Messages Coming from Myths and Contemporary Albanian Theatre

Albanian dramaturgy and theatre have repeatedly turned to myth, approaching it on two levels: as a perceived reality and as an artistic reality. The universality of their ideas and the metaphors that set life against death, the fantastic against the real, and man against his shadow make these dramas and performances provocative and rich in messages, psychological depth and symbolism, and link them to contemporary time and contemporary man. The method followed in this article is a critical analysis of the meaning of myth in the theatre, combined with a demystifying way of looking at things; its main goal is an aesthetic evaluation of the phenomenon that offers a deeper explanation of several concrete performances. Techniques of transformation and distortion—mutations of characters, settings and times, and the coexistence of the living and the dead, of objects, animals and people, and of virtual and real images—heighten the affective states of spectators and the hypnotic, magical power of the theatre. Mythological material turns esoteric elements into important textual-theatrical units. This trend became visible after 1990, with the fall of communism, but it has not infrequently gone to excess, distorting the meanings of mythological narratives. Nevertheless, the use of mythical material, its decoding and the creation of associations with today’s man and life remain among the modern practices of Albanian theatre, and they demonstrate the value of re-semanticizing myth in line with the messages that theatre conveys.