The power of the gaze and the gaze of the power

Abstract

The article briefly focuses on a topic like the power of the gaze and on the kind of domination it is able to create. To heighten this relation we will refer to different works and different periods in the history of theatre. We will analyze such a theme in Ibsen’s Casa di bambola, Pirandello’s Così è (se vi pare), as well as in some medieval texts (for instance the extraordinary XIII century text La visione di Thurkill) and in the spatial structure of the “teatro all’italiana”. The same topic is also detectable in Kleist’s striking essay on puppet theatre, and – at another level – in Wedekind’s Lulu, where the complexity of the gazes’ system works like a tool for domination and the “reversal of the gaze” mechan- ism emphasizes the new power relations.