Main Trends in British English Drama

Universitatea “Dunarea de Jos” din Galati

Facultatea de Litere

I.D.D.

Main Trends in Modern British Drama

(An optional course in English literaturefor 3rd year students in English)

Course tutor:

dr. Ioana Mohor-Ivan

Galati 2009

Main Trends in Modern British Drama2

Cuprins:

CHAPTER 1: ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE 7

1.1. Drama / Theatre 71.2. Genres of Drama 71.3. Elements of Drama 8

CHAPTER 2: REALISM / NATURALISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE 9

2.1. The nineteenth-century theatrical background 92.2. The naturalist movement 9

2.2.1.Zola: early theory 102.2.2.Ibsen: the “modern” drama 102.2.3.Antoine: a new production style 102.2.4.Stanislavski: a new acting style 112.2.5.Chekhov: the “theatre of mood” 11

2.3. Realism in Britain 122.3.1.Domestic realism 122.3.2.The late 19th-century stage 132.3.3.Henry Arthur Jones 142.3.4.Arthur Wing Pinero

142.4. Championing Ibsen: G.B. Shaw 15

2.4.1.Characteristics of Shavian drama 162.5. Shavian Influences 16

2.5.1.Haley Granville Barker 172.5.2.John Galsworthy 172.5.3.D.H. Lawrence 18

2.6. Postwar Developments 182.6.1.John Osborne 192.6.2.Arnold Wesker 19

2.7. Task 20

CHAPTER 3: SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE 21

3.1. The symbolist movement 213.2. European developments 21

3.2.1. Theory: Wagner and Nietzsche 213.2.2. Stagecraft and Production: Appia and Craig 22


3.2.3. Playwrights: Maeterlinck and Claudel 23

3.3. British symbolist drama 233.3.1. Oscar Wilde 243.3.2. W.B. Yeats 253.3.3. T.S. Eliot 263.3.4. Christopher Fry 29

3.4. Task 29

CHAPTER 4: EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE 31

4.1. The Expressionist movement 314.2. European developments 32

4.2.1. Strindberg’s “dream play” 324.2.2. German Expressionism 32

4.2.2.1. Georg Kaiser 334.2.2.2. Ernst Toller 33

4.3. American Expressionism: Eugene O’Neill 334.4. British Expressionism 34

4.4.1. Sean O’Casey 344.4.2. Auden and Isherwood 354.4.3. The radio play 36

4.4.3.1. Louis MacNiece 364.4.3.2. Dylan Thomas 36

4.5. Task 37

CHAPTER 5: EPIC THEATRE AND BRITISH VARIANTS 39 5.1. From Expressionism to Epic Theatre 39

5.1.1. Erwin Piscator 39 5.2.2. Bertold Brecht 40

5.2. British Epic Equivalents 425.2.1. Brechtian Directors 42

5.2.1.1. Peter Brook 425.2.1.2. Joan Littlewood 42

5.2.2. Pseudo-brechtian Plays 445.2.3. Brechtian playwrights 44

5.2.3.1. John Arden 445.2.3.2. Edward Bond 45

5.3. Task 46

MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 47


Obiective:

Aprofundarea cunostiintelor teoretice si a terminologiei de

specialitate privind interpretarea modelelor si structurilor dramatice;

Studierea principalelor directii ale dramaturgiei britanice moderne;

Rafinarea deprinderilor de analiză si evaluare a textelor dramatice

şi a elementelor de spectacol.

Tipuri si modalitati de activitate didactica:

prelegerea,

conversaţia euristică,

explicaţia,

dezbaterea,

studiul de caz,

problematizarea,

metode de lucru în grup, individual şi frontal,

metode de dezvoltare a gândirii critice,

portofoliul,

studiul bibliografiei.



CHAPTER 1 – ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE

1.1. Drama / Theatre

Drama: a play written in prose or verse that tells a story through dialogue and actions performed by actors impersonating the characters of the story.

Dramatic illusion: the illusion of reality created by drama and accepted by the audience for the duration of the play.

Theatre:

a) the building in which a play is performed:

arena stage: a stage surrounded on all sides by the audience; actors make exists and entrances through the aisles.

thrust stage: a stage extending beyond the proscenium arch, usually surrounded on three sides by the audience.

proscenium stage: a stage having an arched structure at the front from which a curtain often hangs. The arch frames the action onstage and separates the audience from the action.

b) drama as an art form, including the written text and the concrete performance.

1.2. Dramatic Genres:

TRAGEDY: serious drama in which a protagonist, traditionally of noble position, suffers a series of unhappy events culminating in a catastrophe such as death or spiritual breakdown.

COMEDY: a type of drama intended to interest and amuse rather than to concern the audience deeply. Although characters experience various discomfitures, the audience feels confident that they will overcome their ill-fortune and find happiness in the end.

TRAGICOMEDY: play that combines elements of tragedy and comedy. Tragedies also include a serious plot in which the expected tragic catastrophe is replaced by a happy ending.


MELODRAMA: a suspenseful play filled with situations that appeal excessively to the audience’s emotions. Justice triumphs in a happy ending: the good characters (completely virtuous) are rewarded and the bad characters (thoroughly villainous) are punished.

1.3. Elements of drama:

PLOT: the events of a play or narrative. The sequence and relative importance a dramatist assigns to these events.

CHARACTER: any person appearing in a drama or narrative.

SETTING: the time and place in which the action occurs; the backdrop and set onstage that suggest to the audience the surrounding in which a play’s action takes place.

DIALOGUE: spoken interchange or conversation between two or more characters.


CHAPTER 2 - REALISM/NATURALISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

Realism in the last half of the 19 th-century began as an experiment to make theatre more useful to society. It was in conscious rebellion against the generally romantic forms of drama that characterized the 19TH century stage, namely closet dramas, historical costume plays (spectacle dramas), melodramas, and well-made plays.

2.1. The nineteenth-century theatrical background

Closet drama: a literary composition written in the form of a play (usually as a dramatic poem), but intended – or suited – only for reading in a closet (a private study). Under the influence of the German Sturm und Drang, the English Romantic poets wrote “closet tragedies”, in which they glorified figures of heroic proportions.Examples: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s Manfred

Historical costume drama: Grand opera-style productions of historical plays (mainly revivals of Shakespeare), which placed their main emphasis on strong emotional contrasts and spectacular effects.Some 19th-century playwrights like Sheridan Knowles and Thomas Talfourd attempted to write high tragedy in the manner of Shakespeare.

Melodrama: A sensational drama of strong emotions and unequivocal moral sentiment that had grown in the 18th and 19th centuries to provide popular entertainment for the urban poor. Ancestors: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jacobean blood and thunder, the gothic novel. Melodrama simplified its antecedents for a mainly illiterate population who needed a clear morality-play opposition between good and evil, and stereotypical characters they could sympathise, hate, or laugh at. It influenced the style of performance (stock companies of actors repeating their stereotypes), the costumes and make-up indicating the social and moral condition of the characters, the scenery signalling a necessary quality of vice, peril, or security.

The well-made play: An adaptation of melodrama for the literate, upper-middle class audience of the established theatre. Originators: Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou in mid-nineteenth-century Paris (hence the alternative name of “Scribean melodrama”.) They codified the structure of their plays as EXPOSITION – DEVELOPMENT – DISCOVERY – CRISIS – DENOUMENT. The well-made play relies for effect on the suspense generated by its logical, cleverly constructed plot, rather than on characterisation, psychological accuracy or social themes.

2.2. The naturalist movement

It opposed romantic situations and characterisation, aiming to put on stage only what could be verified by observing ordinary life.


2.2.1.Zola: early theory

Émile Zola (1840-1902): French novelist and critic, the founder of the Naturalist movement in literature. Zola redefined Naturalism as "Nature seen through a temperament." Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, NANA (1880), dealing with prostitution, and GERMINAL (1885), depicting the mining industry. In his theatre criticism he outlined the following:• Theatre should be the “honest soldier of truth”, serving the

inquiring mind by analysing and reporting on man and society.• Characters: ordinary people in their natural setting;• Stage scenery: vivid background and environment;• Setting, costumes, dialogue: life-like (appropriate to the given

situation and the character’s individuality)

2.2.2.Ibsen: the “modern drama”

• Henrik Ibsen (1826 – 1906) is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of the most important playwrights of all time, considered largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama (the "father of modern drama.”) Victorian-era plays were expected to be moral dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every drama was expected to result in a morally appropriate conclusion, meaning that goodness was to bring happiness, and immorality pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his times and shattered the illusions of his audiences by introducing a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.

• Ibsen’s naturalist plays: The Pillars of Society (1877): moral story of Counsel

Bernick, introducing the theme that lies rot and corrode their originators.

A Doll’s House (1879): story of Nora Helmer’s emancipation from the patriarchal mores of her society

Ghosts (1881): a scathing commentary on Victorian morality, in which a husband's philandering has tragic outcomes on the members of the Alvig family.

An Enemy of the People ( 1882): challenges the Victorian belief according to which the community was a noble institution that could be trusted.

2.2.3.Antoine: a new production style

André Antoine (1858 – 1943) was a French actor-manager, who founded in 1887 the Théâtre Libre in Paris, in order to realize his ideas as to the proper development of dramatic art. His work had enormous influence on the French stage, as well as similar companies like the


Independent Theatre Society in London and the Freie Buhne in Germany. The Théâtre Libre focused on a more naturalist style of acting and staging, performing works by Zola and other naturalist writers and plays by contemporary German, Scandinavian, and Russian naturalists. The productions employed: realistic costuming and acting, unobtrusive stage-movement, realistic furnishings and props, convincing sound and lightning effects.

2.2.4.Stanislavsky: a new acting style

Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 – 1938) was a Russian actor and theatre director, co-founder (with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko) of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in1897.

The MAT was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. It also differed from the other independent theaters since it emphasized theatrical production instead of just neglected plays.

Stanislavski's innovative contribution to modern European and American drama is realistic acting.

Building on the ensemble playing and the naturalistic staging of Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski organized his realistic techniques into a coherent and usable 'system’, which was as important to the development of socialist realism in the USSR as it was to that of 'psychological realism' in the United States (the American 'Method’.)

He developed the so-called “psycho-technique” that requests the following:

o The actor’s body and voice should be trained thoroughly to respond to every demand.

o Actors should be skilled observers of reality in order to build a role.

o Actors should use inner justification for everything done on stage.

o If actors are not merely to play themselves, they must analyze the script thoroughly and define their character’s motivations in each scene. They must discover their characters "objective."

o On stage, actors must experience the action as it unfolds moment to moment as if it’s happening for the "first time."

o Actors must continually strive to perfect understanding and proficiency.

2.2.5.Chekhov: the “theatre of mood”

Russian playwright and one of the great masters of modern short story, Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904) combined in his work the dispassionate attitude of a scientist and doctor with the sensitivity and psychological understanding of an artist. Chekhov portrayed often life in the Russian small towns, where tragic events occur in a minor key,


as a part of everyday texture of life. His characters are passive by-standers in regard to their lives, filled with the feeling of hopelessness and the fruitlessness of all efforts.

Plays:o The Seagull (1894): centres on the romantic and artistic

conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son, the experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and a famous middle-aged story-writer Trigorin.

o Uncle Vanya (1900): a melancholic story of Sonia, her father Serebryakov and his brother-in-law Ivan (Uncle Vanya), who see their dreams and hopes passing in drudgery for others.

o Three Sisters (1901): a naturalistic play about the decay of the privileged class in Russia and the search for meaning in the modern world. It describes the lives and aspirations of the Prozorov family, the three sisters (Olga, Masha, and Irina) and their brother Andrei.

o The Cherry Orchard (1904): concerns an aristocratic Russian family as they return to the family's estate just before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage. The story presents themes of cultural futility — both the futility of the aristocracy to maintain its status and the futility of the bourgeoisie to find meaning in its newfound materialism.

The “theatre of mood”:o It fragments the well-made play, scattering exposition

throughout, excising action.o Lack of focus on a leading character (employs a larger

cast of highly individualised characters meant as a microcosm of society)

o Subtext: the surface of the dialogue seems innocuous or meandering, but implies deep meanings, which forces the spectator to constantly probe, analyse, ask what is implied by what is being said.

2.3. Realism in Britain

2.3.1.Domestic realism: Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” drama

The trend towards a home-grown realistic drama began in England in the 1860s, with the plays of T. W. Robertson (1829 – 1871). The son of a provincial actor and manager, Tom Robertson belonged to a family famous for producing actors. Though he never managed to become a successful actor himself, he wrote a number of plays, mostly comedies, which achieved popularity:

o Ours (1866), o Caste (1867),


o Play (1868), o School (1869), o M.P. (1870), o War (1871).

These plays (known as “cup-and-saucer” drama) were notable for treating contemporary British subjects in settings that were realistic, unlike the Victorian melodramas that were popular at the time. For example, whereas previously a designer would put as many chairs into a dining room scene as there were actors who needed to sit down, Robertson would place on stage as many chairs as would realistically be found in that dining room, even if some were never actually used. In Ours, a pudding was made on stage and this caused a major furor – people were not used to seeing such realistic tasks in a stage setting. Also, the characters spoke in normal language and dealt with ordinary situations rather than declaiming their lines. In addition, the importance of everyday incidents, the revealing of character through apparent "small talk", and the idea that what is not said in the dialogue is as important as what is said are all Robertson trademarks.

2.3.2.The late 19th-century stage

Characteristics:• Theatre had become a fashionable and respectable institution.• Main audience: upper-middle class.• The commercial stage: dominated by actor-managers.• It aimed at projecting an idealised vision of upper-middle class

decorum, suavity, respectability

Society drama:• A type of play whose subject-matter was socially restricted to the

lives of the upper middle-class.• It demonstrated and endorsed a non-objectionable subject-matter

and morality.• As such, it was conservative in matters of social conduct and

sexual morality.

The Impact of Ibsen• The staging of A Doll’s House (1889) and Ghosts (1891) by the

minority theatre outraged a great part of the public opinion.• Clement Scott (drama critic for the Daily Telegraph): “suburban”;

“an open drain”; “a loathsome sore unbandaged”; “ a dirty act done publicly”; “ a lazar house with all its doors and windows opened”.

• Some playwright, nevertheless, started a process of assimilation, producing a compromise between the outspokenness of Ibsen and the conventional society drama. They developed a variant of society drama known as “the problem play”.

The problem play:


• A play that aims to be searching, serious and sophisticated in its treatment of contemporary social issues, trying to offer a thorough-going examination of society’s values.

• Nevertheless, its resolution supports the dominant code of the upper middle-class ethos.

2.3.3.Henry Arthur Jones (1851 – 1934)

Jones successfully began his dramatic career writing Melodrama. Inspired by Ibsen, he moved into more serious drama. He is credited, along with Pinero, for the new movement in England toward Realism. Both writers were provocative enough for scandal, but acceptable to the censors and his public. • Jones’s Mrs Dane's Defence (1900) is illustrative of the new

trend: o The story focuses on Mrs. Dane's betrothal to Lionel,

adopted son to Sir Daniel who is a famous judge. Rumors have been spread by a scandal-monger that the young widow Mrs. Dane is actually Felicia Hindermarsh, involved in a tragic scandal following an affair with a married man in Vienna. Before Sir Daniel gives his consent to the marriage of his son to her he wants to get at the truth of matters, ultimately to clear the rumors and reinstate Mrs. Dane's reputation. Mrs. Dane can produce plausible evidence of her identity and everyone involved is quite convinced of her innocence. Yet in the end Sir Daniel's professional approach leads to the unveiling of the real identity of Mrs. Dane in a famous cross-examination scene, in which a slip of the tongue by Mrs. Dane alerts Sir Daniel of an inconsistency in her story, and allows him to draw the confession out of her that she is indeed Felicia Hindermarsh. The truth is kept secret, though,and Mrs. Dane's reputation in Sunningwater can be reinstated. Nevertheless, they all decide she should leave the village after her marriage with Lionel has become impossible and she complies.

2.3.4. Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934)

• Actor and a leading playwright of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras in England, Pinero made an important contribution toward creating a self-respecting theatre by helping to found, along with Jones, a “social” drama that drew a fashionable audience. His problem-plays helped create public acceptance for the significant changes and radical thinking of Ibsen.

• In 1893 the production of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, his best-known work, raised protest because of its sympathetic portrayal of a woman with a questionable past, but its popularity changed producers’ attitudes towards this new “Ibsenesque" drama.

o The plot focuses on Paula Tanqueray, who has concealed part of her past from her respectable husband, Aubrey, but


this unexpectedly catches up with her when her step-daughter becomes engaged to one of her former seducers. In opposing the marriage, Paula is forced to confess the whole of her past history, and she commits suicide to save herself and those she loves from shame.

2.4. Championing Ibsen: George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)

Shaw was born in Dublin. His father was an unsuccessful middle-class businessman; his mother was a good singer that eventually left her husband, and with her two daughters went to live in London as a music teacher. In 1876 Shaw followed her to London, intent to earn his living by writing. His first publications were serial novels and criticism for a number of English periodicals. In 1879 he joined the Zetetical Society, a discussion club whose members had debates about economics, science and religion. It was here that he met Henry George, a socialist who sustained the importance of economics in society and the necessity of land nationalization. Shaw accepted his theories, read Karl Marx’s “Das Capital” and joined the Fabian society, a group which preached the evolutionary socialism. He worked for this society editing books, writing pamphlets, and displaying his dialectical ability in many public discussions. Shaw befriended William Archer, a Scottish journalist and dramatic critic who introduced him to the work of Ibsen. Both decided to introduce Ibsen into England, in the hope that the Norwegian’s example would bring a healthy change in the British literature. Shaw conducted a crusade supporting the new kind of drama, where the dramatist was at once an ethical philosopher and a social reformer. He set the role of the dramatist in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), a collection of lectures on Ibsen’s drama that he had previously delivered at the meetings of the Fabian society. The tract is as much an advocacy of Ibsen’s genius as it is a manifesto for Shaw’s future work as a playwright. In compliance with its ideas, Shaw launched in 1892 Widowers’ Houses, his first play which, although criticized for his theme (a vigorous attack on slum landlordism), launched him as a dramatist. Like Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written 1893), which expounded the economic basis of modern prostitution, and The Philanderer (written 1893), it was considered too strong to pass the censor and confined to private performance. Arms and the Man (1894) which wittily subverts the conventional view of heroism and male gallantry, was the first of Shaw’s plays to be presented publicly. There followed, among others, Candida (1897), a re-writing of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, The Devil’s Disciple (1897), a parody of melodrama, and The Man of Destiny (1897), a parody of Napoleon. Shaw owned his emergence into fame to the seasons organised by Harley Granville-Barker and J. E. Vedrenne at the Royal Court Theatre between 1904 and 1907. It was here that plays like John Bull’s Other Island (1904), a provocative thrust at the Irish question, and Man and Superman (1905), in which he


expounded his theory of the life-force – the force that impels humanity to procreation, the supreme end of all the species, the main agent of which is the woman, who selects and pursues her lover in order ensure the instinctive regeneration of the race. Caesar and Cleopatra (1907), or Pygamlion (1910) maintained Shaw’s growing reputation for mischief and iconoclasm. In the 1920s, Shaw wrote some of his most serious plays, Heartbreak House (1920), Back to Methuselah (1922) and Saint Joan (1923). Of his later plays, the best include Too Good to Be True (1932) and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939). In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

2.4.1. Characteristics of the Shavian drama

• Though his ideas were seldom original, since he generally borrowed them from economists and philosophers (like Marx or Nietzsche), Shaw was able to infuse into them the spirit of English comedy, creating a sort of drama that could be “committed” and “comic” at the same time.

• Although initially influenced by Ibsen’s anti-romantic theatre, his plays were also the product of two precise ‘lines of interest and experience’: Years and years of public speaking, which provide him with

a deep knowledge of the audience’s expectations, with the plays aiming to subvert them;

His musical education and his love for opera, which led him to create roles for actors with a particular attention to voice contrast, like an opera without music.

The result of these ‘ingredients’ was a new type of play, whose features may be summarized as follows:

o Their purpose is not so much to make people laugh, but to make them realize the absurdity of certain prejudices and reconsider their ideas and attitudes

o Since debate is one of their main features, his plays are also called discussion plays

o The plot is always static, but enlivened by mental actions, with the vigorous and brilliant dialogues providing them.

o Problems are also faced by different points of view, through the so-called dialectic of confrontation.

o The situations and characters, although not always lifelike and somewhat lacking in psychological analysis, are often used to embody an idea or a point of view that the play wants to illustrate – hence the name of “thesis drama”, or drama of ideas.

2.5. Shavian Influences

The links with Shaw’s drama of ideas is most obvious in the work of contemporaries like Harley Granville-Barker and John Galsworthy, but


it also serves as a reference point for the plays written by John Osborne in the second half of the twentieth-century. The political cast of his theatre, seen as having a direct social function, may be seen to reverberate in the realistic emphasis of “kitchen-sink” playwrights like D.H. Lawrence or Arnold Wesker, intent on reforming society by depicting its evils in naturalistic detail.

2.5.1. Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946)

Actor, director, playwright and scholar, Barker was responsible for Shaw’s breakthrough to public acceptance as the initiator and main driving force of the Court Theatre Venture.

As a playwright, Barker shows a Shavian commitment to intelligent debate. Nevertheless, his characters habitually act on the basis of unconscious instincts, which by definition cannot be verbalised. Hence a subtler form of realism evolved in his plays, which are characterised by an almost introvert tone and place their emphasis on the psychological aspects of generic problems. Their endings are characteristically left open with unfinished conversations, while the thesis (or message) that they aim to illustrate is left for the spectators to define.

Plays: -The Marrying of Anne Leete(1900) -The Voysey Inheritance(1905) -Waste(1907)-The Madras House(1909)

2.5.2. John Galsworthy (1867-1933)

Novelist and playwright, Galsworthy remains best known as the author of The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.

His first play, The Silver Box (1906) was specifically written to be performed at the Court Theatre, became an immediate success. He followed it with a series of plays including Strife (1909), Justice (1910), The Eldest Son (1912), The Fugitive (1913), The Skin Game (1920), Loyalties (1922) and Exiled (1929).

His principles as a playwright are outlined in the prefaces to the collected editions of his plays. Here he considers that the aim of the dramatist is to display impartiality and objectivity by setting before the public the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted by his own outlook, so that the audience can draw the moral by themselves. Moreover, each play should be informed by a controlling idea – the cohesive ideology of the playwright himself. It is this “idea” that becomes the ordering principle in Galsworthy’s drama: the workings of society (or, better said, the playwright’s understanding of how society works) characteristically order the action of the plays and determines their plotting strategies.


Because Galsworthy is a moralist, his plays continually attack social injustice and the double standards of class and gender. As such, his drama becomes clearly didactic, working for reform through an overt criticism of contemporary social issues, and is designed to have an immediate impact upon the public.

2.5.3. D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

Lawrence was the son of a miner in Nottinghamshire, whose mother, better educated than her husband and disappointed in marriage by her husband’s coarse and drunken behaviour, made every effort to raise the cultural level of her children to lift them out of the working class. Encouraged by his mother, Lawrence entered Nottingham University to be trained as a teacher. He began his writing career while working as a teacher. In 1912, he fell in love with Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of a professor at the university and they eloped to Germany. Their intense relationship formed the underlying theme of many of his novels. He died of tuberculosis in 1930 when he was only forty-four.

Best known as a modernist novelist, Lawrence’s major works include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Their major theme is human relationships in the modern world where the natural harmony between men and men, men and women has been destroyed by industry and modern civilization. Lawrence developed this theme by exploring the emotional lives and sexual instincts of his characters and showing the great harm that modern industrial civilization has done to human nature, combining thus psychological analysis and social criticism.

The same theme is present in his plays, the best known of which are A Collier’s Friday Night (1909), The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1911) and The Daughter-in-law (1911), collectively known as The Nottinghamshire Trilogy. All three have a strong autobiographical basis, exploring the marriage of a strong and willed woman who thinks herself superior to her husband (as in his own family), while the increasingly destructive effect of educational or cultural pretensions defines the theme.

They are working-class plays which document the wretchedness of working-class existence and the evil of middle-class values, providing a sharp contrast to the sanitized image of the worker characteristic of more traditional plays. Along with this comes an emphasis on the basic daily activities representative for the working-class, anticipating thus the “kitchen-sink” play (a play that portrays the lives of ordinary people) that came into fashion into the 1950s.

2.6. Post-war Developments

1956 witnessed the beginning of a new wave of “realist drama”, brought about by:


a changing national consciousness and the new vision expressing it;

a changing relationship between the government and the arts (the Arts Council)

appearance of new theatres and dramatic companies (e.g. George Devine’s English Stage Company, Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop.)

a particular rebellion against the middle-class fare of the London theatres.

Many of the new plays were labeled as kitchen-sink drama, because their stories often depicted the domestic squalor of working-class families, being set in the poorer industrial areas of the North of England and using regional speaking accents and expressions.

2.6.1.John Osborne (1929 – 1996) Osborne came onto the theatrical scene at a time when British plays

remained blind to the complexities of the postwar period. Osborne was one of the first writers to address Britain's purpose in the post-imperial age. His Look Back in Anger spawned the term "angry young men" to describe Osborne and other writers of his generation who employed harshness and realism, in contrast to what was seen as more escapist fare previously.

Look Back in Anger (1956): The three-act play takes place in a squalid one-bedroom flat in the Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-class, university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the British Army in India. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his venom for Alison's friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress friend of Alison's from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison returns to Jimmy and his angry life.

2.6.2.Arnold Wesker (1932 - )Wesker’s early naturalist plays are typical of the kitchen-sink realism.

Chicken Soup With Barley (1958): it is the saga of a communist Jewish family, Sarah and Harry Kahn, and their children, Ada and Ronnie. Beginning with the anti-fascist demonstrations in 1936 in London's East End and ending with the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the play explores the disintegration of political ideology parallel with the disintegration of the family.

Roots (1959): explores the theme of 'self-discovery'. Beatie Bryant, the daughter of Norfolk farm labourers, has fallen in love with Ronnie Kahn. She returns from London to visit her family all of whom await


the arrival of Ronnie. During the two-week waiting period Beatie is full of Ronnie's thoughts and words. To greet him the family gathers for a huge Saturday afternoon tea. He doesn't turn up. Instead comes a letter saying he doesn't think the relationship will work. The family turns on Beatie. In the process of defending herself she finds, to her delight, that she's using her own voice.

I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960): Ada Kahn, marries Dave Simmonds. They move to an isolated house in Norfolk where they struggle through a back-to-the-land experiment. Dave makes furniture by hand. Friends and family visit them throughout their 12 rural years charting and commenting on the fortunes of their experiment. It doesn't work, but they end gratified to have had the courage to try.

Task:Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the argumentative type:

1. Traditionalism vs modernism: A. W. Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray

2. G. B. Shaw: Thesis drama and Technique in Man and Superman

3. Naturalist Premises in J. Galsworthy’s The Silver Box

4. The “kitchen-sink” play: D.H.Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd

5. The “kitchen-sink” play: Arnold Wesker’s Roots.

6. John Osborne’s Alienation: Look Back in Anger.


CHAPTER 3 - SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

3.1. The Symbolist Movement

Symbolism in the theatre is probably as old as theatre itself, but as a technical and critical term it came into specialized use during the last decades of the 19th century, associated with the French symbolist movement which emerged in reaction against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism. In the manifesto of the movement published in September 1886 in an article in Le Figaro, Jean Moréas decreed that symbolic poetry ‘cherche à vêtir l’idée d’une forme sensible’, while Stéphane Mallarmé, in Oeuvres complete (1891) explained symbolism as ‘the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an état d’âme’. The progenitors of the movement, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, or Valéry, sought in their turn to discover ‘the secret of poetry’, building their ideas upon a latter-day theory of the mystical and the occult, the irrational and the world of fantasy and dream.

It was also Mallarmé who urged the creation of a new drama that would reflect the mental or spiritual life, rather than the crude world of the senses. Thus, for the theatre, at the time when naturalism was at its peak in Europe, symbolism provided an alternative in a powerful and unpredictable mode of playwriting which sought a justification in myth and ritual in order to achieve the visionary quality missed in realism. Aiming to convey the yearnings of human life freed from its material conditions, symbolist playwrights would often try to fuse the arts of poetry, painting, music and dance, taking their lead from an outstanding man of the theatre, Richard Wagner, and a philosopher (of the theatre, among other matters), Friedrich Nietzsche.

3.2. European developments

3.2.1. Theory: Wagner and Nietzsche

Wagner’s parallel interests in both music and drama had resulted not only in the production of his major operas such as Tristan and Isolde (1865) or Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), but also in an impressive body of theoretical writings - The Art Work of the Future (1849), Opera and Drama (1851), and The Purpose of the Opera (1871) -on the form and nature of what he considered to be the performing art of the future, the so-called “music-drama”, where language could be extended by sound in order to create a fuller emotional statement. This Gesamtkunswerk (or “total art form”) was to give a vital expression of the instinctive life, drawing upon archetype and myth, dream and the supernatural.

In his turn, Nietzsche had justified Wagner’s ideas in his own account on The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), where the origins of Greek tragedy were identified with the moment in which the ritual


celebrations of Dionysus (representing all that was emotional and irrational in man) expressed into the song of the dithyramb1, had found the embodiment of dance which had imposed an Apollinian form upon them (characterized by lucidity, reasonableness and harmony.) Thus, the duality and tension between the instinctive and the rational, music and dance, which had led to the birth of tragedy, could only be recuperated in Wagner’s “music-drama”, which Nietszche considered to exercise a Dionysian influence in the modern rational world.

3.2.2. Stagecraft and Production: Appia and Craig

Such theories were to be further developed by Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), the Swiss theorist and designer who renovated theatrical and operatic scenography. His central ideas, outlined in Music and Theatrical Production (1899) and The Work of Living Art (1921), advocated a new stagecraft, which eliminated two-dimensional scene painting and substituted a kind of sculptural movement, a musical control of the actor’s body in space, fusing the whole through use of light. The rhythm of stage movement where the actor’s gestures and movements, akin to dance, spatialised the time units of music under a play of light and colour, were to achieve a synaesthesia able to express a platonic reality, an essence of beauty and perfection behind appearances.

Appia’s theories had much in common with the “eurithmics” of Emile Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950), the “rhythmic gymnastics” advocated as the art of the new performer, trained to use the movement of his body like an instrument, on the assumption that rhythm was the physical expression of abstract time and space.

Another seminal figure for the course taken by symbolist theatre was Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), the British stage designer, editor, founder of a school of acting and dramatic theorist. His ideas, which developed alongside those of Appia, are chiefly expressed in On the Art of Theatre (1911) and The Marionette (1918). Craig also argued for an abstract and ritualistic theatre that would have an equivalent spiritual significance to the tragedy of classical Greece or the Japanese noh drama2, and against the literary elements of drama as well as realism. Like the Swiss, Craig also believed in the need to create a production as a whole, with all its parts, including the actor, subordinated to the vision of a single man, the director,

1 Form of hymn or choral lyric in which Dionysus was honoured.2 A serious and subtle dance drama that evolved in Japan in the 14 th century out of earlier songs, dances and sketches. It was originally performed by priest-performers attached to Budhist temples. Noh plays were lyric dramas and were intended for aristocratic audiences, differing from the popular kabuki. In noh performance movement, music and words create an ever-shifting web of tension and ambiguity. A noh text contains prose and poetry sections. Prose is delivered in a sonorous voice which rises gradually and evenly in pitch, then drops at the end of a phrase. Poetry sections are sung and they make up the bulk of the text. In the central narrative module of a play the major character dances a crucial event from his or her past to a song sung by the Chorus. The vocal pattern is overlaid on rhythm played by musicians on drums and flute. The noh stage consists of a raised dancing platform, covered by a temple-like roof supported by pillars at the four corners, which helps to focus the audience’s attention on the performance. At one side is a balcony which accommodates the chorus, while upstage there is a smaller platform occupied by the musicians. The actors, between two and six in number, wear masks and elaborate costumes, entering and leaving on a long slanting walk from stage left. There is little or no scenery except for the framework with the roof and three symbolic trees in front of the slanting walk, representing heaven, earth and humanity.


who, like a composer, worked to achieve harmony of the various theatre languages. With light and rhythmic movement seen as the basis of the new drama, Craig pursued the notion of a flexible stage by means of which an endless variation of architectural shapes could be created during a performance. In attempting to realize this, he invented movable screens to substitute for scenery and attacked conventional acting, apparently demanding the elimination of the personality – ego- of the human actor, substituted with his Über-Marionette (i.e. a super-puppet), a masked performer submitted to his place in the overall shape, whose perfect stillness of body and gravity of expression was capable of symbolizing, indicating or demonstrating a truth.

3.2.3. Playwrights: Maeterlinck and Claudel

The contemporary dramatist with whom both Appia and Craig shared most was the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Maeterlinck was fascinated by dimensions that make life elusive, such as mysterious forces and blindness. Only though contemplation, absolute silence and inactivity could these be made visible. As such, his plays are characterized by their lack of action, or conflict, and by their suggestive force. His early plays, like Les Aveugles (1890) or L’Intruse (1891), are one-act dramas of silences, shadowy characters, and an immovable scene, where the disconnected, allusive and repetitive prose dialogue is broken by long pauses. Pelléas and Mélisande (1893) is typical of his next series of metaphysical tragedies. Set in an indeterminate medieval world of dream and fantasy, the play is an atmospheric, fairy tale allegory in which Love combats Death and loses and where the scenes exist to present symbols as much as to develop the simple plot, in which the main characters accidentally meet, fall in love and have to account for it with their lives, but only after they have kissed each other in joy and defiance of death. Thresholds, gates, fountains, forest, or castle communicate a powerful sense of mystery and the opera Debussy created out of it in 1902 asserted the continuing power of musical and scenic non-naturalist tradition.

Another strong advocate of the movement was the French symbolist actor and director, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe (1869-1940), who is also responsible for the break-through to public recognition of the religious plays of the French diplomat Paul Claudel (1868-1955). A friend and disciple of Mallarmé, and strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel wrote a series of plays, like Partage de midi (1905), L’Annonce Faite à Marie (1905) and L’Otage (1909), which dramatized his Catholic faith and repeated, in a variety of ways, the theme of human love transformed into the spiritual and the divine. Their style and tone is symbolist, lyrical and ritualistic, with little action and much poetry, as they rely for their power partly on Claudel’s peculiar verse. Written for declamation, Caudel’s lines nevertheless have a variety and subtlety that can fairly be compared with the Shakespearean blank verse.

3.3. British Symbolist Drama


Though the naturalistic definition of modernism promoted by Shaw and Archer – concentrating on social issues and appealing to reason – automatically tended to depreciate the spiritual aspect of existence, dramatists like Wilde, Yeats or Eliot, disdaining everyday reality and the realism that reflected it, committed themselves to symbolism as an anti-naturalistic mode of playwriting able to convey “the permanent and the universal”, the archetypal or the transcendental dimensions of life.

3.3.1.Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Wilde’s early apprentice plays unsuccessfully explored the realm of melodrama and verse tragedy, commonplaces of the 19 th century stage. Thus, Vera: or, The Nihilists (1883) is a melodrama about a group of Russian revolutionary terrorists (or idealists – as Wilde poses the alternatives.) His second play, The Duchess of Padua (1891) is a costume tragedy in blank verse, first staged, like Vera, in New York. It was not until 1892, the year after the publication of his controversial novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that Wilde began to find his own voice in drama. There followed the series of his social comedies, brilliant and witty plays whose success lay in parodying the existing modes. Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) can formally be considered a text-book example of the well-made play, in which the heroine’s reputation rests on the discreet recovery of a fan. A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) are, in terms of plot and subject-matter, problem plays of the kind the contemporary drama of Pinero and Jones offered. What subverts the tone and ethos of such models is Wilde’s dialogue. His upper-class dandies and dowagers have made so merry with the values that the plays purport to uphold that the saving of a marriage has, by the time it is achieved, little more significance than the saving of a cigarette card. Nevertheless in these plays the stagey contrivances are a constraint and Wilde gives no indication of relishing the mechanical plotting of his well-made plays. It is quite otherwise with his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where a stylized plot matches the verbal epigrams of the play. By the doubling of characters, mirror situations, multiplying revelations, the play becomes a parody pastiche of contemporary melodrama, with its plot elements exaggerated into absurdity, while the contrariness of the title – i.e. the importance of not being earnest – is sustained throughout the play. With the sensational trial in 1895 and the playwright’s subsequent imprisonment in Reading Gaol, Wilde’s dramatic career came to an end, though Salomé (1892), an one-act play on a biblical theme, written in French the same year with Lady Windermere’s Fan and banned from production by the Chamberlain’s Office because of its use of scriptural characters, was finally staged in Paris in 1896 by Lugné-Poe.

Salomé not only represents the counterpart to Wilde’s social comedies, explicitely rejecting the morality that the society reflected in them represented, but it also ranks as the earliest and most complete British example of symbolist drama. The legend of the beautiful Jewish princess and her destructive love for John the Baptist, which recurs in the writings of French symbolists like Mallarmé, Massnettet, and is employed by Maeterlinck himself in La Princess Maligne (1889), is reworked by Wilde in a play which becomes the antithesis of naturalist theatre, replacing plot and characterization by the aesthetic values of colour, musical rhythm and dance.


All characters seem to move in a dream, in which their desire and fatal yearning lead to the inevitable denoumént. Salomé seduces the imagination of the Young Syrian, then of Herod – the Tetrach of Judea and her stepfather, while she, herself, is hypnotized by Jokanaan, the prophet, who repulses her. As the horrified Syrian kills himself at her feet, the Princess swears that she will kiss Jokanaan’s lips. The climax of the play is represented by Salomé’s dance of the seven veils. Herod offers her three inducements to dance, but the reward Salomé wants is the Prophet’s head. Again, Herod offers her three bribes to give up her demand, but the Princess cannot be persuaded and is finally offered the head on a silver salver. But this victory is also her defeat. Kissing the mouth, she discovers that “love hath a bitter taste”, while Herod’s desire turns into disgust and orders his soldiers to crush Salomé with their shields. As such, Salomé’s dance and her killing (which represents a significant change from the Biblical source) becomes a celebration of the destruction of the social establishment represented by Herod, literally breaking the succession to his authoritarian rule.

The overt artifice of stylized speech and simplified action, the recurring motifs and repetitive patterns make the play overtly symbolic. Thus it becomes the expression of a purely subjective reality patterned by leit-motifs of colour and symbol, built up musically with incantatory repetitions, alternating shouts and whispers, while its strongest moments are powerfully ritualistic.

3.3.2.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Where Wilde’s Salomé remains a period piece associated with fin-de-siécle aestheticism, W. B. Yeats’s drama has been seen as the model for British avant-garde theatre.

The major figure behind the rise of the Irish dramatic movement, Yeats’s drama was part of a larger design which hoped to revive a national culture in a country where legendary subjects still seemed to have life in themselves, as well as to bring back poetry to the theatre, the poetry that it had missed in Ibsen and the naturalist school. Because his conscious aim was to “create for a few people who love symbol a play that will be more a ritual than a play, and leave upon the mind an impression like that of tapestry, where the forms only half-reveal themselves and the shadowy folds” (Hinchliffe, 20), Yeats turned away from the naturalist stage towards other forms of drama which could convey a different kind of reality, caught up in myth, in the drama of the past and in the supernatural.

The model at hand was the Japanese Noh play being translated by Ezra Pound and, possibly, by Yeats himself. Both Arthur Walley and Fenellosa had insisted that these plays were analogous to Greek and Elizabethan theatre in their religious origins and could be used as models to restore drama to its original power, evoking a sacred presence with all the devices of ceremony, dance, poetry and scenery – a ritual that came close to fulfilling Yeats’s own dramatic ambitions. As mentioned before, the aims and repertoire of the Noh play were firmly established by the fifteenth century and the isolation of Japan as well as the patronage of the richest and most powerful families ensured its survival as an art form. The words may not be very important (and are, anyway, muffled by the masks) but the finest poetry


is used in combination with music, masks and dancing. The avoidance of realism is complete, everything inessential is excluded and the subjects are those basic emotions – love, hate and jealousy – which inspire most drama. The technical demands upon both performers and audience ensure that it is a minority theatre, but it offered Yeats a theatre form of historical importance which did more than merely represent life.

The sequence of Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers”, including At the Hawks’ Well (1916), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1916), The Dreaming of the Bones (1917) and Calvary (1920) is illustrative of the elements that the playwright borrowed from the Noh: a framing chorus, separated from the action, strictly limited gesture and non-naturalistic movement, and a minimal action culminating in a dance. As such, character was presented at the point where individualization merges with type, while acting was stylized and the performers were apt to remain still for long moments of great muscular tension. In these conditions, the words could work to greater effect and ensure that the play achieve a symbolic concentration able to communicate a state almost of trance.

At the Hawks’ Well exhibits a typical structure for Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers”. A short play in verse, telling the story of the young Cuchulain and his wish to drink from the well of immortality, it has only three characters listed as: the Young Man (Cuchulain), the Old Man, the Guardian of the Well (a dancer’s part played by a girl who never speaks.) The scenery is reduced to a single blank screen at the rear, and a patch of blue fabric on the floor standing for the well. Musical accompaniment is limited to rhythmic instruments: drum, gong, zither. The stage curtain is replaced by a square of cloth, on which a golden hawk – the dominant image of the play – has been painted. Ceremonially unfolded and refolded by the Musicians, it also provides the cover under which the actors take their positions at the beginning of the play, and exit at the end. The inner play is equally austere: Cuchulain, the vigorous and aspiring man of action, arrives at the well whose waters are said to give immortality. There he meets the old man who, though has watched it for more than fifty years, has missed each of its upsurgings of magic water, being enchanted into sleep by the Guardian’s dance. The Guardian herself is possessed by the hawk spirit of the Woman of the Sidhe, whom Cuchulain has already met and antagonized. Then the action of the play shows the process that the Old Man has described: the Guardian’s premonition of possession presage the arrival of the water of life; she rises and dances, her dance lulling the old man to sleep and luring Cuchulain away off stage. Afterwards, his disappointment is realized to the sound of the warrior women of Aoife, roused by the goddess to religious war against the intruder. While the Old Man appeals to him to remain by the well and wait for another upsurge of water, Cuchulain leaves, choosing a wandering combative life and embracing thus his heroic destiny.

3.3.3.T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

T. S. Eliot acknowledged and built on Yeats’s contribution to modern poetic drama, even if at one point he suggested in his critical writings that Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers”, which had renounced popular appeal being intent for a select few, “an audience like a secret society” (Hodgson, 80), did not solve the problems encountered by the modern verse dramatist. For Eliot,


Shakespeare was the model to be followed, as a playwright whose plays had been able to appeal for all kinds of audience, both unsophisticated and educated. As he wrote in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, “in a play by Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest auditor, there is the plot, for the more thoughtful – the character and conflict of character; for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive, the rhythm; and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding, a meaning which reveals itself gradually.” (Styan) Thus Eliot’s solution was to incorporate in his plays a multiplicity of levels of appreciation in order to pursue his goal of writing a successful poetic drama for the 20th-century audience. As such Eliot adapted the popular forms of drama of his time (the detective play, or the drawing-room comedy format) in order to render his serious, spiritual themes.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play commission by The Religious Drama Society fir the 1935 Canterbury Festival and Eliot’s first dramatic success, treated a Christian martyrdom as if it was a murder, so that, despite its static form and medieval subject, it was subsequently transferred on the commercial stage. The structure of the play builds up the story of Thomas Becket, the 12th century martyr, through Chorus, priests, Tempters and Thomas himself. Divided in two parts, it starts with Becket’s arrival at his Cathedral from France, determined to resist the submission of Church to State (which Henry demands.) Four Tempters appear to test Henry’s decision, and the last of them is the most difficult to resist, insinuating that pride is motivating the Archbishop. But the Chorus of the women of Canterbury (who express the related anguish of the whole community) enable Thomas, through their pleads, to overcome the paralysis of will induced by the last Tempter. In the second part, the four knights, intent to punish Thomas, arrive at the Cathedral, and their physical threat implicates the audience in the brutality and political expedience of the murder. The play ends on the Chorus’s concluding thanksgiving to Thomas’s testimony through martyrdom. Thus, Becket’s death is presented as an imitation of Christ’s own martyrdom, for Becket becomes the Christian subject who renounces his own free will in order to subject to the pattern designed for him by God’s will. The imagery and rhythms of the Choral verse are designed to carry the audience through the same spiritual progression as Thomas himself, while the use of colloquial prose in the Knights’ direct address to the public reinforces the identification between the two by breaking through the temporal distance and implying thus that the 20th-century loss of faith is no less guilty of Becket’s death than the historical characters themselves.

In his next plays, Eliot rejected the overtly religious drama (as preaching to the already converted) and turned, instead, to secular topics in order to “allow a Christian mentality to permeate the theatre, to affect it, and to influence audiences who might be obdurate to plays of direct religious appeal” (Lemming). As such, Eliot’s social (or drawing-room) comedies, while continuing to experiment with the choral form, turn to Greek myth in order to establish a parallel to the surface action, in order to achieve “a doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once” (Innes), a metaphoric quality which is the characteristic of poetic/symbolist drama.

The Family Reunion (1938) is paralleled by the events and characters of Aeschylus’s The Orestia. Clytemnestra finds an equivalent in Amy the dominant mother, while Harry parallels Orestes, the returning son


responsible for his mother’s death. The plays borrows a misleading detective frame, with a confession of murder (the hero, who returns home to attend his mother’s birthday celebration, is convinced to have murdered his wife, and he confesses this to his half-incredulous and half-panicked relatives), questioning of the suspect, and a possible witness to the crime, as well as the appearance of a police agent. But Harry’s guilt is imaginary. He is simply repeating inherited patterns, for his dream of pushing his wife overboard, at sea, is a projection of his father’s plan to drown Harry’s pregnant mother in a well on the estate. Where Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Harry’s father was persuaded not to dispose of Amy because this would have meant killing his unborn child. Moreover, the net that traps him is the web of family responsibilities, and instead of being butchered with an axe, his life is sapped by his wife’s implacable will to preserve the status quo. The sins are those of omission, and the curse lies in repeating the past rather than a developing pattern of vengeance. Similarly, it is Harry’s refusal to perpetuate the hell of unreality (as symbolized by the country estate of Wishwood) that kills Amy, destroyed by his departure. But instead of fleeing in guilt, like Orestes, Harry’s exit is to be seen as a triumph, while the tragedy is that of his mother, of a person living on will alone. Such hidden parallels are signaled by breaking naturalistic expectations, and, in turn, the unnatural actions of the characters are justified by their correspondence to the myth. The dialogue, reflecting the various levels of the action, switches between colloquial and heightened verse, visionary trances, unconscious utterance and chanted incantation, while the classical figures of the pursuing Fate are listed explicitly in the cast as “The Eumenides” – tangible embodiments of the myth, who, at first, haunt Harry as avengers of his wife, but later come to personify his spiritual change.

Yet, even with the shifts of consciousness in the play, the coexistence of two such different dimensions of reality proved incongruous on the stage, so that, with his next play, The Cocktail Party ( 1949), Eliot resolved this “failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation” (Innes) by concealing the plot’s mythical origins.

The preliminary basis for the play was Euripides’s Alcestis. But here the Eumenides are disguised as a psychiatrist, colonial envoy , and interfering unofficial aunt, interacting with the social group they manipulate. This concealed mythical level is replaced by an external shaping of experience through the imposition of a geometrical symmetry on the surface plot. Not only the missing wife has a lover, but the latter one is in love with the mistress of the husband, whom he selects as a confidant, forming thus a quadrilateral equation. In addition, the action is circular, beginning with the end of one party, and ending with the preparations for another.

The Confidential Clerk (1953) takes this to an extreme. The model is Euripides’s Ions, but the plot follows it in that Eliot has three dubiously parented young people in the play (a husband and a wife each have a misplaced illegitimate child, and both recognize him in the tile figure; he, in turn, is revealed to have lost his real father, and chooses his clerical predecessor, whose own child was lost in the war, as his true spiritual parent.) Where the original myth had a single child – the son of Apollo, believed dead by his mother who tries to kill him when adopted by her husband – Eliot adds an illegitimate daughter and a second unacknowledged son, accentuating thus the parallelism to a farcical level, the automatic


association being not with a classical archetype, but rather with Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Increasingly, in Eliot’s later plays, the mythical subtext becomes more tenuous and, as the social mode comes to dominate, the verse takes on the attributes of ordinary conversation. His last play, The Elder Statesman (1958) resembles Oedipus at Colonus only in the fact that the aged protagonists of both plays go away led by loving daughters and, after resisting messengers from the past, die reconciled with the gods. But the plot of The Elder Statesman, where two blackmailers appear out of Lord Claverton’s past demanding not money but acknowledgement of their existence, while the Lord’s own guilty secret (running over the body of a man already killed by another driver) is equally imaginary reduces the motivation for the spiritual conversion of its protagonists, who lack any convincing personal reality.

Eliot’s plays can thus be seen as a progressive series of experiments, each tackling the dramaturgical problems revealed by his previous attempt to create a specifically modern form of poetic drama.

3.3.4.Christopher Fry (1907 – 1993)

The most direct influence of Eliot’s poetic drama is to be found with Christopher Fry (1907-1993), whose lyric comedies – A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), The Lady’s Not for Burning (1948), Venus Observed (1950), The Dark Is Light Enough ((1954) and A Yard of Sun (1970) – represented the high point of modern attempts to revive verse drama. Recalling Anouilh’s piece roses, Fry relies on mood to achieve imaginative unity, each comedy being keyed to a particular season: bitter-sweet April transition (The Lady’s Not for Burning), the sensuality of summer (A Phoenix Too Frequent and A Yard of Sun), autumnal ripeness and decay (Venus Observed), the nostalgia of winter (The Dark Is Light Enough). The integration of poetic mood and action correspond with his thematic aim to infuse life with spirituality. But his extravagant language and imagery lead to an artificial heightening of the dramatic context, undermining individual characterization. This made his work seem dated as soon as Osborne and Wesker introduced new standards of authenticity in the late 1950s.

Task:

Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the argumentative type:

7. Symbolism and theatre: Oscar Wilde’s Salome

8. Symbolism and myth in W.B.Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well.

9. Symbolism and religious drama: T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

10. Greek myth in T.S.Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.


CHAPTER 4 – EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

4.1. The Expressionist Movement

“Expressionism” designates a general movement in the arts during and just before World War I which expresses extreme feelings of personal, familial and general social breakdown. “Apocalyptic” is the adjective frequently used of this highly subjective movement in which artists figure frequently as protagonists projecting their sufferings over a fractured world. As usual with new movements, the fundamental drive behind “expressionism” was a drive towards freedom. In the main, this “freedom” meant a break away with the constraints of naturalism, seen as a restrictive, determinist, positivist, materialist and reactionary programme, which took people to be products of the environment.

The term was first applied to painting, being coined by Julien Auguste Hervé in 1901 as a useful word to distinguish early impressionist painting from the more energetic individualism of Van Gogh and Matisse, both artists trying to go beyond the mere depiction of an external reality in order to convey their private experiences, inner ideas or visions, i.e., in Hervé’s words, to “to express [themselves] with force”.

As often, a useful general term was soon shared by other art forms, so that it became soon applied to music (e.g. the work of the composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), architecture (e.g. the visions of the architect Erich Mendhelson), film (e.g. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) poetry (e.g. the imagistic lyric verse of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land), or fiction (e.g. the ‘Nightown’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses or the nightmarish stories of Franz Kafka), yet it found itself particularly at home with drama, where “expressionist” came soon to identify any play or production which departed from realism and tried to show life in a very personal, idiosyncratic manner, where the form of the play could be seen to express its content.

This led to the following characteristics being shared by expressionist plays:

The dream structure, disjointed, concentrated, caricatural, questing, strange, is the dominant form of expressionism.

In keeping with this, its characteristic setting has clusters of powerful primary colours, with heavy flickering shadows and strong lighting.

The characters lose their individuality, becoming stereotyped and caricatured, with nameless designations like ‘the dreamer’, ‘the father’, ‘the son’, etc.

The dialogue is poetic and febrile, in order to break the sympathetic feeling directly.


4.2. European developments

4.2.1. Strindberg’s “dream play”

Among the forerunners of the movement, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) ranks as the most important. Though he began as one of the pioneers of early naturalism with plays such as The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1898) and Creditors (1889), after a period of mental crisis he wrote another twenty-nine plays in which he moved towards expressionism, disregarding the strict demands of realism and using materials that resembled dreams, or nightmares. For example, in A Dream Play (1902), the main character is a dreamer, while his imagination (in the form of dreams) designs the patterns, fancies, absurdities and improvisations which make up the play. The Ghost Sonata (1907) is an ironic psychological allegory which uses the same dream-like action to explore the protagonist’s encounter with death, seen as a painful awakening from a life of sleep-walking illusion.

4.2.2. German Expressionism

The expressionist movement within the theatre was first associated with the mood gripping the German drama in the 1910s and 1920s. German expressionism began as a drama of protest, reacting against the pre-war authority of the family and community, the rigid lines of social order. It was a drama of violent conflicts like those established between youth and old age, freedom and authority, and it followed Nietsche in glorifying the individual and idealizing the creative personality. With the advent of Freud and Jung, German expressionism undertook the challenge to disclose and reproduce the hidden states of mind, and in so doing it boldly treated taboo subjects, such as incest and paricide. For example, Walter Hasenclaver’s The Son (1914), which is considered the first representative expressionist play, is an ecstatic drama in which the Son desires freedom from a domineering burgher Father, bringing thus very close the father-dominated world of Freud. Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord (1915) is another rather crude dramatization of Freudian theory: the protagonist of the play is a young man who makes love to his mother and stabs his father. Reinhard Sorge’s The Beggar (1917) is also protesting against the dominance of the family. In an act of symbolic liberation, the son poisons both his mother (who obsessively loves him) and his father (who has a mad obsession with the planet Mars) to be then wedded to a new person, a ‘vital force’ towards which he reaches out.

Nevertheless, the impact of World War I and the mass slaughter of men in the trenches began to undermine this personal and subjective content and hastened the introduction of a more sophisticated concern for man and society (often reacting against the industrialization of society and the mechanization of life), while the skills of Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller brought more discipline to the movement.


4.2.2.1. Georg Kaiser

Thus, Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (1916), one of the crucial texts of the movement, is a vivid episodic play about the collapse of modern industrial society. Its protagonist is a bank cashier who revolts against the world. An idealist searching for the absolute, he repudiates society, embezzles money and flees into a symbolic snowfield where he has a conversation with Death. He plunges on, offering high prizes to winners of a six-day bicycle race, but the people are too tame for his vision. He continues to travel, seeking his brothers in a Salvation Army Hall, where he finds people confessing their sins. He confesses himself, and throws his money into the hall in an ecstasy of abnegation. But the ‘saved’ throw themselves on the money, and the cashier looses faith. He can now trust only one person, a girl, but she calls the police and he shoots himself.

4.2.2.2. Ernst Toller

Ernst Toller’s The Conversion (1917-8) depicts the “Struggle of Man”, which is the play’s subtitle. Here the Man undergoes suffering in factory and prison before a personal transfiguration compels him to publish his manifesto on behalf of fraternity and humanity. The Tranfiguration (1919) is a dream-sequence which presents graphic images of war and it follows the protagonist’s conversion from patriotism to militant pacifism. Toller’s later works are characteristic of the “new objectivity” (the “Neue Sachlichkeit”) towards which expressionism moved when its social concerns came to the fore. While The Machine Wreckers (1922) is a historical parable about the Luddites which attacks the processes of capitalism, Hoppla Wir Leben (Hurray, We Live) (1927) portrays the gap between idealism and political reality through the fate of its protagonist, a revolutionary who, released after several years in prison, cannot stand the discrepancy between the grotesque reality and the ideals he suffered for and commits suicide.

4.3. American Expressionism: Eugene O’Neill

It was mainly through the theatre that expressionism traveled from Germany, so that its most triumphant playwright was the American Eugene O’Neill. Though O’Neill had started as a realist, in the 1920s he also moved to expressionism, producing two masterpieces of the genre. Emperor Jones (1920) depicts the flight of its eponymous hero through the forest. Abandoned by his subjects in the first scene, Jones falls prey to visions (rendered by vivid colour, light, music and movement) and slowly sinks into his psyche (moving from sense impressions through personal memory to the non-personal archetypes of Jung.) Death and solitude are the fundamental concerns of the play, while Emperor Jones, like Strindberg’s Stranger, wants to become the master of his fate, seeking his ultimate freedom by carrying a silver bullet for final use on himself. The Hairy Ape (1921) presents the psychic vs. the physical disparity of the stoker Yank. Yank works in somber and violent stokehold in the bowels of a ship until he wakes up to consciousness of himself when a top-deck passenger, Mildred, faints at the sight of him. Seeking freedom as well, he goes on a similar journey to that of


Kaiser’s Cashier, but can never find a language to convince the others of his pain, and is always hemmed in by iron bars, whether in the stokehold, in prison, or in the zoo, where he finally dies.

4.4. British Expressionism

In Britain, Expressionism was felt over a period of time within the work of individual and very different artists, especially those of European structure. Thus, in D.H. Lawrence’s later novels one can detect a move towards the exploration of extreme states, the deeper, rawer realms of the psyche. For example, in Women in Love (1920) the landscapes, without losing their naturalism , reflect the intense psychological states of his characters. But Lawrence, expressionist in his painting and to a certain extent in his fiction, never became an expressionist in his drama. The second British author, one might include here is T. S. Eliot, whose long poem, The Waste Land (1921) employed fragmented semi-dramatic techniques to convey states of personal and social breakdown. Though his early attempt at drama, Sweeney Agonistes: A Fragment of an Agon, also displays an expressionistic grotesqueness, a preoccupation with murder and violence, and typological characterization, this style is faintly recognizable in his later plays, which move towards symbolism and myth.

Thus, inter-war British playwrights whose work may be accurately labeled as Expressionistic in character are Sean O’Casey, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

4.4.1. Sean O’Casey

Sean O’Casey (1880-1953) developed from naturalistic techniques - employed in his early Dublin trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, 1923, Juno and the Paycock, 1924, The Plough and the Stars, 1926) where graphic depictions of his working-class environment are set against the background provided by the violent course of events leading to the Irish independence – towards expressionism, starting with his 4th play, The Silver Tassie (1928), which juxtaposes overt symbolism with realistic incident and was rejected by the Abbey Theatre on these very grounds, leading to the playwright’s subsequent self-exile in England.

The Silver Tassie is a war parable, in which the story of Harry Heegan, a young and promising football player crippled in the trenches, illustrates the simple theme of youthful joy of life wantonly destroyed. The first act, set in the familiar O’Casey world of Dublin’s tenements, shows Harry, on leave from World War I, leading his football team to victory and the trophy of the silver tassie (cup). It was the second act, a macabre theatrical poem, expressionist in technique and enacted in a battle-scared landscape, which abandons the exploration of character in order to expose the futility of a foolish war, which upset those who expected from the playwright nothing but urban realism. The remaining two acts return Harry to Ireland. Maimed and bitter, he cannot reconcile himself to his changed circumstances. The climactic final act, which takes place at the football club’s dance, forces a recognition of how much has been lost and how little gained: while those who have not been to war enjoy the spoils of the victory, the crippled ex-football


champion, in a wheelchair, bitterly destroys his trophy in utter disappointment.

O’Casey’s next plays are overtly expressionist, with minor figures being one-dimensional representatives of social classes or political forces matched by an equally didactic purpose. Within the Gates (1934) is a satire on the Depression, as well as an attempt at a modern morality play. The action presents a Strindbergian dreamer, while the play itself is his vision. The four scenes set in Hyde Park – a pastoral image extended by having a chorus of young girls and boys representing its trees and flowers – pass from winter to spring and from morning to night, meant thus as symbolic of the cycles of life itself. The action surrounds a Young Woman – the compassionate prostitute of melodrama – who is in search of her salvation, while other characters – that are unrealistic and come in great number – are merely caricatures. Among them there are: a well-intentioned Bishop (who, nevertheless, is also the former seducer of the girl’s mother), a Guardsman (who is shown as presently seducing a Nursemaid), two Evangelists ( who are also voyeurs), a Salvation Army Officer (who is also attracted to the girl he is supposed to save.) Just before her death, the Young Woman moves into a joyful dance with the Dreamer, with the play closing on this symbolic moment of dancing. Of the plays of his last period, Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy (1949) is still expressionistic in treatment, but mixes this with the playwright’s familiar characterization of Dublin’s low life, becoming thus overtly allegorical. Woven through the scenes of the play – which present a series of incidents like the ugly behaviour of a belligerent priest, the cruelty shown to a “young gay girl”, the false piety of the elderly, the never-ending quest for money – is the central figure of the Cock, which is symbolic of Ireland’s fight for the “joy of life” in the face of clerical, social and political oppression.

4.4.2. Auden and Isherwood

The collaboration of W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) resulted in three plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1939), which mark them off as the other chief representatives of German expressionism on the inter-war English stage, as well as of the poetic revival characterizing the 1930s British theatre.

The Dog Beneath the Skin is a political fable which mixes a symbolic quest with expressionist techniques and satiric pastiche. The protagonist of play is an up-right hero, Alan Norman, a villager chosen by his lot to set out on the quest for the missing Sir Francis Crewe (a lost saviour prince) accompanied by a mysterious stray dog. Its episodic plot presents Alan as the innocent abroad, passing through a benighted and corrupt European civilization (represented by a court politely mourning the dissidents ceremonially shot, a night-town of brothels and drug-sellers, a pleasure park, a hospital, an asylum where the lunatics respond to the broadcasts of the country’s dictator). In the end, Alan discovers that the ideal hero, who was the object of his quest, has been with him all the time in the shape of the dog. Together they return to their village, where, instead of acting as the saviour of the established social order, Sir Frances rejects his inheritance and calls on the villagers to join him in the coming war against the Establishment.


Instead of a symbolic quest, The Ascent of F6 presents a symbolic mountain climbing, which, nevertheless, turns also into an allegorical drama in which an individual embarks on a quest for a mother figure and seeks in the process to liberate both himself and society. The hero, a sacrificial saviour-figure with the morality-play name of Ransome, is the leader of an expedition which sets out to plant the flag on an yet uncolonised peak. The journey, though motivated by power manouvering and international economic rivalry, is in fact one into the subcounscious: through a country populated by an amalgam of African natives, Tibetan monasteries and supernatural monsters, mountain-climbing becomes a symbol of spiritual achievement and self-conquest. At the summit, Randsome dies confronting a veiled “Demon”, the symbol of all man’s destructive tendencies, but a dream sequence, in the form of a trial where the hero first accuses then tries to protect the Demon, climaxes in the unveiling of the monster – revealed as the hero’s mother who starts to sing an escapist lullaby as her son dies. In the 1930s, the real life analogues of both plot and hero must have been clear to the audience: on the one hand, the international competition recalled Scott’s race to the South Pole, while, on the other, Ransome could be seen as a fictive counterpart of T.E. Lawrence, as a national hero who had rejected society and had combined a life of action and literary contemplation.

The confusing structure of On the Frontier, their last play, is set against the background of an European war between two imaginary countries, Westland and Ostria, which is fuelled by a mad demagogue Leader and by a cynical businessman, Valerian. Alternating with the main scenes which involve the politicians, the play shows the lives of two ordinary families – shown simultaneously on stage with an invisible ‘frontier” line dividing the scene – as they are affected by war.

4.4.3. The radio play

After the Second World War such kind of drama fostered in the 1930s became the province of radio where the direct appeal to the ear and the imagination made this medium an appropriate one for its subjective lyricism, freeing the plays from the physical limitations of the stage and the crudity of visual symbolism.

4.4.3.1. Louis MacNiece

Clear links to Auden and Isherwood’s drama are discernable both in Louis MacNiece’s Christopher Colombus (1944) – which is the inverse story of the explorer, with solo-voices representing abstract qualities -, and The Dark Tower (1946) – which, like The Dog Beneath the Skin, employs a quest-theme, with a naïve hero being seduced in his search through the phantasmagorical wasteland of society.

4.4.3.2. Dylan Thomas

The structure of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood (1953), a “play for voices”, is given by the progress of one day, from pre-dawn darkness to dusk again, while its main character, Blind Captain Cat, shares the narration with


two other voices, who describe the town, alternating the change of viewpoint, or simply varying the voice trimble or giving “stage directions”. It is a static narrative, in which the descriptive passages are not supplementing the main action, but rather supplement the narrative with vocal illustration, while the dialogue caries from extended passages to the mosaic of short speeches from different characters, briefly introduced by the narrators (as they dream, in the morning, in the afternoon, or as they settle for night.)

These plays, written for broadcasting, can thus be seen to make full use of the freedom of the new medium, where the scene changes and other verbal effects automatically create the “stream-of-consciousness” which subordinates analysis to synthesis and appeals to more primitive elements in the listeners.

Task:


11. Expressionist devices in Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie.

12. Expressionism and the radio play: Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood.


CHAPTER 5 - EPIC THEATRE AND BRITISH VARIANTS

5.1. From Expressionism to Epic Theatre

The period between the wars saw a number of adaptations and developments of earlier forms. If earlier reactions against naturalist theatre included the expressionist movement and the verse drama, another reaction arouse out of a rapidly growing technology which had created the new medium of the cinema as a formidable challenge for the theatre, and was directed against expressionism’s focus on emotion, wishing the stage to embrace the larger social context of the epic. Epic theatre emerged thus in the post World War I Weimar Germany out of the work of two of the most ambitious and innovative directors of the century, Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, though it was the latter’s work to become part of the classic repertoire of world theatre and exert the most powerful influence on contemporary writing and production.

5.1.1. Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) was a left-wing radical for whom the theatre was an important public medium, which could tell political truths and effect political change. His dramatic aims were utilitarian: to influence voters, or to clarify Communist policy, and the standards of authenticity and contemporaneity carried over in his productions for the Proletarian Theatre, which he founded in 1920. There he developed a form of agit-prop (i.e. theatre pieces devised to ferment political action/agitation and propaganda)3

suitable for the German context. Apart from choosing subjects of contemporary relevance, Piscator also made radical use of the new medium of documentary film, whose realism he strove to incorporate into his multi-media productions. Thus he incorporated cinema screens into the set, using old film footage and new documentary to accompany the action, in an attempt to reveal the historical processes behind the public events. He use slide projections of newspaper clippings and captions were projected between scenes. For example, in the historical revue Despite All (1925), which presented a political panorama of events between the outbreak of war in 1914 and the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1918, he employed a simultaneous montage of authentic speeches, news-extracts, photographs and film-sequences. Another striking innovation was his use of stage structures of great imaginative complexity. Toller’s Hurrah, We Live (1927) was performed on a four-storey structure, a multiple stage on which the various levels of society could be seen in ironic juxtaposition. This 3 Agit-prop theatre originated in the aftermath of the Russian revolution as a substitute for newsprint. Its aim was to spread information and the party line through a widely dispersed and illiterate population. The typical form of this type of theatre were the short sketches which illustrated political commentary.


technological staging was extended to the fullest in the production of Alexei Tolstoi’s Rasputin (1927), which used a revolving hemisphere – symbolizing both the globe and mechanization – with scenes played within its opening segments, film and photographs integrated with the action, and texts or dates projected on screens flanking the stage. One element could comment on another, gaining an effect of objectivity or linking cause and effect. In Hasek’s The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik (1928) he notoriously employed two treadmill stages, using animated cartoons as a backdrop to actors and scenery moving across the stage as if on a moving carpet. Although the technology was too ambitious to be financially viable, Piscator’s productions provided a model of epic theatre that influenced Brecht, who collaborated on both Rasputin and Schweik, as well as containing all the techniques of the modern documentary drama.

5.1.2. Bertold Brecht

Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) appropriated much from Piscator’s epic theatre, though his writings on the nature of acting, play-construction and the social purpose of drama claim the term for his own theatre.

His first works to be staged, Baal (1919), Drums in the Night (1922) and In the Cities Jungle (1923) were still recognizably expressionist. It was with the writing of his anti-militaristic Man is Man (1925) that he began to develop his ideas and formal dramatic structures, which later became the basis for his epic theatre. Like Piscator’s productions, this play was concerned with the question of individual liberty, and the way in which organized society and military force could reshape human behaviour: Galy Gay is taken to pieces and put together again as someone else, recalling the character transformations effected by fascism and challenging the old assumptions of liberal humanism that man has an integral identity. Nevertheless, his first popular success came with The Threepenny Opera (1928), his remake of John Gay’s Beggars’ Opera, and the parody opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), which appropriated and mocked the conventions of the Broadway musical, Viennese operetta and the romanticism of early Verdi. With musicians on stage, the use of placards to give spectators an objective perspective on the action, the separation of dialogue from song and a harshly cynical presentation of the material to prevent emotional empathy, these works may be seen as the first consciously developed examples of his famous “alienation” techniques, meant to prevent the audience’s hypnotic identification with the story. To be more specific, Brecht administered a series of shocks by projecting words onto a downstage half-curtain two and a half meters high; he split the stage in two, illuminating with footlights a semi-circular apron built out over the orchestra pit, building thus a bridge between stage and audience and creating a forum where statements could be made. Moreover, the forestage became a place where the characters could gather to dance, sing and, like the Greek chorus, respond verbally and gesturally to the series of tragic and appalling events enacted on the main stage. To avoid the emotional intensity of romantic opera, Brecht organized collisions between music, story and setting. For example, songs could be used to provide an ironic commentary on the action, or reading a projected title could interrupt the tendency of plot or music to flood the mind with feeling, Like in the Elizabethan theatre, the


actors addressed the audience directly, doing away with the fourth-wall convention and calling thus attention to the obvious aritificiality of the stage action. At the same time, a new style of acting was evolved in which the performers demonstrated the actions of their characters instead of identifying with them.

It was in the essays written at this time that Brecht formulated the principles of his “non-Aristotelian” drama. If the Greek critic had declared tragedy a higher form of art than epic partly because of its economy and concentration (a brief crisis, centring on a single place and time), Brecht’s alternative theory considered that epic theatre should present an episodic narrative, covering a broad historical sweep (in the manner of Elizabethan history play) and often involving a journey. Later Brecht was to modify these principles into a theory of “dialectal theatre”, expecting his audience to observe critically, draw conclusions and participate in an intellectual argument with the work at hand. In order to achieve this confrontational relationship between drama and audience, the political issues raised by the plays had to be abstracted and presented in historically or geographically distant contexts where their essential nature could be displayed. This “distancing” effect meant thus that a given social system could be examined from the standpoint of a social system from another period or place.

All his major plays, The Life of Galileo (1938), Mother Courage and her Children (1939), The Good Person of Setzuan (1940), or The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945) illustrate Brecht’s approach to his dramatic material at its clearest. For example, Mother Courage, written in 1939 and first produced in Zurich in 1941, which has become a classic of modern theatre, is a powerful antiwar play, which, nevertheless, distances contemporary events in the context of the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany during the 17th century. As such, Brecht’s interest may be seen to extent beyond the immediate causes underlying both the Second World War and the Thirty Years War into making a statement against war entirely, regardless of its cause. In order to achieve this, he deliberately avoided making his play realistic, employing a number of alienation techniques like: the use of an essentially barren stage setting; the structuring of the play in scenes that avoid any sense of continuity in the action; the use of high intensity, cruel lightning which spotlights the action in an unnatural way; the use of slide projections of headings accompanying each of the twelve scenes in order to provide another break in the continuity of the action and to remind the audience of the presence of the playwright and the fact that they are seeing a play. The plot concerns Mother Courage herself who, accompanied by her three children, lives off the war by selling goods to the soldiers, with no concern for who is winning or losing, and even hoping for the war to go on to secure her livelihood. But, as Mother Courage continues to pull her wagon across field after field, learning how to survive, she also loses her children, one by one, to the war. One son, Eilif, is seduced into joining the army by a recruitment officer, and is led into battle thinking that war is a heroic adventure. The other son, Swiss Cheese, opts for a paymaster’s uniform, but he also perishes in the war that offers no protection. The daughter, Katrin, is likewise a victim of the violence of war. One Swedish officer rapes her, and Katrin becomes mute, another violent treatment leaves a terrible scar on her face, which leaves the young woman unmarriageable. Eventually she too


looses her life while sounding an alarm to war the sleeping town of an imminent attack. The end of the play shows Mother Courage, left alone, picking up her wagon and finding that she can maneuver it herself. The curtain drops as she circles the stage, with everything around her consumed by war. As Brecht intended his character, Mother Courage should be seen as a reflection of society’s wrong values: she conducts business on the battle field, paying no attention to the moral question of war and ultimately failing to see that it is the war that causes her anguish. Nevertheless, audiences and critics alike have tended to treat her as a survivor, almost a biblical figure, a model for one who endures all the terrors of war and yet remains a testament for the resilience of humankind.

5.2. British Epic Equivalents

Although Brecht’s plays had first appeared on the English stage in the 1930s in private club productions, in was only in the 1950s that his plays and theories made a powerful impact, following the outstanding visit that the “Berliner Ensemble” (the acting company founded by the German director in 1948) paid to London in 1956, the same year with Osborne’s premiere of Look Back in Anger.

Vividly contrasting with the naturalistic approach that had dominated the British stage since Shaw, the productions of Brechtian plays like Mother Courage or The Caucasian Circle offered an anti-illusionistic model that proved a revelation for audiences, critics and playwrights themselves. Nevertheless, since his theoretical writing were not available in translation, the politics of Brecht’s theatre was obscured, his subsequent influence on the British stage remaining to a great extent restricted to production values and ways of acting, i.e. the purely stylistic aspect of the epic theatre.

Thus, a wide range of superficially Brechtian drama appeared on the English stage in the 1960s and 1970s. This tended to severe epic techniques from Brecht’s political analysis that the plays were designed to express, and its effects may be best seen in the directorial output of the time.

5.2.1. Brechtian Directors

5.2.1.1. Peter Brook

For example, Peter Brook (1925 - ) borrowed Brecht’s methods in his production of King Lear (1962), which displayed a stark and severe set, with rusted metallic sheets flanking a bare stage, otherwise uniformly lit with a harsh white light in the characteristic style. The costumes were of heavy, worn leather, in imitation of Brecht’s production of Coriolanus, and the props were few and simple: one great stone throne for Lear was all that supplied the opening scene. Moreoever, the king’s part was played by Paul Scofield with cold detachment, all colour drained from his lines.

Other British directors like George Devine (1910-65), John Dexter

(1925-), or William Gaskill (1930 -) were also attracted to Brecht, with Joan Littlewood (1914-) setting the pace.


5.2.1.2. Joan Littlewood

One of the most influential post-war British directors and producers, Littlewood had been associated before the Second World War with the Workers’ Theatre Movement, a left-wing touring company which was to become a pioneering example for the fringe companies of the 1960s due to its use of agit-prop techniques borrowed from the German theatre. In 1953, after years of road playing in village halls and community centres, Littlewood settled her company, renamed as Theatre Workshop, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London, where the director was to put into practice her most ambitious programmes, combining contemporary documentary drama with classic productions of little known plays, encouraging new playwrights like Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney and staging what were to become seminal plays. Until 1973, the year of her last Stratford production, the company managed to retain many characteristics marking it off from the West End, i.e. commercial, theatre. One of the most important features was that the company remained an ensemble, forged over many years since the 1930s, where decisions were arrived at collectively after discussion and no stars existed, the roles were swapped around and training was continuous. Another characteristic was that the text was never regarded as a sacred, inviolable object, nor was the writer put on a pedestal: during rehearsals, the company improvised and altered the text, seeking to increase the directness and immediacy of the production. A further characteristic of her productions was the synthesis of different elements like dance, music and mime, often drawing upon the ingredients of music-hall and popular theatre in an attempt to increase the audience’s sense of participation and involvement. Other means used to lessen the “mystique” surrounding the theatrical event included: the removal of footlights, having performers mingling with the audience at the bar after the show, and organizing special meetings during which members of the audience could question the performers about their interpretation and playing of roles.

Like Brecht, Littlewood wanted to create a popular theatre for a working-class audience, and her productions exhibited a characteristically Brechtian style of energy and vulgarity, such as Oh, What a Lovely War (1963) – a musical satire about the First World War set within a seaside concert party framework, and one of the Theatre Workshops greatest successes - proves. According to the company’s practice, the script was evolved communally, using, like a documentary, authentic speeches and ballads of the time to make up the material of the play. Nevertheless, the carnage of the war was presented in terms of a “pierrot show of fifty years ago”, identifying thus Brecht’s distancing effect with the popular tradition. On the one hand, the pierrot constume focused on the wider thematic significance of the juxtaposed scenes which made up the play, while, on the other, it reminded the character’s representative status, replacing thus the “great men” theory of history with the common man’s perspective, as represented by the clowns. The audience was also emplaced in the communal style of production, at times cast as troops in the trenches by using a ‘plant’ to set up a dialogue with the soldiers on the stage, at other times called to join in the choruses of the songs. Nevertheless, such overt


theatricality was always counterpointed by documentary fact – by having real photographs from the war projected on a screen behind the actor, using slides of posters and advertisements from the era to set the action in the context of the period, or have a newspanel giving a running commentary on the scenes with dates and statistics. Such devices had the effect of contrasting the stark reality with the songs, dance, mime and sketches of the performers.

5.2.2. Pseudo-epic plays

Apart from such directorial ventures, other new plays of the 1960s flirted with fashion and adopted a superficially epic form. Such is the case with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960), which put forward Sir Thomas Moore as a man of great conscience, prepared to risk everything against the despotism of the king. But, unlike Mother Courage, or Galileo, Moore was too much master of his fate to provide much of a commentary on society, and the episodic scenes, linked by the commentary of a Common Man, were uninformed by Brecht’s ambiguities. John Osborne’s Luther (1961) echoed Galileo in style and intention, enhanced by the play using an episodic structure and ‘gestic’ tableaux like the grouping of peasants with a cart and a dead body. But the complexity of the central figure, which simultaneously linked an Oedipus complex with a terrible problem of digestion, put the emphasis more on the man, and less on his historical context, such as epic theatre demanded. Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything (1962) also assumed an episodic structure which concentrated on the ironies of life in the Air Force, while Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), which dealt spectacularly with Pizzaro’s conquest of the Inca of Peru used a formal epic structure to mask the symbolical and allegorical thrust of the play.

5.2.3. Brechtian playwrights

5.2.3.1. John Arden

Probably the first British dramatist to attempt to create a homegrown epic theatre equivalent remains John Arden (1930 - ), who not only demonstrates a real understanding of Brecht’s intentions, but has also persisted in testing epic techniques on the English stage.

As a result of seeing Mother Courage performed in London in 1956, Arden discarded the realistic style he had used in his fist success, Live Like Pigs (1957) – a play which depicts a cosy suburban family who have their lives violently disrupted by a family of gypsies house in the same tenement by the local council – and showed his real colour in 1959 with Sg Musgrave’s Dance , a play regarded now as a modern classic.

Sg Musgrave’s Dance is an anti-war parable, in which Arden repeatedly disconcerts his audience with unexpected and paradoxical developments. The plot, set in Victorian times, concerns Sg Musgrave and his three soldiers, who return to the native town of a comrade who has been killed in a colonial war. As such, at the time of its production, when the British troops were fighting freedom forces in Cyprus, the play had an obvious


contemporary political relevance. Nevertheless, though the soldiers’ intention is most honourable (to show the townspeople the results of Victorian militarism and convert them to pacifism), the audience, sympathising with their ends, are repelled by their behaviour: not only the group turn out to be deserters, but their pacifism becomes highly questionable when they kill one of their number, because he has tried to go off with a local girl. Musgrave himself is a true anti-hero: too much of a fanatic, who must preach his message at gunpoint and threaten the citizens with a gatling gun. The play also makes use of song, direct address and other epic devices, while a dialectical structure stands at its back, refusing to comfort the spectator or confirm him in his beliefs.

Arden’s subsequent plays are also attuned to the Brechtian model. The Happy Haven (1960) centres again on anarchic individualism, which causes a group of joyous old folk rise against the doctors and staff in the nursing home. Ironhand (1963), a play which updates Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, presents the robber baron defending his way of life against the extension of law, the rise of an amoral politician and the dominance of the new middle-class the latter represents. Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1965) distances the theme of imperialism into a 13th century Scottish context, while lsland of the Mighty (1965) is an epic Arthurian romance. Such plays which attempt to represent complex issues in a broad social and chronicle drama demonstrate that Arden’s concerns are similar to those of Brecht (i.e. social and historical), with situations representative of forms of social interaction, and characters tending towards the stereotypical. At the same time, Arden also uses song and separates his scenes to make ‘gestic’ statements, yet, unlike his mentor, he proves a more realistic writer who mainly uses the fourth wall convention to project a rapidly moving plot, and his songs are not so much separate as incorporated into the action.

5.2.3.2. Edward Bond

Apart from Arden, Edward Bond (1934 - ) is also considered as one of the mist successful Brechtian playwrights in English. After naturalist beginnings in plays like The Pope’s Wedding (1962) or Saved (1965), his banished Early Morning (1968) – which rests upon the massive alienation effect of a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale which accentuates their Victorian milieu -, and the censored Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) - which focuses on violence and injustice, distancing the horror with oriental masks – show Bond adopting Brechtian techniques. Nevertheless, like Arden, Bond’s theatre may also be considered as a cross between the epic model and a more mainstream British naturalism, for his plays are more realistic, less caricatural and comic, and they do not employ song and commentary. One constant theme which runs through them is related to the subject of violence, which, in the playwright’s opinion, characterizes the contemporary society. While plays like Saved, Early Morning, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Lear (1971) and The Sea (1973) set to examine its causes, show its psychological effects and suggest radical pacifism as the sole way of breaking out of its vicious circle, later ones like Bingo (1974), The Fool (1976) or The Woman (1978) question the function of drama and the role of the dramatist in inspiring constructive action to change things. This theme provides intellectual consistency to a


work which otherwise might look eclectic, ranging from realism to Brechtian parables, Restoration parody, or Shakespearean revisionism.

Lear, for example, is a cunning and effective reinterpretation of the Shakespearean prototype. According to Bond, Shakespeare’s King Lear is an anatomy of human values which ultimately teaches us how to survive in a corrupt world. In opposition to this, Bond’s play aims to show people how to act responsible in order to change it. The Shakespearean paradigm is observed in what concerns Lear’s movement to sanity from madness, vision through blindness, self-knowledge through suffering, as well as in the play revitalizing certain patterns of imagery and in the metaphorical language used by the main character. Nevertheless, Bond constructs wholly new social contexts for Lear’s actions, which are replete with anachronisms, relating thus the narrative to contemporary issues, because the playwright is interested in 20th-century political forces and in the process of political discovery that leads the old king from an opening scene in which he shoots a worker in order to enforce the speedy building of a wall meant to defend his kingdom to a final scene in which he himself is shot for trying to dig up the same wall. Through the dramatic metaphor of the wall (simultaneously a symbol of defence and entrapment), the play foregrounds Bond’s sense of violent social restriction as an uncontrollable self-generating circle of aggression. Lear’s fear and belief in natural evil first alienates him from his daughters, and then prove self-confirming once Bodice and Fontanelle decide to violently replace the old king, only to continue as slaves to power and perpetuate thus its repressive social institutions. Though Cordelia is first portrayed as a sympathetic character, who support her husband’s charitable sheltering of the king, she ends like a Stalinist figure who resembles the daughters she supplants, because her counterrevolution continues to destroy men in the name of duty, perpetuating thus both the wall and the vicious circle of violence and suffering. While this lack of any conventionally good character becomes one of Bond’s most effective departures from the Shakespearean prototype, the note of optimism on which the play ends is related to the change that occurs in Lear himself: transformed into a critical social prophet, the king dies as he tries to tear down the wall he himself erected against his enemies. It is a triumphant moment of exemplary action meant to teach people that their individual acts can affect history. As such, action is presented as quintessentially human and preferable to stoic resignation in the face of suffering.

Task:


13. Edward Bond’s epic theatre: Lear.

14. The British Brecht: John Arden and Sg Musgrave’s Dance


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Documents

Main Trends in British English Drama