To understand what a play is, you need to know why and why the literary word itself exists in human culture, why it is more important than the definition that is formulated logically, accurately and clearly. And why is this naked and irrefutable logic perceived by units, and literary fabrication - by millions, if not billions.
Man is an emotional being
The nature of man, it turns out, is this: a thought that is not colored by saturated emotion is not able to enter the information space of most specific personalities. After all, the same mathematics as a system of certain knowledge, even purely formally much simpler than Shakespeare's works. Nevertheless, the Queen of all Sciences is truly understood by units, and everything that Romeo and Juliet narrates is understood by everyone. And then there is no need to explain what a play is.
Indicative in this regard is the work of Leo Tolstoy. As an example, the character of the same Natasha Rostova he clearly and clearly described in many pages, but this description did not linger in people's heads for a moment. And suddenly we see her dancing the Russian dance to the guitar of her distant relative, gazing enthusiastically at the night native and Russian sky, absorbing with all her awakening female nature the views of men cast upon her body ... And every person instantly understood her, because he woke up poetic perception of the world. This is what a play is in literature. This is a transfer of a bunch of information about anything through the emotional channels of human consciousness into its information field.
A play is an essay for the stage, radio and television performances
People who have never been engaged in literary work after reading the title of this section will not even be interested in the meaning of what was said. They will not remember that actors walk around the stage, and each of them has its own unique inner world; they won’t think how hard the director, playwright, artist, props, stage technicians worked hard on a particular performance ... But these are all worlds, worlds, worlds that come together to create an artificial Universe in which important thoughts must come to life. And when everything turns out, not a single answer to the question "what is a play" is able to accommodate the action that takes place for two to three hours in front of the eyes of the audience.
An important formality
And yet, what is a play? The definition of this term is very prosaic: it is a set of dialogue of characters that they pronounce during the development of the plot. But in the case when the author, albeit unconsciously, adjusts the speeches of fictional characters to his understanding and vision of what is happening in the world in which he lives, then the truth of life dies and the words sound in vain. Through the speeches of the heroes of the work, it is necessary to show exactly what the character himself sees, not the author. There is no place in the play in order to explain something, to further tell the viewer how this is done in novels and poems. That is why the writing of dramatic works is the most complex form of word art.
Livelier than life itself
Once Gogol was asked what the play “The Examiner” is. At first, the writer became gloomy and closed, and after an hour or two, when the questioner forgot to think about his question, the genius replied that this was something that was more alive than life itself, because it was not a year, but a minute. And he is infinitely right, because each plot twist, the appearance of new characters is a multidimensional allegory, and each individual phrase is a revelation. It is in this definition that the essence of what a play is is about. After all, the viewer, even the inexperienced, instantly grasps the hype, and the written masterpiece, without being born, dies. For all the time in the Russian Empire over 20,000 plays have been written, but very few still live on the stages of the world today - only 7. The mystical number of perfection ...