Theatre

• 1. Introduction

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  Theatre is a collaborative form of performing art that places live performers, usually actors, in front of a live audience in a specific place, often a stage. The word itself reaches back to the Ancient Greek theatron, meaning a place for viewing, and behind that to theaomai, the verb to see, to watch, to observe. From the start, then, theatre was defined by the act of looking. A performer might reach an audience through gesture, speech, song, music, and dance, sometimes all at once. Painted scenery and stagecraft like lighting were used to sharpen the physicality, presence, and immediacy of the moment. This is the oldest form of drama, and it raises questions that span continents and millennia. How did a festival honouring a wine god in one Greek city give the West its vocabulary for performance? Why did puppeteers store their puppets' heads separately at night? And what happened when an English government decided to padlock the playhouses entirely?

• 2. Born In Athens

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  The city-state of Athens is where Western theatre originated, woven into a broader culture of theatricality that ran through festivals, religious rituals, politics, law, athletics, music, poetry, weddings, funerals, and symposia. Mandatory attendance at the City Dionysia, as an audience member or even a participant, was treated as part of citizenship. According to Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BCE and ranks as the first theoretician of theatre, the origins lay in festivals honouring Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. Performances filled semi-circular auditoria cut into hillsides, large enough to seat between 10,000 and 20,000 people. The stage held a dancing floor called the orchestra, a dressing room, and a scene-building area known as the skene. Because the words mattered most, good acoustics and clear delivery were paramount, and the actors, always men, wore masks suited to their characters. A single performer might play several parts behind those masks. Athenian tragedy is the oldest surviving form of tragedy, a kind of dance-drama that emerged sometime in the 6th century BCE and flowered in the 5th. Of more than a thousand tragedies staged in that golden century, only 32 survive, with complete texts by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Most dramatised events from Greek mythology, but The Persians is the exception, staging the Persian reaction to their defeat at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE. When Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in 472 BCE, he had already been writing tragedies for more than 25 years.

• 3. Comedy And The Satyr

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  Athenian comedy is conventionally split into three periods, Old, Middle, and New. Old Comedy survives largely in the eleven extant plays of Aristophanes, while Middle Comedy is mostly lost, preserved only in short fragments in authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis. New Comedy is known primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of Menander. Aristotle defined comedy as a representation of laughable people, involving some blunder or ugliness that causes neither pain nor disaster. Alongside comedy and tragedy at the City Dionysia stood the satyr play, a third form rooted in rural agricultural rituals dedicated to Dionysus. Satyrs were his loyal woodland companions, often given to drunken revelry and mischief at his side. The form was classified as tragicomedy, leaning toward the burlesque, and its plots usually concerned the gods and their tangled involvement in human affairs, backed by a chorus of satyrs. Playwrights competing at the festival had to present a tetralogy, usually three tragedies and one satyr play, though the individual works were not necessarily connected by story or theme. Official records called didaskaliai begin from 501 BCE, the year the satyr play was introduced. Far from Athens, the Greek colonists of Southern Italy, the so-called Magna Graecia, carried this art from their motherland to theatres like the famous Greek Theatre of Taormina. Epicharmus, who worked all his life with the tyrants of Syracuse, staged the gods in comedy for the first time, before the more famous Aristophanes.

• 4. Rome Takes The Stage

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  The Roman historian Livy wrote that Romans first experienced theatre in the 4th century BC, through a performance by Etruscan actors. What followed was a thriving and diverse art form, ranging from street theatre, nude dancing, and acrobatics, to the broadly appealing situation comedies of Plautus, to the high-style tragedies of Seneca. The Hellenisation of Roman culture in the 3rd century BC had a profound and energising effect, and the year 240 BC marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. Livius Andronicus wrote the first important works of Roman literature from that year, with Gnaeus Naevius beginning five years later, though no plays from either writer have survived. The surviving Roman comedies are all fabula palliata, based on Greek subjects, and come from two dramatists, Titus Maccius Plautus and Publius Terentius Afer, known as Plautus and Terence. Plautus, the more popular, wrote between 205 and 184 BC, and twenty of his comedies survive, admired for the wit of his dialogue. Terence wrote his six surviving comedies between 166 and 160 BC, sometimes combining several Greek originals into double-plots. The Roman comic dramatists abolished the chorus and added musical accompaniment to the dialogue, somewhere between one-third in Plautus and two-thirds in Terence. Nine of Seneca's tragedies survive, all adapted from Greek originals; his Phaedra was based on Euripides' Hippolytus. Unlike the Greeks, Rome allowed female performers, and a minority of actresses played speaking roles. Some, such as Eucharis, Dionysia, Galeria Copiola, and Fabia Arete, achieved wealth, fame, and recognition, and formed their own acting guild, the Sociae Mimae.

• 5. The Sanskrit Achievement

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  The first form of Indian theatre was Sanskrit theatre, whose earliest-surviving fragments date from the 1st century CE. It emerged sometime between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE, then flourished from the 1st century CE to the 10th, a period of relative peace in which hundreds of plays were written. The ancient Vedas, hymns composed between 1500 and 1000 BCE, contain no hint of theatre, and the treatise on grammar called the Mahabhasya by Patanjali, from 140 BCE, holds the earliest reference to what may have been its seeds. The major source of evidence is A Treatise on Theatre, the Natyashastra, attributed to Bharata Muni, with estimates of its composition ranging from 200 BCE to 200 CE. It is the most complete work of dramaturgy in the ancient world, addressing acting, dance, music, dramatic construction, architecture, costuming, make-up, props, the organisation of companies, the audience, and competitions. Sanskrit theatre was performed on sacred ground by priests trained in dance, music, and recitation through a hereditary process. Companies under royal patronage were led by a stage manager called a sutradhara, whose name literally means holder of the strings or threads, a role thought analogous to a puppeteer. There were no prohibitions against female performers, and companies were all-male, all-female, and of mixed gender. The Treatise gives most attention to acting, abhinaya, split into a realistic style, lokadharmi, and a conventional one, natyadharmi. Kalidasa, in the 1st century BCE, is arguably regarded as ancient India's greatest Sanskrit dramatist. His Abhijnanashakuntala, The Recognition of Shakuntala, drew on a story in the Mahabharata and became the first to be translated into English and German, later influencing Goethe's Faust.

• 6. Shadows And Pear Gardens

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  The Tang dynasty is sometimes called the Age of 1000 Entertainments, the era in which Ming Huang formed an acting school known as The Pear Garden to produce a primarily musical form of drama. That is why actors came to be called Children of the Pear Garden. During the dynasty of Empress Ling, shadow puppetry first emerged as a recognised form of theatre in China, splitting into two distinct styles, Pekingese in the north and Cantonese in the south. Cantonese shadow puppets were the larger, built from thick leather that cast more substantial shadows, with symbolic colour signalling character; a black face meant honesty, a red one bravery. Pekingese puppets were smaller and more delicate, made from thin, translucent leather usually taken from the belly of a donkey, then painted in vibrant colours. The rods that controlled them were attached at the neck to allow multiple heads on one body, and those heads were always removed at night. This followed an old superstition that, if left intact, the puppets would come to life, so some puppeteers stored heads in one book and bodies in another to further reduce the risk of reanimation. Shadow puppetry is said to have reached its highest artistic point in the eleventh century before becoming a tool of the government. In the Song dynasty, popular plays mixed acrobatics and music, developing in the Yuan dynasty into the more sophisticated zaju, with a four- or five-act structure. Yuan drama spread across China and diversified, producing forms such as Peking Opera, which remains popular today. Across the sea, the Japanese forms of Kabuki, No, and Kyogen developed in the 17th century CE.

• 7. The Wayang Tradition

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  In Indonesia, theatre performances have developed for thousands of years and become an important part of local culture, with the oldest forms linked directly to local literary traditions, both oral and written. The prominent puppet theatres are the wayang golek, a wooden rod-puppet play of the Sundanese, and the wayang kulit, a leather shadow-puppet play of the Javanese and Balinese. Both draw much of their repertoire from indigenised versions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the same epics that feed the wayang wong, or human theatre, of Java and Bali. Some wayang golek performances instead present Muslim stories, called menak. The earliest evidence of wayang comes from the late 1st millennium CE, in medieval-era texts and archeological sites, and the oldest known record dates to the 9th century. Around 840 AD, Old Javanese inscriptions called the Jaha Inscriptions, issued by Maharaja Sri Lokapala from the Mataram kingdom in Central Java, mention three sorts of performers: atapukan, the mask dance show, aringgit, the wayang puppet show, and abanol, the joke art. An 11th-century Javanese poem describes ringgit as a leather shadow figure. Elsewhere, theatre in the medieval Islamic world included puppet theatre alongside live passion plays known as ta'ziyeh, in which actors re-enacted episodes from Muslim history, with Shia Islamic plays centred on the martyrdom of Ali's sons Hasan ibn Ali and Husayn ibn Ali.

• 8. Closed Doors In London

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  Theatre took a long pause in England from 1642 to 1660 because of the Puritan Interregnum. Rising anti-theatrical sentiment had already produced William Prynne's Histriomastix in 1633, the most notorious attack on theatre before the ban, and in 1642 the Puritans ordered London's theatres closed, viewing them as sinful. On the 24th of January 1643, the actors protested by writing a pamphlet titled The Actors remonstrance or complaint for the silencing of their profession, and banishment from their severall play-houses. The stagnation ended when Charles II returned to the throne in 1660 in the Restoration, bringing with him the influence of French culture absorbed during his exile in France. Two companies were licensed to perform that year, the Duke's Company and the King's Company, sometimes in converted buildings such as Lisle's Tennis Court. The first West End theatre, the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, was designed by Thomas Killigrew and built on the site of the present Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The new theatre house abandoned the round Elizabethan form of the Globe for a stage in front and stadium seating, where some seats were better than others; the king took the very middle, with the widest view of the stage's vanishing point. Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg became one of the most influential set designers of the time through his use of floor space and scenery. The century also brought women to the stage, since Charles II disliked young men playing young women and asked that women play their own parts. These actresses were treated as celebrities, yet some called them unladylike, and the new freedom let playwrights add plot twists like women dressing as men. The era's comedies followed the love lives of fashionable young people, much like Sheridan's The School for Scandal, and many were fashioned after the French tradition, especially Moliere.

  Aristotle argued that tragedy consists of six qualitative parts, in order of importance: mythos or plot, ethos or character, dianoia or thought, lexis or diction, melos or song, and opsis or spectacle. His Poetics, from around 335 BCE, is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory, and as the scholar Marvin Carlson notes, almost every detail about it has aroused divergent opinions. The word drama itself comes from a Greek word meaning action, derived from the verb drao, to do or to act. Among the masterpieces of the art are Shakespeare's Hamlet from 1601, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex from around 429 BCE, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night from 1956. In the modern world, mounting a play usually draws together a playwright, a director, a cast of actors, and a technical team including scenic, lighting, costume, and sound designers, a stage manager, a production manager, and a technical director. Stagecraft covers the practical side of this work, from constructing and rigging scenery to hanging lights, procuring props, and mixing sound, and it can be managed by a single person or, in modern Broadway houses, by hundreds of skilled carpenters, painters, electricians, and stagehands. Konstantin Stanislavski treated theatre as an art-form autonomous from literature, and his system of actor training has remained at the core of mainstream Western performance for much of the last century. Actors frequently employ his basic concepts without knowing they do so, though many equate his system with the North American Method, whose exclusively psychological techniques contrast sharply with his holistic, psychophysical approach that works both from the inside out and the outside in.