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‘The Dramatic Sense of Life’: Theatre and Historical Simulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Roger Howard
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Abstract

Many dramatists have written of the world as a stage: less attention has been paid to the consequent effects upon the ‘leading players’ – the politicians who readily enough cast themselves as heroes, and consign others to the roles of villains or at best supernumeraries. Roger Howard argues that on the contemporary ‘world stage’ events all too often take the form of simulations, in which ordinary people must take their allotted parts – or face the coercion or punishment of the state. He looks also at theatre practitioners from the Japanese actor Zeami to Schiller to Heiner Müller who have, for better or worse, examined the nature of the ‘dramatic sense of life’. Roger Howard, who presently teaches in the Department of Literature at the University of Essex, is himself a widely performed playwright, currently working with Theatre Underground, and has written extensively on Chinese theatre and political playwriting, most recently as a contributor to Contradictory Theatres, for imminent publication from Theatre Action Press.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , August 1985 , pp. 262 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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References

Notes and References

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9. Lindenberger, op. cit., p. 29.

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11. Ibid., p. 187.

12. The Guardian, 2 January 1985.

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