The Psychology Of Theatre Audiences

The drama is the only art, excepting oratory, and particular types of music that are developed to appeal to a crowd rather than to a person. Because a drama is, in essence, a story developed to be provided by stars on a phase before an audience, and it needs always to be created to appeal at as soon as to a wide range of individuals.

No author is a dramatist unless he acknowledges this difference of appeal; and if an author is not accustomed to composing for the crowd, he can barely hope to make a rewarding play.

By the word crowd, as it is used in this conversation, is suggested a plethora of people whose sensations and concepts have taken a set in a specific single instructions, and who, due to the fact that of this, display a propensity to lose their private self-consciousness in the basic self-consciousness of the wide range. A crowd, for that reason, is less intellectual and more psychological than the people that compose it.

Now, it has been found in practice that the only thing that will acutely intrigue a crowd is a battle of some sort or other. So far as I understand, no one has yet recognized the primary factor for this, which is, merely, that characters are intriguing to a crowd just in those crises of feeling that bring them to the grapple. A single person, like the reader of an essay or a unique, might be interested intellectually in those mild impacts underneath which a character unfolds itself as slightly as a water-lily; however to what Thackeray called “that savage kid, the crowd, ” a character does not appeal other than in minutes of contention.

The crowd needs those so-called “supportive” parts that every star, for this factor, longs to represent. And considering that the crowd is partisan, it desires its preferred characters to win.