STAGE SPEECH IN THE LATVIAN THEATRE: DEFINITION, FUNCTIONS AND TERMINOLOGY ASPECTS

Abstract

Although it is a defining phenomenon in the holistic perspective of stage acting, stage speech has hardly been researched in Latvia from a theoretical point of view. The American theatre director and theatre semiotician Jon Whitmore (1945) describes the basic term stage speech as a specific wholeness of the speaker’s linguistic and paralinguistic expressive means that form the influence of what the actor says on the spectator [Whitmore 1994: 176]. Language is the dominant factor which influences stage speech. In the theatre, as a separate sign system stage speech most vividly expresses what is different and what belongs to national culture. In Latvia, stage speech had been closely connected with the Soviet theatre theory for 50 years, hence the term which was characteristic of the Russian theatre сценическая речь [Петрова 1981], i.e., stage speech. Since the beginnings of the Latvian theatre it has always been influenced by historically and territorially different schools; and innovations in the field of stage speech have not been introduced by creating them ourselves, but mostly by testing, adapting and compiling foreign experience. In the theatre, stage speech manifests itself as the quintessence of silence, noise and verbal music, in separate cases as a precise reflection of the lexical meanings of words, while most often as a variation on the idea offered by the author of the play, interpreted by the director and embodied by the actor. The aim of the article is to show the necessity of an extended study on stage speech as a whole system of signs in the Latvian theatre and to outline the first steps towards it.