Which thinker asserted that drama is language under such high pressure of feeling that words carry an immediate connotation of gesture?

• A. Peter Brook
• B. George Steiner
• C. Soliloquy
• D. Brecht

Answer: (B)

In drama, language becomes intensified by emotion to the point where spoken words read as gestures—each line carrying not just meaning but the physical weight of feeling and action. George Steiner makes this idea explicit: he treats dramatic language as something pressed by intense feeling, so words acquire an immediate gestural force on stage. This explains why onstage speech often feels less like mere information and more like a performed gesture that communicates attitude, mood, and intention through rhythm, intonation, and bodily presence. The other figures don’t anchor this exact claim in the same way: Peter Brook focuses on the experiential, universal aspects of theatre rather than this specific view of language as gestural under pressure; Brecht’s concept centers on gestus as a means of revealing social meaning and maintaining distance, not language itself becoming gestural under felt pressure; and a soliloquy is a dramatic device, not a thinker who formulated this idea.