Theatre
Revenge and Tragedy
‘When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.’ It’s just a silly joke that my father used to tell me, but it seems that it also sums up something. This question and answer contain the essence of theatre – a play on meaning, how one thing can become another in our minds… It is telling that for us in the West our first theatre was tragedy. In the era when democracy was born, tragic drama had its prime. It is equally telling that in times without democracy, tragedy has given way to morality play: be it Everyman or Triumph of the Will. Tragedy lives questions, morality plays answer them. That’s not to say that tragedy is without morals; on the contrary, what constitutes a tragedy depends entirely on one’s moral viewpoint. To use Geoffrey Brereton’s real-world example – we would not think of the death of Hitler as tragic, ‘though for a Nazi sympathiser it must be supremely so’.
Appreciating Theatre
But where should a respectable bourgeois youth go for his or her entertainment? Certainly not the cinema. One is bound to find oneself akin to an island of sanity amidst a sea of raucous plebeians feeling each other up and hurling popcorn at one another. Even the art galleries are out, for nowadays they are simply flooded with jabbering children from comprehensive schools.
