I’m enjoying rereading David Edgar’s “How Plays Work,” which is packed with delicious information and knowledge.
He writes in the chapter on Genre, of the importance of what people (characters and audience members) know when, which he calls the “choreography of knowledge.” His example is one of my favorites:
“It’s worth noting how brilliantly Sophocles choreographs the information available to the Messenger, Oedipus, Jocasta and us. Things are organised so that the Messenger can reveal what he assumes to be welcome intelligence – that Oedipus is not the son of Polybus – at precisely the moment when we’ve gathered sufficient information to know that this is the worst possible news. … The ordered revelation of knowledge is not just a mechanism for the unfolding of plot but also the expression of the play’s fundamental meaning.”