Aesthetic understanding is a kind of rational cognitive activity that explores the internal relationship of aesthetic objects on the basis of perception.

In short, all the gestures, formulas, and words that have a slight meaning in the drama need to be understood by the audience, and the various "conventional" means of expression used by the dramatists mentioned by Sasai are all premised on the audience's "understanding". In short, all theatrical works that contain a greater meaning of life need to seek the understanding of the audience.

From a one-sided point of view, understanding is a kind of requirement and expectation of the artist to the audience. In fact, this is a kind of requirement and expectation of the audience for the artist. Understanding is the duty of the audience and the right of the audience. The audience craves understanding. Unfortunately, many artists often ignore this desire of the audience, and are afraid that the audience will not understand, and as a result, the audience is deprived of the enjoyment of understanding.

In the theater, the audience will be delighted if they have only a little bit of the right to understand. The early 17th-century Spanish dramatist Vega meticulously observed: "Puns and ambiguous phrasing are very popular among the audience, because each spectator thinks that the meaning of the words is understood only by himself." "If you go deeper into the theater, you will find that this phenomenon is indeed widespread. A straightforward joke can elicit some laughter, but it doesn't make the audience laugh as well as clever jokes that require a little brainstorming. The audience hurried through the process of understanding this ingenious joke, and since he had done it himself, he suddenly seemed so proud and excited that he could hardly believe that the audience around him could also go through the process. He may be a scholar or a scientist, and he does not lack the pleasure of thinking, nor does he have the shallowness of being arrogant and complacent when he understands a sentence, but in the theater he cannot help but be excited about it. For it is a vacancy that suddenly arises in the general state of indoctrination to be filled by oneself, and is an unintentional individual freedom in the context of collective aesthetics.

In 1962, the Chinese dramatist Cao Yu wanted to analyze Chekhov's famous play "The Seagull" for young playwrights in a conversation, so that he could learn from it. But the strange thing is that when Cao Yu read the script to the beginning, he rarely did any analysis and explanation. In the transcript of the conversation left at that time, people only saw Cao Yu "analyzed" like this:

- Another pause! Let's think about how much subtext there must be in the pause!

- Notice how well this pause is used! The so-called implicit is all here.

- How carefully you observe life and people here, and how well it is written!

- The word "he" is wonderful.

- These descriptions are very good at understanding drama.

- This is the real subtlety! If you say a little more, it's all exposed, it's all over!

The playwright, who is longer than words, seems to have no more to say, and always asks the audience and readers to "think" what to think and what to think, but they are reluctant to say more. Cao Yu knows that the gap left by the playwright to the audience's understanding is difficult to summarize in logical language, but as long as the plot background is understood, the general audience can understand. People who have no creative experience always don't value it much, and they don't trust the audience's understanding, so they always talk too much.

In response to this situation, Stanislavsky noted:

New audiences expect to get in person from poets and theaters what they think is important or loved. They don't like to be taught like children on stage. New audiences trust the author and actors, while also demanding the same trust they place in themselves. They don't like to be perceived as stupid.

Therefore, it would be an insult for actors to squint at the audience and explain to them what they would understand at first glance.

It's unbearable to go over and over in the theater to explain things that don't need to be explained.

On the other hand, there are some dramatists who do not consider the possibility of the audience's comprehension, and do not take into account the urgency of the audience's understanding in the process of performance as a fluid temporal art, and set too many difficult comprehension questions for the audience, which has become an aesthetic obstacle. To put it simply, there are too many allusions or too poetic twists and turns in the opera, too professional content in the drama, excessive historical knowledge in historical dramas, and difficult cases in detective dramas; In a nutshell, some epic dramas surpass the profound sustenance of the average level of audience understanding, and the symbolic meaning of modern philosophical dramas that bewilders most audiences...... All these have caused an aesthetic gap. In some dramas, the audience can't understand it well when they watch the play, and they only realize it after reading the script carefully after returning home, which retreats the understanding in the on-site aesthetics into reading comprehension, which is a kind of aesthetic misplacement.

Ionescu

Since the 20th century, Western dramatists such as Chekhov, O'Neill, Brecht, Dürrenmatt, Ionescu, and Pirandello have demanded the audience's understanding with a stronger philosophical sense. In order to stimulate the audience's comprehension mechanism, they used a lot of special artistic means, all of which were to overcome the audience's inertia in aesthetic understanding with strong methods. Brecht said: "When everything is 'self-evident and spontaneous,' people give up understanding altogether. "To do this, they want to resist the inert aesthetic of sliding downhill.

In the early 30s of the 20th century, the aesthete Zhu Guangqian once wrote:

There is a large road in the Alpine valley, and the scenery on both sides is extremely beautiful, and a sign is inserted on the road to advise visitors: "Go slowly, admire!" "Many people live in this world of flowing cars, just as they are in the Alpine valleys, speeding through in a hurry, without time to look back at the scenery, so that this rich and gorgeous world becomes a lifeless prison. What a pity!

For many modern dramatists, they not only exhort the audience to "walk slowly and enjoy", but also want the audience to stop and think more about the world in front of them.

This is very reminiscent of the traditional Chinese opera trick of "stay still, wake up". The "ding" in Chinese drama is not the same as the deliberate interruption used by modern Western dramatists, and most of them refer to the use of some pauses such as appearances and single hammers to adjust the rhythm of the performance, but the opera artists also connect this "ding" with "awakening", indicating that it also contains the purpose of stimulating the audience's understanding. "Ding" means "point", the audience was stunned, and the mechanism of understanding was immediately and quickly activated.

What shows the strength of art more than "fixed" and "point" is the overall reversal. The plot developed smoothly, and the audience followed it smoothly, but they didn't expect it to take a sudden turn near the end, and the audience's aesthetic homeopathy was stopped and suddenly sobered up. This treatment is very similar to the "O. Henry-esque ending" in the field of fiction. The American novelist O. Henry often adds color to the whole novel with an unexpected ending, although it is inevitable that it is deliberate, but his successful works do contain a deeper rational content in the sudden turn. Adding a layer of unexpected content at the end of a play in drama, film, and television works in order to show off skills often makes the audience feel that they are being teased; On the contrary, if a new level of understanding is opened up from here, the audience will get a special pleasure. In contemporary times, the ending of the Sichuan opera "Bashan Xiucai" written by Wei Minglun is a relatively successful example.

The sliding aesthetic state, that is, the inert aesthetic state in which Brecht said that everything is "self-evident and natural", seems to be relaxed and smooth, but it will lead to the rounding and shallowness of the theatrical aesthetics. Meyerhold is deeply concerned about this:

What worries me the most is that we're getting the audience into the habit of laughing without thinking and without fun. Isn't there a bit of over-laughter in our theater now? Will there come a time in the future when audiences who have been spoiled by our gimmicks will have to ask us to use gimmicks to make them laugh, instead shouting or coldly silent about the elegant, timeless script?

Since the habit of "thinking without thinking" is what the dramatist makes the audience develop, the dramatist can also make the audience develop the habit of thinking. Recall that audiences accustomed to medieval theatre suddenly saw Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice, and those accustomed to classical theatre suddenly saw Conspiracy and Love, Ernani, and that Chinese audiences suddenly saw new dramas around May Fourth, and that the audience's habit of "thinking without thinking" would be broken. The dramatist Popov recalled that when he was a child, he watched Ostrovsky's "The Innocent Sinner" come out of the theater as if out of a bewildering dream, and his brother asked him if he understood it, and he was curious: "Is there anything else you need to know besides magic?" The brother excitedly told him his understanding, and Popov was finally "bewildered by this new discovery." It turns out that in this wonderful and bizarre scene, there really are infinite thoughts." From then on, the future dramatist began to approach the theater with a different perspective.

To a large extent, the new performance of old plays is also to provide the audience with the possibility of new understanding. The dramatist Mihoels has developed a new understanding of Shakespeare's image of King Lear, embodying the modern desire to understand everything anew.

Everything today is a continuation of yesterday, and recracking the outstanding plays of the previous generation with modern rational capacity is not necessarily an imposition, on the contrary, it may be the revelation of the true intentions of the masters of the previous generation. Taking Mihoels' re-interpretation of King Lear as an example, he argues that the play is not a family tragedy about the daughter's ingratitude to her father, nor a political tragedy that exposes the reckless neglect of power by the feudal emperor, but a life tragedy. He said that King Lear, as a wise statesman, was far from being so deaf as to be faithful to his three daughters. His reversal of black and white is motivated by his contempt for the line between sincerity and treachery. His political career at the pinnacle of feudal society led him to ignore the truth and falsehood of good and evil, but he could not tolerate confrontation in person, even if he knew the loyalty of those who collided. It was not until after suffering hardships that he finally saw the difference between man and non-man: "I have found it, I have found man, man exists" - so he went from a man distorted by feudal ideas to a man in the mind of a humanist. In Shakespeare's time, there were probably not many people who could understand it this way, which may be the reason why many genius writers throughout history have been lonely for life. In modern times, such an understanding may be more in line with Shakespeare's original meaning and the audience's mind, so Shakespeare has more confidants.

Drawing of a Berlin theater to perform Shakespeare's plays

The times and history will always continue to explore new depths of understanding between the classics of previous generations and contemporary audiences.