Theatre's changing scene
Theatre's changing scene
The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Italian playwright Dario Fo, a few weeks ago, was a reminder both that the theatre is a major art and that it is in good shape. In spite of strong competition from the cinema and to an even greater extent from television, theatre still attracts vast audiences the world over.
What makes the theatre irreplaceable is the direct physical link it establishes between what happens onstage and the audience. This explains why each performance in the theatre is unique. However many times a film or a video is shown its content never varies; a theatrical performance is never the same twice running. The emotions it arouses are stimulated by a mysterious process of alchemy, which begins when the actors encounter an audience that is always different, and which dies out when the curtain falls. Theatre is designed to serve this mystery, to enable it to happen again and again.
This plasticity which is the touchstone of theatre may be one of the reasons why theatre has survived for so many centuries and found a place in so many cultures; why it has adapted to all periods and has sometimes foreshadowed them and even announced their birth.
Since the invention of classical theatre by the Greeks, great dramatists such as Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, Goethe and Ibsen have given wide currency to this concept of theatre in the West. But what of theatre elsewhere? This issue looks at what happened in Japan and India, in Africa and the Arab world, and to some extent in Latin America and Russia, after theatre rooted in traditional society was confronted with "the shock of the new"modern European theatre which has tended to focus on what might be called intimate tragedy rather than the destiny of communities, highlighting the individual personality rather than the archetype. Far from collapsing, however, theatre in these countries has taken on a new lease of life in the twentieth century.
It is almost as if theatre-lovers everywhere had spontaneously agreed that the new should not be allowed to sign the death warrant of the old in this case theatre itself but should instead seek channels whereby traditional inspiration could irrigate modern forms of expression, whereby the theatre, by transforming itself, would continue to celebrate life.
The ninth International Festival of ExperimentalTheatre, held in Cairo from 1 to 11 September 1997, showed brilliantly how attempts are being made on all continents to present many of the great questions of the contemporary world through the prism of theatre.
In other words, where there's life there's theatre.