The origins of drama have also been attributed to simple storytelling, as when the storyteller adopts a false voice or adds characterization through movement and costume. In such terms, the art of theatre could be described at its most fundamental as the presence of an actor before an audience.
Whatever the primary motivation, the first systematic elaboration of theatre can be seen through the work of the Greek playwrights of 5th-century-bce Athens. Aeschylus apparently inherited a form that consisted of a single actor responding to or leading a chorus. His innovation is generally considered to have been the use of a second actor, and it was either Aeschylus or Sophocles who added a third actor as they competed each year for prizes in the Great Dionysia. Once a third actor appeared, the chorus gradually declined, and it was the multiplying individual characters who assumed importance. In this way, ancient Greece left to posterity a measure of specialization among theatrical performers.
Beyond these formal elements, however, Classical drama offers a pattern of development that has been reenacted continually in other cultures throughout history. The rapid rise and decline of drama in ancient Athens paralleled the rise and decline of Athenian civilization itself. Great periods of achievement in theatre have tended to coincide with periods of national expansion and achievement, as in Elizabethan England. Conversely, periods of excessive materialism, such as those during which ancient Greece or ancient Rome declined, tend to produce theatre in which ostentation, spectacle, and vulgarity predominate.
Probably more than in other arts, each theatrical style represents an amalgamation of diverse heritages. Greek theatre has long had the most direct influence on Western culture, but in the late 20th century Balinese and Japanese arts were frequently adapted in the West. Chinese and Indian theatrical practices have had wide influence in Asia. A fundamental difference between borrowings from Greek theatre and borrowings from Asian traditions is that the techniques of Greek performance have not been handed down with the texts. Most of what is known about the actual performance of Greek plays is the result of scholarly and archaeological research. Information about the nature of the music and of choral dances, for example, is very skimpy.
In Asian theatre, on the other hand, techniques as well as texts have survived. For example, the Noh theatre of Japan has been handed down through families of performers with few changes for hundreds of years. In addition to the instructions for performers contained in India’s Natya-shastra, there is a major descriptive treatise on music, giving guidance on musical techniques. The Natya-shastra, which may be as old as Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century bce), is a book with very specific injunctions to performers, including dancers. Some of its techniques may be found in surviving theatre forms such as the Indian kathakali dance. In turn, some of these techniques were assimilated during the second half of the 20th century by such Western directors as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, and Eugenio Barba. Other writers and directors created new relationships between Eastern and Western theatre by consciously exploiting techniques and traditions from such forms as Kabuki and Noh.
There is little doubt that the Greek theatre—and especially the study of its literature—has provided Western theatre with a sense of continuity in stories, themes, and formal styles. The plays themselves are regularly revived, with discernible references to specifically modern concerns. It is also notable that the Greek theatre has served as a model for a wide range of great writers, from Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille in 17th-century France to Eugene O’Neill in the United States during the 20th century. When Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) touched its audiences with awe and pity in the manner of Aristotle’s prescriptions, critics debated whether the play could be genuinely tragic in the Greek sense, given that it had no nobler a protagonist than the salesman Willy Loman. Theatre as expression Mimesis in theatre
The art of the theatre is essentially one of make-believe, or mimesis. In this respect it differs from music, which seldom attempts to imitate “real” sounds—except in so-called program music, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which suggests the sounds of a battle. In this respect the art of narrative in literature is much closer to that of the theatre. In a story, considerable attention must be paid to plausibility. Even if the story is not intended to be believed as having actually happened, plausibility is essential if the story is to hold the auditor’s attention. The principal factor in plausibility is not precise correspondence with known facts but inner consistency in the story itself.
Drama also requires plausibility, but in drama it must be conveyed not by a narrator but by the actors’ ability to make the audience “believe in” their speech, movement, thoughts, and feelings. This plausibility is based on the connection between the impression made by the actors and the preconceptions of the auditors. If the character Hamlet is to be plausible, the actor must make an audience believe that Hamlet could conceivably be as he is presented. This does not mean that the actor must make the audience believe that he (or she) literally is Hamlet, merely that he is plausibly and consistently making-believe to be Hamlet. The aim of a performance is not to persuade spectators that a palpable fiction is fact, that they are “really” there, out on those bitterly cold battlements of Hamlet’s castle at Elsinore. Indeed, they are far freer to appreciate the play and to think about it if they are not “really” present. Knowing all the time that it is a figment, they are willing to enter into the make-believe, to be transported, if it is sufficiently convincing. Yet they know that, however thrilling or pleasurable the rapture, it may be shattered at any moment by some ineptitude or mistake on the stage or by a coughing neighbour in the audience.
That is the basic rule, or convention, of the make-believe of the theatre. The actor breaks the basic rule of the game if he forgets his words, or laughs at private jokes, or is simply incompetent, or is unsuited to his part. No modern audience can accept a vulgar, lumpish, elderly Hamlet, because Hamlet is a young prince whose lines are consistently thoughtful and witty. Yet it is not necessary that the actor playing Hamlet should “really” be all these things; he need only give the impression of being princely, witty, elegant, and young enough to sustain the credulity of the people sharing the make-believe. That credulity can extend a considerable way; the actress Sarah Bernhardt played Hamlet several times in her old age.
Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of Hamlet, lithograph poster by Alphonse Mucha for a French production of the play.The Granger Collection, New York
Thus, in every performance there must be realism in some degree. At certain epochs and in certain kinds of plays, the aim has been to be as realistic as possible. But even the most realistic production (e.g., Anton Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard as first produced by Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904) made immense concessions to theatrical artifice. Conversation in real life often leads nowhere; it is full of inconclusive, meaningless, boring passages. It does not necessarily attempt, as every word in Chekhov’s play must, to fit into a story, to be part of the expression of a theme, or to introduce and reveal a group of characters.