ABSTRACT
I daresay that audiences in most cultures and historical periods have felt that the dramatic characters in their theatre represented (or were intended to represent) intelligible human beings-whether the form was the American musical, Jacobean tragedy, German Sturm und Drang, the Peking opera, Brecht’s Lehrstücke, medieval Mystery plays, Noh drama, or a Broadway production of Nicholas Nickleby. To appreciate the fact that audiences of different cultures and periods viewed their theatre as realistic is to acknowledge the conventional nature of all theatrical representation. A fifth-century Athenian (mutatis mutandis) transported to London to see a revival of David Storey’s The Changing Room would think the production riddled with artifice and convention, presenting a picture far less compelling than, say, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. Such an audient might consider the images and language of the locker room too specific to reveal much of value about ‘real people’, preferring the story of the struggle between two mythical brothers at Thebes for the very reason that it seems closer to the reality of a human situation. Similarly, what strikes us as conventional and ‘artificial’ in a performance of Greek tragedy (or Japanese Kabuki, or Indian Kathakali) would seem to a Greek audience (or their Eastern counterpart) to be perfectly normal and appropriate.
