But whether it relieves or agitates, whether it darkens or illuminates, it is never limited to a mere description of reality. Its function always consists in appealing to the whole man, in permitting the “I” to identify itself with someone else’s life and to take on what isn’t but may possibly be. Even a great instructive artist such as Brecht doesn’t act only with reason and arguments; he also resorts to sentiments and suggestion. (…) Art is necessary for man to be aware of and to change the world. But it is also necessary for the magic inherent to it.
We have taken the dust off a classic of the theory of art, “The Necessity of Art”, by Ernst Fischer (Barcelona: Nexos, 1985) in order to try to explain why one of the oldest forms of expression of creativity in the history of humanity, the theatre, continues, a lost thread of the ritual that twenty five centuries after its birth is still alive and well, despite the many setbacks it has endured. The cinema screen, the era of the “technical reproducibility of art” according to the concept developed by Benjamin, should have buried the theatre in the 20th century, but it didn’t, and nor is the digital era, with the interactive screen, managing to do so.