Styles in Theatrical Staging

This mixture of the suspension of disbelief in the face of the clear artifice that is so much of theater and the requirement that in some arenas we may expect realism results in productions that are a mixture of the fantastical and the realistic - a mixture that is continually shifting. For styles in theatrical staging change from one season to the next as surely as do dress styles or hairdos. Theater in the 1960s went experimental with other art forms, and cast off much of its traditions of realism. While it could not become entirely abstract as could painting (for there were the pesky human bodies of the actors), theater became as abstract as possible, with sets made minimal or dispensed with altogether, period costumes done away with, lighting made seemingly natural. This abandonment of any pretense at realism in theater

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ancaise in his romantic historical melodrama in verse, Hernani. This event has been claimed as the most important in nineteenth-century dramatic history. The production caused a riot, the champions of the old ways confronting in the theatre itself those of the new - this was the first of many public rows which punctuate the story of the modern stage. Victor Hugo won his battle, and although his play was very far from representing real life on the stage, the way had been opened for the coming of modern realism (Styan 3). There are, of course, different kinds of reality, and the reality that Les Miserables presents to us is more one of emotional validity than - as Styan notes - any actual representation or recreation of life on the stage. We want just enough of the realistic in the staging of a play like Les Mis that we can feel the emotions that the play should produce in us, but once we have gotten to that threshold of reality, we do not demand (and we may well even reject) any greater realism. One might suspect, as Grotowski (2002) argues, that theater would have become increasingly realistic during the past decade or even the past generation as the legitimate stage has to compete with the increasingly amazing things that we
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