Prologue as a condition for the embodiment of the motif of the game in the play "Theatre" by N. Kolyada

This article presents an analysis of a play by Nicolay Kolyada, the leader of the "senior" generation of modern Russian playwrights. The aim of the article is to describe the research results of a poetic experiment of changing the traditional communication peculiar to drama. The work shows how the prologue can allow a spectator to be an active participant, creating the theatrical reality. Attention is paid to the features theatrical communication, both historical and modern, on purpose to clarify the plot-forming role of the motive essentially. As far as the basis of the game motive in drama forms the communicative event in the game, we are interested in the drama aspects that break the traditional convention and open communication channels usually blocked by the ''fourth wall''. The terms for this event are primarily set in the prologue. The "Theatre" prologue presents the start of play actions like an ancient prologue. However, Kolyada did not stage the prologue. If in an ancient drama the prologue was a separate compositional element of a play performed by a (some) character(s) of the play, Kolyada's text is not associated with any of the characters: the prologue, like a play staged somewhere, is left out of the stage performance. Replacing the game in a distal, auxiliary field of the theatre (hall) determines the nature of the theatrical communication. This type of communication mainly employs the peripheral connections that reveal the role division of the main performance participants of the real (actor, spectator) and fictional (character) subjects. This is how "actors-and-characters" and "spectators-and-characters'' appear. Communication in the classical comprehension tends to be complicated creating the event of the game as the communication subject and thus explicating the game motive as the plot-forming play motive. These relations are shown in the carnival inversion, in the paradoxical union of Vera and Leonid's interaction. The characters always talk about what is happening behind the wall, which generates the parallelism idea. Kolyada's prologue losing its traditional function to clarify retains the constitutive feature of this part of the drama - it creates the world in terms of spatial and semantic relations. The prologue reveals the key spatial relations in which the viewer can identify and classify the repetitive communication elements that, in turn, constitute the game motive, enhancing and emphasizing the theatrical paradoxes as a dramatic art.

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