An unusual conjunction of three tendencies then prominent in European theatrical thinking and practice determined the formulation of the idea of the New Theater at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. First, to capture and name the essence of theater, second, to give the theatrical performance the status of a work of art, and third, to create a separate and distinct art, the art of theater, out of various materials. Each of these tendencies, the essential, the aesthetic and the autonomous, contributed to the irrevocable transformation of theatrical style within the box stage.

But the postulated New Theater did not result from aspirations so homogeneous as they are frequently depicted. Aside from the accepted autonomy (or separateness) of the theatrical work among other arts, and also the perpetuation of the idea of the synthetic nature of the theatrical spectacle, the remaining postulates in the area of directing, stage design, and acting, the prerogatives of the artist of the theater, the hierarchy of variously defined ingredients were already of a derivative and heterogeneous nature. Perhaps for this reason the seekers of a New Theater: Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, Antonin Artaud, for various reasons frequently chose the path of aesthetic manifestos over firsthand theatrical experience. They have even been referred to as “inhibited practitioners.” But perhaps more important, it turned out, were problems with the creation of such a universal model of the theatrical work, in the form (despite everything) of the Italian box and its conventions, which enjoyed popularity over several centuries.

From the perspective of time, it is increasingly easy to discern a polarity in the New Theater. This was most elegantly expressed by one of the participants in the movement, the “great eclectic,” Max Reinhardt. He formulated two opposed solutions: either “truth against convention” or “style against realism.” This formula can serve as a motto not only for the polemics of the naturalists and the symbolists from the late nineteenth century, but also, apparently with equal insight, for the whole of twentieth-century theater, which in various ways departed from the absolutization of the theatrical world in the place of pure interpersonal relations, introducing, in Peter Szondi's formula, “the inexpressible as well as the expressed, what was hidden in the soul as well as the idea already alienated from its subject.”