SOURCE: "Dreams, Innovation and Technique," in John Marston's Plays: Theme, Structure and Performance, Barnes & Noble Books, 1978, pp. 84-96.

Below, Scott discusses Marston's mastery of dramatic technique, focusing on ways in which his plays fuse intellectual and subconscious response in the reader.

In The Empty Space Peter Brooks writes,

The exchange of impressions through images is our basic language: at the moment when one man expresses an image at that same instant the other man meets him in belief. The shared association is the language: if the association evokes nothing in the second person, if there is no instant of shared illusion, there is no exchange.

Marston was a major figure in moving towards the creation of the total dramatic image: the language not only of words but also of sounds, actions and dreams. It is possible to identify two majorconventions employed in his compositions; the episodic and the...