When the Prague semiotician Jiri Veltrusky maintains that ‘in theater, the linguistic sign system, which intervenes through the dramatic text, always combines and conflicts with acting, which belongs to an entirely different sign system’, he makes explicit a commonplace premise: that the performance and the play constitute two distinct and parallel sign systems. This premise underlies the standard distinction between the dramatic text and the performance text, and forms the basis of what I will call the ‘two-text’ model of the play/performance relationship. The difference between a play and its performance is a difference between the ‘languages’ in which the two ‘texts’ are ‘written’: a play is a text constructed of linguistic signs, and a performance, a text constructed of theatrical signs.