Melodrama

Melodrama is a dramatic genre in which a sharp, tense plot with a stark opposition of good and evil, virtue and vice, is accompanied by emphasized emotionality, touching situations, and moralizing pathos. Melodrama appeals above all to the spectator's feelings, tending toward striking stage situations, unexpected turns of fate, and a happy (or emphatically tragic) resolution. The genre took shape in the French theater of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Ukrainian dramaturgy and theater melodramatic elements were organically joined with folk everyday drama: features of melodrama are present in the popular plays of the Ukrainian 'theater of the luminaries' — Marko Kropyvnytsky and Mykhailo Starytsky (Do Not Go to the Evening Gathering, Hryts) — where a sharp love conflict, songfulness, and emotional tension captivated a broad audience.