Doha Abdul Raouf Al-Mulla

The triad of time, place, and action establishes the basic rules for classical theater, which relies on a story that occurs in a specific time and one place, to arouse the viewer and attract his attention to time and place through the character and the organized theatrical sense rationally that does not allow for reflections leading to the loss of theatrical value within the probability of action and reaction, direct and indirect. This depends on the writer's ability to handle the story theatrically without shocking his theatrical audience with scenes he is unable to bear, but rather trying to refine the audience's senses, and through emotion without extravagance in it or creating exaggerations that suffocate the theatrical outlet that accompanies the tragedy specifically to create the feature of sympathy with the hero without provoking resentment or satisfaction associated with catharsis called returning the right to its owners. This is what "Pierre Corneille" excelled in, who celebrated reason and order in his plays based on the unity of action according to Aristotle to give the scene the feature of necessary understanding influencing the mind of the recipient. To what extent has the contemporary generation benefited from classical theatrical ?

Theater in Three Units:

Classical theater is the theater restricted by the famous triad: unity of time, unity of place, and unity of action, and by a law that controls the representative performance equal to time to awaken consciousness through rationally regular movement, and subject to the standards of the dramatic text that monitors facts in the sense of credibility or objectivity of the imagined so as not to cause shock to the audience even through melodrama, tragically or comically. Late seventeenth-century works have no improvisation in them, because they are based on theatrical discipline and arrangement of roles that sometimes require a type of dramatic entertainment, even if in a traditional form we knew with (Racine) who adapted in French to theater and its issues that completely ignored the old theater or rather the Greek theater and its drowning sometimes in noble poetry with Corneille and Racine's characters that pulse with natural emotion simulating the members of the people without inflation, and without being influenced by Shakespearian philosophical thought and its dramatic and comic mix filled with the comedy of life, or the Voltairian following Voltaire and his tragic insights which are truly considered: art at its social levels richer than Moliere's theater and its mystery that Don Juan wrote.

Moliere or Racine and Corneille did not present absurd plays, but rather followed the precise rules of the reflective theater of truth, or rather providing the spectator with facts for analysis without offending the audience, and with a representative decency that follows the limits of each character and its nature.

The Value of Theater:

The theater that turned into a platform during the French Revolution to serve a cause turned into dramatic improvisations that lost the classical theater its disciplinary rules and opened the doors of romantic theater wide, which drowned in the bourgeoisie and passion for non-ideal romanticism. Was the theater of the Middle Ages what paved the way for the birth of classical theater? Or are its traditions rooted in a classical theater that contained many manifestations of popular life and monitored all life differences in literary forms with theatrical simulation?

The classical and standards that accompanied the theater in the world in general maintained idealism, perfection, and beauty, and with a rational balance despite being subjected to the rules of commitment to the triad of units and ethical rules, as in Pierre Corneille's play (The Cid) to push the viewer towards the lesson and extract the nobility of behavior or negate evil, as is the case in ancient theater, which is education through comedy and showing the defects of souls in tragedy to understand human nature, and to improve human reality through theater. Racine sought to achieve simulation in the literary text that involves the artistic pictorial scene with the poetic imagination directed to society in the language of action, space, and expressive movement performed on theater, afterwards.

Did Europe content itself with spectacle theater and monodrama or one-person theater that the audience deciphers?

And will classical theater remain purely academic, after the symbolism of the age and its modern technologies have entered every home? And will the coming time maintain theatrical after breaking the value of the triad of units and exiting from the monotony of classical representative performance? And does the current age fragment the theater stages that have begun to invest the purposeful imagination to shed light on a case regardless of planting and extracting the high ideals that the ancient classical theater was keen on?