Theories of theatre 2: systematic and critical approaches

Abstract

The previous chapter looked at fundamental questions of theatre theory as defined by Greek philosophy and Western traditions of poetological reflection. With the rise of theatre studies as an independent discipline in the 1960s and 1970s, there emerged a need to theorize the subject over and beyond the traditional themes. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the emergence of the director as an independent theatre artist during the twentieth century made it clear that the staging itself was a complex artwork sui generis that could not be analyzed using the available tools of literary criticism. Secondly, far from being a purely historical discipline, theatre studies began to redefine itself also as one concerned with understanding contemporary artistic practice. Thirdly, all branches of the humanities began to be challenged in these decades by what later became known as the theory revolution. A succession of ‘paradigms’ critiqued existing historical or close-reading models of scholarship, some of which will be discussed in this chapter. Semiotics Theatre semiotics concerns itself with the study of how meaning is produced on the stage by means of signs. It is a subdiscipline of the general theory of semiotics that developed in the twentieth century in the wake of Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857–1913) theory of language. Following Saussure's insights into the structures of language, semiotics was rapidly applied to other areas of cultural expression. As a multidiscipline, semiotics investigates all forms of human (and animal) use of signs.