Most theorists of the past generations have admitted that in art, the sense of reality is more important than the truth, the "naturalness" of the feeling is more important than the truth, and the sense of reasonableness is also more important than the truth. Therefore, "nature" and "reason" are often used as sensual propositions to confront historical reality.

Lessing

Writing a play that draws material from real events often produces two problems: one is that it violates the truth; The second is that it does not contradict the truth but does not seem to be very reasonable and unnatural. Which of these two problems is more serious and intolerable? Lessing thinks it is the latter, and he says that heaven will make the former mistake but not the latter.

The realism of the audience has great power, which can neither be replaced nor disguised. Some playwrights declare in front of the screen that "the following is a true story", trying to lure the audience with historical truth, but as a result, it does not contribute to the feeling effect. When a real event arrives in the theater, it is very likely to become an "unreal real event". Even if a historian or sociologist comes to see a play, when they sit down as an audience, aesthetic perception immediately overcomes everything, and a rich and unequivocal knowledge of history is no substitute for their theatrical realism.

The 17th-century French official theorist Chapolin wrote an essay criticizing the tragedy of Gournay's Cid, which has long been criticized by the theater world, but that article gave a very good opinion on the question of the realism of the theater for the audience. Shapolan Says:

The purpose of epic poems and dramatic poems is to benefit the listener or audience, and this can only be achieved by using things that are reasonable, not facts. It uses this tool to direct people to this destination more because people are more receptive to it; On the other hand, facts can seem strange and unbelievable, and people will disbelieve them as untrue, so it will not be easy to achieve their goals.

Only what is reasonable will not meet with resistance from the listener and the audience.

These words of Shapolan have touched on an important topic in aesthetic psychology. The Enlightenment Diderot was opposed to the entire aesthetic base on which Shapolan was based, but he came to a similar conclusion on the question of the realism of the audience. He reveals the interesting phenomenon that audiences are often very indifferent to historical truth but sensitive to natural things in the theater, and finds a psychosocial basis for this phenomenon:

Audiences don't always demand authenticity. When he recognizes the false as the true, he can go through hundreds of years without noticing, but he is still sensitive to natural things; Once he has an impression, he never throws it away.

So, can the real thing be in the play? Yes, but you have to see if this real thing can make the audience feel real. Some real things, the way and process that happen are in line with people's psychological process of gaining a sense of reality, then it has become a good subject matter like "made in heaven". Lessing says that the playwright sometimes needs to draw on a real piece of history, "not because it has happened, but because for his immediate purposes he is not better able to fictionalize a historical fact that has happened in this way" and "it is not worth spending so much time looking through history books."

What the artist is interested in is not the incident itself, but the way in which it happened. However, even real events that happen in the best possible way have to be reworked by artists to give them a more intrinsic credibility.

For example, it is often impossible for real events to reveal the inner character of the person in question, and the result is inevitably to have a real impact. It is in this sense that Lessing's rather puzzling words reveal truth: the character of the characters makes the facts more real. By truth, we undoubtedly mean realism.

Xun Huisheng's performance

The script provides the literary basis for the achievement of realism, which comes directly from the perception of the audience and depends on the actors. A good actor can make some less realistic plays shine with full realism on stage. A drama critic watched Peking Opera artist Xun Huisheng's performances of "Kan Yu Chuan" and "Lantern Festival Fans"

Later, he made such a comment:

Both plays are very legendary, and reading the script in isolation can even lead to reasonable worries about how to make sense, worrying that those bridges, which at first glance seem light, will not be able to bear many of the opening and closing rushes that come from the sky. However, as soon as you enter the theater, as soon as Mr. Xun appears on the stage, his characterization immediately attracts you, all the seemingly tortuous corners are unblocked, and all the accidents are inevitable under his flesh-and-blood character portrayal.

The critic's two different intuitions when reading a script and watching a play illustrate the importance of actors' performances to the audience's realism.

For a long period of European history, it was believed that the mission of all performing arts was to reproduce the situation provided by the script in as realistic a way as possible, so that the audience could have an illusion of "empathy and immersion". Illusion is the full-area storage state of realism, the highest form of realism. However, not only have Eastern dramatists historically disagreed with this idea, but there has also been growing dissent among European dramatists. Many theorists believe that a performance that creates illusions wholeheartedly is not a good performance, and that an audience that is trapped in an illusion and cannot extricate itself is not a good audience.

In August 1822, when Othello was about to kill his wrongfully married wife, Desdemona, a soldier on duty at the theater opened fire on the stage, wounding the arm of the actor playing Othello. This kind of thing has happened in many parts of the world. If theatrical realism is aimed at hallucinating, then this shooter is the best audience, because he is completely hallucinating.

A still from "Othello".

Stendhal used this incident to conclude that even if drama could cause some kind of illusion to the audience, it was an incomplete illusion. The complete hallucination of oblivion, if it occurs, is only fleeting. The vast majority of audiences are fully aware that they are sitting in the theater and watching a work of art perform, rather than participating in a real thing. Martin Essling agreed with Stendhal that the illusions and illusions of reality created by theatre should not be complete and pure. The soldier who shot is not a good spectator, and a good spectator will not be so insistent. "When we watch Othello, we are deeply moved by the misfortune of the protagonist: but at the moment when he falls and we burst into tears, we also say to ourselves, almost as if we are suffering from schizophrenia: 'How beautiful is Oliver's pause!'" He achieved this effect so brilliantly just by raising an eyebrow. ’”

Stendhal

That is to say, the audience is in a two-tiered overlapping perception in the theater.

Some performing artists can guide the audience to get a full sense of realism about the characters with their superb acting skills, and even make them forget the existence of the actors. The acting skills of the actor who played Othello at the Baltimore Theater are unknown, but there is a performance artist who is as good at creating illusions as the Italian actress Leonora Duss. It is recorded that in 1891 she went to Russia to perform, and a Russian audience member said that from the first minute of her appearance, "the actress disappeared at once, and a woman of all the might of a woman" and "after only a few minutes of appearance, you can be forced to forget that you are mainly to see celebrities, or rather, to draw you into the life of the character you play, and to put aside all critical analysis and ideas." For me, at least, the performance left that impression immediately and until the end of the script (with a few exceptions)." In Petersburg, where the art of acting is quite developed, Duss's performance caused such a pious amazement, which shows that such a performance is extremely rare in the field of vision of the world theater. More often than not, it is the opposite of what Peter Wemboldt uses: it is not "not a few places" that make the audience think that this is acting, but "a few more places" that make the audience forget that this is acting.