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We feel it. We live it. And we read, write, hear about it. We discuss the latest developments in the performing arts. In our industry, the entertainment industry, many make theatre their life, dedicating their heart and soul, their energy and precious time to it. Often to an extent so it absorbs us entirely. So, what is this thing called theatre? Going back to the basics, what does it entail and where does it come from?
Theatre is a collaborative form of performing art. It uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage.
The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music, acrobatics, and dance.
Elements of art, such as painted scenery and stagecraft such as lighting, sound, and special effects are used to enhance the physicality, presence, and immediacy of the experience.
The specific place of the performance, a building, or an outdoor venue, is also named by the word “theatre.”
This derives from the Ancient Greek θέατρον (théatron, “a place for viewing”), itself from θεάομαι (theáomai, “to see”, “to watch”, “to observe”).
Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements.
Modern theatre includes performances of plays and musical theatre. The art forms of ballet, opera, and circus are also theatre and use many conventions such as acting, costumes, and staging.
Let’s take a closer look at the different types of theatre…
Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance.
The term comes from a Greek word meaning “action”, which is derived from the verb δράω, dráō, “to do” or “to act”.
The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception.
The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by and written for this collaborative production and collective reception.
The early modern tragedy Hamlet (1601) by Shakespeare and the classical Athenian tragedy Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BCE) by Sophocles are among the masterpieces of the art of drama.
A modern example is Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill (1956).
Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335 BCE) – the earliest work of dramatic theory.
The use of “drama” in the narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the 19th century. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov’s Ivanov (1887).
In Ancient Greece however, the word drama encompassed all theatrical plays, tragic, comic, or anything in between.
Drama is often combined with music and dance. The drama in opera is generally sung throughout. Musicals generally include both spoken dialogue and songs. And some forms of drama have incidental music or musical accompaniment underscoring the dialogue.
In certain periods of history (the ancient Roman and modern Romantic) some dramas have been written to be read rather than performed. In improvisation, the drama is not written before the moment of performance. Instead, performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.
Music and theatre have had a close relationship since ancient times. Athenian tragedy, for example, was a form of dance-drama that employed a chorus whose parts were sung. As were some of the actors’ responses and their ‘solo songs’.
Modern musical theatre is a form of theatre that also combines music, spoken dialogue, and dance. It emerged from comic opera (especially Gilbert and Sullivan), variety, vaudeville, and music hall genres of the late 19th and early 20th century.
After the Edwardian musical comedy that began in the 1890s, the Princess Theatre musicals of the early 20th century, and comedies in the 1920s and 1930s (such as the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein), with Oklahoma! (1943), musicals moved in a more dramatic direction.
Famous musicals over the subsequent decades were, e.g., My Fair Lady (1956), West Side Story (1957), Hair (1967), A Chorus Line (1975), Les Misérables (1980), Cats (1981), and The Phantom of the Opera (1986). As well as more contemporary hits such as The Lion King (1997), Wicked (2003), and Hamilton (2015).
Musical theatre may be produced on an intimate scale Off-Broadway, in regional theatres, and elsewhere.
But it often includes spectacle. For instance, Broadway and West End musicals often include lavish costumes and sets supported by multimillion-dollar budgets.
Theatre productions that use humor as a vehicle to tell a story qualify as comedies.
This may include a modern farce such as Boeing Boeing or a classical play such as As You Like It.
Theatre expressing bleak, controversial, or taboo subject matter in a deliberately humorous way is referred to as black comedy. Black Comedy can have several genres like slapstick humour, dark and sarcastic comedy.
Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.
Tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilisation.
From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2,500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett’s modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller’s postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change.
In the wake of Aristotle’s Poetics, tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy).
In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre.
Improvisation has been a consistent feature of theatre, with the Commedia dell’arte in the sixteenth century being recognised as the first improvisation form.
Popularized by Nobel Prize Winner Dario Fo and troupes such as the Upright Citizens Brigade, improvisational theatre continues to evolve with many different streams and philosophies.
Keith Johnstone and Viola Spolin are recognized as the first teachers of improvisation in modern times.
With Johnstone exploring improvisation as an alternative to scripted theatre and Spolin and her successors exploring improvisation principally as a tool for developing dramatic work or skills or as a form for situational comedy.
Spolin also became interested in how the process of learning improvisation was applicable to the development of human potential.
Spolin’s son, Paul Sills popularized improvisational theatre as a theatrical art form when he founded, as its first director, The Second City in Chicago.
All this being said, theatre is in a state of constant evolution. This has been shown quite clearly during the Covid19 pandemic, starting last year. The art form, suddenly finding itself without venues to perform in, explored now outlets and forms of expression.
Theatre is part of humanity. As diverse as human beings. Forever woven into the fabric of our societies around the globe.
Main source for this journey into the essence of theatre is Wikipedia.
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Liam Klenk was born in Central Europe and has since lived on four continents. Liam has always been engaged in creative pursuits, ranging from photography and graphic design, to writing short stories and poetry, to working in theatre and shows. In 2016, Liam published his first book and memoir, 'Paralian'.
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