Wild Duck Journal #1

Wild Duck Journal #1

“Visual action can be as important on the stage as speech.” How far do you agree with this claim? In you answer you should refer to two or three plays you have studied.

I think that visual action is just as important as speech on a stage. If you take the audience into consideration, which you should, a play is like a book but acted out. The whole point of being acted out is that you have movement and action involved. This is evident more so in Wild Duck then in Oedipus, each of these plays highlights how either visual action or speech are important.

In Oedipus the King, there is a lot of speech, where Oedipus goes off on long speeches along with the chorus which also has very verbose parts in the play. The lack of action is displayed through the lack of stage direction. While there is some stage direction, it isn’t very complicated or specific, there are only stage directions for when characters enter or leave. So in Oedipus the King the speech aspect of the play is very important.

In Wild Duck, there is a lot of stage direction and sometimes this stage direction has more descriptiveness then the text itself. There are many instances where the stage directions are used to tell the reader what the scene looks like and how the characters are interacting in that scene. There is also a good amount of speech but it is balanced out by the numerous stage directions.