Structuralism and After: Trends and Tendencies in Theatre Analysis, Part One

Abstract

Susan Bassnett's ‘Introduction to Theatre Semiotics’ appeared in TQ38 (1980). reflecting in its very title the need to make theatre people of the English-speaking world better aware of approaches to theatre analysis which had been influential on the Continent since the work of the pioneer Czech semioticians of the 'thirties. But, as she now points out. these early workers in the field were themselves theatre practitioners, while more recent approaches have suffered from a tendency to divorce creators of theatre from the process and the vocabulary of analysis. Developing her account from the papers presented at the Conference on Theatre Analysis held last year at the University of Warwick, where she herself teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature. Susan Bassnett here introduces the corrective work of the new generation of continental theatre analysts, and relates their ideas and approaches to the recent decline of energy felt in British (as in most European) theatre, paralleled as it is by a growth in the influence of non-western theatre forms.