Whose Theatre Is It Anyway? Ancient Chorality versus Modern Drama

Abstract

This chapter explores the extent to which the relative marginalisation of ‘theatre’ in the disciplines of anthropology and sociology the consequence of a set of assumptions about ‘theatre’ which became naturalised in the early 20th century: in particular, the notion of a play as its text, and of (a) performance as its realisation. For many today, the word ‘theatre’ still connotes going to or putting on ‘a play’, and the word ‘drama’ engagement with psychological realism or some or other imagined human universality. But both these notions became dominant in the 1880s, when theatre and acting became increasingly identified with authentic and authored texts: newly serious, respectable, and above all centred around the object on stage, an object which both challenged and flattered the analytical and interpretative capacities of the newly inclusive public it implied. Wherever writing exists, performances, however broadly defined, will have some or other relationship with forms of textual prescription, record, and imitation. However, literary drama (or modern drama, the new drama, or simply ‘the drama’) emerging together with late 19th-century European interest in the authentic, social realism, and naturalism, marked a significant shift in ideas of theatre towards the object on stage and away from a concept of theatre as relational ritual and public event.