Modern Theatre’s Expansion into Reality

Although the tension between the real and the illusion based upon it are at the heart of the theatrical experience, in the final years of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twenty-first, many theatres in Europe and the United States became particularly interested in calling attention to the real in their work. Although Hans-Thies Lehmann in his Postmodern Theatre (2006) devotes a few pages to this phenomenon, as one type of postmodern experimentation, what he designates as “the irruption of the real” he considers only one among many types of postmodern experimentation. I will argue, on the contrary, that it constitutes a major shift in the practical and phenomenological world of theatre, and a turning away from mimesis, which has been at the heart of the theatre ever since Aristotle. English version by Leslie Damasceno.