1st edition: June 2009
This book deals with the birth and development of theatre, starting from ancient Greek drama and moving to Shakespeare, Calderon, Molière, the Hindu classics, puppet and shadow theatre and reaching up to contemporary authors and genres both in Greece and abroad. Professor, translator and director Yangos Andreadis questions past or distant forms, presenting an unusual dialogue –orchestrated in a kind of synchronic frame– between the Greeks and Shakespeare, Plato and Calderon, puppet theatre and ancient historians, the Greek shadow theatre Karaghiozis and Brecht. Euripides’s Medea, Aristophanes’s Birds, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ibsen’s Ghosts are re-examined through the additional tools of psychoanalysis and theatrical anthropology. The works and days of French vanguard artist and thinker Antonin Artaud are related to psychiatric research on psychosis, in order to arrive to some conclusions concerning the role of logos and the body in contemporary world stage. Finally, tragedy, crime novels and film noir are related to Aristotle’s concept of family clashes as the ‘soul’ of tragic plots, in order to trace the analogies between the tragic hero of antiquity and its contemporary counterpart in cinema.
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