ABSTRACT
Democracy, which presupposes egalitarianism, and which embodies political assumptions about the perpetual and desirable nature of historical change and who may, by virtue of their membership of the human race, contribute to it, reduces, according to Lukács, the metaphysical dimension of ‘mystical’ experience which he deems an essential ingredient of tragedy. Although modern life is distanced from that of ancient Greece, that distance permits a certain kind of cognition that goes under the general name of ‘tradition.’ The Aristotelian model, according to Boal, is designed “to provoke catharsis” and thereby fulfils a “repressive function” that has bedevilled theatre ever since. Tragedy intervenes to correct any failure to observe the Law and it does so “through purification of the extraneous undesirable element which prevents the character from achieving his ends.” Boal identifies that element as hamartia, the one ‘tragic flaw,’ an “anti-constitutional flaw” that must be eliminated as a barrier preventing the hero from conforming to “the ethos of the society”.
