Buy a programme for Mike Bartlett’s new play Game and, apart from the expected background articles and CVs of the cast, you encounter the present tension between two styles of theatre.

Directed by Sacha Wares and designed by Miriam Buether, Game is a 55-minute dystopia about a culture in which the poor are given luxury accommodation in exchange for suffering a sort of extreme paint-balling by the rich. Theatregoers wear headphones and watch the live action either behind glass or on video monitors. Formally, it more resembles video-game or television than conventional theatre.

And yet although the evening depends almost entirely on seeing and feeling, the programme – as is now standard in new writing theatres – contains the whole script. In this case, stapled within the centre pages is a simple facsimile of the dialogue, without any covers or flourishes. A fancier publication is available from Nick Hern Books (NHB). But generally avid for play-texts – having enjoyed Tom Stoppard’s new play The Hard Problem (Faber) twice on the page after once on the stage – I found that Game was lessened rather than strengthened by being read afterwards.

The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

The bare dialogue and stage directions give no sense of the unsettling and innovative spectacle that the work becomes in the theatre. Someone – such as a student or theatre-lover unable to travel to the Almeida – who read the text without seeing it would be in the position of an archaeologist asked to guess the personality of a skeleton.

This disconnect is an illustration of the way in which British theatre, which has traditionally been based on the word, is increasingly exploring – through a new generation of directors and designers – the physical, visual and sensorial.

The work of Bartlett straddles this transition. His hit play King Charles III rewarded reading after seeing, permitting appreciation of the daring and ingenuity of the mock-Shakespearean verse. But his recent one-act drama Bull – dramatising violent office politics in the setting of a boxing ring – was, like Game, largely a visual and physical event, with study of the words providing only an enjoyable reminder of some of the spectacular invective spoken.

King Charles III by Mike Bartlett. Photograph: Johan Persson/PR

At Shakespeare productions, Sir Winston Churchill would sit with the script on his knee, in order to check that the actors were getting the lines right. So it’s perhaps a good thing that history has spared the war leader from being in the audience for the two most recent productions at London’s Royal Court theatre.

Not only would he have found the depiction in Jack Thorne’s Hope of a Labour council refusing to accept a Tory government’s spending cuts to be a bit leftwing but, if checking it against the published version, would have hurled it aside in confusion, because what the actors say and do differed so significantly, with lengthy sections of dialogue cut and the introduction of much physical business unmentioned on the page.

And, while the Conservative hero would probably have been horrified by the content of the current production, Zinnie Harris’s How to Hold Your Breath – which starts with a young woman having a one-night stand with the devil – Sir Winston would have been even more disturbed if he had consulted the Faber play-text to check if he could believe his eyes, as the publication contains an entirely different first scene that never appears in the production. (Oddly, the published Hope also contained a thrown-away opening.)

It has long been standard for published plays to include a note along the lines of the one that appears in the NHB edition of Thorne’s play: “As the text went to print before the end of rehearsals it may differ slightly from the play as performed.” The Faber text of How to Hold Your Breath omits this warning, although similar wordings appear in other releases from the same firm. Stoppard, an eager re-writer, thanks Faber in an author’s note to a later edition of one of his plays, for their indulgence of his frequent textual revisions for new productions.

Hope by Jack Thorne. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

What’s surprising about the disparity between the printed and acted scripts of the plays in the 2014-15 Royal Court season is that digital technology has made it easier to accommodate late changes. Nick Hern, who runs NHB, the most visible theatrical imprint apart from Faber, tells me that, with Hope last year, Jack Thorne was able to email the latest rehearsal version as late as 2 November, with proofs sent out to him by 4 November. He returned the proofs on 7 November, and sent through some replacement scenes and speeches the following day before the book was printed on 10 November, a fortnight before previews began.

Yet, even so, by opening night, the published and performed plays notably diverged in several places, with the text, for instance, containing no mention of sequences featuring ukeleles and mime. This may reflect last-minute rethinking by Thorne or the director John Tiffany but may also represent a position – held by many dramatists – that a script can be interpreted in many ways, with the premiere staging being only one of them.

One benefit of digital publishing is that the ebook version of the play-text can theoretically be revised right up to opening night and then during the production, so that the play-text always matches the current played text. But Hern says that dramatists often choose to leave their initial script as it was, preferring it to remain the basis for any revivals.

How To Hold Your Breath by Zinnie Harris. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Some changes, though, have such impact on the meaning of a drama that they must be recorded for future performances. There’s one such striking rewrite in a post-premiere NHB edition of Caryl Churchill’s play Drunk Enough to Say I Love You. In the original script, a malevolent character called Sam threatens and menaces a chap called Jack. The play was widely taken as a metaphor for US foreign policy – [Uncle] Sam dominating [Union] Jack – but, in a preface to the corrected text, the dramatist explained that, while she had always intended Sam to represent America, his victim could have stood for almost anywhere in the world and so she changed the second character’s name to the more universal name of Guy.

Churchill, one of the star names on Hern’s list, well illustrates the gains and pains of publishing plays. As much of her output – including Top Girls and Serious Money – is set by exam boards and regularly produced by student actors, the books sell well. But Churchill’s more recent work – such as Love and Information – consists of unattributed lines of dialogue, with no characters, settings or stage directions specified. So later directors are allowed complete creative leeway, but anyone who reads the script without seeing a production receives only a fragment of the experience.

Indeed, Churchill and Stoppard – Britain’s two leading senior dramatists – offer completely opposite models in this regard. Reading one of his scripts afterwards vastly enhances the experience of seeing the play; but studying one of hers, for the reader, can reduce the play’s impact. This makes them perfect representatives of text-based and event-based theatre.

The modern fashion for providing audiences with the words they have heard is clearly popular. Hern says that, during the limited run of a new play, a theatre might shift around 1,500 to 3,000 copies, depending on the size of the venue: figures that more than satisfy publishers of literary fiction and poetry.

But, as recent examples have shown, the latest renegotiations in the main production hierarchy – between director, writer and designer – mean that a post-theatre reader now sometimes discovers what they didn’t get to see rather than what they did. The text of Game is like having the instruction manual without the machine.