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Theatre - an Art and a Reflection of Our Real Life

Ask yourselves when did you attend a theater lately? What play was performed? What was the topic? How did you enjoy the production? What feelings provoked to you effectively seeing the play "live"? Did the play have an impact on your thoughts and perspective of life? Did you find something that fits with your ideas about life or was it similar with something that happened in your real life in the past or with what is happening even now? Did the play made you doubt about your opinion regarding one thing or another from everyday life? Every one of us should have introspection about what represents theatre in our lives.

The goal of theatres is not only to present literature in a dramatic way, but it is an art which explore and express ideas, concerns, doubts, hopes of humankind. Performing a play means words, gestures, mimics, feelings expressed live and, especially a communication level directly with the audience. I stand this opinion having in mind the origin of the word "theatre": theatre or theater (from French "theatre," from Greek "theatron,," meaning "place of seeing"). Theatre is the "branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, mime, puppets, music, dance, sound and spectacle -- indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts."

Theaters around the world are dedicated to presenting theater as an art form. Usually, the plays chosen for production engage audiences in an introspection and philosophical examination of the complexities of contemporary life (Newsletter of The Wilma Theater). A wonderful performance of a fantastic play is one of the most rewarding and climactic experiences a culture can provide. A society will always provide themes for people to write and perform a play about what's ruling in the real life. Thus, theater influences and is influenced by the society in which it is created and plays performed in theatres reflect profound ideas from a society.

Plenty theatres around the world prides themselves in presenting quality theatre, by bringing plays with fresh, surprising, contrasting and sometimes challenging perspectives and points-of-view from real life. "I suppose that theater uses more of the actual substance of life than any other art" wrote Athol Fugard in the 1960s and 70s, in his extensive notebooks. Movies are interesting, but there is nothing like the thrill of a live performance of a play on the stage. As Athol Fugard says, theatre uses flesh and blood, sweat, emotions, human voices, real pain and real time.

Sometimes plays reflects and is bound with life experience - Athol Fugard's My Children! My Africa! correlates with previous experience that Athol had in 1956: he worked as a clerk in Johannesburg Court and this experience opened his eyes to the injustice of apartheid. Further more, different life-experience became an inspiration for later plays (for example, in 1935 Fugard moved with his family in Port Elizabeth where he met servant and confidant named Sam, inspiration for Master Harold...and the Boys; or, in 1939, when Fugard got his first look at Uitenhage mountains, impressions of which later resurfaced in Mr. M's speech in My Children! My Africa).

Most of Fugard's plays stand as a proof of reality reflected in theatre as an art of real life. Athol Fugard's play My Children! My Africa reflects a cruel reality of his times: South Africa's dehumanizing system of apartheid laws that denied freedom to blacks. Worried that his country would never live in peace, Fugard wrote the play in hopes that the polarization between blacks and whites would end and world will know peace, freedom and understanding between each other. The play is based on a true incident and gives good insights into the situation in South Africa.

My Children, My Africa" is inspired by real events and describes a teacher's attempt (Mr. M) to bring understanding between two of his students: one is a middle class white girl - Isabel - and the other one is a brilliant black boy - Thami - who grew up in Coketown ghetto. The path toward understanding each other is marked by pain, but in the end brings respect and acceptance between the two of them.

This humane and dedicated teacher who believes in the power of ideas, not stones, inspires the minds of the enthusiastic white schoolgirl and black schoolboy and changes their lives forever. The play is a "timeless and powerfully poetic work about race, justice, fundamentalism, freedom, and self-knowledge," themes that we can find in many plays performed on theatre stages around the world.