 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Plain talk
By Mursi Saad El-Din
Rummaging through my books and publications, accumulated over 50 years, I came across several copies of a magazine called Drama.
Going through the back issues of Drama, I relived my years in London. I had the pleasure of watching quite a few of the plays reviewed on its pages. I well remember Laurence Olivier at the New Theatre in A Long Day's Journey into Night. In the same week two performances of Romeo and Juliet opened, one at the Dolphin and the other at the Young Vic, while Much Ado about Nothing was showing at a nearby theatre. What was really interesting was the combination of classics and modern plays by Albee, Stoppard, Whitehead and their contemporaries. Londoners always had a feast of drama and it was difficult to make a choice.
Plays in Performance was only a section of Drama. Every issue contained a number of articles dealing with all kinds of questions pertaining to drama and theatre. An interesting article in one of the issues had the intriguing title Theatre and Theatres. The writer, Ronald Hayman, starts by saying that sometimes we use the word theatre to mean the building, sometimes the activities inside. When the word is stretched to cover different things, the author argues, it often means the relationship between them becomes blurred. And one question which is always side-stepped, he argues, is the extent to which theatrical activity is affected by the buildings available to it and by the prevailing structure of theatrical society.
Inevitably, Hayman claims, the relationship between the actors and the audience is conditioned by the shape and size of the auditorium. To most of us the word theatre immediately suggests the proscenium stage, which is hardly in line with the developments of the past few decades. We now have the arena theatre, the open-air stage and other innovative approaches to the performance site. And there is no doubt that no theatrical event is ever fully successful without blending the audience into some kind of unity, something difficult to achieve in conventional spaces which automatically impose physical divisions by separating the space into tiers. Ronald Hayman goes on to review the development of the stage from Elizabethan times through to the Victorian theatre, which emphasised the importance of the pictorial element. He follows this with a history of the two London theatres which have origins in the 17th century -- Drury Lane and Saddlers Wells. Then, touching upon four which were built in the 18th century -- Her Majesty's, the Haymarket, the Royal Opera House and the Lyceum -- as well as the Adelphi and the Old Vic built in the 19th century, he posits the claim that since theatres were built during different epochs there was no continuous architectural tradition of theatre building.
The writer goes on to discuss details about the distance between the actor and the audience, giving the example of the Globe Theatre where Shakespeare presented his plays. There, the spectator sitting in the back row of the top gallery was not so very much further away from the stage than the groundlings or even the courtiers, sitting on the stage itself.
The magazine, of course, carried a great many more pieces, one particularly interesting article discussing the notion of universal theatre. I cannot, at a time when literary magazines seem to have such a hard time surviving, wonder if it is still published. I certainly hope so.
