“Rethéâtraliser le théâtre! Le théâtre pour le théâtre!” (“Retheatricalize the theater! Theater for the sake of theater!”) rang the epigraph of Georg Fuchs's 1909 Revolution in the Theater. It became the battle cry of the third phase of the search for the New Theater at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (the return to the arbitrary conventionality of theatrical art), which emerged after the experiences of naturalism and symbolism, and after Appia and Craig had placed the problem of the actor at the center of the aesthetics of the New Theater. Georg Fuchs, director of the Künstlertheater in Munich (1908–1914) and other proponents of the retheatricalization of the theater: such as Nikolai Evreinov (creator of the mass spectacle The Storming of the Winter Palace in 1920 for 100,000 spectators) and Jacques Copeau (founder in 1913 of the Parisian Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier), were linked with the earlier reformers by the categorical renunciation of all illusionism in the theater. They differed from the naturalists and the first symbolists in the absolutization of the conventionality of the scenic art, and from Craig and Appia by treating the plays not as aesthetic objects, but as chances for the creative interaction of stage and audience.

It is also possible, however, to discern in this phase a continuation of the antinomies of the entire movement, so visible in the original naturalist-symbolist synchronicity. On this occasion it is a matter of reconciling the post-symbolist principle of indirect presentation or re-presentation with reflections on the essence of the effect of the play on the audience as derived from the scientific postulates of naturalism, and on the “theatricality instinct” (based on transformational rules). According to Evreinov, this latter was assumed to be a natural and primal human instinct, and at the same time the source of all art (as proved by the psychology of play, especially among children; the anthropology that described the ritual foundations of primitive culture; and finally the “theater of historical events,” such as those of the Napoleonic era).

The theoreticians of postmodernism were late in encompassing the theater in the orbit of their consideration, but once this occurred, they discerned almost immediately the ideal symmetry between the assumptions underlying the trend and the essence of the theatrical. At once, they emphasized the active participation of theater and drama in the creation of the critical phase of modernism (especially in Europe; there was an enumeration of the examples of German expressionism, dadaism, futurism, the creativity of Maeterlinck and Yeats, and later Artaud and Brecht). They went on to point out another, programmatic contiguity: every work of theater illustrates the tension between product and process (no complete final version of the work exists, after all). Finally, more than other form of art, theater embraces the extremes of high and low culture.

In the philosophical texts of the patron saint of the entire movement, Jacques Derrida, it is no accident that the metaphor of the stage appears. The Derridian theses that the theatrical space is an undecided and at the same time deconstructive space involved in the “impossibility of unambiguity” and that “the audience becomes a stage unto itself,” corresponds perfectly to the self-consciousness of twentieth-century theater and to the state of mind of the theatrology of the time. Attempts at putting the world of drama in order after the experience of the theater of the absurd (analogous to the phenomenon of art after the end of art) also indicate the multiplicity of mimesis in the contemporary theater (Austin E. Quigley), the lack of dialogue and closing of the dramatic structure (John Peter), and the end of individualism and the image of “rootless existence” (George E. Wellwarth, Erika Fischer-Lichte).

In 1984, Darko Suvin diagnosed the malaise of the “individualistic drama,” connected with the history of the illusionistic stage. In 1980, Maurice Valency announced the “end of the play” as a result of the rejection in the twentieth century of the traditional doctrine of mimesis and the myth of cosmic order. For this reason, perhaps, the dominant theme in plays (and theater) at the end of the twentieth century seems to be the conflict between reality and illusion, between the truth of human existence and the necessary mendacity in interpersonal conventions as described by Anthony S. Abbott. Precisely this conflict is intended to unite the diversity of models of post-absurdist drama: Harold Pinter, Peter Weiss, Tom Stoppard, Peter Handke.

An important difference between regular and irregular genres emerged from the beginning within the space of the box stage. The former (comedy, tragedy) maintained the dominance of the word in the conventional acting space (as in Serlia's concept from 1545: a square with streets in perspective for comedy or a temple-palace complex for tragedy). The place for the staging of regular genres on the l’italienne stage was “transparent”: the play was presented separately and the decoration existed separately. In turn, the irregular genres (referred to as “intermediate,” which over time became increasingly significant—such as opera, drama, tragicomedy, or melodrama) treated visual perception as being on an equal footing, or even as having the highest priority.

For those irregular genres, the box stage was an ideal machine for conjuring up an illusory, visual world. The image, the visual presentation, the repraesentatio, turned out to be more important than the earlier verbal conventions that safeguarded dignity and good taste, like the “owl curtain” in tragedy, always lowered for things and subjects that exceeded the necessary decency. The dominance of the stage image achieved its culmination in the era of romanticism, together with the use of ever-more-complicated machinery. This was also the point at which the irregular genres confirmed their preponderance, including a new one—romantic tragedy.

To the degree that dramatic events still arose in the baroque era independently of autonomous time and space (the human actor was subordinated to the illusion of the theatrical image), in the nineteenth century the event began to decidedly predominate over its own time and space (in practice this meant that the theatrical character was brought into the foreground and endowed with the autonomous function of shaping time and space).

Dobrochna Ratajczak wrote that:

Modern theater was thus formed parallel to the development of changing dramatic conventions in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries as a spatial art of depiction. The visual theatrical presentation, the actor's creation of character as an expression of the language of the body, and the line of plot were all depicted according to symmetrical or asymmetrical rules of geometry.

The abstract square image of the stage (a cube in its spatial version), inscribed with lines of central perspective, created the illusion of an infinite, unchanging, homogeneous space, and thus permitted the spectator “to take in the whole range of the stage with a single glance.” But an equal role in the creation of the stage image was played by the illusions produced by scenographic conventions and, increasingly importantly, the peopling of the stage with the motor forces embodied in human beings—the actors. This is how, in the wake of the stereoscopic visual principle, modern individualism and a hierarchical conception of human existence entered the theater.

The circle (sphere) of the actor's “speaking gestures” (with meaning inhering in each line of movement of every significant part of the body) was—regardless of the value of the Delsartian codification—an expression of the modern faith in the universality of the extra-linguistic emotional code, and also of the ubiquity of the “reading in” of intention that defined each interpersonal relation (which according to contemporary psychology justifies the application of the theatrical metaphor in social life).

This was also a new understanding of acting, not only as the art of declamation or singing, but as the artistic repletion of the space of the stage with a dynamic, three-dimensional image of the body in motion—a visual work of art constructed by the actor or dancer. And finally, the circle of gestures can be read as the taking up anew of the concept of Vitruvian man—in the Christian version disseminated in the Renaissance, when “the Vitruvian figure inscribed in a square and a circle became a symbol of the mathematical sympathy between microcosm and macrocosm.” Deserving of special treatment is the question, passed over here, of modern theater architecture, which was influenced alongside the Vitruvian tradition by Renaissance study of mnemonics and hermetism.

Both the naturalists and the symbolists wanted a theater that expressed “the truth,” as opposed to the received stage conventions. They had, however, different conceptions of both truth and convention. The former dreamed of the truth of objective knowledge, turning to the reality of the milieu and the characters it defined (consenting to the mediation of literature and the living actor). The latter opted for the truth of the experience of non-mimetic art. Aiming for the absolute, the expression of the inexpressible, they chose evocation instead of showing (they saw in naturalism, after all, just another illusionistic convention) and dreamed at times of removing the actor (and literature) from the theater.

The whole search for the New Theater began at the end of the nineteenth century with the questioning of the actor's domination of the theater. This beginning is sometimes forgotten, with the accent often being placed instead on the tendency—derived from the ideas and practices of Wagner (Gesamtkunstwerk)—toward synthesizing the theatrical art and making it autonomous, while at the same time transforming the theatrical space (where, after the electricity revolution and the spread of Adolphe Appia's ideas, came the “death of the praktikabel conquered by the platform,” and after that the wide acceptance of the idea of “empty space”). After all, the search for the New Theater gave birth to the revolt against the nineteenth-century star system that was based on the rhetoric of declamation and the “semiotics” of gesture.

New Theater theorists decided to downgrade actors and subordinate them to the overriding idea of the spectacle. In their opinion, star actors—using their skills at making an immediate impact—made it impossible for the performance/spectacle to achieve its most important aesthetic aims by transforming the play into a separate, autonomous, and synthetic (based on the synthesis of the arts) work of art. This overriding idea—guaranteeing the unity of the work of theatrical art—was first sought in literature (the search for the New Theater was, after all, kicked off by two revolutions in dramaturgy: naturalism and symbolism) or in the function of the Theater Artist, who assumed responsibility for the entirety of the work—this is what Craig, Appia, and Wyspiański thought.

“The last 100 years have seen a constant battle against the concept of theatrical illusion: the idea that what we are watching is a plausible reproduction of reality. Everything has conspired against it,” wrote Michael Billington in 2012.

The phenomenon of dramatic and theatrical illusion, which was subjected to various forms of deconstruction in the twentieth century, seems to be inextricably bound up with the very European convention of simulating scenes of real life on stage in accordance with the social models and norms accepted at a given moment.

The effectiveness of theatrical illusion in the European theater tradition resulted not so much from the constantly improved, rich repertoire of staging and acting techniques as from, above all, the willingness of spectators to accept the dominant theatrical conventions. At various times, as Pierre Francastel noted, there have been various recipes for creating illusion. The effectiveness of illusion, in painting or the theater, depended after all on the “collectively accepted means of understanding reality.” Theatrical illusion depended, as Reginbald A. Foakes wrote, on “the activity of mind on the part of the spectator that distinguishes dramatic illusion from scenic illusion.”

In his French Dictionnaire du Theatre [Dictionary of Theatrical Terms], Patrice Pavis put forward just such a definition:

The fullest manifestation of the theater of total illusion was the naturalistic convention of the “fourth stage wall” at the end of the nineteenth century, permanently dividing two worlds—the theatrical work and the audience, who for the first time sat in the dark. Total illusion was assumed by the theater of August Strindberg, among others. As J. L. Styan encapsulates this postulate: “His audience was to be completely convinced of the reality of the world of the stage and transported wholly into its sphere of influence.”

Of the legacy of the quest for a New Theater at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there remains on the one hand an ideal model of the closed and repeatable authorial work that triumphs over its temporal nature. On the other hand, a competing model has been established of eternally incomplete communication and an open field of co-creation by many authors, including the audience. These opposed conventions have defined the boundaries of the contemporary theater, between creation and co-presence. Repeatedly destroyed in the cycle of “theatrical revolutions” but in fact indestructible, the box stage has immersed contemporary theater in insoluble spatial contradictions: open and closed, unity and diversity, secularity and the sacred, and above all, symmetry and asymmetry, the eternal order of the theatrical image and the living, thinking, feeling actor who shatters that order. The interplay between the sensual and illusory experience of limited, conventional space and the substantiality of the Other present in the here and now marks another theatrical boundary and has led over time to questions about the nature of the fleeting reality enclosed in the box, and also about the co-creative function of the audience, whose senses and experiences co-created the illusory—or disillusory—effect. Here, two model solutions have been possible: the truth of making-present or the convention of representation.

Post-Cartesian dualism imposed on modern drama the tension of the two theaters, the external and the internal. To grasp that tension it turned out to be necessary to relativize action understood in the Aristotelian sense, in favor of a subjective perspective, the introduction of epic commentary but also the allocation to the director of a privileged position as constructor of forms, marking out the frame and dynamics of changing situations, building the rhythm and tension. The coupling of “me—not me” finally objectivized the contemporary theater of alienation: in models of existential metaphor, in the limitation of the interpersonal to spontaneous speech acts, in attempts at the exploration of the human “primal substance” by the actors.

Henri Gouhier's definition “Représenter c’est rendre présent par des présences” (to represent is to make something present through presences) is totally inadequate to Tadeusz Kantor's Theater of Death, the essence of which—as described in detail elsewhere—is precisely the “impossibility of making present” both the dead “literary pre-existence” of the spectacle (drama, fable, characters) and the subjective memory of what-was.

Neither does the semiologists’ definition “theater is the spatialization of literature” fit the assumptions of Kantor, who used linguistic citations from Witkiewicz's Tumor Brainowicz, visual references to Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke and the prose of Schulz in The Dead Class to create possibilities (even for an instant) of the ostentatiously “substitute” existence of the dead pupils in moments when the class came to life and the photograph of memory dissolved. This is one of the principles of the Theater of Death: literary roles and motifs make impossible the rebirth (in reconstructed reminiscences of long-dead characters and incidents), or rather such reconstruction is lost in the trap of “impersonation.” Inaugurated with the 1956 Cuttlefish, the years-long “playing (with) Witkacy” in the Cricot 2 theater, extending through The Dead Class of 1975, was based on the assumption that the plays—even the most avant-garde ones that nevertheless had long been fulfilled in the imagination of their author, constituted “the DEAD world of the DEAD.” For Kantor, the fundamental contradiction of the theater is found in the stage—play relationship, and even the momentary unity of literature and theater is impossible. On the one side of this eternal conflict there is, thus, the fiction of the play, its fable, and the “reality of fictional drama,” associated with the condition of death. The reality of the theater, entangled in the conflict with theatrical illusion, remains on the other side. The stage is the place where this transformation of the eternal condition of death into the condition of momentary, ostensible, simulated life plays out.

It is not, after all, literature that undergoes “spatialization” here, but rather the photographic plates of memory of Kantor himself as he creates the Theater of Death by conjuring up the metaphysics of photography. The black-and-white image of the small group of pupils sitting at their desks constantly returns in performances of The Dead Class and freezes into immobility.

From a temporal perspective the rather paradoxical intersection of the thinking about the New Theater from 1890–1939 and the birth of structuralism is striking. The definition of the ingredients of the theatrical work and the specification of their mutual interdependence in the lyrical treatises of such visionaries as Appia or Wyspiański, as well as Schlemmer or Artaud, corresponds to one of the basic theses of structuralism, that “The true nature of things may be said to lie not in things themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.”

Another thesis of structuralism, regarding the audience as the “fourth creator” (Meyerhold) or the main arbiter (Brecht), corresponds to the analysis of the stage—audience relationship: “A wholly objective perception of individual entities is therefore not possible: any observer is bound to create something of what he observes.”

This might be why, in the late 1970s, Richard Hornby identified the structuralists Stanislavsky, Brecht, and Artaud (along with the one living person on the list, the American anthropologist and director Richard Schechner) as most important for the contemporary theater.

Yet in reality the most important theories of the theatrical work, from the 1930s, arose mostly outside the theater, and in all certainty the formulation of them was not exclusively the work of theatrical practitioners (even the “inhibited” ones). These latter continued to reach for poetical manifestos or personal commentary, but they gave up on creating ideal models of the theatrical work in words, leaving this task to the critics and theoreticians of the theater. From the 1930s until the waning of the 1960s, things happened totally differently from what had transpired in the times of the flourishing of the box stage, or its reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A new profession came into being: theoretician of the theater—rather loosely, or secondarily, connected with the practice of theater.

The limited scope of the influence of the postulates of the avant-gardists attempting to yoke the theater into the circle of permanent revolution that was obligatory in the visual arts of the 20th century, the unsuitability of “-isms” to the everyday world of the theater, and finally the utopian nature of the New Theater model—all of this together determined that the new discipline coming into being at the time—theatrology or theater studies—began by compiling a description of theatrical reality according to methodological directives carried straight over from other humanistic disciplines, and above all linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, and to a lesser degree musicology and art history.

The invention during the Renaissance of the modern box (from the German Guckkasten, literally a “looking box”) or Italian (a l’italienne) stage and its development in the Baroque period were closely connected with the dominance at the time of a view of the world based on painting. The vital optical connection between the spectator's eye and the three-dimensional stage image appeared from the start to be an attractive solution to the basically mathematical problem posed for painting by the greatest artists of the time: how to integrate the space of the image on the basis of the principle of the objective reproduction of perceived, physical reality.

To this day, that stage, boite a miracles, which transforms the theater into an ever more effective optical box, inscribes the Euclidean visual pyramid (following Alberti's treatise on painting) in theatrical space, remains the most perfect manifestation of the Renaissance belief that the world is geometrical in form, and that nature itself is unchanging, subject to mathematical rules and accessible to man in the form of a spectacle at once true and fleeting, like the image conjured up in a camera obscura. Alberti wrote in 1435:

This was not, of course, the sole model of the theater in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: it persisted and developed in opposition to the still vital medieval, Shakesperean, and popular tradition (commedia dell’arte). Without repeating all that has been written copiously and in detail on this subject, it is perhaps worth reminding ourselves about the direction in which the new invention developed, between the architectonic-symbolic Vitruvian and the painterly-illusionist anti-Vitruvian concepts. Between the actor-centered theater that highlights the word, without decoration and machinery, and the decorative theater that aims for the Renaissance form of the total spectacle. Between the theater of the opened space and the theater enclosed in the box of a chamber.

Two opposing concepts of the theatrical work turned out to be the most durable achievements of the search for the New Theater from the 1890s to 1939. One of them treated the performance as a message, and the art of the theater as a platform that brings about a dynamic feedback loop in the relation between stage and audience. The second called for seeing the spectacle as an autonomous aesthetic subject, an equally entitled product of other forms of art, arising from the synthesis (or harmony) of ingredients that are named and conceived of in a variety of ways.

The proponents of the first concept (Stanisławski, Copeau, Meyerhold, and Brecht) generally placed literature and the art of acting at the center of attention. Improving and transforming acting techniques, while attempting to reconcile the truth of the actor with the truth of the role—and the audience (which played the role of arbiter, acquiring increasingly greater significance over time)—they accented the conventionality of theatrical art as a “language of signs,” which either reflected the real world, or expressed a non-mimetic game with conventions.

Those who inclined toward the second concept (Craig, Appia, Schlemmer, and Artaud)—accorded pride of place in the theater of the future to a single artist, the stage manager, poet/musician, and priest. And they more or less openly sought exemplars of ideal structure in music, dreaming of something along the lines of visual musicality that would triumph over the temporal impermanence of theater.

New Theater utopia arose out of a conviction about the ineluctable destruction of the traditional box, but it was incapable—apart from utopian constructions recorded in manifestos—of erecting a homogeneous spectacle, universally accepted and corresponding to contemporary aesthetics, on the ruins left behind. The competing models cause difficulties in defining both the essence and the form of the spectacle in our time, and the very limits of theatricality, or the specifics and hierarchy of theatrical materials. Thus it is that the fundamental impulses (essential, aesthetic, and autonomous) that marked the beginnings of this process turned, after a century of trial and error, into their own contraries. Today, the essence of the theater seems more impenetrable, the aesthetics more impermanent, and the autonomy more doubtful than ever before.

In the well-known book The Empty Space, Peter Brook carried out his familiar division into Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate theaters. The Holy theater was an expression of the dream, frequent in the 1960s and 1970s, of the rebirth of authentic links between the modern stage and ritual and myth. In the footsteps of Artaud, there was a proposal at the time that the Invisible should again become the Visible, that the Eternal would find expression in rhythms, forms, and gestures, that the stage would meet all the criteria of the locus sacer, and time would take on the ritual dimension of sameness, presentation, and presence.

In much of his mature theatrical activity, Brook appeals directly to myth and ritual—in the whole cycle of well-known productions, after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company, including Orghast (1971), The Iks (1975); and Conference of the Birds (1976). Sometimes he plucked fabular material out of mythical stories, or resorted to the fruitful theatricality of patterns of religious activity. Elsewhere he gave proof of his faith in the supremacy of the ideas of co-participation and community. The most famous manifestation of this attitude was of course his Mahabharata. Brook produced several versions of the Mahabharata with different lineups of actors: the French-language version had its premiere as part of the Avignon Festival on July 7, 1985; the English-language version was shown for the first time in Zurich in August 1987, and finally the film version was produced in 1990.

This legendary production has repeatedly been described as the logical crowning of Brook's many years of creative process, in search of what he called “interior culture.” But it was also a personal illustration of the “intercultural” principles he adopted, a practical lesson in the theses of the anthropology of the theater which were obligatory in the work of the International Centre for Theatrical Research (Centre International de Recherche Théâtrale) that Brook directed in Paris from 1971 on.

In the Mahabharata, Peter Brook utilized the experience of the Paris Centre—conceived of as a place for the meeting of many cultures—but also his research trips with an international group of actors to Iran, Africa, the USA, and India. This led to the gathering of what would seem to be a wealth of incompatible experience.