How the audience reads post: dramatic in contrast to realist theatre assignment

Realism takes the audience on a journey through their story, building connections by creating empathy for the protagonist, making an emotional connection. An audience will interpret and read the circumstances the characters are faced with, more often than not it is openly explained in the conflicts in the narrative. Some spectators may be able to relate to the circumstances or relationships in the performance, so much so that they can feel what a character experiences. To perhaps even take that feeling home with them; a tale which relates to their own.

But the difference between relate and incorporate is where Realism and Post-Modern theatre differ. Tim Etchells’ Forced Entertainment performs simple, fragmented stories addressing common concepts of human experience. Their 1996 production Showtime explores a collection of themes with the most prominent being death. With a dying man in agony being faced with a feeble questionnaire and a detailed description by a woman in a dog suit of how she would commit suicide, it is clear that these are not realistic circumstances.

Alike Epic Theatre, Forced Entertainment change characters to give a disjointed nature and to develop subtle juxtapositions or to just radically change direction. For example, in their performance Showtime there is a woman in a dog suit, who for the first two thirds of the production yaps and persistently barks like a dog, crawling on all floors around the stage. The actor asking questions starts questioning the dog, to which the dog replies in perfect English and then proceeds to take off her costume head to tell a long and dark story of how she would commit suicide. another reference, paraphrase? ) Inhabiting the nature of a dog, then suddenly becoming a common person assists in the creation of levels between characters. By changing and forcing the audience to constantly re-evaluate every new character and their purpose, places the audience as active spectators, who have to mentally keep up with the game of the performance. As most Realist theatre has specific themes it wants to address to the audience, ambiguity in its performance is best avoided.

Which is why Realist theatre has maintained such a structured set of conventions and ‘ rules’ for stage performance. Clear action, conflict and characterisation all assist in the portrayal of a theme to heard the audience into the direction it wishes them to follow. As Realism tries to deflect ambiguity, Post-Modern theatre thrives from it. “… to see what understandings of contemporary experience emerge when the art work dissolves the divide between the original and the secondary. In this deliberate confusion the lines between the spontaneous nd the pre-scripted, reality and fiction, the immediate and the distant, bodies and texts, event hood and representation and the live and the recorded are often made to fade away. ” (Void Spaces, pg 20) This undefined state between spaces is what can grip an audience to long for understanding, to give them space to fill the gaps in with their own imagination. Ultimately making the play apart of their own world in that moment. This enticing space allows the audience to employ their own freedom of thought, whereas Realist theatre likes to shape their interpretation into a certain outcome.