Anaïs Folguera’s Reviews > Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance > Status Update

Oedipus the King begins in spectacular fashion. A large group of supernumeraries enter from stage left [...]. Conventionally, such an entrance denoted that they had come from the nearby city; an entrance from stage right denoted a journey from farther afield [...].

The unproductive consequences of the play-as-novel approach — a deformed text, a disappointed reader — suggest, however, that habits of reading cannot be unproblematically transposed across differential forms. The dramatic text must be read on its own terms. (2/2)

Given the status of the nocel as the dominabt literary form of the modern period, is ith hardly surprising that the play-text is often read as a novel manqué. The casual reader has a conditioned investment in the pursuit of narrative pleasures which are guaranteed by a fictional 'contract'. (1/2)

It is possible to decode the text as a multi-layered system of transgressive meanings, then the object of enquiry becomes the process whereby the lack of meaning or comunication is established [...]
1.Quantity, supply information as required but without excess
2.Quality, to be truthful, not to lie or make an utterance without adequate data
3.Relation, to be relevant
4.Manner, to utter with precision ad clarity, etc

[...] Preoccupation with space signifies a resistance to the temporal; the room is still known as the nursery, a spatial metaphor for the golden age of childhood and resistance to time passing. (2/2)

The dominance of spacial indicators, 'this room', 'this place', and the 'double pointing' to 'you and I'/'brother and sister', signal an attempt to reaffirm a sense of location and identity which are unfer threat in the 'here and now' of the dramatic present. [...] (1/2)

The act of generating action through speaking is therefore turned upside down into the act of speaking of actions which will go no further rhan words.
The deictic use of the 'I' licensed for comic play relies on furthering ambiguity of identity and self-referentiality.
When the 'I' is 'fixed', ad refers unreservedly to the 'i' who speaks, then conditions of sincerity and felicitous uptake are restored.

The linguistic sign-system is prioritised in terms of its own 'artistic' mode and is hierarchised [...] in relation to other sign-systems operating in a performance context. The dominance of the linguistic sign-system therefore ensures the reader/spectator's focused on _what_ is said, and on the philosophival 'truths' embodied by the dialogue.
In comedy, the ideological discourse is social rather than philosophical.

(Aristophanes, Plautus, Molière et al.), invite the 'commonplace' by permitting the use of dialect or colloquial expression. Or verse is used as a means to parody the tragic (as opposed to ennobling the comic).

The three levels of speech s action which need concern us here are the locutionary (uttering a sentence that makes sense), the illocutionary (the act performed in speaking the sentence, e.g. making a request or promise, issuing a command) amd the perlocutionary (the effect on the addressee tjrough what is said, e.g. the act of persuading). Not all utterances are met with the called-for action-response [...]