how is speech used in the occidental theatre
Answers
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Answer:
Speech in the Occidental theater is used only to express psychological conflicts particular to man and the daily reality of his life. His conflicts are clearly accessible to spoken lan¬guage, and whether they remain in the psychological sphere or leave it to enter the social sphere, the interest of the drama will still remain a moral one according to the way in which its conflicts attack and disintegrate the characters. And it will indeed always be a matter of a domain in which the verbal solutions of speech will retain their advantage. But these moral conflicts by their very nature have no absolute need of the stage to be resolved. To cause spoken language or expression by words to dominate on the stage the objective expression of gestures and of everything which affects the mind by sensuous and spatial means is to turn one's back on the physical neces¬sities of the stage and to rebel against its possibilities.
It must be said that the domain of the theater is not psycho¬logical but plastic and physical. And it is not a question of whether the physical language of theater is capable of achiev¬ing the same psychological resolutions as the language of words, whether it is able to express feelings and passions as well as words, but whether there are not attitudes in the realm of thought and intelligence that words are incapable of grasp¬ing and that gestures and everything partaking of a spatial language attain with more precision than they.
Before giving an example of the relations between the phy¬sical world and the deepest states of mind, let me quote what I have written elsewhere: