Games and reenactments

In times of great social upheaval, unrest and change – in other words, these days – should theaters be playing plays? Although life offers us arguments for different answers every next day, it's not bad to remember what the essence is - the context, the background - of the question itself. All the more so, as there is currently a whole lot going on in the squares, streets and roads of this country a different kind of "theater", which in scope, momentum and evoked emotions far surpasses the art theater as we know it and turns it - at least at first glance - into a "straw among the whirlwinds", so to speak.

What, then, in such a situation, remains"theatergoers" - and not only the actors? To give up action from the stage altogether, for the sake of joining your audience in street processions, choirs and protests, or, on the other hand, to try to - using all the means provided by the theater performance, as well as its context - from the stage itself, question reality in an artistic-critical way and thus contribute to change? The dilemma is almost as old as the (Western European) theater itself, but, apparently, the answers provided by examples from history are most often for the contemporaries in question, they are not acceptable (partially because they are not universal).

The first significant example of solving this dilemma can be found in the theater and society of ancient Greece - more precisely, in one of the darkest moments of this civilization. Namely, as Johanna Kaninck's research recently proved, in the final days of the Peloponnesian War, in the spring of 404 BC, neither the siege of the superior Spartan army, nor the plague and famine that ravaged the city prevented the citizens of Athens from holding, in full scale, the theatrical program of the Great Dionysian festivities. If this concentration and will of all social classes to preserve the presence of the theater can be partially attributed to the ritual significance and function of the plays, this cannot be true in any case for the great theater of the Elizabethan period, in England at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, the performance of (Shakespeare's) Lord Chamberlain's Company and other permanent acting troupes was threatened from season to season by successive epidemics of the plague - and how little the lives of the actors (but also the spectators, living from the lower classes) were valued, is also evidenced by the fact that the court theater censor (wittily referred to as the "Master of Revels"/Master of Revelry) canceled the performance of theater performances only when the number of deaths from the plague exceeded the number of fifty per week. On top of that, the theater itself was still often considered a breeding ground for moral contagion, as evidenced by the saying of the then influential Puritan preacher Wycox: "The cause of the plague is sin, and if you consider it well, the cause of sin is the theater; therefore, the cause of the plague is the theater." And yet, despite censors and epidemics, the actors did not give up their mission - playing in provincial taverns, fairs and empty streets.

Of course, the new, civil centuries introduced new ambiguities into the previously simple dilemma of wanting/having to play. Thus, the anecdote told by Mirjana Miočinović in the brilliant play "Theatre and the Guillotine" is indicative: upon the news of the fall of the Bastille in 1789, a certain Planchet de Valcourt, the director of the theater "Smešne razbibrige"(!) tore the tulle curtain behind which his actors had to dance and exclaimed: "Long live freedom!". However, it was not even five years before, as a kind of "flowers of freedom", "party" theaters sprung up in Paris, where actors were booed and, quite often, were in danger of losing their heads due to the use of wrong phrases in addressing (characters), which were not in the spirit of "emancipation" of the Terror period.

The modern age, especially the twentieth century, brought an even greater gap between the "sacred theater" and practical reality, especially the reality of major and significant historical events. So, for example, the chroniclers recorded how, on November 5, 1917 (according to the new calendar), two days before the epochal upheaval - the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd - there was a premiere Tarelkin's death Suhovo-Kobiljina, under the direction of Meyerholjd, the performer of the main role before the final monologue "looking blankly at the audience", slowly took off his wig and revealed the corpse's scalp. But was the absolute silence in the auditorium, which accompanied this gesture, a sign of some kind of catharsis caused by the artistic process or, on the other hand, a signal of the realization of an imminent social upheaval (for some: breakdown)?

To play or to participate - that is, in other words, a dilemma that theater people today can avoid only if they stop thinking in extremes. When he replaces acting from the stage with the role of a participant in a street procession, the actor not only accepts the renunciation of his essential active advantage, but, in a far-reaching way, undermines everything he has done - and will do again - on the stage. Because the nature of playing with illusion is such that it can always be played over: actors, spectators, even those who call themselves critics. If he stops in the procession for just a moment, looks around and sees the reason/topic of the protest, today's "theatre worker" - by no means just an actor! - he has the opportunity to understand, I am convinced, the inadequacy and pettiness, the insignificance and barrenness of most of the "problems" in which he participated in the marketing of our stages in the last, well, rather theatrical seasons. And only from the moment of that realization can the illusion end and freedom can begin: first as a game, then as rapture, then as a belief and, finally, as a daily need. Only then does it cease to be important where, and in front of whom, the Game takes place - because it, in all its ephemeral and permanent forms, is equated with life.