A theatre: past and present

Essay by fakultetlijaUniversity, Bachelor'sA, May 2014

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A THETRE: PAST AND PRESENT

In this essay I am going to compare 'The Deadly Theatre', a chapter from the Peter Brook's book 'The Empty Space', with one of the Shakespeare's plays 'The Taming of the Shrew'. My aim is to show how theatre and the influence of theatre have changed over time and establish an audience's role during that process. Also, I am going to mention Shakespeare's influence on the theatre and the methods he used. So, the main topic of this essay is theatre. What is theatre? What do we need to have a good theatre today?

The most interesting and also quite a motivating claim from 'The Deadly Theatre' to me are its first sentences: 'I CAN take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.'

It means, we do not need special place and incredible people to make something big. All we need is a strong will and we have to try hard. If we do, everything is possible. But, the rest of the chapter is not so positive. Actually, it has a negative view of the theatre today. We can clearly see that from these sentences: 'The condition of the Deadly Theatre at least is fairly obvious. All through the world theatre audiences are dwindling. There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole, the theatre not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains. The theatre has often been called a whore, meaning its art is impure, but today this is true in another sense - whores take the money and then go short on the...