Anti-theatrical

Antitheatricality refers to enmity expressed against theater and theater-making artists. At the height of theater's popularity in a historical epoch, antitheatrical feeling is often concurrently also present. Other terms used are anti-theatricalism, or antitheatrical prejudice, employed by Jonas Barish.

In many Western languages acting, theatricality, operatic, melodramatic, and 'making a spectacle of oneself' have negative, hostile, or belittling connotations. In French, juste la comédie is dismissive of a theatrical action.

Barish argues from theater's ability to stir enjoyment, incite potentially problematic action, to wrestle with problems stemming from the act of mimesis, and from a distrust of the profession of acting. In his book Antitheatrical Prejudice, he intended to prove that "The durability of the prejudice would seem to reflect a basic attitude toward the lives of men in society that deserves to be disengaged and clarified... The ultimate hope [of the book] is to illuminate if possible the nature of the theatrical, and hence, inevitably, of the human." On the other hand, Eileen Fisher finds matters of the antitheatrical to be "internal spats, self criticism from theater practitioners and fine critics. Such 'prejudices' are usually based upon aesthetic dismay at our theaters' rampant commercialism, general triteness, boring star-system narcissism, and overreliance on Broadway-style spectacle and razzmatazz."

The importance of Greek drama to ancient Greek culture in general was expressed in The Frogs by Aristophanes. In Plato's view, however, expressed in The Republic, acting is a special if leading case of mimesis. Mimesis is regarded as suspect, for its power over man's formative mind. A stage actor must then "be prohibited from miming illiberal or base characters, lest they receive taint from them. They must not imitate women either, or slaves, or villains, or madmen, or 'smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, boatswains, or the like.'"

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