Theatre and Religion

The volume presents papers read at the fifth Bochum-Cracow Symposium on Comparative Theatre Studies. Its range extends from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, geographically, it covers Ireland, England, German-speaking Europe and Spain, as well as Eastern Central and Eastern Europe. Its wide scope enables it to reveal a number of unexpected similarities between historically and geographically distant phenomena. While medieval provincial England and seventeenth-century provincial Poland use religion as the guarantor of the dramatic world and employ the dramatic medium for predominantly devotional purposes, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries try to use the theatre as a building-ground for a new, religiously-based feeling of communitas. Remarkably, the power of religion is invoked and testified to also by a-religious playwrights. While all contributions except one deal with the dramatic influence of either Christianity or Greek paganism, incidentally suggesting the polarity, even irreconcilability of the two, the most moving account of the role of religion in a post-religious age deals with the part played by Judaism in helping the survivors of the Holocaust to find linguistic expression for their experience.