Convention of Modern Theatre
The presence of the fourth wall is an established convention of modern realistic theatre, which has led some artists to draw direct attention to it for dramatic or comedic effect when this boundary is "broken", for example by an actor onstage speaking to the audience directly. This is common in childrens theatre, where a character can ask the children for help.
The acceptance of the transparency of the fourth wall is part of the suspension of disbelief between a fictional work and an audience, allowing them to enjoy the fiction as if they were observing real events. Although the critic Vincent Canby described it in 1987 as "that invisible screen that forever separates the audience from the stage," postmodern art forms frequently either do away with it entirely, or make use of various framing devices to manipulate it in order to emphasize or de-emphasize certain aspects of the production, according to the artistic desires of the work's creator.
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Famous quotes containing the words convention, modern and/or theatre:
“By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by
convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space.”
—Democritus (c. 460–400 B.C.)
“The modern city hardly knows pure darkness or pure silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“I can get dressed earlier in the evening with every intention of going to a dance at midnight, but somehow after the theatre the thing to do seems to be either to go to bed or sit around somewhere. It doesn’t seem possible that somewhere people can be expecting you at an hour like that.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)