Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

34 Chapter 2 What Is a Play?
Drama requires conflict, and Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello is filled with it: between father and daughter, soldiers and
officers, and, fatally, husbands and wives. In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2009 production directed by Kathryn
Hunter, Patrice Naiambana as Othello furiously hurls Natalia Tena as Desdemona to the ground in a jealous rage as the
conflict between them escalates. © Geraint Lewis
THIRD WITCH: All hail, Macbeth, that shalt be King
hereafter!
BANQUO: Good sir, why do you start, and seem to fear
Things that do sound so fair?
In this scene, the inciting incident of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth (which follows two brief expository scenes), a
witch confronts Macbeth with the prediction that he will
be king, thereby posing an alternative that Macbeth has
apparently already considered, judging from the startled
response that elicits Banquo’s comment.
Once established, conflict is intensified to crisis, usually
by a series of incidents, investigations, revelations,
and confrontations. Sometimes even nonevents serve
to intensify a conflict, as in the modern classic Waiting
for Godot in which two characters simply wait, through
two hour-long acts, for the arrival of a third, who never
comes. Indeed, with this play, Samuel Beckett practically
rewrote the book on playwriting technique by showing
how time alone, when properly managed, can do the job
of heightening and developing conflict in a dramatic situation.
In a way, Beckett suggests, we are all always in
conflict by choosing just to keep living.
The Climax Conflict cannot be intensified indefinitely.
In a play, as in life, when conflict becomes insupportable,
something has to give. Thus every play, be it
comic, tragic, farcical, or melodramatic, culminates in
some sort of dramatic explosion.
As we have seen, Aristotle describes that explosion, in
tragedy, as the catharsis, a cleansing or purification. The
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