| Popis: |
Theatre is the most social of art forms and, as such, requires a great many conventions so that the theatrical event, on and off the stage, can take place in an orderly fashion. We know from history that festivals in Ancient Greece were highly organized. It was also in Ancient Greece that the theoretical foundations of our western theatre were laid and, twenty-five centuries on, the name of Aristotle is still invoked, rightly or wrongly, in discussions concerning the structure of drama. Although the Anglo-Saxon world escaped the worst excesses of neo-classical formalism, mainly thanks to the influence of Shakespeare, the rules that came to govern French seventeenth-century theatre (unities of time, place and action; unity of tone; verisimilitude and decorum) aimed at creating an orderly, coherent, harmonious, rational dramatic poem. These same rules came to embody the ideal of playwriting throughout the western world after neo-classicism established itself as the dominant aesthetic norm in the seventeenth century. A good play was a play with a strong, straightforward plot moving relentlessly to its logical, tragic or comic, conclusion, with clearly drawn and highly individualized characters, with well-written, rhetorical dialogue, to be clearly and evocatively spoken by actors who convincingly portrayed their roles in a familiar setting or in some easily identifiable exotic location. Such were the ideals upheld by all dramatists hoping to have their plays performed in the theatre, from Aeschylus to Ibsen. At the risk of further oversimplification, it can be said that, before the twentieth century, the dramatic form was eminently logical and rational (even when dealing with extraordinary events) and that it aimed at providing spectators with an authentic picture of their world. When our forebears recognized that the world was in a state of chaos-and they often did-their artists aimed at constructing meaning out of that same chaos, at creating order out of disorder, at giving shape to what is shapeless. The ‘New Theatre’ of the 1950s, soon to be known as ‘the theatre of the absurd’, overturnedtwenty-five centuries of tradition by rejecting all rules and by facing the chaos head-on. |
