How to enjoy theatre?

1. How to enjoy theatre? Lecturer: Wang, Yueh-chiu Associate professor National Penghu University

2. How a play becomes a performance? • Playwright • Agent • Producer • Director • Angels • Special company staff

3. The director steers the play and ensures that the contributions of the cast and of the designers of sets, costumes and lighting all contribute towards his interpretation. • The style and mood of a play should be reflected in its settings and costumes, a point clearly made in the recent Royal Company’s enormously successful production of Nicolas Nickleby.

4. Costumes are an obvious point of interest, but a clever designer can manipulate an audience’s feelings in both bold and subtle ways.

5. Today’s theatre is the result of an almost continuous period of development over several thousand years. • The origins of drama are complex and remote, involving a study not only of the earliest civilizations but of man himself. • (1) man’s behavior (2) ancient folk ceremonies and (3) religious ceremony.

6. The importance of ritual in the story of drama lies not only in the significance of the event being celebrated, but in the creation and communication of an emotional response-by-product of ritual.

7. What is theatre? • 1. Over the centuries the nature of drama and the manner of its presentation have changed considerably; the theatre has adapted and responded to changing times and sentiments. • 2. In fact, theatre today is going through one of its most striking periods of adaptability, and its forms and activities are more varied and widespread than they have ever been.

8. Modern theatre is less sensational, but it can still provide headline news. • Clearly, theatre is a powerful medium. It is capable of influencing the thought and feeling of its audience to a remarkable degree, usually through its stock-in-trade of laughter and tears. • The great strength and special attraction of the theatre is its immediacy; it is live entertainment. Live theatre indulges its audience over passages that are going down well, and moves on swiftly when it senses disinterest.

9. This atmosphere is especially noticeable at a successful comedy, when an audience will be particularly relaxed and happy, while at a serious play their attentiveness is increased and concentration intensified. A shared experience has proved salutary, and quite apart from what the members of the audience have derived from the play itself, they have benefited from the mere experiencing of it in the company of other people.

10. This is what theatre is all about—communicating and stimulating a response. Theatre is particularly suited to achieve this end since it deals with most of the senses. • The costumes and settings, the drumming and chanting and the essence of all drama—conflict-make an amazing piece of total theatre.

11. But a play can be powerful using only the simplest of settings, naturalistic acting and ordinary everyday clothes—provided the theme is riveting enough. • It is the ability of theatre simultaneously to stimulate thought and to entertain which has made it such a lasting art form.

12. Theatre comes in many guises. It can be magically beautiful or violently cruel, it can thrilling or merely charming, stimulating or reassuring, purely for pleasure or something to make you think. There is such a diversity of subject matter and so many forms of presentation.

13. Basically there are two sorts of theatre in Britain today: first commercial, and second sponsored and subsidised. Commercial theatre exists to make money. To this end commercial theatre usually chooses plays in the light entertainment bracket. • Sponsored and subsidised theatre are heavily supported by such funding bodies as the Arts Council, local authorities, large business firms, and cultural organizations.

14. The scale and standard of production achieved in both commercial and subsidised theatre depends largely on the finance available, which controls such things as the size of the theatre and the company employed, as well as the status of the artistic director and designers.

15. Plays were designed and written in dramatic terms for presentation in a theatre. The text of play is a blueprint requiring the skills of a director, designers, actors and stage-hands to bring it to life on-stage. • A fine play and production, however, generate their own interest and will probably win you over irrespective of your mood.

16. Most playwrights stick to familiar ground and do not switch from tragedy to zany farce or comedy; a new play by Alan Ayckbourn is mostly likely to be another light domestic comedy. • It is the critic’s job not only to assess the actors’ performances and the effectiveness of the production, but also to comment on matters of genre and to locate the play in its period.

17. When you go to a performance you should be aware that every single thing you see and hear on stage has been carefully pre-planned—the colour of a particular dress, the exact moment at which a cigarette is lit or a drink taken, and whether a character stands or sits. Nothing happens by chance.

18. Stage lighting is also important in a production, though paradoxically the more effective it is the less it draws attention to itself. The basic purpose of stage lighting is to illuminate the actors and the stage and inform an audience of such obvious matters as daylight, moonlight, tropical or arctic conditions.

19. It is also helpful to be aware of the patterns of stage grouping made by the actors on-stage. This is a highly skilled business, which is the province of the director. It is his job to ensure that the cast are displayed on-stage to the best advantage, and that in their moves across the stage they do not conceal or bump into each other.

20. Metaphor and allegory are potent weapons in the hands of a playwright. • Acting styles change with theatre buildings, but what has not altered is the basis of all acting, crating and presenting a character other than oneself. How is it achieved depends on the society and conventions of the time, but the effectiveness and power of such a creation has been recognized since the dawn of time-acting is as old as man himself.

21. The actor’s changing status –from a lower status to be acceptable in polite society (p. 32-35). • Acting styles have changed considerably since the time that Henry Irving dominated the stage. Irving believed that acting was for displaying the great passions; he concentrated on spectacular productions of Shakespeare and gave riveting performances of melodrama.

22. A new form of naturalistic drama began to appear around 1900. Plays were written in a more relaxed style and acting changed to reflect this elegance and naturalness. Art concealed art and the actor appeared not to be acting at all but simply behaving naturally. • In the 1920s and early 1930s, theatre audiences needed laughter and light entertainment. So the easy naturalistic style of acting continued.

23. In the later 1930s came a renewed interest in Shakespeare and the classics, with the acting of such up-and-coming stars. Acting again became powerful and physical, but this time without the Victorian melodramatic bombast. • In modern times, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, acting has undergone a further radical change reflecting the contemporary permissive society.

24. There are two kinds of actor. First, there is the character actor who disguises his appearance and attempts a series of widely different roles and secondly there is the actor who is a ‘self-impersonator’, one who, no matter what part he plays, always presents himself.

25. The essence of acting is communication. The measure of an actor’s skill is the vividness of his portrayal and how indelibly he imprints the thoughts and feelings of his role on the minds of his audience. The greatest acting parts are those in which the character experiences a variety and depth of emotion.

26. Tragedy provides the actor with the greatest possible scope for great acting; comedy contain fewer opportunities to run the gamut of emotion. Furthermore, comedy usually contains more than one leading role; there is seldom single, towering figure around whom the play revolves.

27. The essential attributes of a good actor are a warm heart and a cool head. Great acting is the result of these two attributes. The cool head contributes the technique which transmits the emotional responses of the heart, but never allows the passion to take over or run away with itself and the performance.

28. The producer’s job is to set up the production, a task which is largely administrative and financial. The artistic direction of the play is in the hands of the director alone.

29. Ancient Greece and Rome • Performance of drama in ancient Greece were vivid affairs; they were religious and civic occasions to which the entire community flocked. Plays were only performed on special occasions at great festivals lasting from dawn to dusk, and several days at a time.

30. Although all Greek cities were thought to possess their own theatres, Athens was pre-eminent and all the plays that has come down to us are Athenian. All the parts were played by men, for no women were allowed on the Greek stage.

31. A Greek play consists of a series of episodes, which relate the plot of the play, alternating with choral odes by a chorus ranging in number from fifteen to fifty. • All the actors wore large masks and special costumes. Moreover, the plots were extremely well known to the audience, being take from familiar stories of the exploits of the gods and goddesses and legendary heroes.

32. Greek dramatists used familiar legends and tales to reflect contemporary individual or community problems. Their plays dealt objectively with human behavior. Greek comedy has been described as obscene, and certainly to some people the ubiquitous use of huge replicas of the male sexual organ might be considered objectionable.

33. Greek theatres • The very earliest Greek theatres were simply levelled spaces in the open air, roughly circular, at the foot of some convenient hillside which provided the grandstand from which the onlookers watched.

34. Greek tragedy offered quality, the Romans offered quantity. Drama had to compete with extremely popular circus-type entertainments and mime shows. • Roman comedy is far more important and interesting; it dispensed with the chorus and choral odes, resulting in comedy of a more narrative and naturalistic structure.