Set from "The Magic Flute".

For any work of art to be effective, it must be predicated to attract the attention of the audience. "The audience was very attentive and very quiet when they watched the play, and that showed how focused they were," Brooke said. There is such an atmosphere in the theater that the actors feel as if there is a bright light illuminating their performance. ”

Although the audience came to see the play, the auditorium itself was full of distractions. There must be a force that is enough to free different audiences from all kinds of distractions. More importantly, this power must be brought into play as early as possible, that is, strive to attract the audience's attention as soon as the play opens. After the opening of the play, strictly speaking, all passages that do not attract the attention of the audience should be cut.

O.W. Schlegel noted:

Many people get together, and if their eyes and ears are not drawn to a common goal outside of their circle, they will distract from each other. Thus, the playwright, like the orator, must begin by making the audience's mind move with a strong appeal, controlling their attention as if they were entities.

In this way, the opening of the play has become a breakthrough for the dramatist to attract the audience's psychology. Chinese Peking Opera artist Gai Zhaotian also said this truth in layman's terms:

There is a saying that "acting should start at the beginning and not at the end", that is, a play, a character, as soon as it appears, it must give the audience a deep impression, so that people are interested in looking down, the more they watch, the more they feel good, don't play dull and boring in front, so that people don't want to look down, even if the back is good, the audience always feels that it is almost hard.

Gai Zhaotian plays Wu Song

What does it mean to have a bland beginning? Gai Zhaotian said, for example, that he had seen a kind of performance of "Wu Song Fighting the Tiger", which was a Wu Song who was tired of walking on the mountain road, and the hero found a big bluestone slab, lay down, and fell asleep. The tiger walked over, sniffed up and down his body with his nose, Wu Song rubbed the tiger whiskers on his face, brushed it with his hand, turned over and fell asleep again, and finally woke up, Fang Shi found that it was a tiger. This kind of performance is very different from the treatment of this play by Gai Zhaotian himself, and the problem is that it begins with exhaustion and sleep, which is both procrastinating and sluggish.

Gai Zhaotian once imagined that "if Wu Song appeared in a hotel, he could only deal with the bartender and sit and drink", which was also unattractive. The hotel is safe, and the gossip about the tigers in the mountains is not enough to attract the attention of the audience. Note that there can only be an urgent anticipation of the state of affairs here.

European theatre also requires that the audience's attention be captured from the outset. Hegel also laughed at a play that began with a hotel chatter as much as Gai called the heavens. He said: "Goethe's Götz von Perishingen is a striking example. When we open the first page of this poetic drama, we see a hotel in Schwarzburg, Frank State, where Metzler and Sifus are sitting at the dining table, two knights warming themselves by the fire, and the owner. Hegel also quotes a dialogue from the first page of the play:

Sifus: Hansel, another glass of soju, pour it to the fullest.

Owner: Drink up, you're a bottomless pit.

Mezler: (to Siefus) Tell me the story of Bethlechengen again; The people of the Bunburg are furious, and they will faint with rage......

Hegel thought that such descriptions were too boring, mundane and shallow. He believes that these sentences are okay to read as a script, but it is difficult to attract the audience once they are given shape on stage, because what can attract the audience's attention should be something that is not ordinary, "not just two farmers, two knights and a glass of soju".

Many playwrights believe that only by making things clear from the beginning can the audience consciously pay attention to the plot that follows, but it is inconvenient for ordinary dramas to adopt the method of self-reporting and briefly describing the reasons at the beginning of traditional Chinese opera, so it is easy to explain the "prehistory" of the relationship between the characters in the beginning of the whole paragraph as a preparation for attracting the attention of the audience, and this kind of explanation itself is difficult to attract the attention of the audience. In fact, all explanations that cannot attract the attention of the audience enough are invalid. In the beginning of the play, attracting the audience's attention comes first, and the explanation of the relationship between the characters comes second.

Meyerhold has very succinctly summarized the characteristics of each part of the play, from which we can see the main responsibilities of the beginning of the play:

There should be some hint at the beginning of the script to grab the audience's attention. In the middle of the script, there should be a dramatic scene that shakes people's hearts. Before the end of the play, it should be cooled down and the strings relaxed. How to deal with it in the future is irrelevant.

While emphasizing that the play should attract the audience's attention from the beginning, Meyerhold also pointed out that the weapon used to attract is not primarily an unusual novelty, but a "hint" of a trend. That is to say, the beginning of the play should immediately be thrown into a tendency, and this psychological tendency of the viewer should be directed further by suggestion, so that they will have a kind of remedial attention.

Sudden stimuli that cause occasional attention are different from recourse attention. In psychology, episodic attention is called unintentional attention, and repetitive attention is called intentional attention.

Wu Song, who was sleeping on the big bluestone slab, was tickled by the tiger's whiskers, and when he opened his eyes, he found that it was a vicious tiger, which was unintentionally noticed; Wu Song, who deliberately broke into Tiger Mountain, always remained vigilant, paying close attention to the wind and grass on the mountain road, and finally found the tiger, which was intentional attention.

A new character with no foreshadowing suddenly enters the scene, and the audience attracts unintentional attention; The audience's eyes are fixed on the door in the center of the stage, and the plot foreshadows that an important person will appear there, which is intentional attention.

A person who no one expected was suddenly declared a murderer, and the audience attracted unintentional attention; The audience was puzzled by the demeanor and speech of the two suspects, which was intentionally attentive.

……

Although unintentional attention can also effectively deter the audience, if you pay too much unintentional attention, the whole play will have a tendency to be lively and tired, nervous and superficial. Intentional attention, on the other hand, is a kind of attention that presupposes the consciousness of the audience, and once this attention is generated, the audience will actively mobilize their own will, eliminate all kinds of distractions, and concentrate on pursuing the prospect of the situation.

Drama inevitably attracts some unintentional attention, but it should focus on intentional attention. In the opening part, the audience should be moved from unintentional attention to intentional attention as quickly as possible.

Li Yu said:

Instead of flickering and flickering, people are confused, how can it only pretend to be a few people, so that they can be more frequent and frequent, and it is easy for them to do things without being easy for others, so that the viewers can come to each other, as if the old thing is the more?

The melancholy caused by Li Yu's "flickering and flickering" drama in the audience is actually a kind of unintentional attention, while the "each comes freely, as if it were an old thing" that he appreciates is close to intentional attention.

In daily life, people often encounter people and things that come unexpectedly and fall sharply. Over time, people slowly become mature, automatically filtering, and maintaining a continuous focus only on what they find interesting. Drama does not have so much time, and it is mainly dependent on the condensed psychological contact process that the people and events that suddenly appear on the stage to attract the heartfelt attention of the whole audience.

It is abundantly proven that it is the "beauty barriers" that are erected by the artist without taking into account the psychology of the audience's acceptance that cause the greatest damage to the establishment of such a program.

In 1958, when Tian Han was writing the historical drama "Guan Hanqing", the first scene of a draft began in the way of "play within a play". After the opening, there was another stage on the stage, and there were several rows of "audiences", which turned out to be a certain theater troupe in Beijing inviting the literary and art circles to watch their new play. The stage on the stage was performing "June Snow" with Dou E as the protagonist, but the two old audience members on the stage first argued, one said that the play was changed tightly and carefully, and the other said that the theme was not as sharp as the original work, and each set up reasons. Their arguments affected the rest of the audience, the attendants came to intervene, and the old audience members left in a rage. The director came out to mediate and said: "The two old gentlemen don't argue, the play below is to solve this problem." So the second show began.

Tian Han's "Guan Hanqing"

This one was fortunately deleted. The reason why it is difficult to do so is not because of the difficulty of acting in a "play within a play", but because it artificially creates a psychological gap between the real audience in the audience and the ontology of "Guan Hanqing". The audience's most precious first attention was wasted in a reluctant situation, paying attention to the stage and off the stage of the first performance of a theater troupe, and even listening to the highly professional academic discussion of the two old gentlemen, which finally led to the ontological content that is really worth paying attention to, but unfortunately the audience's attention has been distracted at this time. If you really believe in the director's mediation at the end of the first scene, the audience will regard watching the following play as a rational activity to find out who is who and who is wrong between the two old gentlemen, and become psychologically wary of the realism of the stage.

At first glance, the story of the Yuan Dynasty is far away from the audience, and the two old audience members are very close to the audience. But in terms of aesthetic psychological distance, it's the opposite.

As we mentioned in our discussion of the feedback process, many dramatists in recent times have sought to shorten the distance between the performance and the audience, and some have recognized that the key is psychological distance. If you only work on the surface, many very "close" performances will distract the audience.

In order to get the attention of the audience as quickly as possible, the dramatist is not excluded from using some special stage techniques. For example, important figures appear in an eye-catching stage position with the lighting and musical accompaniment. A particular development of this technique is to have the figure descend down the stairs, climb in through the window, or even hang from a balloon. The reverse application of this technique is to make the characters quietly emerge from the most unobtrusive position on the stage in the sudden darkness and silence. These techniques are generally effective for attracting the audience's unintentional attention. But in any case, the audience is paying attention in a relatively passive situation.

All the skills that can fully attract the attention of the audience are always not only to attract the audience's unintentional attention, but also to quickly and skillfully arouse the audience's intentional attention.

For example, if the lights, music, and the reaction of the crowd on the scene do not appear at the same time as the main character, but appear slightly earlier, so that the audience first sees an abnormal light in an unoccupied area, hears a certain prophetic sound, or witnesses the crowd on the stage in anticipation, holding their breath, and giving way to the position, then the audience's attention to the character who will be on the stage quickly becomes a kind of intentional attention.

If the appearance of the character is sudden, but after the appearance of the character, the audience only sees his figure in the window, or there is still an umbrella or fan to cover his face, or there is a period of time with his back to the audience, then unintentional attention is transformed into intentional attention at this brief moment.

If the character suddenly comes on the stage in a hurry and outright, the director will ask him to pause in the appropriate position. This pause is also a respite for the audience's passive unintentional attention, and to dive into the quality of intentional attention.

In fact, this is true for the characters on the stage, as well as everything else in the play that needs to attract the audience's attention, that is, they should take on the responsibility of stimulating intentional attention as soon as possible.

Unintentional attention is also useful. When the audience is not mentally prepared, a new dramatic factor suddenly appears, or a sudden twist appears, which surprises the audience. This dramatic effect has many functions, and the better one is to deepen the audience's understanding by changing suddenly. The deliberate reversal will stimulate the audience's thinking ability. Let's rephrase this question in the later section on audience understanding.