The Seats Stay Unmoved: Theatre, Audience and Engagement

Abstract

Dramatization of reality has been a fodder to the human mind since time immemorial. The discovery of dramaturgy and serious theatricality just aggravated the mechanism further. Since the entire phenomenon is highly relevant in the eyes that watch, adopting important measures to keep the watch going, is necessary. The concern of audience engagement can be studied, based on the architecture of the theatre, the ambience of it, and with modern evolutions going on, new modes of attraction like food and refreshment turn out to be of great importance. The essay mentions a critical approach in analysing the psychological tendencies of the audience, with the continuous flux in time and hence the mechanisms, as put forward by several playwrights over the ages and locations. The inference is a step taken to align and conclude how the basic psychological aspects of audience engagement remain the same, since the time of the proscenium to the modern terms of theatricality, even in the times where the space of performance is contracting gradually to end up being confined in a box.