Thasos \'tha-,s6s\ Island, northern Aegean Sea, northeastern Macedonia, Greece. It covers 146 sq mi (379 sq km). It was colonized c. 700 bc by Greeks from Paros who exploited its gold mines and founded a school of sculpture. The Persians seized Thasos in the early 5th century bc; it later came under the authority of Athens as a member of the Delian League. A Macedonian dependency in 202 bc, Thasos passed to Rome in 196 bc. The Turks ruled it from the mid-15th century ad until it was ceded to Greece in 1913. Its industries include boatbuilding, fishing, and tourism, and it has been a base for offshore oil exploration since the 1970s. Many 7th-2nd-century-BC monuments have been found there.
Thatcher, Margaret, Baron¬ ess Thatcher (of Kesteven) orig. Margaret Hilda Roberts
(b. Oct. 13, 1925, Grantham, Lin¬ colnshire, Eng.) British politician and prime minister (1979-90). She earned a degree from the University of Oxford, where she was one of the first woman presidents of the Oxford University Conservative Associa¬ tion, then worked as a research chemist. After her marriage to Denis
Thatcher (1951), she read for the bar and specialized in tax law. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 and served as secretary of state for educa¬ tion and science (1970-74). As a member of the Conservative Party’s newly energetic right wing, she succeeded Edward Heath as party leader in 1975. In 1979 she became Britain’s first woman prime minister. She advocated individual initiative, confronted the labour unions, privatized national industries and utilities and attempted to privatize aspects of health care and education, pursued a strong monetarist policy, and endorsed a firm commitment to NATO. Her landslide victory in 1983 owed partly to her decisive leadership in the Falkland Islands War. A split in party ranks over European monetary and political integration led to her resignation in 1990, by which time she had become Britain’s longest continuously serving prime minister since 1827.
theatre Live performance of dramatic actions in order to tell a story or create a spectacle. The word derives from the Greek theatron (“place of seeing”). Theatre is one of the oldest and most important art forms in cul¬ tures worldwide. While the script is the basic element of theatrical per¬ formance, it also relies in varying degrees on acting, singing, and dancing, as well as on technical aspects of production such as stage design. The¬ atre is thought to have its earliest origins in religious ritual; it often enacts myths or stories central to the belief structure of a culture or creates com¬ edy through travesty of such narratives. In Western civilization, theatre began in ancient Greece and was adapted in Roman times; it was revived in the medieval liturgical dramas and flourished in the Renaissance with the Italian commedia dell'arte and in the 17th—18th centuries with estab¬ lished companies such as the ComiiDIE-Francaise. Varying theatrical forms may evolve to suit the tastes of different audiences (e.g., in Japan, the kabuki of the townspeople and the no theatre of the court). In Europe and the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th centuries theatre was a major source of entertainment for all social classes, with forms ranging from burlesque shows and vaudeville to serious dramas performed in the style of the Mos¬ cow Art Theatre. Though the musicals of Broadway and the farces of Lon¬ don’s West End retain their popular appeal, the rise of television and movies has eroded audiences for live theatre and has tended to limit its spectators to an educated elite. See also little theatre.
theatre Building or space in which performances are given before an audience. It contains an auditorium and stage. In ancient Greece, where Western theatre began (5th century bc), theatres were constructed in natu¬ ral hollows between hills. The audience sat in a tiered semicircle facing the orchestra, a flat circular space where the action took place. Behind the orchestra was the skene. The theatres of Elizabethan England were open to the sky, with the audience looking on from tiered galleries or a court¬ yard. During this period the main innovation was the rectangular thrust stage, surrounded on three sides by spectators. The first permanent indoor theatre was Andrea Palladio’s Olimpico Theatre in Vicenza, Italy (1585). The Famese Theatre in Parma (1618) was designed with a horseshoe¬ shaped auditorium and the first permanent proscenium arch. Baroque Euro¬ pean court theatres followed this arrangement, elaborating on the interior with tiered boxes for royalty. Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Ger. (1876), with its fan-shaped seating plan, deep orchestra pit, and darkened auditorium, departed from the Baroque stratified auditorium and reintroduced Classical principles that are still in use. The proscenium the¬ atre prevailed in the 17th-20th centuries; though still popular in the 20th century, it was supplemented by other types of theatre, such as the thrust stage and theatre-in-the-round. In Asia, stage arrangements have remained simple, with the audience usually grouped informally around an open space; notable exceptions are the no drama and kabuki of Japan. See also amphitheatre; odeum.
Theatre Guild U.S. theatrical society. Founded in New York City in 1918 by Lawrence Langner (1890-1962) and others, the group proposed to produce high-quality, noncommercial plays. Its board of directors shared responsibility for choice of plays, management, and production. After the premiere of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House in 1920, the Guild became his U.S. agent and staged 15 of his plays. It also pro¬ duced successful plays by Eugene O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, and Robert Sherwood and featured actors such as the Lunts and Helen Hayes. It helped develop the American musical by staging Porgy and Bess (1935), Okla¬ homa! (1943), and Carousel (1945); it also produced the radio series The¬ atre Guild on the Air (1945-53) and presented plays on television.
theatre-in-the-round or arena stage Theatre in which the stage is located in the centre of the auditorium with the audience seated on all sides. The form evolved from Greek theatre and was used in medieval
Margaret Thatcher, 1983.
AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTOS
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Theatre National Populaire ► theodicy I 1895
times. From the 17th century the proscenium stage limited audience seat¬ ing to the area directly in front of the stage. In the 1930s, plays at Mos¬ cow’s Realistic Theatre were produced in the round and the arena stage began to gain favour in Europe and the U.S. Its advantages are its infor¬ mality and the rapport it creates between audience and actors, but it requires actors to turn constantly to address new sections of the audience.
Theatre National Populaire \ta- , a-tr 5 -na-syo- , nal-p6-p[E- , ler\ (TNP) French national theatre created in 1920 to bring theatre to the gen¬ eral public. Under the direction of its founder, Firmin Gemier (1869-1933), the TNP initially offered productions from the other national companies. In 1951 it established a permanent company under Jean Vilar (1951-63), giv¬ ing 150 performances a year in and around Paris, charging ticket prices competitive with the movies. By 1959 it was as popular as the Comedie- Francaise. In 1972, in an effort to decentralize the theatre, the government transferred its title to a subsidized theatre company in Lyon.
Theatre of Cruelly Theory advanced by Antonin Artaud, who believed the theatre’s function was to rid audiences of the repressive effects of civilization and liberate their instinctual energy. He proposed to do so by shocking them with mythic spectacles that would include groans, screams, pulsating lights, and oversized stage puppets. He described the Theatre of Cruelty in his book The Theatre and Its Double (1938). Though only one of his plays, Les Cenci, was ever produced in accordance with his theory, his ideas influenced avant-garde movements such as the Living Theatre and the Theatre of the Absurd.