Theatre in the Corridor

Abstract

“Theatre in the Corridor” was written, in Czech, in December 1939; that explains why the first paragraph sounds rather anachronistic. It has remained unpublished for nearly forty years.This was my third attempt to write a theoretical paper, after “Man and Object in the Theatre,” published in 1940 (English translation in: Paul L. Garvin, ed., A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style, Washington, D.C., 1964) and “Mácha's Conception of the World,” published the same year.My approach followed the general theory of the Prague Linguistic Circle, focusing on the concepts of structure and sign. But I was much more influenced by the Prague School's poetics, linguistics, and general esthetics than by its sporadic studies about the theatre, which I found somewhat loose in their reasoning.