreds. The resources below will introduce you to the period and its many masterpieces.

"English Renaissance Theater" (Wikipedia)

The Wikipedia entry on English Renaissance theater provides basic information on the period's theaters and playhouses, playwrights, actors, and performances.

Early Modern Drama Database

A vast tabular record of every recorded early modern English play performed in London between 1573 and 1642, this database includes each work's date, author, genre, company, and the theater where it was first performed.

"Elizabethan Theater" (Victoria and Albert Museum)

This informational article on theater during the Elizabethan era from the Victoria and Albert Museum includes a helpful, introductory section on William Shakespeare.

"Database of Early English Playbooks" (Univ. of Pennsylvania)

This database, maintained by the University of Pennsylvania, allows you to search for any early modern English dramatic work and access a wide range of information on each text.

"Why Should We Study Elizabethan Theater?" (Oxford Univ.)

In this podcast, Professor Tiffany Stern of Oxford University discusses why Elizabethan theater is still important and relevant in the world today.

Modern and Postmodern Drama

Twentieth-century and postmodern drama deviate from earlier theatrical eras in numerous ways. Below, you'll find resources that delve into the difficult-to-define aspects of postmodernism, and that introduce you to the most famous and experimental texts of the period.

"A History of British Theater" (BBC)

This timeline from the BBC details the progression of British theater from 1350 to 2015. Although it's limited in that in only discusses British theater, it is a helpful outline of how drama has changed from the early modern to contemporary periods.

"A to Z of Modern Drama" ( The Guardian )

Michael Billington, theater critic for The Guardian , has a collection of articles about "what makes modern theatre tick," from "absurdism" to the comedic performers he dubs "zanies."

"Postmodern Theater" (Wikipedia)

This Wikipedia entry covers the basic groundwork of what might constitute the "postmodern" work, which is rooted in mid-20th century European postmodern philosophy.

Examples of Postmodern Dramatic Works (Drama Online Library)

This collection includes detailed descriptions of many postmodern dramatic texts, including what exactly makes them "postmodern." Each explores contemporary issues in non-normative ways.

Forced Entertainment Theater Company

Forced Entertainment, based in Sheffield in England, is one of the most well-known experimental theater companies in the world. Through their performances, they push theater to its limits and question what it can express about contemporary society.

In order to understand how a performance comes together, you must understand the venue in which it is performed. There are many different components of any theater, all of which contribute to and impact the performance itself. In this section, you'll find resources describing these different elements, along with examples of well-known theatrical spaces around the world.

Types of Stages

"Stage (Theatre)" (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia's entry on the stage includes a definition of the term, a section on types of staging, and another section on stage terminology. You'll also find links to further resources.

"What the Types of Theatre Stages and Auditoria?" (Theatre Trust)

The U.K.'s national advisory public body for theaters offers a list of the most common types of stage arrangements, including some photos and images for reference.

"What Spaces Make Up a Theatre?" (Theatre Trust)

This page from Theatre Trust details the most common elements of a theater complex, and includes high-quality photos for reference.

"Creating and Staging a Devised Performance" (BBC)

This guide from the BBC's study support resource Bitesize offers staging diagrams and lists the pros and cons of each stage type.

Stage Terminology

There are many terms and phrases used in relation to the theater. Did you know that "stage left" refers to the left side of the stage from the performer's point of view, rather than the audience's vantage point? Use the resources below to familiarize yourself with many other theater-related words.

Glossary of Technical Theater Terms (Theatrecrafts.com)

This beginner's guide, from a website devoted to entertainment technology resources and history, focuses on the fundamentals of technical theater.

"60+ Theater Terms Every Actor Should Know" (Backstage)

This list is intended for actors, but it's informative for anyone hoping to learn about theater productions. It includes sections on architecture, tech, the actors, and the crew.

"The Theater Dictionary" (Theatre Development Fund)

This dictionary from the Theatre Development Fund (TDF) defines a wide variety of theater-related terms, and each term includes both a written definition and a video explication.

"Drama Vocabulary" (Teachers Pay Teachers)

This resource pack from the popular website Teachers Pay Teachers includes a worksheet with 27 different dramatic terms, as well as an accompanying quiz to test the vocabulary.

Famous Theaters Around the World

Below, you can find links to the official websites of many well-known theatrical venues. We've directed you to the theater's "About Us" pages, but we invite you to explore each website further. Of course, this is just a small selection of a vast network, so we have also included a list and database to consult for further examples.

Shakespeare's Globe

The reconstructed Globe Theatre, located on the south bank of the river Thames in London, is one of the most well-known theaters in the world. Built only a few feet from the site of the original Globe of Shakespeare's day, this theater is renowned for its original practice productions, which aim to mimic the conditions of early modern theater. The theater also puts on more experimental productions.

The Public Theater

The Public Theater in Greenwich Village, New York, was designed to provide accessible theater to everyone. The theater group is known for their Shakespeare in the Park performances, they also put on a wide variety of plays and musicals.

The Old Vic

Located in South London, the Old Vic is an independent, not-for-profit theater that opened in 1818. To this day, it hosts many of the greatest stage actors in the world.

"17 Amazing Theater Cities That Aren't London or New York" (Mic)

This article lists a number of locations that aren't immediately recognized as "theater cities," but that boast thriving theater scenes to rival New York and London.

"Theaters Database" (Theatre Trust)

Theatre Trust offers a searchable database of U.K. theaters from the early modern period to the current day. Enter a search term, or click "Browse A - Z."

Hours upon hours of work precede any successful opening night. In order to mount a production, a director must be chosen and a tech crew brought on board, auditions are needed to select the cast, and an often lengthy rehearsal schedule follows. Below are resources that allow you to explore various approaches to the production process.

Rehearsal and the Cast

The rehearsal process is what brings an entire performance together; from read-throughs to blocking and direction, every aspect of a performance must be rehearsed in order to prepare it for an audience. Everyone's rehearsal experience is different, but the resources below explore some common components.

"What Really Goes On in the Rehearsal Room?" ( The Guardian )

This blog post from The Guardian 's theater blog discusses the rehearsal process. It considers the secretive and private nature of the rehearsal room.

"Can You Ever Have Too Much Rehearsal?" ( The Guardian )

This post, also from The Guardian 's theater blog, questions how much rehearsal should precede a performance, and asks whether too much rehearsal can hurt rather than help a production.

"First Day of Rehearsals" (Royal Shakespeare Company)

Byron Mondahl, an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company's recent production of Hamlet, details his experience of the first day of rehearsal.

"Rehearsal Process for 'Much Ado About Nothing'" (YouTube)

In this video, a director and actors from the National Theatre in London discuss the rehearsal process. They speak to the importance of reading classic play texts, understanding why the character say what they do, and translating that into performance.

Technical Theater Roles

While actors may be the face of a performance, those who work backstage are just as integral to the production. Those in technical theater roles ensure that everything runs smoothly. The links below will help you understand this aspect of the theatrical world.

"Technical Theatre" (Wikibooks)

This entry from Wikibooks offers a brief and basic overview of the various roles involved in technical theater, from the costume designer to the master electrician.

Technical Theater Subreddit (Reddit)

This subreddit is dedicated to people involved or interested in technical theater, providing a place to ask questions or seek advice on anything regarding the topic.

"Glossary of Technical Theatre Terms—Jobs" (Theatrecrafts.com)

Theatrecrafts.com provides another helpful glossary of terms, this one dedicated specifically to the various jobs that occur backstage.

"Who Works in a Theater?" (Theatre Trust)

Theatre Trust provides a slightly more in-depth and detailed glossary of different roles in technical theater, and describes all the ways they contribute to making a performance possible.

Theatrical Performance

If you're acting in a production, you'll need guidance on preparing for the performance and understanding your audience. Here, you'll find resources to help you understand the unique challenges posed by performing live.

"Exercise Class: Preparing for Performance" ( The Guardian )

This advice from a RADA graduate gives some suggestions for how to prepare, physically and mentally, before a performance. The exercises are intended for actors to relieve stress and nerves.

"Stage vs. Screen: What the Big Difference" (New York Film Academy)

This short but informative piece highlights the differences between watching a film and a live theater performance. It is important for any performer to understand these differences, particularly the expectations of a live theater audience.

Should Stage Actors be Movie Stars? ( Slate )

This piece also delves into the differences between performing on stage and on screen, questioning whether movie stars should be stage stars and vice versa.

"What Makes a Great Theatre Actor?" (BBC)

This guide from the BBC describes what, in the author's opinion, makes great theater actors. It highlights the difficult nature of live performance.

Now that you understand the basic principles of drama and theater, it's time to delve into some celebrated dramatic works and learn about the people who wrote and performed them. Below, you'll find links to texts and resources on some of the most familiar figures in the world of drama and theater.

Famous Playwrights

Provided below are links to the Goodreads pages of some of the most celebrated playwrights of all time. These pages include a helpful biography, complete list of works, as well as quotes and forums. Although this is a very small selection, it is a good starting point to learn about some of the most often-performed and discussed dramatic works.

William Shakespeare
Anton Chekhov
Henrik Ibsen
Oscar Wilde
Tennessee Williams
Luigi Pirandello
Lorraine Hansberry
Samuel Beckett
George Bernard Shaw
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Arthur Miller

Famous Dramatic Works

Don't know what plays to read first? Start here. You'll find different authors' lists of the greatest or most popular plays of all time, along with databases that host hundreds of dramatic texts.

"50 Best Plays of All Time" (Time Out)

Here is one author's list of the 50 best plays ever written, from A Raisin in the Sun to Our Town . While every list is of course subjective, this list will introduce you to well-loved plays that have stood the test of time .

101 Greatest Plays ( The Guardian )

Michael Billington, a theater critic for The Guardian , wrote a book on his picks for "101 greatest plays." The article above comments on his choices, and considers some of the "greats" he left off the list.

"50 Classic Plays Every Student Should Read" (Online College Courses)

This list of classic plays from an online learning center contains a brief description of each play and why you should read it, along with a link to Amazon for each one.

"The Most Popular High School Plays and Musicals" (NPR)

This article from NPR discusses the most popularly performed plays and musicals among high school students since the 1940s.

"Plays" (Drama Online)

Drama Online provides links to over 2,000 plays and accompanying resources. You can listen to a full-cast performance of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, or read and interpret Shakespeare's Macbeth with the help of the "Play Tools" tab. (Note: while some of the site's content is free, other resources require a subscription that your school or library may have purchased.)

Folger Digital Texts

Here, you'll find meticulously edited digital texts from the Folger Shakespeare Library. When you click the "Read" button on the right, you'll be directed to a page with links to each of Shakespeare's plays.

Famous Dramatic Actors

Get to know the actors who have brought dramatic literature to life. Below, you'll find a few authors' lists of the greatest actors to point you toward further research, along with articles and books that delve more deeply into the careers of particular stars.

"Greatest Stage Actor Poll in Pictures" ( The Telegraph )

Dame Judi Dench was voted the greatest stage actor in a poll by The Stage . Here, The Telegraph offers a photo and short blurb on each of the other actors who received the most votes.

"Who is the Greatest Stage Actor Ever?" ( The Guardian )

In this article, The Guardian comments on the same poll by Th e Stage. It helpfully critiques it for omissions and an overwhelming focus on British performers, while offering its own suggestions for actors who should have made the list.

"Thespis" (Wikipedia)

Meet the ancient Greek poet Thespis, who according to Aristotle was the first to appear onstage as a character. This Wikipedia article has sections on Thespis's "alleged works" and legacy.

"Theater Actor" (Biography.com)

Explore Biography.com's webpage on famous theater actors, from Edwin Booth to Ian McKellen. Click on an actor's name and photo, and you'll be redirected to their biography page.

Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh (Amazon)

This series of essays by Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells is aimed at a broad readership. Wells discusses the greatest performers of Shakespeare's works, from great tragedienne Sarah Siddons to the actor and director Kenneth Branagh.

It's often said that plays and dramatic works are meant to be seen on the stage, not read on the page. Still, there is much to be gained from reading the text of a play. You'll become more alert to the nuances of the language, and will gain a greater appreciation for the play's structure and thematic focus. Here, you'll find resources to help you read, interpret, and write about dramatic literature.

"How to Read a Play" (School Theatre)

This illustrated guide offers 30 steps to better understand and analyze a play text, from paying close attention to the character's journey to analyzing scenic metaphor.

"Writing about Drama" (Univ. of North Carolina)

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has created a guide to writing an essay on dramatic works that walks you through the important points of analysis to consider.

"How to Read and Enjoy a Dramatic Play" (ThoughtCo)

This blog post considers how reading a play-text can enhance understanding of the performance and how to get the most out of it.

"Top Tip for Analysing Drama" (YouTube)

This short video from an English teacher offers strategies for analyzing drama, noting that different tools must be used to analyze plays and novels.

While many of the resources above may help teachers plan lessons, the links below are designed specifically for that purpose. You'll find suggestions for which plays to teach, websites dedicated to the art of teaching drama, classroom activities, and entire drama units.

"Best Works of Shakespeare to Teach in High School" (ThoughtCo)

This post from a veteran secondary school educator suggests a list of eight Shakespeare texts that high school students find interesting and informative.

Theatre Links

This website by Justin Cash hosts over 5,000 links to resources from across the globe on drama practitioners, styles, scripts, and stagecraft.

Drama Activities and Games (TPT)

This Teachers Pay Teachers resource for middle school and high school students offers "drama trunk" cards for warm ups, improvisation, storytelling, language activities, and more.

Introduction to Drama (TPT)

Another Teachers Pay Teachers resource, this drama unit for middle school and high school students is comprised of six, 50-minute lesson plans, homework tasks, extension activities, and more.

"Shakespeare Teacher Resources," LitCharts Complete Guide to Shakespeare Resources

For a large selection of resources specifically devoted to teaching Shakespeare, take a look at another guide in this series, LitCharts Complete Guide to Shakespeare Resources.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

How audiences engage with drama: identification, attribution and moral approval.

1 Calleva Research Centre, Magdalen College, Oxford, United Kingdom
2 Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

Fictional storytelling has played an important role in human cultural life since earliest times, and we are willing to invest significant quantities of time, mental effort and money in it. Nonetheless, the psychological mechanisms that make this possible, and how they relate to the mechanisms that underpin real-world social relationships, remain understudied. We explore three factors: identification (the capacity to identify with a character), moral approval and causal attribution with respect to a character’s behaviour in live performances of two plays from the European literary canon. There were significant correlations between the extent to which subjects identified with a character and their moral approval of that character’s behaviour that was independent of the way the play was directed. However, the subjects’ psychological explanations for a character’s behaviour (attribution) were independent of whether or not they identified with, or morally approved of, the character. These data extend previous findings by showing that moral approval plays an important role in facilitating identification even in live drama. Despite being transported by an unfolding drama, audiences do not necessarily become biased in their psychological understanding of why characters behaved as they did. The psychology of drama offers significant insights into the psychological processes that underpin our everyday social world.

Introduction

Storytelling is a uniquely human activity whose evolutionary function remains unclear, although it likely provides a means of transmitting a culture’s core beliefs and the worldview that forms an important basis for creating a sense of community ( Dunbar, 2014 ). In contemporary hunter-gatherer societies like the Kung San, fireside conversations that involve stories predominate in the evening ( Weissner, 2014 ). Although such stories commonly include origin stories and accounts of travels, they have probably always included fictional or semi-fictional accounts. In all cultures, fictional stories have come to play an unusually important role, providing not only a corpus of well-loved stories that define a culture but also forms of entertainment on which we are willing to spend considerable amounts of time and money. Even in traditional societies where storytellers are not paid for their efforts, people are nonetheless willing to spend considerable time being entertained by them, at no small cost in terms of potentially more functional uses of their time. Indeed, we seem to be universally willing to listen to the same well-loved stories over and over again without satiation ( Leavitt and Christenfeld, 2011 ), with the same stories being maintained over long periods of time and very considerable geographical distances (e.g. the ‘Tale of the Two Sisters’ which appears in various forms as a folktale all over Europe: Ross et al., 2013 ). The magnitude of these costs, whether measured in terms of time or money, suggests that this form of activity is evolutionarily important and not some trivial by-product of a capacity designed to subserve a more important purpose.

We are so immersed in storytelling in everyday life that we forget how complex the cognitive processes of understanding and enjoying stories actually are. The most engaging stories are about people – or things that are accredited, for the purposes of the story, with human psychological attributes (such as talking animals, fictional beings like fairies or even trees and rocks when these are described as having minds). These include, minimally, the capacity to mentalise (in its simplest form, theory of mind) in order to be able to understand the mindstates of the storyteller and the character in the story, as well as distinguish between the real and fictional worlds ( Dunbar, 2008 , 2017 ; Carney et al., 2014 ), the capacity to identify with ( Cohen, 2001 ; Tal-Or and Cohen, 2010 ) and empathise with ( Green and Brock, 2000 ; Green et al., 2004 ) the fictional characters as portrayed, and transportation (the capacity to become immersed in a story: Green et al., 2004 ; Green, 2005 ). In this respect, of course, fictional stories necessarily depend on the same cognitive mechanisms as our capacity to tell factual stories.

Mentalising and identification (as defined by Tal-Or and Cohen, 2010 : see Table 1 ) would seem to be defined very similarly (being able to understand the mindstate of another individual). For present purposes, we treat them as synonymous concepts. Though ostensibly similar, mentalising (and hence identification) differs from empathy in being a form of ‘cold cognition’ (beliefs about mindstates), whereas empathy is a form of ‘hot cognition’ (emotional feelings). Higher-order mentalising (beyond formal theory of mind) not only makes it possible to parse complex utterances in speech ( Oesch and Dunbar, 2017 ), but also limits the number of individuals whose minds we can monitor simultaneously ( Stiller and Dunbar, 2007 ; Powell et al., 2012 ; Krems et al., 2016 ) as well as directly affecting the complexity of the stories we can enjoy ( Carney et al., 2014 ). Without the capacity to mentalise, we would be unable to distinguish between the speaker and the mental states of the characters they describe or recognise that an actor is representing a fictional character rather than speaking their own thoughts. Without this ability, we are likely to assume that the action on the stage is real and might be tempted to leave our seats to intervene.

Table 1 . Questions completed by participants after watching each play excerpt.

Becoming engaged in (or transported by) a story or play reflects the extent to which we invest emotional as well as mental effort in decoding the text ( Green et al., 2004 ; Wirth, 2006 ). When we identify with a character, we care deeply about the character and worry about what will happen to them ( Green et al., 2004 ). Moreover, the degree to which we identify with a character in a story can subsequently affect our opinions about the story or drama ( Green, 2005 ). Tal-Or and Cohen (2010) drew attention to the fact that identification and transportation (both of which are known to affect enjoyment) may often be confounded in many studies; they concluded, on the basis of careful experimental manipulation, that these are in fact independent dimensions of the sense of enjoyment that audiences gain when reading or watching fiction. Identification can thus be an important dimension of an audience’s engagement with a play.

In addition to these more conventional aspects of our ability to engage with the characters in a story, we also here consider two additional dimensions: moral approval and attributional style. Though rarely given as much attention, an individual’s moral attitude towards a character is likely to be important in how they engage with a story. Their view of whether a character is acting morally or immorally (irrespective of the standard against which this might be judged) might well colour both their willingness to identify with, or warm to, a character as well as their ability to make appropriate attributions about the character’s motives. While there is an extensive literature on the psychological bases and ontogeny of moral attitudes (e.g. Kagan and Lamb, 1987 ; Baird and Astington, 2004 ), and much commentary by literary scholars has focused on the moral status of characters’ behaviour (e.g. among many others, Baines, 1980 ; Zamir, 2007 ; Laam, 2010 ), the role of moral approval/disapproval as an audience response to characters has not usually been considered a variable of interest in experimental studies of fiction.

Attributional style, on the other hand, is the tendency to explain personally significant events in particular ways. This is sometimes seen as reflecting an individual’s natural psychological style (they blame other people or circumstances for the disasters that befall them rather than taking the blame themselves) but equally provides a useful way of understanding other people’s behaviour (someone acted as they did because that was just their personality or because of the circumstances they found themselves in). Central to this, and of particular relevance for the present study, is the concept of ‘locus of control’ ( Rotter, 1966 ), with its emphasis on the way external versus internal factors are viewed as influencing events. Attributional style has been applied to a wide range of psychological disorders ( Abramson et al., 1978 ; Bentall et al., 1994 ; Buchanan and Seligman, 1995 ) as well as the behaviour of normal individuals in a variety of contexts ( Kinderman et al., 1998 ) and has commonly been interpreted as underlying pessimistic (especially reflected in learned helplessness or hopelessness) versus optimistic attitudes to life. While attributional style has been viewed as an essentially endogenous trait, the concept of locus of control lends itself describing the behaviour of third parties, and we here use it as a framework to ask how subjects ascribe locus of control to a character in a play and whether this in turn influences their engagement with the character.

There has been a longstanding interest in how we infer the intentions of characters in fictional literature ( Ross, 1977 ; Pollard-Gott, 1993 ; Culpeper, 1996 ). Tal-Or and Papirman (2007) , for example, found that subjects viewing short movie clips were more likely to commit the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE, the tendency to automatically attribute behaviour to internal motivations rather than external circumstances) by attributing behaviour to the actor’s personality than to the fact that the actor was simply following a script. Moreover, the level of transportation in response to the clip was significantly correlated with the magnitude of the FAE. Attribution thus has some potential to offer insights into judgements about characters. Attributional judgements might well affect an individual’s empathy with a character, for example, and hence their willingness to engage (or identify) with the character. We used Kinderman and Bentall’s (1996) IPSAQ, in which attribution involves three mutually exclusive causal loci: dispositional, external personal and external situational. These ascribe an individual’s actions to their own intrinsic psychological make-up or personality (dispositional), the influence of other people on the individual (external personal: hereafter, simply ‘external’) or circumstances largely beyond the individual’s control (external situational: hereafter, ‘situational’). We ask whether subjects identify more with a character in a play if they feel that the character’s locus of control is beyond his/her control (e.g. due to the circumstances they find themselves in or to the behaviour of other characters).

Experimental studies of fiction have largely involved written stimuli (selections from novels or specially written fictional or pseudo-factual accounts) or have focussed on the influence of film or TV ( Drabman and Thomas, 1975 ; Huesmann et al., 2003 ; Huesmann and Eron, 2013 ). Here, we use live-performed scenes from staged drama: the opening scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear (1607) and the opening scenes from Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (second half of the fifth century BC). We chose these plays for two reasons. First, tragedies are most likely to arouse deep emotional responses in some (though not necessarily all) of those who watch them ( Dunbar et al., 2016 ), thus maximising the likelihood of differential responses. Second, the two plays are separated by two millennia and are the product of very different cultural and theatrical contexts, thereby providing some scope for addressing the question of how universal any responses might be. Finally, an important component of how well storytelling (including dramatic storytelling) works its magic lies in the way the story has been conceived and how it is told. To address this, we presented the plays in two very different ways – different in interpretation, costume and set while using the same text and the same actors.

It is a truism of performance studies that one never sees the play; one sees only one version of the play. The actor Tony Church (1989) who played Polonius at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1965 and 1980 describes the very different character he played in Peter Hall’s political 1965 production (Claudius running a spy-state, with Polonius a Machiavellian courtier) versus John Barton’s 1980 domestic version with its focus on families (Polonius as father; Brockbank, 1989 ). We commissioned two radically different interpretations of Antigone and King Lear , using the identical text for both interpretations and the same actors and director. In one version, the characters were presented sympathetically; in the other, the characterisations were reversed so that the good characters now became the bad ones and vice versa (reversed characterisation). This allowed us to assess whether the dramatist’s storyline (which remained unchanged) or the way the story was told (the input of the actors and the director) had a greater impact on the audience’s response.

We ask three specific questions with respect to how subjects view the behaviour of the characters in the play. We ask first whether audience members differentiate in similar ways between characters on the dependent variables (i.e. Identification rating, Moral Approval and Attribution rating), and whether this is influenced by their familiarity with the plays or the different interpretive staging of the plays. We then ask whether the extent to which participants identify with a character correlates with their moral approval of that character’s behaviour. Third, we ask whether participants are more likely to morally approve of a character’s behaviour if they view that behaviour as being determined by external circumstances (external or situational attribution) rather than the character’s own psychological disposition (dispositional attribution).

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Eighty-three participants (33 male, 46 female; 4 declined to specify gender; mean age 26.8±12.7years, range 18–71) were recruited by advertisements and attended one of two performances, for which they were paid £5. Of the participants, 62 (76%) were currently enrolled as university students, of whom 16 (19% of all participants) were studying English and 23 (28%) were studying Classics and so might be expected to be especially familiar with one or both of the plays. Prior to watching the performances, participants completed a general background questionnaire (demographic and educational background). They then watched the two scenes (c.20min performance time each), after which they completed a questionnaire on their responses to the characters at the end of each version. The experimental design was between-subjects with each audience group watching either the conventional or the reversed characterisation versions (but never both).

The study was approved by the University of Oxford’s Central University Research Ethics Committee.

Stimuli and Presentation

Participants watched live performances of the opening two scenes of Shakespeare’s King Lear and the opening three scenes of Sophocles’ Antigone (in English translation). Of these, five of the characters in the Lear excerpt have significant speaking parts (Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Edmund and Gloucester), and three (Antigone, Creon and Ismene) have significant speaking parts in Antigone. (We did not include lines delivered by the chorus in Antigone .) All the actors were members of the university or college dramatic societies and were used to public performance to a high standard; the directors were student directors with considerable experience directing plays for public performance. The plays had been fully rehearsed and the actors and directors were each paid £20. The performances were given on stage, with the participants seated in an auditorium. Subjects watched Antigone first and Lear second.

Each play was presented in two radically different versions (conventional characterisation and reversed characterisation) in order to determine whether the neutral text (which stayed the same) or the performance (which was presented differently) plays the more important role in influencing audience engagement. Half the participants watched the conventional characterisation and half watched the reversed characterisation of both plays. One director was responsible for the two versions of Lear and another director was responsible for the two versions of Antigone . The same set of actors and directors performed both versions of each play. The conventional version of Lear (sympathetic to Lear and Cordelia) was presented in mediaeval dress with warm palettes and rich fabrics, opening on a relaxed and sociable banquet. This is a world in which authority is humanised, parental dignity wounded, and Lear’s tearful outrage a painful and unexpected climax; Edmund is scheming and resentful, and his father Gloucester out of his depth. In the reversed characterisation version, the script was identical but the way the characters were portrayed was reversed: the mild and anguished ones were presented as grasping and aggressive, while the scheming and hostile ones were presented as mild and confused. In this version, Lear was staged in modern dress as a board meeting of a family firm at which the eponymous patriarch divides the family empire. Lear was portrayed as a psychopathic, focussed businessman concerned to ensure the future of his business empire; Cordelia accepts, yet at the same time resents, her position as favourite, pandering to her father with disdain; her two sisters are vulnerable and strained – out of their depth in the boardroom politics between their father and Cordelia – while Gloucester is physically aggressive and Edmund marginalised and denigrated. In the two versions of Antigone , the eponymous heroine was first staged as an ethically principled absolutist (the conventional portrayal) and in the second as a morally rebellious teenager. In the first version, Creon is tyrannically non-negotiable, a moral traffic warden for whom a rule is a rule, whereas in the second version he is a humane ruler placed in an impossible position, all handwringing anguish and indecision. The two performances of each play were dramatically very different.

Participants were not given any information about the task or asked to focus on anything in particular but were merely told that they would be asked to rate their enjoyment of the two plays they were about to see. At the end of each performance, participants completed a questionnaire which asked them to rate, for each main character separately (a) how much they identified with the character [five questions, each on a 1–7 Likert scale, using the instrument from Tal-Or and Cohen, 2010 based on Cohen (2001) ; Identification questions], (b) whether they approved of the character’s behaviour (Moral Approval question: responses on a Likert scale, converted to −3=strongly disapprove, +3=strongly approve, with 0 as midpoint), and (c) using the Kinderman and Bentall (1996) IPSAQ instrument, whether they thought the character’s behaviour could be attributed to the character’s intrinsic nature (Disposition), the behaviour of the other characters (External) or something about the situation that the character found him/herself in (Situation; also on a 1–7 Likert scale; Attribution questions) ( Table 1 ). For Lear , participants were asked these questions about the five key characters in the excerpts, namely, Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Gloucester and Edmund; for Antigone , they were asked about the three main characters, namely, Antigone, Ismene and Creon. For analysis, the Likert scale scores for each of the five Identification questions were averaged to give a mean overall score for this variable.

Participants were also asked to state how often they had either read or seen each play (on a 4-point scale: never, once, twice, three or more times). The reading and viewing scores were highly correlated within plays (Spearman r S >0.447, p <0.001), but, perhaps not too surprisingly, only very weakly correlated between plays (0.096≤r S ≤0.334). Of the 83 participants, 30 had never read and 35 had never seen a performance of Lear , and 25 had never read and 48 never seen Antigone . Only 21 had seen Lear more than once and only 10 had seen Antigone more than once. For the analyses, the scores for reading and viewing for each play were added together to give a Familiarity score for that play (which could therefore range from 0 to 6; Supplementary Material Data Sheet 1).

Statistical Analyses

Since most variables are not normally distributed, we use non-parametric statistical tests. However, for comparisons across characters and for multivariate analyses, we use analysis of variance as this is robust to departures from normality. In each case, effect sizes are given in a form appropriate to the particular statistical test used for an analysis, but only for significant effects.

All statistical analyses were executed in SPSS v.27.

Descriptives for variables for each character in each play are given in Table 2 .

Table 2 . Descriptives for conventional characterisation * performance.

We first test whether participants consistently differentiate between characters and whether these judgements are influenced by either their familiarity with the plays or how the play was staged. Table 3 indicates that participants rated the characters in a very consistent way: in each case, Cronbach’s alpha for the mean Identification score indicates acceptable levels of agreement across audience members. Figure 1 plots ratings for each character under the two performance conditions. We ran MANOVAs to determine whether the ratings on the five outcome variables (mean Identification rating, Moral Approval and the three IPSAQ attributional scales) were influenced by character, familiarity with the texts or staging (how the play was performed; Table 4 ). Irrespective of how the play was staged, there was a significant effect of character in every case (except Situational Attribution in Antigone ), with no effect due to familiarity with the material (again with one exception). With four exceptions, there were no consistent effects due to staging. The exceptions were that the reversed staging resulted in consistently higher ratings for External and Situational Attribution in Lear ; in addition, there were significant character*staging interaction effects for Dispositional Attribution in Antigone (where the ratings for Ismene and Creon reversed) and Moral Judgement in Lear (where the ratings for Cordelia and Edmund reversed). Dropping Familiarity increases the significance levels somewhat on all tests but does not change the overall pattern of results [except for the effect of Performance on Identification ratings in Lear , which changes from being marginally non-significant ( p =0.084) to being significant ( p =0.027)].

Table 3 . Cronbach’s alpha scores on summed responses to the five identification questions across participants for the eight main characters in the two plays.

Figure 1 . Mean (±95% CI) for the five variables for each of the main characters in the two plays for (A) composite score on the Tal-Or and Cohen (2010) Identification scale, (B) Moral Approval ratings and (C-E) scores on the three dimensions of the Kinderman and Bentall (1996) Attribution scale. Filled symbols: conventional characterisation; unfilled symbols: reversed characterisation.

Table 4 . MANOVAs comparing ratings across characters and performances (conventional versus reversed characterisation) for each play, with Familiarity as a covariate.

The patterns of identification in the conventional, sympathetic performances were exactly as one would expect: participants identified more readily with Cordelia than with Lear, and morally approved of Cordelia’s behaviour more than anyone else’s, and they similarly identified more with Antigone than with Creon or Ismene, and morally approved of her behaviour more. That there should be some (albeit limited) effect of staging on ratings for Ismene, Creon, Cordelia and Edmund is not too surprising, since these are the characters that, in professional productions, tend to arouse the most extreme responses in audiences. Antigone, caught in an extremely difficult situation, is rated positively no matter how she is presented, and Lear always receives low ratings (perhaps because, in these opening scenes and in the absence of the pity he might arouse later in the play, he is seen as instigating division within the family irrespective of how he might be doing this).

It is worth noting that the moral approval ratings for lesser characters did exhibit some response to performance type: at least in Lear , there was a striking tendency for most ratings of Edmund, Goneril and Gloucester to converge in response to the reversed characterisation performance, although they all remained in the mid-ground between Lear and Cordelia ( Figure 1B ). Notably, the main characters did not exhibit such shifts in audience perception, perhaps because these characters are more tightly drawn by the text with less scope for alternative interpretations or are characters that, for dramatic effect in the compressed timescale of a play, are more exaggerated in order to push the audience into entering more firmly into the action of the play as conceived by the playwright.

So far, we have established two key points: audiences discriminate reliably between characters and their ratings are, by and large, unaffected by how the play is staged or by their familiarity with the play(s). The latter finding implies that the words that the dramatist places in the mouths of the characters are more important in defining our sense of engagement with them as individuals than how actors might choose to portray them.

To examine our second question (the extent to which the rating variables correlate with each other), we pooled the two performances for each play in the light of the fact the staging has very little effect on ratings. We first consider how consistently participants rated their moral approval of the main characters. In all cases except Ismene, they typically came down firmly on one side or other as to whether or not they morally approved of a character’s actions ( Table 5 ). The average proportion of scores that are on the minority side of the midpoint is just 17.7% across the eight characters. Thus, with the exception of Ismene, the scores are typically truncated at the midpoint (the point of ambivalence): in other words, participants took a consistent view on each character. Within this constraint, Moral Approval ratings correlated positively with Identification score for six of the eight characters in the two plays, even with Bonferroni correction ( Table 6 ). The exceptions were Goneril and Edmund, and even these yielded positive (albeit non-significant) correlations. In other words, participants morally approved of a character’s behaviour roughly in proportion to the extent to which they identified with that character.

Table 5 . Distribution of moral approval ratings for characters (two performances pooled).

Table 6 . Correlations between mean identification and moral approval ratings for each character.

Our third question concerns the extent to which moral approval of the individual characters’ behaviour correlates with the participants’ perception of what was to blame for how the characters behaved. In Antigone , the behaviour of both Creon and Antigone was viewed as largely due to their own dispositions, whereas that of Ismene owed its origin more to the situation in which she found herself. In Lear , the behaviour of Lear and Cordelia is attributed to their dispositions, but with some effect due to external influences in the case of Cordelia. Edmund’s behaviour is also seen as reflecting his disposition, but in many respects, participants were more ambivalent about him. Goneril and Gloucester were both seen as victims of circumstance. Moral Approval ratings did not correlate significantly with any of the Attribution ratings for any of the eight characters (Spearman correlations, all p >0.05) with just two exceptions (Antigone for External Attribution, p =0.007; Creon for Dispositional Attribution, p <0.001). This suggests that, generally speaking, moral approval was given independently of the explanation that audience members offered for a character’s behaviour.

We have shown that members of an audience reliably differentiate between characters in two canonical tragedies from very different historical periods in terms of their ability to identify with characters (a capacity that we equate functionally with mentalising), their moral approval of the character’s behaviour and their attribution of the psychological causation of a character’s behaviour. However, contrary to expectation, there was no overall performance-by-character interaction for these variables, suggesting that directorial style had less influence on the audience’s ratings for the set of characters in a play than the text itself allows, even when controlling for prior familiarity with the plays. In this respect, drama and other forms of storytelling may differ from everyday social interactions: in real-life contexts, how something is said seems to be more important than what is said, at least as far as identifying the quality of the relationship between two speakers is concerned ( Dunbar et al., 2021 ). This may be because storytellers need to craft their characters more precisely in the compressed temporal context of a play or story. Secondly, we found that, irrespective of performance, the audience’s identification with a character correlated with the extent to which they morally approved of the character’s actions. However, neither of these correlated with their attribution of the psychological causes of individual characters’ behaviour, notwithstanding the fact that they consistently distinguished between attributional styles in respect of the various characters. This suggests that attributional style was more dependent on the character as drawn by the playwright than an audience member’s ability to identify with a character or the moral stance that they took in respect of the character.

Our results, thus, suggest that the broad findings that have been reported for narrative literature in respect of identification and engagement (‘transportation’ in the terminology of Green and Brock, 2000 ) also apply to live dramatic performances, indicating that differences between modes of storytelling (readerly versus performance-based) may be considerably less than the similarities (see also Green and Brock, 2000 ; Sherry, 2004 ). The fact that our subjects exhibited a strong correlation between identification with a character and the level of moral approval for that character confirms the earlier finding that readers of fiction who become highly ‘transported’ are generally more positive towards characters ( Green and Brock, 2000 ). Identification and transportation in this sense are not, of course, identical concepts, but transportation does seem to be important for readers to be able to develop a sense of identification with a character ( Green et al., 2004 ).

Psychological studies of audience engagement have tended to focus on the concept of identification as one of the key processes underlying ‘transportation’ (or ‘narrative transportation’; Gerrig, 1993 ; Green and Brock, 2000 ) whereby readers become engaged with (or engrossed by) a text through relating to a character. Van Laer et al. (2014) suggest that narrative transportation is the outcome of two key processes (the individual being able to empathise with the characters and the story plot activating his or her imagination) that between them lead to a state of suspended reality. The result is a psychological separation between the fictional world and the real world within which the reader is actually situated. Without being able to keep these two worlds mentally separate, the reader would treat the fictional world as real, a problem that is likely to be magnified with staged drama because the action on the stage is performed by real people and looks like (and hence could be mistaken for) real life (see Bullough, 1912 ; Elam, 2002 ).

Nonetheless, an important conclusion from our results is that, despite becoming engaged with a character, audience members are able to maintain sufficient distance to take an independent view of the psychological causes of the characters’ behaviour. It is this capacity to step back from the immediacy of the present world to consider an alternative parallel world (whether fictional or a real world elsewhere in space or time) that allows us to hold back and remain in our seats rather than intervene on behalf of the victim in a play. Cognitively, this is no small feat: it depends on high-order mentalising capabilities that are neurophysiologically expensive ( Lewis et al., 2017 ) and involve complex extended neural networks ( Powell et al., 2010 ; Lewis et al., 2011 ; Brown, 2020 ). Young children, especially those too young to have developed theory of mind, typically see characters as real and only come to recognise the difference between fiction and reality as they develop high-order mentalising skills ( Morison and Gardner, 1978 ; Harris et al., 1991 ; Chandler, 1997 ). This finding would seem to have implications for everyday real-world psychology where we may often face a dilemma in which our relationship with (or attachment to) a particular individual (notably close friends and family) conflicts with our ability to provide rational psychological explanations for their behaviour. That we are able to separate out these two dimensions may be important for our capacity to provide balanced, sensible advice to those with whom we are emotionally bound – something that may be crucial in maintaining the integrity and cohesion of a social community.

Mentalising is also important from the storyteller’s perspective. To be able to tell an engaging story, the storyteller needs to construct both the characterisation and the unfolding story in such a way as to guide the audience’s beliefs and engagement. Engagement may be lost when the narrative becomes implausible or too complex ( Tal-Or and Cohen, 2010 ). Storytellers must also constrain their construction of a plot to fit the audience’s psychological competences such that these are not over-taxed ( Dunbar, 2005 , 2017 ; Zunshine, 2006 ). Analysis of the structure of Shakespeare’s plays, for example, demonstrates both that the number of speaking parts in individual scenes approximates very closely to the size of everyday conversation groups and that the structure of networks based on co-presence in the same scene exhibits classic ‘small world’ patterns of the kind found in natural social networks ( Stiller et al., 2004 ). This is true even of contemporary hyper-link cinema ( Krems and Dunbar, 2013 ), despite the fact that this particular genre (which includes films, such as Crash , Babel and Love Actually ) explicitly attempts to break through these everyday limitations by linking the lives of individuals whose actions are dissociated in time and space. While these structural components to a story are important in order to avoid overburdening audience psychology, the key to storytelling nonetheless lies ultimately in the psychological mechanisms that draw the audience in.

Disposition theory ( Zillmann and Bryant, 1975 ; Raney, 2004 ; Weber et al., 2008 ), which argues that audience enjoyment is high when characters who are disliked experience negative outcomes (and vice versa), might be an alternative explanation for our findings. Disposition theory identifies empathy and similarity/dissimilarity (i.e. in-group bias) as important psychological components, but ultimately a sense of (social) justice is thought to play a central role ( Raney and Bryant, 2002 ). Raney and Bryant (2002) argue that enjoyment of drama (film) is the intersection of judgements made about characters (disposition formation) and judgements made about justice (a moral view). In an empirical test of this, they found that these two ratings were independent and that the two together significantly predicted enjoyment of short film clips (accounting for ~23% of the variance between them). While this hypothesis was explicitly developed for crime drama as a genre, the general approach can easily be generalised to other forms of drama (e.g. soap operas: Weber et al., 2008 ). To the extent that moral approval is one of the core elements in disposition theory ( Raney, 2004 ; Weber et al., 2008 ; Zillmann and Bryant, 1975 ), our results offer some support for this proposal.

Other potentially important traits that we did not investigate, such as experience-taking (the ability to enter into the experiences of a character: Kaufman and Libby, 2012 ) and empathy and sympathy ( Goldstein and Winner, 2012 ), are also likely to play an important role in individual differences in the ability to become immersed in fiction. More importantly, perhaps, the storyteller’s ability to trigger these mechanisms through choice of words or narrative structure may play a crucial role in eliciting a response from an audience ( Kaufman and Libby, 2012 ). Kaufman and Libby (2012) have suggested that ‘experience-taking’ may be an important component of engagement because it allows an individual to transcend the self-other boundary. In a series of experimental studies, they showed that high self-concept accessibility (the capacity to reflect on the causes of one’s own behaviour) blocks engagement in fictional narratives (apparently because individuals are unable to enter into the world of the depicted character), whereas in-group cues narrated in the first person have a positive effect on engagement. Similarly, Goldstein and Winner (2012) used live stage performances to examine the extent to which cognitive empathy (understanding another’s emotions), emotional empathy (feeling another’s emotions) and personal distress (experiencing a negative emotional reaction to another’s plight) predict sympathy for characters in two staged plays. They found striking sex differences, with level of sympathy best predicted by emotional empathy in men but by cognitive empathy in women.

It is notable that psychologists have largely failed to engage with the fictional world of literature despite the fact that it offers an opportunity to explore the psychology of a mental world that not only plays a significant part of everyday life but may also be one that reflects psychological processes that are fundamental to everyday human behaviour ( Goldstein and Bloom, 2011 ). In this respect, there have been surprisingly few experiments that have used audiences with live drama to explore appreciation of, and attitudes towards, fiction. Although working with audiences at live performances is inevitably fraught with difficulties, not least because confounds are less easily controlled than they are in the laboratory, we can have some satisfaction in how well this particular experiment worked. Despite many potential problems, the results we obtained seem to be robust and, where they mirror results from previous laboratory experiments, reliable. They also appear to be consistent across plays that are separated both by almost two millennia in time and by cultural background. This gives us some confidence in the generality of the findings we report, such as the fact that audiences are able to disengage their level of identification and moral approval for a character from the psychological explanations they are prepared to give for the character’s behaviour; the consistency of these ascriptions across plays not only from very different theatrical traditions (and historical periods) but also interpreted/performed in very different ways is telling. The explicitly cognitive aspects of our capacity to cope with storytelling and the theatre have yet to be explored in any detail (but see Carney et al., 2014 ), yet may provide important insights into how we cope with everyday real-world social interactions (including, perhaps, our ability to engage with virtual mental representations of real but absent individuals) as well as offering a better understanding of why, at a psychological level, fiction works for us.

Our results suggest three main conclusions. One is that the text, as crafted by the playwright, takes precedence over both the director’s influence and the way the actors present the characters on stage. This may reflect our two particular dramatists’ ability to draw characters so finely that the audience is offered little leeway in how to interpret them, something that may be particularly important for those characters whose behaviour is central to the plot as the dramatist conceives it. It could be that less skilled storytellers are not able to impose their characterisations on their audiences so effectively. More detailed experimental analysis would be required to confirm this, but it offers a possible psychological basis for explaining the differences between successful and unsuccessful storytellers.

Second, the level of moral approval of a character’s behaviour was highly correlated with the participants’ ability (or willingness) to identify with the character and the particular dilemma that the character faced (see also Green and Brock, 2000 ). Causal direction remains to be determined here and would clearly merit more detailed experimental study. Third, that said, audiences clearly differentiated between identification with a character and moral approval of their actions, on the one hand, and the attributional explanations they offered for the character’s behaviour, on the other: they seemed able to take a consistent view of the psychological causes of a character’s actions that was independent of whether or not they approved of how the character had behaved. This cognitively demanding, yet largely unresearched, mechanism that allows us to hold contradictory views of someone in mind at the same time probably plays an equally important role in everyday life by allowing us to engage mentally with people who are not physically present.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary Material , and further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC), University of Oxford. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

Author Contributions

BT, LM, FB, and RD conceived the project, designed and carried out the experiments, analysed the data, and wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

The research was funded by the John Fell Fund, and the analysis and writing up were funded by the Calleva Research Centre, Magdalen College, Oxford.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The project was made possible by a grant from the Fell Fund, which provided funding for BT and the experiments, and the Calleva Research Centre.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.762011/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: drama, fictional transportation, identification, moral approval, attribution

Citation: Teasdale B, Maguire L, Budelmann F and Dunbar RIM (2021) How Audiences Engage With Drama: Identification, Attribution and Moral Approval. Front. Psychol . 12:762011. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.762011

Received: 20 August 2021; Accepted: 18 October 2021; Published: 05 November 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Teasdale, Maguire, Budelmann and Dunbar. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: R. I. M. Dunbar, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Rikard Hoogland , Stockholm University

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Dianne Berg , Clark University

Edinburgh Fringe 2023: how to immerse yourself in the world’s biggest arts festival

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Succession is as much about technology as it is about money, power and family

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Top contributors

Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University

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Associate Professor of Education, University of California, Irvine

Professor of Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne

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SCC Research Guides

ENG 102 - Drama Research Guide

ENG 102: Drama Research Guide

This guide is designed to help you complete a research paper about a play (drama) in English 102, as well as complete an Annotated Bibliography if required. Follow the steps below in order - each step builds on the one before it, guiding you through the research project. We offer research advice/tips, as well as recommended sources of literary criticism, citation help, etc.

Next: 1. Getting Started >>
1. Getting Started
2. Explore Your Play
3. Narrow Your Topic
4. Find Literature Criticism
5. Cite Your Sources
6. Write Your Annotated Bib
7. Write Your Paper
Literary Criticism Guide
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Theatre Research Paper Examples

Artaud’s theatre influence
Costumes use by actors and actresses to exemplify history on the theatre stage.
Theater reserved for the irrational
O’Neill Eugene and Players from Provincetown
David Belasco, Producer of Theatre
Theatre in an era where home entertainment dominates
My preliminary Impression of Acting
Describe and explain science occasions in European theatre presentations
Influence of religion on theatre development
Theatre in a Shakespeare era
Piscator Erwin and scenery projection
The Music Function in Theatre
The theatre that lives
The 3D entry and how it has impacted the experience of going to theatre halls
Theatre is used as a tool to impact politics.
The differences and similarities between Chinese and American operas
The propagandist methods used to spread dictatorship
Where war plays a role in driving nationalism
The impact of the second world war on arts social development
When theatre grows into a blasphemous entity
Technology infusion in theatre
The role children play in European performances on the theatre stage
Theatre role as a lesson in philosophy
Community theatre commercialization
The elements that are the most influential in the Elizabethan theatre and culture era
European society’s gender bias
Puppetry influence on cartoons these days
Who was the most guilty for blame in the demise of Smith Eva?
Foreman Richard and the hysterical theatre/Ontological theatre
Wealth and morality in renowned European plays
Theatre’s position as the source of Europe’s liberalism
Theatre’s role as an emblem of nationalism. Theatre’s place in the history of European
Theatre’s role as a tool in social commentary
The melodramatic assembly in the shape of racism
Svoboda Josef, the scenographer master

Interesting Theatre Research Paper Ideas

How Has Theatre Changed Since the Turn of the Century?
What Was the First Play to Receive a Pulitzer Prize?
Who Is Your Favorite Stage Actor, and Why?
What Is the History of Experimental Theatre in New York City?
What Is the History of Theatre in Medieval Times?
What Are Some Common Themes of Shakespearean Plays?
What Are Some Common Themes of Greek Plays?
How Have dramatic Techniques Changed Throughout Time?
Who Are Some Famous Directors Today, and How Do They Compare to Those of the Past?
Greek Theatre in the 5th Century BC
The Roman Theatre and its Influence on Modern Theatre
Important women and Theatre in 17th and 18th Century England
The Shakespearean Globe Theatre
Commedia del’Arte
The Development of Realism in Nineteenth-Century European Drama
Brechtian Theory and Epic Theatre
The Development of Realism in American Drama from O’Neill to Williams
Antonin Artaud: The Development of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty
Stanislavski’s Method: A Case Study of a Modern Actor Training System
Which Is More Important: Acting or Directing? Why?

Easy Theatre Topics for Students

What is the relationship between representation and reality in theatre?
In what ways are theatrical conventions used to construct and communicate meaning?
What is the role of the spectator in theatre?
What does it mean to say that theatre is a social process?
In what ways is the study of theatre important to understanding human experience?
How does theatre contribute to our understanding of history, culture, and society?
What is the relationship between live stage performances and technology?
Why study Theatre Studies?
How will theatre change as a result of the pandemic?
What are some topics that would make great theatre essays?
Why do most people prefer watching movies to watching plays in theatres?
How can we encourage more people to watch plays rather than films?
Do you prefer watching films or plays at the theatre, and why?
Why do people like watching plays?
What is the history of the theatre?
How to write a play review?
How do movies differ from theatres?
What are the different roles in a theatre play?
Why was the Greek Theatre built in the way it was?
What is the purpose of a Theatre Review?
Should Theatre be made more accessible for blind people?
How does music affect theatre performance?
What is theatre?
What are the characteristics of Shakespeare’s plays?
A topic on the dramatic play, “Othello.”
In the play Hamlet, the character Polonius and his “famous” advice to Laertes.
Movie adaptations of novels: How do they compare with the printed word?
How does a play or novel you have studied change your understanding or appreciation of history?
The life and works of famous playwrights, for example, Aristotle, Sophocles, William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Tennessee Williams.
The lives of actors and actresses in ancient Greece, the Elizabethan era, or modern times
What is tragic drama? Tragic heroes from Greek drama and modern plays
The history of Greek theatre
The changing role of women in theatre since the Elizabethan period
The Importance of Theatre
The Best Form of Entertainment
A Brief History of Drama
The Role of Women in the Theatre
How to Write a Play
The Role of Music in the Theatre
The Evolution of the Art of Acting
The Evolution of Theatre Design and Architecture
How to Become an Actor or Actress
Famous Actors and Actresses
How has the concept of the theatre changed over time?
How does theatre influence society?
What is the role of theatre in modern society?
What is the purpose of theatre?
What are the historical origins of theatre?
Who was the first playwright in history?
What is the impact of theatre on education?
Explain how drama can help develop children’s social skills and self-esteem.
What are some factors that contribute to the successful production of a play?
How can I choose a good play to perform with my students?
What are some strategies for teaching students about acting and stagecraft?

A-List Of Intriguing Theatre thesis topics and Prompts

This list of Theatre thesis topics has been divided into Master’s thesis topics and Ph.D. thesis topics. The current thesis topics below are available for theatre studies students.

“The Clash Between Classical and Contemporary Music Theater: A Study in British Musicals from 1970 to 1980.”
“The Effects of Music on Audience Perception of Emotion in Musical Theater.”
“The Importance of the Musical Director in Modern Musical Theater Productions.”
“The Evolution of Race Relations in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“Sam Shepard’s Use of Mythology in Buried Child and True West.”
“An Analysis of the Role of Women in William Shakespeare’s Comedies.”
The Future of Theatre Criticism: Implications of Social Media on the Profession.
The Relevance of Shakespeare in Contemporary Theatre.
The Performance and Impact of Greek Theatre Today.
The Influence of the Cultural Revolution on Modern Chinese Theatre.
The Influence of Milton’s Poetry on Modern Theatre.
Using Theatrical Symbols in Political Propaganda.
Nationalism, Globalization and Contemporary Theatre in Latin America.
Latin American Women’s Role in Contemporary Theatre.
I will write a thesis exploring the intersection of drama therapy and disability theatre. Working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and mental illness is an important part of my life. I became interested in this topic because it combines two things that are so meaningful to me.
My thesis concerns performance-making’s role in forming a cultural identity for diverse communities. The topic I am exploring is how theatre can be used as a tool for participatory development. Specifically, I am looking at how performance-making can be used as a tool for community engagement and dialogue and the pedagogical implications of this practice.
I want to write my thesis on the relationship between narrative structure and theater design: how we use stories to shape spaces and how spaces inform our stories. This is a question I’ve been thinking about since studying abroad, when I learned that all of the theaters in Italy were built before Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, despite being designed to accommodate his plays specifically.
My thesis falls into Theatre & Performance Studies (TPS) category. It’s about Shakespeare’s use of clowns in his plays, focusing on Falstaff in the Henry IV plays Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

List of possible term paper topics on Theatre

Theatre term paper topics range from Contemporary Theatre to Historical Theatre, Broadway Theatre to Theatre Design. I have listed a few topic suggestions below to help you get started on your theatre term paper. In addition, I have included a list of the most popular theatre research paper topics. The following is a suggested list of topics for your theatre term paper:

Brecht and Epic Theatre
The Golden Age of Broadway – 1920-1940
The Renaissance in England and France
The influence of Greek culture on American drama
Shakespeare’s Hamlet – a psychological study
Your favorite Shakespeare play
The styles and themes of Tennessee Williams’ plays
Anton Checkhov’s plays – an analysis of female characters
Chekhov as a modern dramatist
Bertolt Brecht’s use of alienation in Mother Courage and her Children
The importance of theatre in the modern world
Theatre as a lifestyle
Theatre and politics
How to attract more people to attend theatre shows?
Reasons why people watch theatre today
The history of theatre
The place of theatre in the past and present world
The reason why fashion is so important for theatres
Differences between modern and old-school theatres
How do politics influence the work of playwrights?
“The Lion King” and Social Responsibility
“A Raisin in the Sun”: Walter’s Dream
“A Raisin in the Sun”: The American Dream Deferred
A Doll’s House: The Decline of the Institution of Marriage
A Doll’s House: Nora Helmer Character Analysis
Antigone: The Role of Women in Antigone
Antigone: Creon or Antigone – Who is the Tragic Hero?
Antigone: Creon as a Tragic Figure in “Antigone”
Antigone: Power Corrupts, but Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
The Crucible: What Made “The Crucible” Such a Successful Play?
The Crucible: John Proctor Character Analysis
Death of a Salesman: A Research Paper on Arthur Miller’s American Dream
Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman’s Failing American Dream
Death of a Salesman: Willy Loman as Tragic Hero in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Theatre Research Paper Questions and Essay Prompts

✔ Choose one particular element of theatre and analyze its role in modern performance. For example, you may write about costume design, lighting, stage props, or the screen itself. ✔ Compare and contrast modern theater with the theater of the past – for example, popular theaters in Shakespeare’s time. How has theater changed? Are there any elements that have remained intact? ✔ Analyze a specific actor (or actress). You may compare their work to other actors of their time; also, you can compare their work to actors of today. In either case, provide examples from at least three performances by this actor. ✔ Write an essay on how the audience impacts a given performance. If a performance is well-received by an audience, does it necessarily mean it is good? Conversely, can a poor performance receive rave reviews from an audience? Make sure to support your thesis with examples from specific performances. ✔ Analyze how various theatrical traditions address social issues. For example, you may write about Chinese Peking Opera or Japanese Kabuki Theatre. Alternatively, you may address Theater of the Absurd and analyze its key elements as well as its functions within society as a whole

Interesting Drama Paper Topic Ideas

Drama and the facilitation of leadership
Types of stages and drama productions
Operetta and emotion: An analysis of Sweeney Todd
South Pacific: Depictions of war in theater
Adaptations of theater to cinema
The role of spectacle in contemporary theater
History of Broadway
A brief history of drama
Creative dramatics
Set design and modern theater
Drama and the development of imagination
Music and theater
Classical mythology and tragedy
To Kill a Mockingbird: Race and dramatics
European drama
Television drama and depictions of family values
Social stigma and Elizabethan actors
Radio drama: Pre-television popular culture entertainment
Dionysus and the origins of theater
Tennessee Williams and modern theater
Role play in group therapy
Greek Tragedy
Drama and the Harlem renaissance
Drama and the psychology of self-confidence
Acting and expression
African American expression and Blacksploitation: The Wiz.
Drama on the stage and screen
Shakespeare’s histories
Revolutionizing contemporary musical theater: Rodgers and Hammerstein
The art of directing: Bringing stories to life
Chinese Drama
The Wizard of Oz: Contemporary influences
Drama in elementary education: Developing thinking, feeling and moving skills
The exploration of social issues in drama
Shakespeare and his contribution to drama
The Diary of Anne Frank: Expressions of the Holocaust in art
Homosexuality and theater
The Interrogation of Nathan Hale: Minimalism and the forging of a nation
Contemporary theater influence in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Performance skills
Choreography and contemporary theatre
Three Theban plays: Depictions of civil disobedience
Drama and team building
Multiple intelligence: Howard Gardner and drama
Improvisation and expression

Ideas for good topics for theatre research papers

Does a director or an actor define what the play will be like?
Drama as a universal language;
Does cinema kill theater?
The role of music in a certain play;
The place of improvisation in contemporary theatre;
History and origins of opera and ballet;
The roles of ‘personal’ and ‘collective’ in a play.
Shakespeare’s contribution to the development of theater;
The influence of ancient Greek tragedy on modern-day theater;
How does theater develop a viewer’s imagination?

An excellent theatre research paper starts with selecting a captivating and robust subject. It offers a good foundation that, coupled with other research guides, will provide a polished and exciting paper. So as a writer interested in writing about theatre, your choice of topic will define the rest of the document. The catalog of theater research paper topics provided will set you on a course to writing an excellent paper.

Get Help from the Experts with your Theatre Research Paper Topics Paper

We hope you’ve found this article useful. It may seem like there are many theatre research paper topics to choose from, but maybe not as many as before after reading this blog post! If none of these ideas sparks your interest, don’t worry – we have writers who can help with that too. Place an order today and start crafting your perfect essay or dissertation for school or work tomorrow morning.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you write a theatre research paper.

Define Your Thesis Statement
Do Research
Sketch an outline of your essay
Write Your Research Paper in a Structured Way: Introduction, body, and conclusion.

What are some drama topics?

Drama in elementary education: Developing thinking, feeling, and moving skills

What are some good ideas for a research paper?

Some common research paper topics include climate, birth control, health, abortion, change, technology, global warming, history, gun control, science, social media, AI, and child abuse.

What are the five acceptable research topics?

The Impact of U.N. Policies on the Environment
Bar Code Implants
The Impact of Globalization on Religion
Imposed Democracy
Marketing and Media Influence on Teens

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Drama Paper Topics

Drama can be defined as a play for television, radio, or theater. While the mediums of television and radio are more modern and contemporary in nature, theater has been present in the human experience for some time. Originating in ancient Athens, drama developed during the 6th Century BC as facilitated through performances that were conducted to honor the god Dionysus (Drama, 2015). Definitions that are more formal have been articulated as “a visual display of a composition or prose through a live performance of dialogue or narration” (Drama, 2015). Though its original roots were religious in nature, theater has evolved into a variety of representations. While it is not uncommon for drama to engage in social commentary, drama can also be for pure entertainment purposes. Though not necessary to be considered drama, there is also a cross section of the genre that includes music as a mechanism to set moods, increase meaning, deliver dialogue, or to tell the entire story. Drama can be minimal and improvisational or it can be full of spectacle and quite complex. As a subset of the humanities, drama is an important topical pursuit for understanding the human experience as a whole or at a given point in history.

The professional staff at PowerPapers.com has the necessary skills, experience, and background to tackle any drama paper topic. Helping students select suitable frames of inquiry for their drama projects from singular or interdisciplinary perspectives is well within our staff’s expertise. Whether or not your project is a short discussion post or a completed Doctoral thesis on a drama subject, PowerPapers.com has a proven track record of satisfied and returning clients. For your drama paper topic needs , PowerPapers.com’s staff members can be reached by email for questions regarding scopes of inquiry or for placing an order from our secure server.

Interesting Drama Paper Topics

Drama is multifaceted in that it can be used to tell stories, express artistic ideas, influence people, champion causes, express religiosity, entertain, advertise, and educate, among other things. As a result, there are a multitude of perspectives in which one can employ in selecting a drama paper topic and completing an academic project on the subject. Drama studies can include actual constructs for increasing ones acting skills or they can equally be employed in educational explorations for classroom use. In addition, drama can be tied into virtually any period of human history since its development during the 6th century. While drama majors may have to stick more with traditional explorations of the subject, those outside the major can find ways to incorporate drama into their field of study. A military historian, for example, could examine dramatic representations of human warfare as expressed through plays Julius Caesar and South Pacific. Similarly, a geography major may choose to explore the geographic characteristics of a region and apply this information to the development and expression of drama among those people.

Below is a list of some topics that would fall within the spectrum of drama paper topics. This list can be utilized as a literal selection tool for a research paper topic or it can be used to generate ideas related to a student’s original concepts. In either scenario, PowerPapers.com is ready to help with all phases of project completion from topic selection to editing as well as anything in between. The interdisciplinary nature of drama is such that it would not be an understatement to say that there is more than likely some area of inquiry that can satisfy even the most discriminate student.

The exploration of social issues in drama
The role of spectacle in contemporary theater
Revolutionizing contemporary musical theater: Rodgers and Hammerstein
Dionysus and the origins of theater
A brief history of drama
Drama and the Harlem renaissance
Classical mythology and tragedy
Shakespeare and his contribution to drama
Adaptations of theater to cinema
Drama on the stage and screen
Television dram and depictions of family values
Performance skills
Acting and expression
Music and theater
Shakespeare’s histories
To Kill a Mockingbird: Race and dramatics
South Pacific: Depictions of war in theater
Choreography and contemporary theater
Tennessee Williams and modern theater
Types of stages and drama productions
A history of Broadway
Chinese Drama
Greek Tragedy
The Interrogation of Nathan Hale: Minimalism and the forging of a nation
Role play in group therapy
European drama
Three Theban plays: Depictions of civil disobedience
The Diary of Anne Frank: Expressions of the Holocaust in art
Radio drama: Pre-television popular culture entertainment
Improvisation and expression
The Wizard of Oz: Contemporary influences
Contemporary theater influence in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange
Operetta and emotion: An analysis of Sweeney Todd
Multiple intelligence: Howard Gardner and drama
Drama in elementary education: Developing thinking, feeling and moving skills
Drama and the development of imagination
The art of directing: Bringing stories to life
Homosexuality and theater
African American expression and Blacksploitation: The Wiz.
Social stigma and Elizabethan actors
Drama and the psychology of self-confidence
Creative dramatics
Set design and modern theater
Drama and team building
Drama and the facilitation of leadership

Click for more great research paper topics listed by discipline .

Drama. (2015). Questia: Trusted Online Research. Retrieved from https://www.questia.com/library/literature/drama

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The Use Of Drama and/or Theatre Techniques in Research

Related Papers

Onika Henry

Qualitative Research in Psychology

Izumi Sakamoto

Key Concepts in Theatre/Drama Education

Graham W Lea , George Belliveau

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences

antonio iudici

International Journal of Education and the Arts

Lauren Segedin

Youth Theatre Journal

Jeanne Klein

The intervention in this proposal aims to create nudges within a nudge in the world of theatre to promote greater social connection and awareness of the value of a strong social network through training theatre groups. Using an understanding of the theory of natural automatic processes (System 1) and areas of the brain primed for community and cooperation, the trainer can introduce to theatre groups certain features and techniques within a dramatic work to effect greater audience involvement, thereby making aspects of the drama more impactful to the audience. This experience can give the audience a taste of the rewards that can be derived from social connection and even give them ideas on how to strengthen their social networks. Initially, this training is aimed at theatre groups in Singapore that tend to carry the objectives of offering social messages such as enhancing relationships, practising courtesy and even making certain health initiatives more appealing.

Theatre Journal

Jessica Bockler

An exploration into the psychosomatic dynamics of theatre-based practices was undertaken using heuristic methodology (Moustakas, 1990). Twenty-two practitioners, some working independently, others working collaboratively, were interviewed about their approaches, focusing on their experiences of self-expressive performance as a way to work on the self and to induce healing and/or transformative growth. The heuristic approach also allowed for the researcher's direct involvement and participation in the practices under investigation, enabling her to explore firsthand the potential of theatre-based practice as a means to work on the self. Following heuristic methodology, the researcher created a Composite Depiction and a Creative Synthesis, juxtaposing the individual approaches of the research participants and highlighting the core elements of Theatre as a Transformative Practice. In doing so, she proposed that the practices explored facilitate an attunement of ego, some leading to deep, body-based introspection which in turn enables the practitioner to gain greater self-insight and internal balance through expressive engagement with felt senses and corresponding imagery. The researcher further suggested that Theatre as a Transformative Practice requires specific conditions under which the creative journey can lead to healing and personal growth. The chief condition identified was that the work be approached with mindful awareness of others and self in the performative relationship.

Arts&Health

Dorota Weziak-Bialowolska

Background: There has been agrowing interest in using artistic interventions as a method of developinginterpersonal competence. This paper presents a meta-analysis evaluating the impact of theatre interventions on social competencies. Methods: Twenty-one primary studies totaling 4064 participants were included, presenting evidence available since 1983. Included studies were assessed in terms of quality, heterogeneity, and publication bias. Results: Our findings indicated that active theatre participation significantly improved participants' empathic abilities, social communication, tolerance, and social interactions, with the largest pooled effect size for social communication (0.698) and the smallest for tolerance (0.156). Our findings did not corroborate the impact of theatre on self-concept. Conclusions: This paper shows that theatre interventions have a positive impact on social competencies. The paper makes a methodological contribution by showing that randomized and non-randomized studies yielded comparably valid results.

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The use of drama in science instruction—a review of the literature

Review Paper
Published: 09 September 2023
Volume 3 , article number 162 , ( 2023 )

Cite this article

Gulnara Namyssova 1 ,
Kathy L. Malone ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9286-4054 1 , 4 ,
Janet Helmer 1 ,
Gulfarida Myrzakulova 1 ,
Ali Shafiei 2 &
Brian Edmiston 3

267 Accesses

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Although there has been previous research concerning the use of drama in science education, a comprehensive review has not been completed over the past 20 years. The current article explores this topic in greater depth by focusing only on empirical-based peer-reviewed research studies that detail the use of drama in the science classroom between 2000 and 2020. The question remains: does incorporating drama into science teaching improve student understanding? Twenty empirical studies were reviewed focusing on students as active participants in drama interventions in PK-12 classrooms. The studies were analyzed according to available demographic data (e.g., grade levels, science topics, geographic distribution), research designs, type and duration of drama interventions, use of epistemic practices, and empirical results (e.g., science skills, content knowledge change, epistemic practices). The reviewed studies revealed that no matter the grade level, drama in science has a positive benefit for students in terms of attitudes toward science and improving conceptual knowledge. Integrating drama into science offers a possible way of improving interest in choosing a science major. Based on the review's findings, conclusions and recommendations for future research are offered.

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Conclusion: A Synthesis for Now and Possibilities for the Future

Reflective discussion on teaching and learning science with drama: emerging themes.

Drama As a Learning Medium in Science Education

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Data on article coding is available from the corresponding Author upon request.

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Namyssova, G., Malone, K.L., Helmer, J. et al. The use of drama in science instruction—a review of the literature. SN Soc Sci 3 , 162 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-023-00750-3

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Drama in Education Exploring Key Research Concepts and Effective Strategies

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As schools have become more aware of their role in addressing personal and social issues, the importance of ‘values and attitudes’ have begun shaping education and curricula worldwide. Drama in Education explores the six fundamental pillars of the national curriculum guide of Iceland in relation to these changing values and attitudes. Focusing on the importance of human relations, this book explores literacy, sustainability, health and welfare, democracy and human rights, equality and creativity. It demonstrates the capability of drama as a teaching strategy for effectively working towards these fundamental pillars and reflects on how drama in education can be used to empower children to become healthy, creative individuals and active members in a democratic society. Offering research-based examples of using drama successfully in different educational contexts and considering practical challenges within the classroom, Drama in Education: Exploring Key Research Concepts and Effective Strategies is an essential guide for any modern drama teacher.

Ása Helga Ragnarsdóttir is an adjunct lecturer in drama and theatre education at the University of Iceland, School of Education. Hákon Sæberg Björnsson is an M.Ed. graduate from the University of Iceland.

Critics' Reviews

The book Drama in Education: Exploring Key Research Concepts and Effective Strategies tries to connect the academic research based approach with the practical value of drama. Our education system was created for different times and so, towards the end of the second decade of the 21 st century, we must explore how to transfer it for a new era – the age of constant, overpowering changes. To deal with them effectively, we need different personal and social skills which drama can develop. The book responds to the needs of the modern educational and cultural system offering academic evidence of drama impact and power as well as creative ideas for teachers to use in the classroom. It discusses the concept of fundamental pillars for education which are linked to different aspects of using drama in the classroom. The book is divided into six different chapters which are linked to introduced educational pillars. The international authors present different perspectives and experience in researching and applying drama. Prof. Dr hab. Alicja Galazka, University of Silesia, Poland and Trinity College, London, UK There is no shortage of books advocating drama as a powerful medium for learning, developing social skills and promoting equality and social justice. In less abundance are publications which support their claims for drama’s efficacy with empirical evidence. This is just such a book. The foreword focuses on the importance of considering context in research and this is acknowledged by each contributor as they set out their research projects. Their findings are all the more convincing because they include details of the practical sessions that provided the empirical evidence. Although each chapter describes a small-scale piece of practical research the number of issues covered is comprehensive ranging from how drama can be responsible for measurable improvements in literacy and reducing bullying to integrating immigrants and challenging the destructive rise of new nationalisms. This book will inform and encourage drama educators everywhere and serve as an inspiration to those wanting to regard their own practice as a potential subject for research. Andy Kempe, Emeritus Professor of Drama Education, University of Reading, UK

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Exploring how ASD-related genes influence brain networks that guide behavior

Side-by-side headshots of Benjamin Auerbach, Howard Gritton and Brad Sutton.

The CDC estimates that “1 in 36 children has been identified with autism spectrum disorder,” or ASD.

ASDs have a wide range of symptoms characterized by neurodivergent behavior and atypical communication. A blend of genetic alterations in the brain causes these symptoms; determining which genes affect what behaviors can be challenging.

Together, Howard Gritton , a professor of comparative biosciences and bioengineering; Benjamin Auerbach , a professor of molecular and integrative physiology and neuroscience; Brad Sutton , a professor of bioengineering and the technical director of Beckman’s Biomedical Imaging Center and Jozien Goense , a professor of psychology and bioengineering will study how genetics contribute to biological behaviors that underpin ASDs.

"Understanding how the brain works, and how it may work differently in neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, requires access to brain function at multiple levels of analysis, from genes to cells to circuits to behavior,” Auerbach said.

Neurons use electrical signaling to communicate over short and long distances. The researchers will determine how specific gene alterations may modify how neurons connect and communicate in the context of behavioral symptoms of ASD.

“We hope to uncover how gene-cell type interactions contribute to autism-relevant behaviors by manipulating each independently,” Gritton said.

The team will manipulate genes in distinct cell types and use whole-brain imaging to study how those alterations affect brain function and behavior, addressing a previously intractable problem.

“We can explore the broad impacts of a few genetic changes and find mechanisms for targeting therapeutic interventions,” Sutton said.

The researchers will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to evaluate relationships between ASD characteristics and the brain’s structural and functional neural pathways, an approach with potential to transfer into clinical settings and inform novel treatment targets without problematic side-effects.

"The use of functional connectomics in this way is unique, and the work done here will be instrumental for enabling new projects and applications using these techniques across campus,” Goense said.

Researching the effects of collagen dysfunction on tissue

Side-by-side headshots of Bruce Damon, Mariana Kersh and Christina Laukaitis.

Collagen-based tissues like tough, fibrous tendons or soft, flexible skin serve diverse purposes in the body. These tissues are made from the same building blocks, but each tissue type develops differently and has varying levels of mechanical resilience and functionality.

Collagen is an important protein that provides structural support in these tissues, and its quality is also an important factor. For example: anew rubber band resembling healthy tissues is mechanically resilient and returns to its original shape after being stretched, while a used rubber band resembling older, damaged or dysfunctional tissues may not be as resilient.

Collagen dysfunctions are thought to be an underlying cause of symptoms associated with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, which leads to impaired function of connective tissues in the body. A non-invasive clinical method of distinguishing healthy tissue from impaired tissue does not yet exist.

Together, Mariana Kersh , a professor of mechanical science and engineering and biomedical and translation science; Bruce Damon, a professor of bioengineering and the co-director of the Carle Illinois Advanced Imaging Center ; and Dr. Christina Laukaitis, a geneticist and clinical associate professor, will use quantitative MRI to study the relationship between tissue microstructure and composition and their biomechanics function.

The researchers will use a collagen missense mutation model (in which the amino acid building blocks of collagen proteins are arranged incorrectly), to understand the effects of human diseases that cause collagen dysfunction.

By developing a method to identify damaged tissues and examine their mechanical function using MRI, the team hopes to provide a pathway to enable earlier diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of collagen injuries and disorders like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

“This exciting project will let us start to bridge the gap between fundamental science and clinical translation by incorporating our three areas of expertise: engineering, imaging and clinical genetics. This work is only the beginning toward our interests in translating research to improve the wellbeing of others," Kersh said.

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