The theater is a particularly privileged semiotic object. Unlike literature or painting which operate within a single sign-system, theater combines a variety of sign-systems – language and gesture, costume and decoration, music and lighting – each of which generates meaning according to different principles. This complexity creates special challenges for understanding theater as a meaning-generating system.

Erika Fischer-Lichte’s book examines each of the sign-systems of the theater and investigates the ways they relate to one another. The result is a brilliant articulation of a semiotics of theater.

Fischer-Lichte describes the different cultural systems that can be employed as theatrical sign-systems and explores how they generate meaning.

She discusses the important problems of creating meaning in the theater, such as the mobility and polyfunctionality of the theatrical sign and the combination of heterogeneous signs, and arrives at a definition of theatricality as a special mode of aesthetic meaning generation.

She develops this notion of theatricality in a brief study of Baroque theater. In the last part of her book. Fischer-Lichte presents principles and methods for the analysis of performance and applies these to a performance of Pirandello’s Henry IV.

She discusses the nature of the theatrical text, the transformation of the literary and dramatic text into the theatrical text, the notation of the theatrical text, and its hermeneutics.