Book Review: Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production
Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production
Dr. Robert Knopf
London: Methuen Drama, 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1408184301
Dr. Robert Knopf’s Script Analysis for Theatre: Tools for Interpretation, Collaboration and Production provides an insightful and adept guide to a practice that has proven elusive to both theatre students and practitioners.
As the author states early in the work his years as both an academic teaching script analysis and as a director have elucidated the problems of communication within theatre practice. Despite working towards a single goal (the production), directors, actors, dramaturgs and designers often operate within their own language and analytic approaches. Knopf argues the failure of these disparate groups to adequately communicate is a great challenge to achieving a successful production. This book sets out to identify a shared vocabulary theatre practitioners can utilize when working collaboratively on a production.
The first two chapters comprise the bulk of the text, focusing on analyzing the world of the play and investigating structure and action. Drawing heavily on acting theory and dramaturgical practice, the first chapter guides the reader through the process of investigating the character and environment of the play as well as its historical context and production history. Chapter two continues this task by interrogating the structural choices the playwright made before spending the remainder of the chapter introducing the concept of actions and objectives and demonstrating its application through several case studies.
The case studies utilized in the book present a nice range of writers and practices. All works are pulled from the Norton Anthology of Drama and include the line numbers from that text which makes this book an attractive option for college courses. While it certainly does pull heavily from the western male canon, it does offer a refreshing mix of genres, time periods, styles, and perspectives. In his preface Dr. Knopf’s literature review references female playwrights’ rise in prominence in the past century as participating in a movement towards a feminist dramatic structure in opposition to Freytag’s “masculine structure.” This “feminine structure” is exhibited through a series of peaks throughout the text rather than a singular climax towards the end and is an especially valuable tool for investigating episodic and less conventional scripts. Additionally, Dr. Knopf’s background in teaching and directing avant-garde theatre provide a valuable and oft-neglected inclusion of these non-conventional styles to a script analysis text.
Despite its many strengths the book does suffer from problems of organization and editing. Chapter one refers to a subsequent chapter solely devoted to dramaturgical analysis that never appears in the text. While chapter two spends more time analyzing dramatic structure it is unclear if this was the section referred to or if there was an editorial oversight in the final stages of production. This is especially confusing because the first chapter gives a significant amount of attention to dramaturgical analysis. Additionally, the book would benefit from consistent division of content. Chapter one and the first part of chapter two are sectioned off regularly but once the focus shifts to action and objectives, chapter two continues for fifty pages without major section breaks. More explicit division of concepts either within the chapter or through additional chapters would be especially beneficial to instructors looking to adapt the text to a semester’s schedule.
The book concludes with a chapter on turning the analysis into a workable production concept and a collection of blueprints for the practices described in the previous three chapters. The blueprints in the final chapter are an excellent resource with helpful tools for replicating this process, although having them available online for students and practitioners would have been even more helpful. The book also includes two appendices. The first provides a list of action verbs to assist in analysis and the second is a sample score utilizing the practices and notations demonstrated throughout the text. A thorough bibliography and index are also included.
Script Analysis for Theatre offers a thorough and insightful guide to contemporary script analysis for production and is highly recommended for both theatre students and practitioners.
Michael Saar
Lamar University