Theatre or literature (on the theory of theatre of based on the study of literature)

Abstract

This work undertakes the problem of philological reflection on theatre, placing in the centre of considerations the relations between the word and the stage. Often criticised for its onesidedness, the reflection of specialists in literary studies focuses modern scholars around two leading methodologies - that of semiology and that of phenomenology. In the article the author adduced some selected works of Western theorists - the classic book by Anne Ubersfeld "Reading Theatre", which is a lucid example of "a literary theory of theatre", which in fact ignores the specificity of stage art, and the publications which fo llow the semiological route and are the work of such well-known theatrologists as Erika Fischer Lichte, Keir Elam and Martin Esslin. The philological point of view adopted in these works causes either granting literature a dominant role with respect to theatre, or, in turn, makes it that both disciplines are treated as beings which have been artificially separated, devoid of any relationships. The works mentioned here are the proof of limitations and shortages of the semiological method, which is positively tested exclusively as a tool of the description of a performance and which is always incapable of making over-all attempts to look at a performance and at its semantics.