History of theatre

Asian Theatre History

The origin of Asian theatre can be traced to over 3500 years ago, beginning with early forms of Indian and Chinese theatre. Asian theatre developed to a high degree during a period of 1000 years, roughly from 350 to 1330 A.D., a time when there was little theatre in Europe. The cultures of Asia also reached a high point in philosophy and religion during this period, which left a permanent impression on Asian theatre.

Indian Theatre

The origin of theatre in ancient India or rather folk theatre and dramatics can be traced to the religious ritualism of the Vedic Aryans. This folk theatre of the misty past was mixed with dance, ritualism, plus a depiction of events from daily life. It was the last element which made it the origin of the classical theatre of later times. Many historians, notably D. D. Kosambi, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Adya Rangacharaya, etc. have referred to the prevalance of ritualism amongst Indo-Aryan tribes in which some members of the tribe acted as if they were wild animals and some others were the hunters. Those who acted as animals like goats, buffaloes, reindeer, monkeys, etc. were chased by those playing the role of hunters and a mock hunt was enacted.

In such a simple and crude manner did the theatre originate in India about 3500 years back in the Indo-Aryan states of Rig Vedic times. There also must have existed a theatrical tradition in the Harappan cities, but of this we have no literary Numismatics or any other material proof.

Bharata Muni (fl. 5th–2nd century BC) was an ancient Indian writer best known for writing the Natya Shastra, a theoretical treatise on Indian performing arts, including theatre, dance, acting, and music, which has been compared to Aristotle's Poetics. Bharata is often known as the father of Indian theatrical arts. His Natya Shastra seems to be the first attempt to develop the technique or rather art, of drama in a systematic manner. The Natya Shastra a tells us not only what is to be portrayed in a drama, but how the portrayal is to be done. Drama, as Bharata Muni says, is the imitation of men and their doings (loka-vritti). As men and their doings have to be respected on the stage, so drama in Sanskrit is also known by the term roopaka which means portrayal.

The Natya Shastra is incredibly wide in its scope. It consists of minutely detailed precepts for both playwrights and actors. Bharata describes ten types of drama ranging from one to ten acts. In addition, he lays down principles for stage design, makeup, costume, dance (various movements and gestures), a theory of aesthetics (rasas and bhavas), acting, directing and music, each in individual chapters.

Bharata sets out a detailed theory of drama comparable to the Poetics of Aristotle. He refers to bhavas, the imitations of emotions that the actors perform, and the rasas (emotional responses) that they inspire in the audience. He argues that there are eight principal rasas: love, pity, anger, disgust, heroism, awe, terror and comedy, and that plays should mix different rasas but be dominated by one. According to the Natya Shastra, all the modes of expression employed by an individual viz. speech, gestures, movements and intonation must be used. The representation of these expressions can have different modes (vritti) according to the predominance and emphasis on one mode or another. Bharatamuni recognises four main modes: speech and poetry (bharati vritti), dance and music (kaishiki vritti), action (arabhatti vritti) and emotions (sattvatti vritti).

The Ramayana and Mahabharata can be considered the first recognised plays that originated in India. These epics provided the inspiration to the earliest Indian dramatists and they do even today. Indian dramatists such as Bhasa (c. 2nd century BC) wrote plays that were heavily inspired by the Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Kālidāsa (c. 1st century BC) is arguably considered to be ancient India's greatest Sanskrit poet and dramatist. Three famous romantic plays written by Kālidāsa are the Mālavikāgnimitram (Mālavikā and Agnimitra), Vikramuurvashiiya (Pertaining to Vikrama and Urvashi), and Abhijñānaśākuntala (The Recognition of Shakuntala). The last was inspired by a story in the Mahabharata and is the most famous. It was the first to be translated into English and German. In comparison to Bhasa, who drew heavily from the epics, Kālidāsa can be considered an original playwright.

The next great Indian dramatist was Bhavabhuti (c. 7th century). He is said to have written the following three plays: Malati-Madhava, Mahaviracharita and Uttar Ramacharita. Among these three, the last two cover between them, the entire epic of Ramayana. The powerful Indian emperor Harsha (606-648) is credited with having written three plays: the comedy Ratnavali, Priyadarsika, and the Buddhist drama Nagananda. Many other dramatists followed during the Middle Ages.

Chinese Theatre

Main articles: Chinese theatre, Beijing Opera, Cantonese Opera

There are references to theatrical entertainments in China as early as 1500 BC during the Shang Dynasty; they often involved music, clowning and acrobatic displays.

The Tang Dynasty is sometimes known as 'The Age of 1000 Entertainments'. During this era, Emperor Xuanzong formed an acting school known as the Children of the Pear Garden to produce a form of drama that was primarily musical.

During the Tang Dynasty, shadow puppetry first emerged as a recognized form of theatre in China. There were two distinct forms of shadow puppetry, Cantonese (southern) and Pekingese (northern). The two styles were differentiated by the method of making the puppets and the positioning of the rods on the puppets, as opposed to the type of play performed by the puppets. Both styles generally performed plays depicting great adventure and fantasy, rarely was this very stylized form of theatre used for political propaganda. Cantonese shadow puppets were the larger of the two. They were built using thick leather which created more substantial shadows. Symbolic color was also very prevalent; a black face represented honesty, a red one bravery. The rods used to control Cantonese puppets were attached perpendicular to the puppets’ heads. Thus, they were not seen by the audience when the shadow was created. Pekingese puppets were more delicate and smaller. They were created out of thin, translucent leather (usually taken from the belly of a donkey). They were painted with vibrant paints, thus they cast a very colorful shadow. The thin rods which controlled their movements were attached to a leather collar at the neck of the puppet. The rods ran parallel to the bodies of the puppet then turned at a ninety degree angle to connect to the neck. While these rods were visible when the shadow was cast, they laid outside the shadow of the puppet; thus they did not interfere with the appearance of the figure. The rods attached at the necks to facilitate the use of multiple heads with one body. When the heads were not being used, they were stored in a muslin book or fabric lined box. The heads were always removed at night. This was in keeping with the old superstition that if left intact, the puppets would come to life at night. Some puppeteers went so far as to store the heads in one book and the bodies in another, to further reduce the possibility of reanimating puppets. Shadow puppetry is said to have reached its highest point of artistic development in the eleventh century before becoming a tool of the government.

In the Sung Dynasty, there were many popular plays involving acrobatics and music. These developed in the Yuan Dynasty into a more sophisticated form with a four or five act structure.

Yuan drama spread across China and diversified into numerous regional forms, the best known of which is Beijing Opera, which is still popular today.

South-East Asian Theatre

Theatre in South-East Asia was mostly influenced by Indian theatre. In Thailand, it has been a tradition from the Middle Ages to stage plays based on plots drawn from Indian epics. In particular, the theatrical version of Thailand's national epic Ramakien, a version of the Indian Ramayana, remains popular in Thailand even today.

In Cambodia where, at the ancient capital Angkor Wat, stories from the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata have been carved on the walls of temples and palaces. Similar reliefs are found at Borobudur in Indonesia.

Japanese Theatre

Noh

Main article: Noh

During the 14th century, there were small companies of actors in Japan who performed short, sometimes vulgar comedies. A director of one of these companies, Kan'ami (1333-1384), had a son, Zeami Motokiyo (1363-1443) who was considered one of the finest child actors in Japan. When Kan'ami's company performed for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), the Shogun of Japan, he implored Zeami to have a court education for his arts. After Zeami succeeded his father, he continued to perform and adapt his style into what is today Noh. A mixture of pantomime and vocal acrobatics, this style has fascinated the Japanese for hundreds of years.

Bunraku

Main article: Bunraku

The countries of Asia, after a long period of civil wars and political disarray, were unified and at peace primarily due to emperor Tokugawa Ieyasu (1600-1868). However, alarmed at increasing Christian growth, he cut off contact from Japan to Europe and China and outlawed Christianity. When peace did come, a flourish of cultural influence and growing merchant class demanded its own entertainment. The first form of theatre to flourish was known as Bunraku. The founder of and main contributor to Bunraku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725), turned his form of theatre into a true art form. Bunraku is a highly stylized form of theatre using puppets, today about 1/3d the size of a human. The men who control the puppets train their entire lives to become master puppeteers, when they can then operate the puppet's head and right arm and choose to show their faces during the performance. The other puppeteers, controlling the less important limbs of the puppet, cover themselves and their faces in a black suit, to imply their invisibility. The dialogue is handled by a single person, who uses varied tones of voice and speaking manners to simulate different characters. Chikamatsu wrote thousands of plays during his lifetime, most of which are still used today.

Kabuki

Main article: Kabuki

Kabuki began shortly after Bunraku, legend has it by an actress named Okuni, who lived around the end of the sixteenth century. Most of Kabuki's material came from Nõ and Bunraku, and its erratic dance-type movements are also an effect of Bunraku. However, Kabuki is less formal and more distant than Nõ, yet very popular among the Japanese public. Actors are trained in many varied things including dancing, singing, pantomime, and even acrobatics. Kabuki was first performed by young girls, then by young boys, and by the end of the sixteenth century, Kabuki companies consisted of all men. The men who portrayed women on stage were specifically trained to elicit the essence of a woman in their subtle movements and gestures.

Western Theatre History

Greek theatre

The earliest days of western theatre remain obscure, but the oldest surviving plays come from ancient Greece. Most philologists agree that Greek theatre evolved from staged religious choral performances, probably in the generation preceding Thespis. There are, however, findings suggesting the possible existence of theatre-like performances much earlier, such as the famous "Blind Steps" of the Minoan Palace at Knossos: a broad stone stairway descending to a flat stone courtyard that leads nowhere - an arrangement strongly suggesting that the courtyard was used for a staged spectacle and the stairway was in fact used as seating.

Roughly one tenth of Ancient Greek theatrical texts have survived intact.

Aristotle is also important, primarily for his description and analysis of Greek drama in his Poetics.

The above-mentioned playwrights made some of the most renowned Greek plays, but their staging had little or nothing to do with twentieth-century theatre. Their dramas were always part of a series of four performances (a "tetralogy"): the first, second and third plays were a dramatic trilogy of related events staged in temporal order, and the culminating fourth performance was a satyr play, a play on a lighter note, with enhanced celebratory and dance elements. Obviously, performances lasted several hours and were held during daytime.

The dramas rarely had more than three actors (all male), who played the different roles using masks. There was a chorus on the stage all the time which sang songs and sometimes spoke in unison. As far as we know, each drama was played just a single time, at the traditional drama contest. Such contests were always held in the context of major religious festivals, most notably those in honor of the god Dionysus, and competed for an honorific prize (such as a tripod and a sum of money) awarded by a panel of judges - usually these were the sacerdotal and civil officers presiding over the particular religious festival. The prize was awarded jointly to the producer, who had financed the staging, and the poet, who was at the same time the author, composer, choreographer and director of the plays.

The importance of ancient Greek theatre came largely in retrospect, as major playwrights like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe tried to recreate classical theatre unsuccessfully. Another school attempting to revive classical theatre argued that Greek actors did not speak, but sang. From this school came the opera.

Roman theatre

The theatre of ancient Rome was heavily influenced by the Greek tradition, and as with many other literary genres Roman dramatists tended to adapt and translate from the Greek. For example, Seneca's Phaedra was based on that of Euripides, and many of the comedies of Plautus were direct translations of works by Menander.

When comparing and contrasting ancient Roman theatre to that of Greek theatre it can easily be said that Roman theatre was less influenced by religion. Also, Roman theatre was more for aesthetic appeal. In Roman theatre war was a more common thing to appear on stage as opposed to the Greek theatre where wars were more commonly spoken about in Greek plays. This no doubt a reflection of Roman culture and habits.

The audience was often loud and rude, rarely applauding the actors, but always shouting insults and booing. Because the audience was so loud, much of the plays were pantomimed and repetitive. The actors developed a kind of code that would tell the audience about the characters just by looking at them.

A Black wig meant the character was a young man.
A Gray wig meant the character was an old man.
A Red wig meant the character was a slave.
A white robe meant the character was an old man.
A purple robe meant the character was a young man.
A yellow robe meant the character was a woman. (Needed in Early Roman Theatre, as originally female characters were played by men, however as the Roman Theatre progressed, women slaves took the roles of women in plays)
A yellow tassel meant the character was a god.

Plays lasted for two hours, and were usually comedies. Most comedies involved mistaken identity (such as gods disguised as humans).

Medieval European Theatre

In the Middle Ages, after the fall of Roman civilization, cities were abandoned, southern and western Europe became increasingly more agricultural. After several hundred years towns re-emerged. The Roman Catholic church dominated religion, education and often politics. What remained of theatre was based on the Greek and Roman performing arts: mimes, minstrels and traveling jugglers.

Theatre was reborn as liturgical dramas—written in Latin and dealing with Bible stories—which would be performed by priests or church members. Then came vernacular drama spoken in common language, not Latin, and were a more elaborate series of one-act dramas taking place in town squares or other parts of the city. There were three types of vernacular dramas. Mystery or cycle plays were short dramas based on the Old and New Testaments organized into historical cycles. Miracle plays dealt with the lives of saints. Morality plays taught a lesson through allegorical characters representing virtues or faults. Secular plays in this period existed, but medieval religious drama is most remembered today.

Plays were set up in individual scenic units called mansions or in wagon stages which were platforms mounted on wheels used to move scenery. Often providing their own costumes, amateur performers in England were only men, but other countries had female performers. The platform stage allowed for abrupt changes in location which was an unidentified space and not a specific locale.

Among the more notable religious plays were "The Summoning of Everyman" (an allegory designed to teach the faithful that acts of Christian charity are necessary for entry into heaven), passion plays (such as the Oberammergau Passion Play, which is still performed every 10 years), and the great cycle plays (massive, festive wagon-mounted processions involving hundreds of actors, and drawing pilgrims, tourists, and entrepreneurs) York Corpus Christi Play Simulator. The morality play and mystery play (as they are known in English) were two distinct genres.

Since many of the most theatrically successful medieval religious plays were designed to teach Catholic doctrine, the Protestant Reformation targeted the theatre, especially in England, in an effort to stamp out allegiance to Rome. See Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (1994).

Whereas the Church carefully watched over the scripts of its dogmatic plays, in order to ensure that the faithful were being taught accurate doctrine, by the end of the 1500s Queen Elizabeth was controlling the stage just as effectively, through a system of patronage, licensing, and censorship. Hamlet's reference to a frenetic performance that "out-Herods Herod" refers the tradition of presenting King Herod as a bombastic figure, suggesting that Shakespeare seems to have expected his audience to be familiar with this particular medieval tradition, long after the religious landscape in England had changed.

Puritan opposition to the stage -- informed by the arguments of the early Church Fathers who had written screeds against the decadent and violent entertainments of the Romans -- argued not only that the stage in general was pagan, but that any play that represented a religious figure was inherently idolatrous. In 1642, the Protestant authorities banned the performance of all plays within the city limits of London. A sweeping assault against the alleged immoralities of the theatre crushed whatever remained in England of the Medieval dramatic tradition.

Commedia dell'Arte

Commedia dell'Arte troupes performed lively improvisational playlets across Europe for centuries. It originated in Italy in the 1560s, and differed from conventional theatre in that it was neither professional nor open to the public. Commedia dell'Arte required only actors at its heart, no scene and very few props were considered absolutely essential. Plays did not originate from scripts but scenarios, which were loose frameworks of productions providing only the situations, complications, and outcome of the work. The actors improvised most dialogue and comedic stunts (called lazzi). The plays were based around a few stock characters, which could be divided into three groups: the lovers, masters, and servants. The lovers had different names and characteristics in most plays and often were the children of the master's character. The role of master was normally based on one of three stereotypes: Pantalone, an eldery Venetian merchant who wore his pajamas most often; Dottore, Pantalone's friend or rival, a doctor or lawyer who acted far more intelligent than he really was; and Capitano, who was once a lover's character, but evolved into a man who bragged about his exploits in love and war, but was often terrifically unskilled in both. He normally carried a sword and wore a cape and feathered headdress. The servant character type (called zanni) had only one recurring role: Arlecchino (also called Harlequin). He was both cunning and ignorant, but an accomplished dancer. He typically carried a wooden stick with a slit in the middle so it made a louder noise when striking something. It is from this "weapon" that we garner the term "slapstick." A Commedia troupe typically consisted of 10 to 12 members, a few of which were women. Most actors were paid by taking a share of the play's profits roughly equivalent to the size of their role. Commedia was in its peak from 1575-1650, but even after that time new scenarios were written and performed. Carlo Goldoni wrote a few commedia scenarios starting in 1734, but since he considered the genre too vulgar, he refined the topics of his own to be more sophisticated. He also wrote several true plays starring Commedia characters. By 1775, however, the genre of Commedia dell'Arte lost public interest and died out. Improvisation today is very close to that of Commedia.

Renaissance theatre

Neoclassical Theatre

Neoclassicism was the dominant form of theatre in the eighteenth century. It demanded decorum and rigorous adherence to the classical unities. Neoclassical theater as well as the time period is characterized by its grandiosity. The costumes and scenery were intricate and elaborate. The acting is characterized by large gestures and melodrama. Many agree that soap operas actually have neoclassicism intertwined, especially with the complicated and multi-faceted plots.

Twentieth Century Theatre

Twentieth century theatre often continues the project of realism but there has also been a great deal of experimental theatre that rejects the conventions of realism and earlier forms. Epic Theatre, absurdist theatre and postmodern theatre are examples. However, the dominant form of theatre is now the end of this horrid but funny style musical. Example playwrights and practitioners obiously include Brecht, Artaud, Stanislavsky, Pinter, Berkoff, Becket etc

References

Wilson, Edwin. Goldfarb, Alvin. Theatre: The Lively Art. Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 4 edition (June 21, 2001). ISBN 0072462817

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