Representations of Melodramatic Performance

Abstract

Among the reformers advocating a people's theater in the early twentieth century, there were those theorists of culture for the masses, like Romain Rolland and Anatolii Lunacharsky, who realized that to appeal to a broad audience a genuinely popular theatre must not only be uplifting and civic in spirit, but also entertaining. They recognized that such a popular theater already existed in the nineteenth century in the form of melodramatic performance: it had democratized the stage, brought the lower classes into the theatre, reduced the gap between the actor and the auditorium, and enabled the spectator to enter into the action, thereby creating a sense of communion (Bradby and McCormick 15–29). Rather than proposing a return to the sacred rituals of Greece or the religious festivals of the Middle Ages as the basis of a people's theater, they argued that melodramatic performance—purified of its commercialism and crudity—offered the model for a revolutionary new popular art.