(selection of Mina Shpela Krstevska, translated by Elizabeta Bakovska)
In his intention to stress the need of theatre aesthetics, which will not result from the impeccable diction of the actors from abroad, but from the actors who stutter but they do it in their mother tongue, Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theatrologist, says:
“In the developing countries it was a must to take the theatre capitals as a model and goal… The actor was not allowed to be influenced by those like him; He dreams of a company of the so-called educated viewers. He intends to integrate the traditions of others, not expressing his own. He takes his culture as a divine message, and he himself does not utter a single word.”
Later in his explanation that theatre should always match the aesthetic needs of the recipient, that is, each audience wants plays that confirm its vision of the world, he says that:
“The cradle of the epic theatre would be unimaginable without their thousands of proletarians, and the castration and anthropophagi of Tennessee Williams, without New York. I would also be absurd to stage Brecht’s Mother on Broadway, as well as the Iguana Night before Berlin Trade Union.”
Boris Zingerman in his book “Jean Willer et all” gives material that corresponds to Boal’s view. Zingerman says:
“Antoan, fearing the expansion of the Russian theatre in 1923, more specifically fearing the Camera Theatre of Mayerhold and Tairov’s plays, said: Unless you stop the enemy, there will be no French theatre, and our plays will become German, Russian, Black.”
What does this say? It is clear that the theatre is not only a carnival and holiday but also a mechanism. A mechanism of the play ritual whose provenience, national habitat, nationality, we can determine. What does that mean?
It means that its immanent task should always be pointed out:
to be the island in the archipelago of islands;
to fit the local theatre aesthetics;
to build an emotional contact with the audience.
In his book Labyrinths, Bora Drashkovic says: “The play wealth is the genealogical tree of a people.” The same thing can be said about the theatre, and add that “theatre trunk rings are multiplying, the tissue matures in the space”. It matures, and why? So that the people, not alone, but with their hardship and loneliness can enter that matured cell and feel it. Feel it as an encouraging crowd, as the breathing of the closest kin, and keep quiet in one’s mother tongue. There is no man who does not enjoy when he sees his double on the stage and when he hears from the double himself his own name or his nickname. There is no man who does not want to live his destiny via his double.
The theatre can have open windows to the world, but it must have its fireplace where the fire will speak about the specific issues of the matter that releases the heat…
In his strategy on national theatre, Georgio Streler says that the creation of a national theatre is among other things susceptible to the repertoire. This means that the theatre organizing itself as a national one obtains a clear image of what should exist and what it should express itself through. Thus, it imperatively responds to the tasks stated: to go back to classics, to use the modern things, to turn towards itself. Addressing theatre literature it creates an instrumentarium for its aesthetics and idea orientation, that is, it helps the free expression of dialectic principles.
So, what remains as a conclusion in the determination of the national identity of the theatre?
Stressing the elements that comprise it:
theatre play must be a mechanism that will support the experience of the theatre via an emotional contact;
the audience who will feel the relation to their own even in the roughness of the language;
playwrights who build the conflict on the national interest.