Theatre
Theatre is the art of representing plays, using actors. Theatre is closely joined with literature, and sometimes it is joined with music creating musicals.
In this post, i will specially talk about the Greek theatre.
Greeks were the pioneers of theatre as we know it, they had specially 3 genres or types of theatre:
- Tragedy: They always depicted suffering and death among the characters,
- Comedy: They always featured happy endings, or were used to cause light laughter.(Greek comedy wasn`t like modern comedy)
- Satyr: Satyr always made fun of the government or even the gods, to express the disgust.
Greek theatre was represented in what they called "Theatron", which was divided in 2 parts (aside the seats for the public) :
- Orchestra: A large semicircular area with a rectangle in the center, this was where actors stood and talked to the audience.
- Skene: It was at the back of the orchestra, this is where the actors changed clothes and prepared to go on stage.
Theatrons were constructed ingeniously using the s¡natural slope of the hills to help building them faster.
As greeks were the pioneers of modern theatre, it was obvious that a greek was who established the main terms in a play, it was Aristotle, who coined the terms of:
- Plot
- Theme
- Character
- Music
- Dichon
- Spectacle
Greeks were very proliferous in their writings, among the best play-writes, we can find:
- Sophocles
- Aeschylus
- Euripides
- Aristophenes
- Meander
One of the best plays of greek writers was "Oedipus Rex", which has been represented hundreds if not thousands of times, and it was first premiered in 429 B.C.
Written by: Sophocles
Date: 429 B.C.
Where: Greece
Director: It is an old play, may vary, in this case is Sir Tyrone Guthrie
Synopsis: Oedipus rex is the story of Oedipus who was the real son of the kings of Thebes, who are told by the oracle that this son will kill his own father (the king) so they give it to a servant to kill him, he does'´t want to so he leaves him in a hill, where a shepherd finds him and takes him to corinth. Once there he gives the baby to the kings because they couldn´t have any. The kings raise him and one day oedipus goes to the oracle, where he is told the same story as his real father. Scared of killing his "father" (the corinthian king), he flees to Thebes, where in the way he finds himself in the road with an old man, who annoys him so he kills him. When he arrived to Thebes he fights (intellectually) with the sphinx and ends up victorious. Because of that act of bravery, he is named king (as the old one was dead) and marries the queen to have offspring. Some time later plagues came and the only way to solve them is to find the real killer of the old king. After a tough investigation he finds out that he killed the king himself, and realizes that he (the old king) was his real father and the queen was his mother. In an act of desperation he grabs a knife and pokes both of his eyes out. Even the braves person couldn´t escape from destiny.
