Introduction

Summary

Theatre and Meaning

Applied to drama, the word “meaning” is ambiguous. It covers the metaphysical content that is represented objectively in the complexion of the artifact; the intention of the whole as a complex of meaning that is the inherent meaning of the drama; and finally the meaning of the words and sentences spoken by the characters and their meaning in sequence, the dialogic meaning. […] Drama cannot simply take negative meaning, or the absence of meaning, as its content without everything peculiar to it being affected to the point of turning into its opposite. The essence of drama was constituted by that meaning.

—Theodor Adorno (1958)

As Adorno points out in this short passage from his essay on Beckett's Endgame, the issue of meaning in theatre is complex. Standing at the crossroads between all other arts, theatre is an intricate web of semiotic fields, woven from literal and figurative language, from visual and linguistic references that stand both alone and in sequence, from the interplay of positive and negative meanings, their pairings and contrasts. Meaning in theatre is multilayered, intertwined between form and content, text and context, history and culture. Reading theatre is thus sophisticated detective work that consists of unraveling the subsequent layers, from superficial asymptomatic reading to complex engagement with the visual, linguistic, and performative language of the theatrical work.