bourgeois theatre
A cultural phenomenon which emerged during the rise of the European bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century the term has often been applied in a more pejorative manner to dominant forms of theatre culture in capitalist contexts. In Marxist parlance ‘bourgeois’ refers to the legal owners and, more recently, to the managerial and high state official controllers of merchant, industrial, and money capital who have replaced the aristocracy as the class in control of the means of production. However, bourgeois theatre continues to be created by and appeal to a broader range of social groups, especially members of the diverse middle class, from professionals to clerical, technical, and service workers. Through its assertion of democratic liberalism, bourgeois theatre subversively challenged aristocratic absolutist order. In contrast to the French ... ...
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