La tragedia nel teatro del Novecento: Coscienza del tragico e rappresentazione in un secolo al 'limite'

In his famous essay on the reflection of the tragic in ancient drama reflected in the tragic in modern drama, Søren Kierkegaard observes that tragedy still remains the tragic and that the idea of the tragic remains essentially the same, as it remains natural for mankind to weep. The consciousness of the tragic has traversed Western culture for millennia. It is closely bound up with the intuition of the inescapable limits, inseparable from the human condition. If the sense of the tragic is a permanent structure of human consciousness, tragedy is a form in which that structure has historically been translated. It was dramatic art and the stage that embodied and expressed it, enabling it to exist. As Peter Szondi rightly points out, it is only the modernity that, while decreeing the death of tragedy and reconstructing its transformation through the centuries, has developed the tragic as a philosophical idea. It is the modernity that, after Nietzsche, has fueled a great debate about tragedy to the point as times of making it a paradigm for the interpretation of human existence and reality. The book returns firstly to Greek source as was done by almost all the modern artists whose work is discussed in its pages. The purpose is to identify certain nuclei which in the historical development of this form of consciousness and its representation, have served as models, but above all as points of reference variously transformed and interpreted: above all the necessity of a limit. The book thus examines the variety of shapes that tragedy took in the twentieth century by analyzing several emblematic texts where the idea of limit is variously interpreted against the backdrop of the range of ideologies and philosophies that characterized the twentieth century. The texts considered are Ibsen’s Gengangere, Claudel’s L’annonce fait à Marie, O’Neill’s Morning becomes Electra di O’Neill, Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, Camus’ Caligula, Beckett’s Fin de partie, Delcuvellerie’s Rwanda 94 and Josse de Pauw’s Ruhe. The book considers also the correlation in each text selected and analyzed between the embodiment of the idea of limit and the idea of theater expressed by in the technique of construction of the text. The study includes a cronology of stage performances and a photographic insert.