Theatrical Conventions Research Articles

The Juncture Of Musical Theatre And Theatrical Music: A Literature Review

This paper is a position paper that highlights the intersection of musical theatre and theatrical music, two art forms within the Ghanaian context that blend music and drama but with distinct orientations. The essence is to clarify blurred boundaries and lack of clear distinction between these two art forms, which often leads students of music to confusion or misinterpretation in composition and performance discourse, performance practices, and artistic production. The approach used is a review of some topical issues related to the topic to unravel the distinction to make contribution to knowledge in music composition and performance as well as other cognate disciplines such as ethnomusicology and theatre studies. It is seen that while musical theatre integrates music as a vehicle for storytelling within a staged performance, theatrical music emphasises music's dramatic qualities without necessarily conforming to theatrical conventions. The two concepts have shared elements such as narrative, emotional expression, and performance as well as some differences in structure. Understanding the two Chiasmus is key to composing works that identify the key juncture where these art forms converge, offering insights into their mutual influence in contemporary performance.

Scénická poznámka středověkého chrámového dramatu z hlediska obsahu a formy. Úvod do problematiky

The stage directions of medieval plays, the so-called rubrics, represent a unique and integral part of the dramatic text which is most often examined for the purpose of interpreting and reconstructing the staging aspect of a concrete play or general staging forms and conventions of the period theatre. Somewhat less attention has been paid to formal and stylistic aspects of rubrics, their language, purpose and their diverse functions within the text of the medieval play, their relation to the dialogue, and so on. The study presents the content, style and specific form of the rubrics of medieval Church drama and outlines possible ways of their interpretation with the help of modern theories and classification of stage directions in a drama. It is based on the previous extensive analyses of Latin rubrics of more than two hundred dramatic texts of medieval Church plays, consisting mostly of the Latin (or bilingual) liturgical plays staged within the close connection to liturgy in European monasteries and churches during the whole Middle Ages (i. e. Easter and Christmas drama, liturgical dramatizations connected to Marian feasts) and also several semi-liturgical or extra-liturgical religious plays.

The vertical axis and the agôn between theatre and philosophy

ABSTRACT This article explores the controversy between ancient Greek dramatists and their fellow philosophers over the vertical axis, with special reference to Socrates. I begin with a discussion of the vertical axis in Greek theatre, and turn to Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus to discuss the vertical as a manifestation of the tragic preference ascribed to our “divine” upper body over our “bestial” lower body. Then, I discuss the deus ex machina as an image of divine vertical intervention in the horizontal human plot, and claim that Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical critique of this theatrical convention fails to notice that the dramatists made a subversive use of the illogicality of this convention. The second part of the article is dedicated to the vertical as an expression of man’s desire to transcend the boundaries of the human sphere. I discuss the negative treatment of this desire by Greek dramatists, who regard it as an unworthy aspiration, compared to its positive treatment by Greek philosophers, who presents it as a worthy aspiration, since it is only through such an ascent that one can get a glimpse of the eternal. In this context, I examine two representations of Socrates: his deus ex machina appearance in Aristophanes’ Clouds, implying the hubristic stance of philosophers; and his habit of long immobile standings as introduced in Plato’s Symposium, implying the philosophers’ superiority over the dramatists. However, the publicly-visible nature of Socrates’ standstills also turns them into a display of philosophizing, meaning that Socrates of the Symposium is a philosopher who (perhaps unfairly) theatricalizes his verticality so as to challenge the art of theatre.

Risk and surprise: stand-up comedy in a relaxed venue

When investigating relaxed performance, little attention has been paid to live stand-up comedy. The relaxed performance increases the accessibility and inclusivity of live theatre performances. Yet this poses great challenges to stand-up comedy, which often entails offensiveness and physical discomfort. This article focuses on the paradox between relaxed performance and stand-up comedy. It examines the challenges and positive effects of incorporating stand-up comedy into a relaxed venue through a case study of Evelyn Mok’s live comedy performance in a relaxed venue at a comedy event ‘Comedy without Victims’ held at Battersea Arts Centre in 2019. Combining the analysis of comedian-audience interactions with an interview between the author and Mok, this article contends that, although audience interruptions may disrupt the delivery of comedy routines and place the comedian in an uncertain status, the relaxed venue reshapes the comedian-audience relationship and galvanises the autonomy of audience members, particularly those who are socially marginalised. Consequently, it enhances the subversive power of stand-up comedy in challenging ableist ideologies in theatre conventions, disturbing the existing discussions about social divisions and addressing social injustice. In this regard, relaxed stand-up comedy acts as a democratic site where comedy performance propels and expands real social transformation.

Feminist Rereading of Shabih’khani in Iran

This article examines Shabih’khani, a traditional ritual performance in Iran also known as Ta’ziyeh, in the context of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement. It includes the historical challenges faced by Iranian women in a patriarchal society dominated by politics and religion, augmenting existing research on women’s Shabih’khani through recently discovered documents that show the erasure of feminine symbols within the tradition. The article also explores the theatrical conventions, dramaturgical elements, and historical reasons for the emergence and decline of women’s Shabih’khani, together with factors that contribute to the endurance of men’s Shabih’khani. By drawing connections and comparisons between Shabih’khani and the contemporary ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, it illuminates the factors shaping the movement and offers insights into its potential for success and progress.

Maria Blut or On the Lost Charm of Theatricality

The present article aims to observe the new formulas of theatricalization of the show, starting from an eloquent example in this regard, the Natives of Maria Blut (Die Eingeborenen von Maria Blut), an adaptation after Maria Lazar, directed by Laura Bihler. The discussion about theatricality, one that marked the middle of the 20th Century, returns increasingly relevant in the context of increasingly visible attempts at de-theatricalization, which appeared especially against the background of the unprecedented expansion of technologies on theatrical stages. Dramaturgy and story-telling, sets and costumes, chromaticism and psycho-physical organization of the stage space, the multiple role and the deep recalibrations of the theatrical convention, the mask and its force to produce a certain type of atmosphere – all these become so many major milestones in -a discussion of what theatricality was and has become.

Women’s knowledge and musical form: adapting historical identities in Martin Guerre

Abstract This essay assesses the afterlives in film, theatre, and scholarship of a sixteenth-century legal proceeding in which a Basque peasant named Martin Guerre was subject to identity theft. Focusing on the 1996 West End musical, the essay proposes that the conventions of musical theatre allowed this adaptation to revise earlier versions of the story in response to then-current concerns in historiography, in particular, those of new historicist criticism. It argues that the musical’s focus on the female lead’s knowledge and consent, informed by the cultural context of the 1990s, constituted a key intervention in the adaptive history of the Martin Guerre story. And it examines the musical’s engagement with new historicist ideas about the contingency of early modern identity, noting that the lyrics and structure present a contrast between a contingent identity reliant on property ownership, kinship bonds, and religious community with a more ‘modern’ identity based on psychological continuity and unique selfhood. In conclusion, the essay proposes Martin Guerre as a case study for broader questions about how historical individuals’ agency can be represented in adaptation.

Deceptive Benevolence: Witnessing Whiteness in Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano

Focusing on the Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s novel Dance on the Volcano (1957), this essay examines representations of an anxious White minority on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. It argues that Vieux-Chauvet deploys theatrical conventions to suggest that White benevolence, a valence of White saviorism, is a performance designed to maintain the status quo of colonial Saint-Domingue. The essay also considers the implications of examining global South critiques of Whiteness for the often US-centric field of critical Whiteness studies. Dance on the Volcano focuses on a uniquely formative moment: the last years of colonial rule punctuated by the raced tensions that gave way to a revolution that forever altered the global colonial order. Vieux-Chauvet’s use of dialogue, gestures, and eavesdropping illustrate the duplicity of White characters, while foregrounding the critical gaze of the protagonist, the first woman of color to perform in the theater of Saint-Domingue.

"It Feels So Real": The Value of Using Elements of Theatre to Rehearse a Profession

Abstract: In partnering with occupational therapy (OT) degree programs to enhance students' preparedness for the field, the applied theatre in education company, Theatre in Tandem, implemented sessions utilizing the applied theatre forms of structured improvisation and role-play to rehearse the profession. This piece documents learning possibilities found in the unpredictability of these theatre conventions: supporting the classroom curriculum, navigating realistic interactions in simulated scenarios, and creating space for the students to negotiate ambiguity as they made connections between the classroom learnings and the professional field.

JOKER MEMES AS A FORM OF EXPRESSING INNER THOUGHTS: A CHARACTER ANALYSIS OF JOKER WITH REFERENCE TO THE THEATRE OF CRUELTY

The term ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ was coined by the French theatre director, Antonin Artaud (1986-1948), in 1932, and it was a widely debated concept in that decade. The ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ is more concerned with the audience's sense experience than with dialogue and content. The term the theatre of cruelty offers a ground-breaking concept that aims to cultivate profound and immersive theatrical barriers between performers and audience members. Through its deliberate efforts to elicit intense emotional responses and challenge established theatrical conventions, it captivates by providing a transformative and boundary-breaking experience. The presence of the idea of the theatre of cruelty can be seen in films such as ‘The Joker’ and ‘Batman’. According to various studies, the film character Joker is influencing real-world violence. Traditionally, the role of the Joker, a clown character in the circus, is to create a comic sense among the audience. The Joker usually creates false himself and his pain and sadness within himself and expresses happiness outside to make the audience happy or create relief. In due course, it turned into a creepy clown, a clown carrying violence. Through the films ‘The Joker’ and ‘Batman’, the Joker's character gradually evolved into a celebrity anarchist. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people throughout the world made memes of the Joker character with violent elements to express their feelings and to anticipate attention and care. The Joker has become a multilayered character. People started to enjoy the dark characteristics of the Joker character in the films more than the comic elements of the Joker character. With the help of secondary sources and data collected through social media, newspapers, and articles, the study attempts to understand memes as a form of expressing inner thoughts concerning the theatre of cruelty.

희곡의 진화

Chekhov's play “The Wood Demon” was written in 1889, and was adapted as “Uncle Vanya” in 1896. This study compares the event and structure of the two works, explores the compositional causes that made the differences between the two plays, and identifies the evolution of Chekhov's playwriting and its aesthetic characteristics.
 When writing “The Wood Demon”, Chekhov took a critical attitude towards the conventions of contemporary theater. He thought it inappropriate to show dramatic events on stage, which belong to exceptional phenomena in everyday life. On the other hand, he was of the opinion that theater should express aspects of real life, in which various human emotions are revealed. To represent real life instead of dramatic events in his plays, Chekhov had to create a new form of his play. His attempt resulted in the creation of “The Wood Demon”, which could not be positively evaluated in the world of contemporary theater.
 “The Wood Demon” is a play with a dual structure in which daily life in the countryside and the motif of love coexist: The expression of daily life hinders the dramatic development of events, and the events reduce the space for detailed description and presentation of social aspects. Chekhov tried to create a play with a new aesthetic, but contemporary critics only saw the absence of traditional conventions instead of something new in his play. His intention to add novelty to the play turned out to be a failure. He was neither faithful to the existing theatrical technique nor completely abandoned it. His comedy “The Wood Demon” ended up being an eclectic work of the new and the old.
 The adaptation of “The Wood Demon” made it possible for Chekhov to completely get out of the traditional theatrical technique centered on dramatic development of events and create a play “Uncle Vanya” with the new conventions and form. The genre of the new play became ‘scene’, and instead of ‘the event of Love’, ‘the event of Arrival and Departure’ became the center of the content.
 If the unity of time and space was maintained in “The Wood Demon”, Chekhov gave up temporal structuring and chose spatial structuring in the play “Uncle Vanya”. As a result, the new play shows various aspects of a space, not the causal flow of events: Fragmentary words and actions with weak causality become the content of each act. While “The Wood Demon” is built on the time structure and maintains the causality, consistency, and sequentiality of time, “Uncle Vanya” uses space instead of time as the compositional principle of the play, opening a new horizon for theater.

Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz

Reviewed by: Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori ed. by Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz Inge Arteel Martin Kagel and David Z. Saltz, eds., Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2022. 200 pp. Scholarship on the Hungarian-born Jewish playwright and director George Tabori (1914–2007) is gaining new momentum, especially under the impulse of Martin Kagel, professor of German literature and culture at the University [End Page 135] of Georgia. After the 2018 publication of a substantial special section on Tabori in Nexus, the essay series in German Jewish Studies, Kagel has now co-edited with David Z. Saltz the book Open Wounds: Holocaust Theater and the Legacy of George Tabori. So far, Tabori scholarship has predominantly addressed the generic and ethical specificities of Tabori's interaction with Holocaust remembrance culture, focusing on his provocative grotesque humor and his radically intertextual rewriting of dramatic and theatrical conventions. In her opening essay, eminent Tabori scholar Anat Feinberg stresses the need to look at other aspects of Tabori's work as well. Feinberg herself gives the example of Tabori's often overlooked experimental directorial practice in the 1970s and 1980s in Bremen and Vienna. Tracing Tabori's legacy means asking how the dramaturgical specificities of Tabori's work relate to theater and performance of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At stake is first of all the embodied form of the survivor-witness so central to Tabori's dramaturgy. Several contributions tackle this question in a comparative approach. Alice Le Trionnaire-Bolterauer convincingly shows Tabori's connection with the newer avantgarde in confronting the physicality of Tabori's ritual dramaturgy with two theater performances by Israeli artists, Arbeit Macht Frei vom Toitland Europa (1991) by the Israeli Akko Theatre and Yael Ronen's Third Generation: Work in Progress (2008). Rebecca Rovit reads the drama of Tabori's contemporary Charlotte Delbo and two playwrights of the succeeding generation, Yehoshua Sobol and Peter Barnes, through the lens of Tabori's work. Rovit carefully outlines the quite diverse dramaturgical means with which these authors address the question of theater as a space to bear witness. Johanna Öttl, in her comparative reading of Tabori's The Cannibals with Robert Schindel's drama Dunkelstein (2010), shows how we can read Tabori's embodied theater as a way to present victims as singular self-determined subjects, whereas Schindel shows how this self-determination has been reduced to a mere convention in melodramatic cinema. Tabori's nonrealistic aesthetics, including his disturbing and grotesque humor, present a second and maybe even bigger challenge, especially when transposing his work to the formats of popular culture. Peter Höyng's contribution on Urs Odermatt's film adaptation (2009) of Tabori's Mein Kampf shows, though Höyng is careful not to voice too strong a judgment, how the film nullifies every aspect of Tabori's aesthetics. Ironically, it is the failed adaptation [End Page 136] that retrospectively makes Tabori's dramatic "palimpsest" (157) stand out as the highly complex and provocatively grotesque work it is. Barbara Wallace Grossman's chapter on so-called Holocaust musicals asks whether they can provide an equivalent for Tabori's disturbing laughter. The answer is nuanced: melodramatic Broadway productions do not pass the test at all, whereas some more stylized productions do explore musical theater "as an appropriate genre for presenting Holocaust narratives" (182). The challenges of a transcultural transposition in performance practice are touched upon by the director Laura Forti, who discusses the difficulties she faced when staging The Cannibals in Italy in 2002. Her contribution indirectly indicates how rewarding a more encompassing transnational investigation into Tabori's work could be, an approach that would reflect on how Tabori addresses the legacy of the Holocaust as a European one. Other contributions adopt a more historiographical and genealogical perspective. Klaus van den Berg compares two quite diverse stagings by Tabori of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 1966 and 1978. Van den Berg reads them in relation with Walter Benjamin's thoughts on "image-space" and "performing space," an approach very well suited to trace the shift from...

Prospero's Girls

This essay examines the afterlives of Miranda and Ariel, Prospero's "girls," on stage and in film. A longstanding editorial and theatrical tradition that assigns Miranda's "abhorrèd slave" speech to Caliban informs the ongoing representation of Miranda as a passive and submissive character, even after the speech is restored in the twentieth century. The two-hundred-year-long history of reassigning Miranda's speech to Prospero coincides with the tradition of casting a girl actress as Ariel. Dismissed in recent years as an outmoded and déclassé theatrical convention, Ariel's history as a girl left a strong impression on the play's theatrical and artistic legacy. Restoration adaptations of The Tempest added more and more girl characters to Prospero's island, reflecting an intensified interest in girls and girlhood as the play charted the paths to Miranda's marriage and Ariel's freedom. With Miranda representing domestic expectations and Ariel embodying the dream of liberation, Prospero's girls and their history reflect the conflicting and competing expectations placed upon girls and the dream of a patriarchal power that, rather than stifling girls, sets them free.

Soulpepper 2022: Decolonizing Toronto Theatre

This research project, “Decolonizing Toronto Theatre,” examines how Soulpepper, a mainstream Toronto theatre company, and their collaboration with Native Earth Performing Arts are contributing to the equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization of Toronto theatre through their recent Indigenous productions: Kamloopa and Where the Blood Mixes. The author watched, read, and analyzed both plays to explore how these two productions transform and redefine the intellectual, political, and artistic conventions of Anglo-Canadian theatre. Her analyses of these plays are informed by the various texts centered around Canadian Indigenous history and Indigenous theatre. She also used an ethnographic approach by talking to people involved in both productions. She conducted interviews with the playwrights, the associate artistic director at Soulpepper, and some artists involved in both plays. These conversations with the people involved allowed her to understand these plays beyond their content: the inner workings of how a production comes to fruition. The conversations also allowed for a reflection on the similarities and differences between the creative approaches the artists involved took as well as the positive impacts these productions have had on Toronto theatre. Finally, by applying ethnographic findings and analyses of the plays, this piece compiles the analyses and research conducted over the course of the internship.

Thrill Me: Queerness, Spectatorship, and the Utopian Performative in South Korean Musical Theatre

This article explores how the staging of transnational musical productions articulates changing perceptions of queer identity by considering the South Korean remounting of the off-Broadway musical Thrill Me (2007). I argue that Thrill Me reflects what Jill Dolan terms a “utopian performative” in that by watching the musical, many women spectators related to queer subjects in ways that transgressed but did not threaten the gender norms of South Korean society. Through close readings of the source and target scripts on the page and in performance, I provide an account of the origins of key contemporary South Korean musical theatre conventions and examine the commodification of queering in such theatre. In complex ways, South Korean women spectators used theatre to evade suffocating gender and economic norms as audiences were encouraged to identify with ambiguously marked gay male queerness. Their commodification of queer subjects did reinforce generalizations about marginalized identities; however, at times, the spectacularization of under-represented minorities can offer a method of survival for other oppressed gender categories.

Диалог гигантов: как Бродвей и Голливуд «спасли» американскую мультипликацию (а она —их). (Kunze, Peter C. Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2023. 224 р.)

Peter Kunze’s book Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance is a (overwhelmingly) well-researched study of the transmedial migration of popular narratives in the 1980s and the 1990s. Focused on Disney’s appropriation of the Broadway integrated musical (H. Ashman, A. Menken), the study demonstrates how the musical theatre conventions improved the quality of Disney’s main product — the animated film. Kunze engages in close reading of an extended episode from the history of cultural production (the Disney Renaissance), showing the complexity and unpredictability of various media convergences. For instance, the book reconfigures the roles of managerial and creative labourers behind the Disney transformation, wittily (and convincingly) bringing to the forefront 1982 as annus mirabilis, which triggered immense changes in the cultural sector. After discussing Disney's appropriation of the musical Broadway, the book reveals how the updated animated musical comes back to the theatrical stage and transforms ‘respectable’ Broadway by alternative styles and agendas (Julie Taymor’s The Lion King). Apart from other sources, the research uses hardto- access archival materials, the author's interviews with the practitioners and their entourage.

Staged history: Concept of theatricality in the modern utopia (England, England by Julian Barnes)

The work explores the concept of theatre and the role of theatrical conventions in Julian Barnes’s utopian novel England, England. This article discusses theatricality as the principal artistic strategy of the novel, heavily influencing its formal and thematic structure. It outlines the main characteristics of the theatrical chronotope, and considers the similarities between theatricality and the conventions of the utopian novel per se. It examines closely the way Barnes exploits the various semantic implications of the chronotope in his critique of contemporary society. Methodologically the article is based on the findings of theatre semiotics and employs them as its theoretical framework (Alter, Fischer-Lichte, Pavis), while also considering sociological (Debord), anthropological (Milton Singer, Geertz Clifford), and psychological (Erving Goffman) approaches to the phenomena of theatre. Tightly intertwined with actual cultural and social strategies, theatre has always been an essential integrative part of social life. The author uses theatricality to take a reflective attitude towards the contemporary culture, to examine and display the political and social strategies which are considered as immanently theatrical. Under the theory of theatrical semiotics, the decisive aspects of theatre as an aesthetic system are theatrical space and time. The main characteristics of the theater are conceptualized primarily in the theatrical chronotope. On this ground, it can be argued that the significant structural element through which theatricality is incorporated in novelistic discourse is that of the artistic chronotope. The specific enclosure of the theatre universe manifested within the typical utopian locus serves to arrange it as the space of utopian social experiment perfecting the latent tendencies of the culture and exposing them to critical observation. Theatrical “a-temporality” correlates with utopian “a-historicity” and unfolds the rupture with the historical continuum which gives free rein to its purposeful reconstructions. Theatrical images are subjected to regrouping in eclectic totality and re-combinations of disrupted elements of the historical continuum. The cyclicity of the performances representing historical and mythical figures and the re-enacting events essential for national identity involves the spectators in pseudo-communication. It actually deprives them of experiencing real time and space, replacing it with the comfortable pseudoexperience of consuming surrogate images. Thus, the main characteristics of theatrical chronotope are employed to develop the novel’s essential concerns with such issues as reconstruction of individual and national identity and their subjection to distorting speculations. Theatricality reveals the nature of a forward-looking industrial society as a commercial spectacle turning national culture and history into a manipulated commodity.

‘Curtains, music and stages’ in Zoom theatre: framing devices in Coney’s Telephone

ABSTRACT Coney’s interactive digital piece Telephone, created and performed by Tassos Stevens, was premiered in April 2020 amidst the first lockdown in England. Performed via the videoconferencing platform Zoom, it employs conventional framing devices such as a prologue, opening music, a surrogate stage curtain and a virtual theatre bar. This paper intends to examine the functions of these theatrical conventions in the Zoom production. The author argues that these devices are used not only for their usual dramatic purposes, but are also adapted with new functions for digital media and the special circumstances of the pandemic. They inform the spectators of the dramatic situation and the contextual situation of lockdown, in order to provide crucial technical instructions, to frame the performance within familiar domestic spaces and cyberspace, and to seek their understanding of the unusual form in which the piece is made. By the explicit and emphatic use of these conventional framing devices, the production activates the audience’s consciousness of the theatrical dual orders of presence and representation, so as to construct a live theatre experience and senses of co-presence and togetherness, which are all the more significant during a time of theatre closure and social distancing.

Writing (Irish) Histories on the Body: DruidShakespeare, Gender, and the Shakespearean History Play

This essay explores the relationship between Irish Shakespeare performance, gendered bodies, and theatrical convention, using Druid Theatre Company’s 2015 production DruidShakespeare as a case study. Using Shonagh Hill’s theories of women’s embodied mythmaking in Irish theater, I show how the performances and gendering of Derbhle Crotty and Aisling O’Sullivan as Henry IV and Henry V respectively can be read within (following Hill) a broader genealogy of creative female corporeality. I do so through exploring Crotty’s performance of undress, nudity, and femininity as Henry IV, before demonstrating how O’Sullivan’s anti-heroic Henry V negotiated the histories and iconographies of Irish and Shakespeare performance. Ultimately, I argue that this corporeal exploration of gender and history was integral to DruidShakespeare’s political project, and integral to its desire to adapt and represent Shakespeare meaningfully for and to Irish audiences.

A Comparative Analysis of Classical, Shakespearean and Modern Tragedies

Tragic drama since the Classical Greece has had some distinct changes in the course of its development. Since the time of Sophocles, tragedy has been shaped by different theatrical conventions and philosophies. It has experienced different kinds of change under various kinds of situations, pressures etc., which obviously came from the changing world about it. Each period sees the development of a special orientation and emphasis, a characteristic style of theatre. The framework of this paper falls on its search to draw a comparative analysis of the Classical, Renaissance and Modern tragedies. The tragic conception from the time of the Greeks to the present has undergone a metamorphosis in definitions and experience This paper therefore highlights the fundamental similarities and differences between the tragedies of the Classical, the Renaissance and the Modern ages. It discusses the overall significance of changes in convention which tragedy like every other genre has undergone from the ancient period. The paper concludes that it is obvious from the consideration of the three great periods of tragedy that no theatrical period ever repeats itself as there are differences among them as there must be since the theatre of any given period reflects the world in which it exists.