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I don't think Tolkien was condemning drama per se, or even illustration - he illustrated his own myths many times. I think he was merely pointing out that the more we are given the less we participate, the less we contribute.
What drama does is to effectively take away our participation in the experience - particularly so with fantasy. An actor performing a dramatic reading of a fairy story is different to a full cast movie, with sfx & close ups, where the actors effectively take over. Faerie is, simply, different. I don't think we can accuse a 'bells & smells', high church catholic of puritanism. Dramatisation of myth - which is by its nature impersonal - as far from the everyday as possible - requires as much participation from the individual as possible if it is to work.
We have to keep in mind that Tolkien is speaking specifically of fantasy in the essay. Some things can be dramatised, some can't. It is fantasy, for Tolkien which cannot be dramatised. Tolkien is also putting forward a defence of literature as an artform in its own right. There is now almost an assumption that books are effectively, as I said, 'first draft screenplays' Tolkien saw it differently. Some literary works are not dramatisable - by their nature. Its not a matter of how much money, or how good the effects or the director/writers are. And in a work like LotR, where so much of the power of the work is due to the language (It began with language, after all) that is especially the case.
How can one dramatically reproduce the effect of the 'drums in the deep', with their onomatopoeic 'boom- doom, doom-boom', or adequately reproduce a creature of 'shadow & flame'?
Presenting realistic drama is one thing - especially if the piece was written as a drama to be performed - but to attempt to present something written to be read as a drama, especially if the piece is a fantasy, is, as Tolkien states, asking too much.
LotR was never intended to be dramatised - one of the most powerful & affecting things about it is the use of language (of which Tolkien was a master), & that is all lost when the story, stripped to its bare bones, is presented as drama in any form other than a dramatised reading (which, lets face it, is effectively what Greek drama, as originally performed, was). How many times have we heard the filmmakers say that 'x' would not have worked on screen? This is an admission that the material they were working with is not suited to such adaptation.
Of course, drama & illustration can give us images, but that's the whole point - we are given the images, we don't participate in their construction, so that world is not our world. I didn't see my Middle earth on screen at any point, though at times I was vaguely reminded of it - mostly by my feelings about how they'd got it 'wrong'. I could watch it as a 'drama' & be affected by moments in it - Eowyn singing Theodred's funeral dirge made the hairs stand on the back of my neck - but it was not 'Lord of the Rings' to me, for the very reasons Tolkien gives in the essay.
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