4. From the history of theatre

Imitation, play, and performance have always been part of everyday human life. Though any official theatre history claims that the origins of theatre were more or less the invention of one particular community, which dates back to the days of ancient Greece. The very words theatre, drama, tragedy, and comedy are Greek in origin.

During the sixth century BC, Athens became one of the largest and most powerful cities. This standing was indivisible from spending vast quantities of energy and money on artistic and intellectual activities.

First, the Athenians created an extravagant spring festival, the Great Dionysia, which celebrated the fermentation of new wine. And they dedicated for it a large area above the Temple of Dionysus on the south-west slope below the Acropolis. At the foot, they lowered a performance space; and the whole area was known as the theatron – the spectacle-place or viewing-place.

The typical processions and sacrifices of the Great Dionysia led up to competitions in honour of the god, held before a seated gathering of people. Many such Greek festivals included competitions in music, songs, dance as well as the usual athletics.

However, the Athenians were determined to do something different. And soon a purely Athenian art-form was established at the Great Dionysia: tragoidia. There were only three dramatists competing each year, and each put on three tragedies. The traditional date for the first competition was 534 BC, and in 508 BC the magistrate of Athens organized the festival and selected the year’s playwrights; and the city treasury paid for the actors and the prizes.

It is of interest what the sequence of a tragic performance was: actors alternated sections of iambic speech and dialogue with dance-songs performed by the chorus. In fact, the alternation of scenes of action with choral dance-songs is the basic underlying structure of Greek tragedy. The plays were based upon time-honoured narration of epic poetry, above all the Iliad and Odyssey, and a whole reservoir of stories about distant heroic past, its great dynasties and wars and rich Greek mythology. The main purpose of the performers was to move their audience to strong emotions and to emphasize similar aspects of the stories: suffering, mortality, inevitability and responsibility, guilt, revenge, recognition, persuasion, anger, deceit and endurance.

Comedy, or at least Athenian komoidia, is said to have been introduced into the programme of the Great Dionysia in 486 BC.

The same era of culturally self-promoting democratic Athens gave rise to the development of drama from its beginning to a golden age that provided theatre to last for hundreds of years, and that was not rivaled, in Europe at least, until the London of Shakespeare.

Task I. Answer the questions.

1. How old is the theatre?

2. Which country became the cradle of European theatre?

3. Did the genres of comedy and tragedy appear at the same time?

4. What did the first theatre look like?

5. What is the structure of Greek tragedy?

Task II. Say what words refer: a) only to the cinema, b) only to the theatre,

c) to both of them.

Stage; performance; show; booking office; animated cartoon; act; to star; cast; producer; director; stalls; balcony; newsreel; actor; to dramatize a novel; to make a book into a film; opera-glasses; foyer; feature film; leading role; to be on; to dub; scenery; screened version; scene; to make up; camera-man; subtitles.