Chapter 12 - Theatre and media

Summary

As one of the oldest media, theatre has survived several epochal shifts in media technology. Whether it was the invention of the printing press or the challenges posed by the invention of cinema, radio or television, the theatre met these innovations with openness and accommodation rather than with rejection. Very often, the new medium took the theatre as its model (with respect to presenting entertainment, especially of the fictional kind (dramatic stories)) before developing other forms and conventions. The theatre always reciprocated by integrating certain elements of the new medium into its own aesthetic and even organizational forms.

Although the theatre has been exposed to competition from other media since the beginning of the twentieth century, and has certainly lost its previous dominant position as the main purveyor of fictionalized entertainment, the discipline of theatre studies has, until recently, been hesitant to seriously investigate the relations between theatre and other media. There are both historical and political reasons behind this reluctance. Historically, we can trace a gradual but steady expansion of the subject in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period one of the most frequently cited ‘theoretical’ statements defining the essence of theatre was Eric Bentley's famous formula: ‘A impersonates B while C looks on’ (see the introduction). Such efforts to ‘reduce’ theatre to a minimalist basic situation went hand in hand with an attitude that sought to keep other media at a safe distance from the stage.