The Fall of Theatricality in the Age of Modernity

Abstract

The above title' maintains that a breakdown has taken place within theatricality. So it would appear at any rate, from a post/late-modernist point of view.2 The aim of this article is to illustrate that this is the case. During the period 1890-1930 the same claim was made by a number of Modernist theater directors. The Russian theater figure Nicolas Nicolaievitch Evreinov posed the question of whether certain periods were more theatrical than others (1930). His opinion was that the Renaissance in England and Spain, and the French Rococo period were distinctly theatrical, while Evreinov's own time was the most de-theatricalized of them all: not even the theater itself was theatrical. Evreinov was not alone in this view of the