2.4: Three Theatres. The Mirror of Reality / The Anatomical Theatre / The Theatre of The World
Theatre can be understood in many ways: as a mirror reflection of reality, as a cognitive tool, and as a model of the world. In our research on theatricality, these three approaches allow us to trace how the stage intertwines with history, politics, knowledge, and collective experience. Theatre reveals the mechanisms governing social life, organises ways of seeing the world, and enables culture to recognise itself. Our attempts to understand theatricality are based on our research into ancient drama, the works of Jan Kochanowski, Shakespeare, Polish Romantics and Modernists, and contemporary playwrights.
In our research, an important point of reference is the metaphor of theatrum orbis terrarum – the theatre of the whole world. From this perspective, political campaigns, diplomatic rituals, parades, and street performances have stage-like feel and can be analysed as theatre plays. Here, theatre meets cartography, history and reflection on space: a map can be read like a stage, and a city like a dynamic spectacle. One example of this approach is our analysis of the diplomatic and political game between the Florentine Republic and the Mamluk sultan, a key element of which was the famous procession through the streets of Florence with a giraffe offered by the Mamluk ambassador to Lorenzo de Medici. Moreover, our Faculty has produced a study devoted to the contemporary version of street theatre; in our opinion the semiotics of spectacle and the semiotics of urban space illuminate each other.
At the same time, theatre is sometimes seen as a cognitive tool. Once, dissecting rooms were called anatomical theatres; similarly, the theatre stage enables the ‘dissection’ of the world and the analysis of the relationships between power, physicality, violence, and conflict. In this sense, theatre teaches anatomy of reality, prompting careful recognition of structures hidden beneath the surface of the spectacle. The connection between the Elizabethan stage and the idea of theatrum anatomicum allows us to read Christopher Marlowe’s plays as cognitive tools that offer no comfort, but reveal the truth about the human world.
A separate area of reflection is the dynamics of communities created in the theatre space. Here, the stage becomes a laboratory of social and emotional relationships, particularly evident in times of crisis. Contemporary stagings of Shakespeare’s plays are analysed as responses to the experiences of pandemic, war and global uncertainty – attempts to work through fear, loss, and anxiety.
Theatre and the contemporary challenges
The mediatisation of the performing arts, particularly evident during the pandemic and lockdown, is one of the challenges facing contemporary theatre, whose creators have long sought to break down the infamous ‘fourth wall’ and to remove the physical and symbolic distance between the stage and the audience, in order to invite (and sometimes force) the latter to abandon their role as passive viewers-voyeurs and to become more involved in the course of events. The mediatisation of art changes and complicates the meaning of such concepts as ‘happenings’ of a live theatre performance and active participation of the audience. However, even traditionally understood physical co-presence in the theatre is in itself a multidimensional phenomenon, not always experienced in the same way and not necessarily ensured by physical presence in the theatre. It therefore requires reflection, which should precede any discussion of other possible forms of co-presence today.
Theatre and theology. The stage as a space of meaning
Literature is the oldest form of practising theology. The theological complexity of Shakespeare’s plays indicates not so much the difficulty or even impossibility of understanding many of the themes in Hamlet or King Lear without reading them from a biblical perspective, but the fact that literature itself has the power to evoke catharsis and spiritual transformation.
↑ Lorenzo the Magnificent receiving the homage of the deputies, Giorgio Vasari, 1556–1558, Palazzo Vecchio (Florence), (source: Wikimedia Commons).
↓ FROM THE TOP. 1 Melpomene with a tragic mask – Roman sculpture, 2nd century AD, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Copenhagen) 2 Contemporary theatre masks (photo: F. Ungaro, source: pexels.com) 3 Frontispiece of Theatrum Vitae Humanae – Theatre of Human Life by Jean-Jacques Boissard, 1596 (source: Wikimedia Commons)