What Are Dramas?

Drama is one of the types of literature that has gained popularity during the years. This form of entertainment has not lost its patronage or vigor and continues to remain popular, despite all the technology involved in a film-making. In fact, it is rightly said that the magic of drama is more than the representation of fiction via performance.

A drama is ideally enacted in a theater, open or closed, and the performances are by actors, live, before an audience that either sits around or before the stage. A single drama is a collaborative effort. The cumulative efforts are pooled for the various modes of production, flow of the text and research in the form of literature adopted.

Various forms of dramas

Indian Drama

Folk theatre and dramatics can be traced to the religious ritualism of the Vedic peoples in the 2nd millennium BC. This folk theatre of the misty past was mixed with dance, food, ritualism, plus a depiction of events from daily life. The Ramayana and Mahabharata can be considered the first recognized plays that originated in India. These epics provided the inspiration to the earliest Indian dramatists and they do it even today. Indian dramatists such as Bhasa in the second century BC wrote plays that were heavily inspired by the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Japanese Drama

Japan, after a long period of civil wars and political disarray, was unified and at peace primarily due to shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu (1600-1668). The first form of theatre to flourish was Ningy? j?ruri (commonly referred to as Bunraku). The founder of and main contributor to Ningy? j?ruri, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), turned his form of theatre into a true art form.

Neoclassical theatre

Neoclassicism was the dominant form of theatre in the eighteenth century. It demanded decorum and rigorous adherence to the classical unities. Neoclassical theatre as well as the time period is characterized by its grandiosity. The costumes and scenery were intricate and elaborate. The acting is characterized by large gestures and melodrama.

Southeast Asian theatre
Theatre in Southeast Asia was mostly influenced by Indian theatre. In Thailand, it has been a tradition from the middle Ages to stage plays based on plots drawn from Indian epics. In particular, the theatrical version of Thailand's national epic Ramakien, a version of the Indian Ramayana, remains popular in Thailand even today.

By: Evelyn Carter

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