philosophy and theatre an introduction

me, is what the‘performer’and the‘spectator’know about their situation: does the watcher know that the empty space has been call ...

3 Truth and Illusion Antonin Artaud’s provocative collection of essays, The Theatre and its Double, is a call to arms for those ...

arguably more significant. It also has some historical support: certainly, in medieval texts, the Latin termludi is found to ref ...

Content and form Artaud’s remark about‘lies and illusion’reminds us that, even at first glance, there are two completely differe ...

theatre with the ethics of everyday life.^15 Creating a definition with a particular aesthetic or philosophical goal in mind is ...

also about cats and birds, perhaps predators and prey. For these sorts of reasons, the idea that we learn from theatrical perfor ...

theatrical performance can go wrong in a way that afilm can’t: actors can get put off, forget lines, corpse; equally, actors may ...

Even with regard to explicit statements, Russell’s claim requires serious qualification. First of all, there’s a great deal more ...

the other kinds of performance under consideration (but, then again, the spoken word is often a feature of other kinds of artist ...

buildings.^24 Plays are adapted asfilms and vice versa, used as the basis for operas, as inspiration for dance performances. We ...

difference to us; it has no connection (I would suggest) with whatever it is that we think we learn from plays like Hamlet.^20 T ...

The Old Vic’s 1960 production of Romeo and Juliet would, on this understanding, be renaissance drama and post-war theatre. We ca ...

itself to a narrow, traditional focus on a Western literary canon, to the exclusion of other, marginalised forms of theatre that ...

expressed by Aristotle, and I focus on his view, although he is by no means the only one.^23 Aristotle, recall, argued that trag ...

going to see? Not really: this performance differs considerably from another performance I have seen; but they are bothHamlet; s ...

of character as playwrights had hitherto conceived of it was completely false. People change their minds, act irrationally and b ...

analysis are mostly irrelevant; any attempt to tell performers what to do, based on the words of some playwright (dead or alive) ...

truth-seeker, or both? Does it say that what happens to such a type is that he always comes to no good, or that heprobablycomes ...

work.^32 None of these pressures obviously applies to play texts as works of dramatic literature–so one can see why reading a pl ...

directors and theatre companiescanmake all sorts of creative decisions about how to use the text ofHamlet, including using it in ...