Reading the stage directions aloud

Text: an original contemporary reading-group-account-style practice extract.

We read the scene around a library table. Nobody intended to act, so we hurried through the stage directions as though they were packaging around the spoken lines. The woman in the scene agreed to leave. We treated her answer as a clear decision until one reader repeated the direction: She stops with her hand on the latch.

That pause changed the conversation. One person thought she was afraid; another thought she was waiting for somebody to prevent her departure. We returned to the words before the direction and tried them with each possibility in mind. The answer remained the same, but it no longer sounded like the whole decision. A hand could reach the door while its owner still hesitated.

We did not settle on a single motive. The direction had supplied an action, not an explanation of every feeling behind it. I went home remembering how easily we had discarded the small sentence that kept our larger interpretation from becoming too certain. Reading it aloud had made a pause in the scene become a useful pause in our judgement.

In this extract, the writer tries to show that a small detail can alter an interpretation.

Evaluate how successfully this is achieved. Support your views with detailed reference to the extract.