theatre

Place or building in which dramatic performances for an audience take place; these include drama, dancing, music, mime, opera, ballet, and puppet performances. Theatre history can be traced to Egyptian religious ritualistic drama as long ago as 3200 BC. The first known European theatres were in Greece from about 600 BC.

The earliest theatres were natural amphitheatres, where the audience sat on open hillsides. By the Hellenistic period came the development of the stage, a raised platform on which the action took place. In medieval times, temporary stages of wood and canvas, one for every scene, were set up in churches and market squares for the performance of mimes and miracle plays. With the Renaissance came the creation of scenic illusion, with the actors appearing within a proscenium arch; in the 19th century the introduction of the curtain and interior lighting further heightened this illusion. In the 20th century, alternative types of theatre were developed, including open stage, thrust stage, theatre-in-the-round, and studio theatre.

Famous theatre companies include the Comédie Française in Paris (founded by Louis XIV in 1690 and given a permanent home in 1792), the first national theatre. The Living Theater was founded in New York in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. In Britain the National Theatre company was established in 1963; other national theatres exist in Stockholm, Moscow, Athens, Copenhagen, Vienna, Warsaw, and elsewhere.

Traditional Japanese theatre includes No and kabuki.

Centres of world theatre
In the USA the centre of commercial theatre is New York City, with numerous theatres on or near Broadway, although Williamsburg, Virginia (1716), and Philadelphia (1766) had the first known American theatres. The ‘little theatres’, off-Broadway, developed to present less commercial productions, often by new dramatists, and of these the first was the Theater Guild (1919); off-off-Broadway then developed as fringe theatre (alternative theatre). In Britain repertory theatres (theatres running a different play every few weeks) proliferated until World War II, for example, the Old Vic; and in Ireland the Abbey Theatre became the first state-subsidized theatre in 1924. Although the repertory movement declined from the 1950s with the spread of cinema and television, a number of regional community theatres developed. Recently established theatres are often associated with a university or are part of a larger cultural centre.