Honestly this question rings a little "false" to me. Live theatre invented Naturalism, after all, at least in terms of dramatic media. But honestly, in terms of actually conveying such a thing have not film and television eclipsed theatre. No matter how splendid a box set might be, it pales in comparison to something filmed in actual location. Likewise immersive theatre in specific locations cannot help but feel less naturalistic than something projected onto a screen simply because you have to "break" the illusion to move around.
These are rules of thumb, of course. How else? I'm talking about generalities not dogmas and formulae.
Nevertheless seems to me a lot of the greatest power I've seen in theatre captures the fantastical, the uncanny, the unnatural better than Lord of the Rings or The Haunting of Hill House ever managed (and I adored both!).
I have never been more viscerally frightened than watching a two person version of The Turning of the Screw, in a tiny black box stage. Likewise a one-woman show by a friend of mine, Megan Therese Rippey, gave to me in Deer Woman a more powerful religious experience in some ways than The Passion of the Christ or The Last Temptation of Christ or Jesus Christ Superstar! on the screen--a sense that something genuinely, gloriously, frighteningly and thrillingly holy had entered my presence. In both, just as in other live theatre examples, the power of my own imagination filled in the details. In other words, my own soul wrote part of the story.
Twice in the last two years I have seen ten minute plays written by my friend Vanessa Cate, plays that qualified as epic fantasies. Now, doesn't that sound absurd? Yet both worked! Both felt more powerfully alive and full of wonder than seeing White Walkers or dragons on Game of Thrones (a show I watched eagerly).
So here is where I'm going with this.
Seems to me, by innuendo and dipping into that childlike (as opposed to childish) sense of wonder which theatre achieves at its best, we can eshew special effects and makeup. We can hint at miracles and monsters. Actors reacting to something offstage, or even onstage but unseen by the audience, can inspire. We can light the flames of our own dreams, waking or sleeping. Just as in the play The Elephant Man an actor need not don elaborate prosthetics to become a man deformed almost beyond belief. In Equus we have no need of real horses on stage.
Nor is this even remotely new. Recall the words with which Shakespeare began his play Henry V, a play with really nothing fantastical in its subject matter at all...
Into a thousand parts divide one man and make imaginary puissance/Think when we speak of horses you see them printing their proud hooves in the receiving earth/For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings/Jumping o'er time, turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass.
