Theatre Of Beauty

Theatre is a finite Art. Once a particular show ends, that is it. If you did not see that show, you never will. Thus theories about theatre all, tend to be about the process of bringing a script to stage, how to act, how to talk, etc. No one can talk about theatre they have not seen. They can read reviews, they can look at directors notes, hear the memories of people who did see, or were in a particular piece, but this is no substitute for actually seeing an historically important performance.

I am told that David Warner's portrayal of Hamlet in the sixties defined the character for a generation, yet I will never see that portrayal, how, therefore, can I assess it, write about it, discuss or analyse it.

This gives theatre one great advantage and one great disadvantage.

Advantage: Ideas are always fresh.
Disadvantage: Ideas are constantly reused.

Occasionally, someone like E. Gordon Craig comes along and introduces some new ideas. In 2000 years of theatre, there are about 30 to 40 people who can be identified as having changed the course of theatre. Shakespeare, Brecht, Stanislavsky, Boal, Artaud, Brook, Pirandello, Beckett, Shaw, Satre, Chekov, Meyerhold, Grotowski, Craig. These are the famous ones.

For one of the oldest identifiable arts to have only had theories applied to it in the past hundred years is incredibly strange.

Also, incredibly most of those people's theories concentrate more on the science of theatre, i.e how to get from the script to the stage by one of several routes, than to the art of theatre.

Artaud, Beckett, Brook, Meyerhold concentrate on the idea of theatre, what and why it is, as an art, rather than as a political engine which is how such people as Boal, Brecht, Satre, Shaw saw it as.

Artaud's theatre of cruelty is an idea of how to attune an audience into an entity capable or recieving his vast ideas, by being cruel and unusual to them. Beckett's plays are symmetrical. Brook attempts to turn theatre into a religious experience, even replacing seats with pews. Meyerhold fought against Stanislavsky's realism, returning symbolism to theatre.

All of these are attempts to find out what theatre is and what it is capable of. They all miss the point. Theatre is everything and is capable of anything.

While each individual production may be part of a particular school of thought and may advance that school of thought.

I have lost my train of thought, it is nearly four in the morning, I shall continue this at another time.