Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #76 - Theatre

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday, but I'm a day late this week because I was away for the weekend (I really must remember to create and schedule them before I go away....). They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Theatre

Theatre has been part of human society for thousands of years, taking many different forms. Sometimes it is to entertain the masses, other times it is a place where the rich and well-connected gather to be seen by their peers. The actors and actresses who take the stage have varied from the masked and semi-anonymous players in Ancient Greek theatre to the household names and stars of the Enlightenment and modern times. In some cases, famous actors and actresses were sought after as party guests, gigolos or mistresses by nobles and even royalty.

Tell me about theatre in your setting ! Does it serve an educational or ritual purpose, is it purely for entertainment, or is it a subtle form of subversion? Are the plays traditional morality fables, or are the playwrights themselves famous ? What is the social status of actors, and how do they interact with the playwrights, their fans, and the powers of the day ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.