POLITICS AND THEATER AS GUARDIANS OF A COMMON WORLD

Sa？etak In this paper the author claims that the history of European drama and theater contains an original answer to the classical political question of relation between an order and change. The theater’s fundamental goal is preservation of a common world in the absence of which the theater itself becomes meaningless. Confronting us at first with the abyss of searching for the meaning of life, the great dramatists than help us return to the normality by providing us with an answer whispered in their ear by the spiritual, historic and political circumstances of their age. Those among them aiming to preserve the existing order, such as Aeschylus, Molière and Racine, artistically revealed to the audiences the order’s grounding idea. For others, such as Goethe and Schiller, whose artistic genius recognized in the history signs of a development towards a republic of autonomous citizens, theater was a place for esthetic education of an elite expected to accelerate the process of coming into being of a new common world. Authors of revolutionary periods, such as Brecht and Pirandello, used theater to inspire radical change of all existing social and political institutions. Finally, to the authors such as Euripides, Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, theater made it possible to cry out for an old common world that no longer has a grounding idea and therefore disappears