TYPES OF THEATRE Musical Musicals are plays that are performed in completely in song and dance form. Musicals were made immensely popular by London’s West End to New York’s Broadway theatre. Fringe Theatre Fringe theatre is a form of theatre that is experimental in its style and narrative. One of the highlights of fringe theatre is that it’s pretty frugal in nature – in terms of technicalities, production value etc. In its earlier days, fringe plays were held in small scale theatres and little rooms above pubs. Often, these kind of plays are also full of edgy and unconventional stories, led by one person and wrapped in a single act. This helps a fringe play stay low cost and have multiple showings in one day. Melodrama Melodrama is a form of theatre wherein the plot, characters, dialogues are all exaggerated in order to appeal directly to the audience’s emotions from the very beginning. Orchestral music or songs are often used to accompany the scenes or to signify specific characters. This form of theatre was most popular during the 18th and 19th century. Comedy Now, don’t we all know what a comedy play is! Comedy plays could cover various themes spanning satire, malapropisms, characterizations, black comedy and so on. Shakespearean plays explain that if a play has a happy ending then it’s a comedy, but over the years, comedy has come to denote so many other things – one of them being conveying a social message to the audience in a more palatable format. Tragedy Tragedy play is based on human suffering and emotionally painful events. These plays have evolved from Greek tragedy plays that focused on a single theme and plot, to its present day form that tackles multiple themes, storylines and sub-plots. Earlier tragedy plays chronicled only the royalty and people in places of immense power, however over the course time they have become the stories of the common man’s struggle. Historic Plays These plays are based on a historical narrative – they are either an enactment of a historical event or personality, or an adaptation of the same. This genre has been best defined by William Shakespeare’s plays like Julius Caesar and Henry IV. Solo Theatre Again, like the name suggests, solo theatre is led by only one actor. These plays could be anything, from comic acts to theatrical representations of poetries and stories. This style of theatre stems from the rich and ancient history of oral storytelling present in almost every culture for a thousand years, where people gather around one person who enacts out the whole story (including multiple characters). What makes solo plays so interesting is the fact that actor has to make sure the act does not get boring or monotonous for the audience; s/he has to keep adding different strokes and shades to his performance. Internationally, Sir Patrick Stewart has enacted all 43 characters of Charles Dickens’s novel A Christmas Carol (which is the only novel to be turned into a Solo act). Epic An epic is often mixed up with a tragedy play, although both are completely different concepts. In an epic, the focus is less on making the audience identify with the characters on stage and more on bringing out the connection with the setting of the stage. Epic theatre is more about scale, and it relies on making people react to the story more rationally than emotionally. Autobiographicals Autobiographical plays are, as the name suggests, plays told from a first person perspective. The lead walks (or talks, for that matter) the audience through his life and its many moments. Autobiographicals can either be a solo play or a multi-character play.
