A play that can stand up to repeated viewing should be like this: its plot is not complicated, but it contains a turbulent psychological trajectory, and the audience has to experience a strong psychological experience every time it watches it. This requires a play to contain some psychological mechanisms that have gaps and contradictions in its simplicity and simplicity, so that the audience has to climb psychologically every time, neither the winding Pantuo Road, nor the unobstructed Yangguan Road.

Chateaubriand

Such works contain a kind of "immunity" that is enough to combat the psychological boredom of the audience, that is, the contrasting psychological program. To illustrate contrastive mental programs, we can look at the French writer Chateaubriand's analysis of Shakespeare, a master of this subject. Chateaubriand says:

Most people can probably see that Shakespeare made extensive use of contrast. He liked to juxtapose joy with sorrow, and liked to interweave entertainment and cheer with funerals and wails. The musician who had been invited to Juliet's wedding arrived just in time to accompany her coffin. They didn't care about the family's funeral, and even made very indecent jokes about things that were most incompatible with the disaster. Who can not see the whole life from this? Who can fail to understand the full pain of this scene? Who hasn't seen something like it?

The best example of this is the knock on the door in Macbeth, which the English writer de Quincey discussed. Why did Mack's sudden knock on the door after he and his wife murdered King Duncan make the audience feel solemn and terrified again and again? This is where contrasting mental programs come into play. The knock on the door is not directly related to their murder, nor does it constitute a direct threat to them, because it is not knocking on the door of the house where they are, but it has a very strong psychological effect on the audience. De Quincy pondered for many years and came to his conclusion that the murder scene was meant to make the audience feel the magic of human beings, and that Shakespeare succeeded in showing the audience a psychological world that was isolated from normal reason and the everyday world, and that the audience was subjected to a one-way demonic psychological feeling when watching the scene. The knock on the door makes the audience suddenly aware of the existence of daily life and the existence of normal rationality, and thus suddenly produces a strong contrast between human experience and demonic experience. In his famous essay "On the Knock on the Door in the Play", de Quincy analyzed in detail the twists and turns of the audience's psychological journey when watching this play, and also used his own personal experience to show that the audience will not get bored of the acceptance and experience of this contrasting psychological program, even if they watch it again and again, year after year.

Victor Hugo illustrates this contrasting mental process in Shakespeare's plays very thoroughly. "The whole is made up of opposites," he said. Shakespeare threw his weight into duality. In Shakespeare's plays, there is "a light and a dark mixture" and "comedy shines in tears, and whimpering comes out of laughter". "Shakespeare's symmetry is a universal symmetry, all the time and everywhere. It is a universal contrast, life and death, cold and heat, justice and partiality, angels and demons, heaven and earth, flowers and thunder, music and harmony, spirit and flesh, greatness and insignificance, ocean and narrowness, waves and saliva, storms and whistles, self and non-self, objective and subjective, strange and wonderful, typical and monster, soul and shadow. It is with this existential and inconspicuous conflict, this never-ending repetition, this eternally present positive and negative, this most basic contrast, this eternal and universal contradiction, that Rembrandt constitutes his light and dark, and Villanais constitutes his curves. This combination of contrasts becomes a contrasting mental program, similar to the knock on the door in Macbeth.

Swiss playwright Dürrenmatt has reached a new level in arranging contrasting mental programs. He often uses the method of detaching from and reversing the normal track of reality, "reproducing reality in paradox".

When watching his "Romulus the Great", the audience not only felt the precarious situation of the Roman Empire being constantly conquered by the Germans, but also felt the surprisingly unusually leisurely and boring Roman Emperor Romulus, who should be in a hurry. This contradiction and absurdity is enough to lift the hearts of any audience. When the captain of the cavalry came to report the danger in the midst of the enemy's dense arrows, the emperor was calmly raising chickens; When his family members angrily raised their daggers and scolded him for his shamelessness before fleeing the palace, he went to bed unhurriedly; What is even more strange is that the victorious king of Germania, who stormed the palace, not only did not harm him, but also humbly took refuge in him...... Through these strange contrasts, Dürrenmatt reveals a series of profound meanings about the rise and fall of history that he believes in, and when these ideas are grasped by the audience, they are contrasted with the absurd appearance.

At first glance, there are similarities between the paradox and the suspicious array in the melodrama, but in fact, there is a big difference here. The illusions and doubts in the melodrama are just like a baggage cloth, and when the truth is shaken open, its own value no longer exists, and it cannot withstand repeated viewing; The paradox is different, it always appears as a counterpoint, and each repeated viewing deepens the taste of the deep meaning.

It's not just a playwright's business to input contrasting mental programs to resist the audience's psychological boredom. Hugo Says:

One of the differences between geniuses and mortals is that all geniuses have a double glow. …… In all geniuses, this double return to the light exalts to the highest level what rhetoricians call symmetry. In other words, to become the supreme talent to observe everything from both positive and negative perspectives.

Meyerhold said, "The more amusing the comedy, the more serious it must be." The famous actress Vera Pashinaya said: "It is appropriate to mention the law of contrast when creating characters. The more relaxed and carefree the character's life, the more pathetic, painful and sad he suffers. "These are also about the importance of contrasting mental procedures from the perspective of acting and directing.

On the stage of traditional Chinese opera, almost all accomplished dramatists are well aware of the psychological efficacy of opposites, and regard it as the secret of the "watchfulness" of a play. Gai called the sky and said:

A kind person, even when he is most sorrowful, sometimes has to take care of others, not only refusing to cry in front of others, but also forcing a smile; But this kind of laughter is more sad than crying. The actor has to perform from the heart, and the effect is: the character is laughing, but the audience is crying.

Of course, there are more profound social causes of psychological boredom that cannot be completely solved by a pre-designed trajectory of psychological fluctuation. This involves the cultural rigidity of the times.

The contrasting psychological program can only solve the problem of the psychological form in the audience's aesthetic process, and cannot take too much into the content deposited in the interim. Therefore, some plays that can give the audience a strong psychological feeling in the theater are still tired after watching them; On the contrary, some dramas with relatively thin psychological programs can also attract the audience because of the freshness of the content.

The deeper problem is that even the contrasting mental procedures that were originally adopted to overcome boredom can become rigid and boredom. Diderot sarcastically said that there is such a play, as soon as an anxious and rough character appears, the audience can immediately expect that the calm and gentle character will also come out quickly. He said it was almost as close as a truant student hiding in the corner of the auditorium. Obviously, this is due to the repeated and clumsy application of a certain law of contrast over a long period of time.

"Historically, all meaninglessness has been caused by repetition," Brooke said. The soul-destroying performance and the rehearsal of the training substitute role are feared by all sensitive actors. These repetitive imitations are lifeless and deny life. In the word 'repetition', we seem to see the basic contradiction of the art form of drama. To develop, you need to be prepared, and preparation often involves multiple iterations of the same occasion. Once the preparation is complete, it has to be watched, which will give rise to the demand for repeated performances, and in this repetition, the seeds of decay are bred. ”

Brooke also pointed out that even for theater masters like Stanislavsky and Brecht, they should not be rigidized by worship. He said that Stanislavsky had greatly improved the quality of theatrical art, which was remarkable from a historical point of view. However, drama cannot be built on a certain system, because all systems are subject to change. Brecht's theatrical legacy should also be seen in the same way. Brecht brought the shocking into the theatrical arts, "but what should now be noticed and valued is that after forty years, his ideas, theories and practices should no longer be fully followed or copied, because they are related to the specific times in which he lived, and the social practices he experienced." Today's life has changed." According to Brooke, our basic attitude towards these two theatrical systems should be:

What we need to do now is to re-examine what is still alive in their doctrine and what is no longer alive today. This is a historical forward movement.

Svoboda "Oedipus the King"

Stanislavsky and Brecht were themselves theatrical innovators, and future generations should treat them with an innovative attitude. It is a tragedy to push the fruits of innovation into ossification.

The same should be said for the classics of history. Antonin Aalto has a clear opinion on this issue, saying that if the modern audience does not understand "Oedipus the King", the audience should not be blamed, "We have the right to say in our own way, in the closest and most direct way, in a way that is compatible with contemporary sentiments and fashions, and that everyone can understand, what has not yet been said". Aalto attaches great importance to the emotional manners and ways of understanding of contemporary audiences, and uses their aesthetic and psychological needs as a yardstick for judging drama. It is certainly an innovation to start from the psychological needs of the present to say things that have not been said by predecessors, and it is also an innovation to deal with what has been said by predecessors. Psychological boredom, in the final analysis, is an estrangement to contemporary audiences.