A drama or a play can be either open or closed. As a play text is mostly comprises of dialogue, it is up to us, the readers to imagine who the characters are, where they were at the time of the conversation, how they speak, what is their relationship with each other and so on. When you are working with an open text, you can interpret the text freely as the open text permits ambiguous stage directions. This is because the play writer gives little or no stage direction unlike in closed text where the stage directions are abundant and sometimes it is impossible not to follow them.
During the previous class, we were required to act out a play entitled ‘Bingo’ by Edward Bond. The play is an open text, so we are free to interpret what the play is all about. It is surprising on how many versions of the play that we can come out with despite its short text (only 10 lines!). Some of us interprets that the characters in the text were two strangers in a bar and another version told of kindergarten children who were eager to know what one of their friends was doing. Based on the characters that we have chosen, we consider the two most important elements in acting out a play which are the body gestures and the tone of voice. We did use a lot of our imagination to make the activity a success.
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