Phenomenological aspects of the Prague School theatre theory

The rise of Structuralism and semiotics in Western thought during the 1970s and 1980s led most theatre theorists to misinterpret the Prague School contribution as a mere transfer from Russian Formalism. They consequently disregarded those aspects of several Czech theorists' work which pointed to the dynamism, changeability and flexibility of the system of theatre signs, thus going beyond the taxonomic formality of semiotics and actually anticipating contemporary phenomenological readings of the stage. A revisionist reading of a number of theatre-related issues, raised by various theorists of the Prague School, proves that their work was indeed pioneer in that it definitely discerned and articulated the binocular nature of theatre mechanics and created a chiasmic perception in theatre studies between semiotics and phenomenology much earlier than any such theoretical perspective was conceived elsewhere in the West.