Modern Drama - Major Playwrights

1
Modern Drama - Major Playwrights

• Part I Europe
• Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Wilde, Shaw, Synge,
  Pirandello
• Course Modern British and American Plays
  ??????
• Date March 2010

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Extracts from each play text

• Ibsens A Dolls House (1879)
• Strindbergs Miss Julie (1888)
• Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard (1904)
• Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• Shaws Pygmalion (1912)
• Synges Riders to the Sea (1904)
• Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an
  Author (1921)

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Henrik Ibsen(?? ??, 1828-1906)

• Norwegian playwright, poet
• the father of modern drama
• the prose social dramas dramas of protest
  against social conditions, inquiry into the
  conditions of life and issues of morality
• domestic dramas
• realistic plays ? naturalistic plays ? symbolic
  plays

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Henrik Ibsen Notable Works

• A Dolls House (1879) 1889 UK perf. a
  realistic play, a criticism of the acceptance of
  traditional roles of men and women in Victorian
  marriage
• Ghosts (1881) a naturalistic play, commentary
  on Victorian morality
• The Wild Duck (1884) - Ibsens finest and the
  most complex work
• Hedda Gabler (1890) psychological conflicts
• The Master Builder (1892) symbolic plays,
  psychological conflicts

5
Ibsens contributions to the modern theater

• Ibsen was a very important influence in opening
  up the discussion of the position of women in
  society . . . Nora in A Dolls House started a
  discussion about the position of women in
  Victorian marriage Mrs Alving in Ghosts drew
  attention to the double standards of morality for
  men and women and Hedda Gabler ultimately
  constitutes a plea to allow women to develop
  their creativeness. (Martin Esslin, 1976 98)
• endowing his work with a double-leveled
  perspective (Robert Brustein, 1991 49)

6
Ibsens contribution to modern British drama

• Ibsen has been called the father of modern
  drama because he was the first to use the stage
  to debate contemporary social dilemmas, as in his
  best known play, about a claustrophobic marriage,
  A Dolls House.
• Ibsens plays offers Lessons on the hypocrisy
  and dual standards of society
• He took for his subjects, for example, the role
  of women in society (A Dolls House and Hedda
  Gabler) and the consequences of inherited
  syphilis (Ghosts).

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Ibsens contribution to modern British drama

• When A Dolls House was first performed in London
  in 1889 it triggered a major debate on the
  inadequacies of the commercial theatre.
• The Theatre of Ideas Ibsenites young
  enthusiastic intellectuals for the new plays
  inspired by Ibsen seized on the idea of theatre
  as a political force.
• Social comment, drawing audiences with realistic
  controversial drama concerning ordinary people

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August Strindberg ???? ?????? (1849-1912)

• Swedish playwright
• naturalistic drama expressionistic drama?????,
  ?????
• Miss Julie (1888)a one-act naturalistic
  tragedy???? ???
• A Dream Play (1901) a symbolist and mystic
  style

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Naturalism

• . . . was a movement, initiated by Emile Zola
  the application of the new positivist, scientific
  spirit of the age to literature.
• Zola not only wanted a realistic representation
  of everyday life, he rejected the idea which had
  infused the classical, the romantic and even the
  realistic theatre of his period, that art should
  strive to show the beautiful, heroic, uplifting
  and inspiring. (Martin Esslin, 1976 60)

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Naturalism (continued)

• Zola wanted the artist to uncover the truth about
  society in the same spirit of objective inquiry
  as that of a natural scientists approach to
  nature.
• It was in this spirit that Ibsen in Ghosts
  brought a hitherto taboo subject like venereal
  disease into the theatre and caused an enormous
  scandal. (Martin Esslin, 1976 60-61)

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Naturalism (continued)

• The basic impulse behind the naturalistic
  movement was a determination to capture the whole
  of human experience, however sordid and ugly, to
  leave nothing unsaid. It did this by an
  accumulation of significant detail. In romantic
  drama, the heroes talked in lofty poetic terms
  about love or glory . . . By concentrating on the
  concrete detail rather than on abstract
  sentiments, naturalism tended to transform itself
  into a style in which objects increasingly became
  symbols, embodiment of ideas. So naturalism
  merged into symbolism. (Martin Esslin, 1976
  61-62)

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Naturalism (continued)

• Strindberg . . . who had started out as
  naturalist, took a slightly different path.
• In his determination to represent experience
  exactly as it really was, he soon discovered
  that depicting the external world tells only half
  the story you also had to include the way that
  world was experienced by an individual, and that
  meant his internal world. (Martin Esslin, 1976
  62)

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Expressionist drama

• Hence Strindberg wrote a number such plays The
  Ghost Sonata, To Damascus and the Dream Play
  itself which, quite in the spirit of naturalism,
  tried to depict a dream. (Martin Esslin, 1976
  62)
• In expressionist drama the characters frequently
  do not even have names (in Ghost Sonata the Old
  man, the Student, the Mummy, the Colonel, etc.).

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Bertolt Brechts epic theatre (????? ???)

• Bertolt Brecht rejected naturalism as well as
  the classical and romantic theatre . . . although
  he took many ideas from them. His favourite term
  . . . was epic theatre.
• Brecht wanted an undramatic- an epic-theatre .
  . . in which the audience watch the play in a
  detached, critical frame of mind. This is the
  famous Verfremdungseffekt . . . translated as
  alienation effect. It really means strange-making
  effect. (Martin Esslin, 1976 64-65)

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Bertolt Brechts epic theatre (????? ???)

• Brechts theatre therefore is anti-illusionist
  that is, no effort is made to create an illusion
  of reality. Instead the stage becomes something
  of a lecture platform, a laboratory in which
  models of human behaviour are examined, tested
  and evaluated.
• Whereas the naturalists and Brecht concentrate on
  social reality, the external world, other
  playwrights, following Strindberg and also
  novelists of dream states like Kafka and Joyce,
  turned towards the representation of the world of
  fantasy and dream. (Martin Esslin, 1976 65)

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Theatre of the Absurd (??? ?)

• Theatre of the Absurd or Absurdist theatre
• . . . an absurdist play uses concretised poetic
  images which gradually unfold and disclose their
  deeper meaning.
• In the conventional realistic play, the main
  emphasis is on plot and character in the
  Brechtian epic play it is on the demonstration of
  human behaviour patterns in the absurdist play
  the main means of conveying significance and
  effect are image and metaphor. (Martin Esslin,
  1976 66)

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Anton Chekhov(?? ??, 1860-1904)

• Russian playwright
• Four-act realistic plays
• The Cherry Orchard (1904) ??? ???
• Three Sisters ?????
• Uncle Vanya ??????
• The Seagull ?????

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Chekhovian drama

• Chekhov uses the drama neither as a vehicle for
  individualistic self-realization (Ibsen) nor as a
  means of exorcistic self-expression (Strindberg)
  but rather as a form for depicting that fluid
  world beyond the self, with the author
  functioning only as an impartial witness.
• His plays reflect both his sympathy for human
  suffering and his outrage at human absurdity,
  alternating between moods of wistful pathos and
  flashes of ironic humor which disqualify them
  from being mere slices of life.

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Chekhovian drama (continued)

• For if Chekhov is a detached realist, permitting
  life to proceed according to its own rules, he is
  also an engaged moralist, arranging reality in a
  particular way in order to evoke some comment on
  it.
• . . . his conviction that life as it is is life
  as it should not be. (Brustein, 1991 138, 139)

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Chekhovian drama (continued)

• Chekhov will introduce political, social, and
  philosophical discussions into his work, because
  these are threads in the fabric of reality. But
  he is careful neither to take sides nor to hint
  at solutions.
• It is the duty of the judge to put the questions
  to the jury correctly, he observes, employing
  his favorite courtroom metaphor, and it is for
  members of the jury to make up their minds, each
  according to his taste. (Brustein, 1991 145)

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Chekhovian drama (continued)

• Chekhovs impersonality is a surface
  characteristic and beneath this surface is a
  satiric, admonitory moralist . . .
• Chekhov the realist pretends to have no other aim
  than the faithful representation of reality but
  Chekhov the moralist is always conscious of a
  higher purpose than mere imitation. (Brustein,
  1991 147)

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Chekhovian drama (continued)

• Chekhovs revolt is directed against the quality
  of contemporary Russian life. (Brustein, 1991
  148)
• The conflict between the cultured upper classes
  and their stupefying environment between the
  forces of light and the forces of darkness
  provides the basic structure of most of Chekhovs
  plays (Brustein, 1991 149-150)

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The Cherry Orchard (1904)

• premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by
  Constantin Stanislavski
• Chekhov intended this play as a comedy however,
  Stanislavski directed it as a tragedy ? the dual
  nature of the play
• has become a classic work of dramatic literature
• the plays influence on many dramatists including
  Eugene ONeill, Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Miller

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The Cherry Orchard (1904) synopsis

• The play concerns an aristocratic Russian woman
  (Madame Ranevskaya) and her family (including her
  17-year old daughter Anya) as they return to the
  familys estate (which includes a large and
  well-known cherry orchard) just before it is
  auctioned to pay the mortgage.
• While presented with options to save the estate,
  the family essentially does nothing and the play
  ends with the estate being sold to the son of a
  former serf (Yermolai Lopakhin), and the family
  leaving to the sound of the cherry orchard being
  cut down.

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The Cherry Orchard (1904)

• Act One opens in May when the cherry trees in the
  Ranevskaya orchard are blooming.
• Trofimov a young student who acted as tutor to
  Ranevskayas son, Grisha, who drowned five years
  prior to the beginning of the play

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The Cherry Orchard (1904) themes

• the effect social change has on people, the theme
  of identity, the 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.
• In reflecting the socio-economic forces at work
  in Russia at the turn of the 20th century,
  including the rise of the middle class after the
  abolition of serfdom in the mid-19th century
  (1861) and the sinking of the aristocracy, the
  play reflects forces at work around the globe in
  that period.

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Oscar Wilde(??? ???, 1854-1900)

• Irish-born English playwright, poet
• comedy of manners (drawing-room comedy)
• a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic
  movement (Aestheticism) in England, which
  advocated art for arts sake
• the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits
  involving homosexuality and ending in his
  imprisonment (189597).

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Oscar Wildes Works

• his only novel
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
  ??????? ????
• comic masterpieces
• Lady Windermeres Fan (1892) ???????? ???
• An Ideal Husband (1895) ????? ???
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

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Aestheticism (art movement)

• late 19th-century European arts movement which
  centered on the doctrine that art exists for the
  sake of its beauty alone, and that it need serve
  no political, didactic, or other purpose.
• The movement began in reaction to prevailing
  utilitarian social philosophies and to what was
  perceived as the ugliness and philistinism of the
  industrial age.

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Aestheticism (art movement)

• Its philosophical foundations were laid in the
  18th century by Immanuel Kant, who postulated the
  autonomy of aesthetic standards, setting them
  apart from considerations of morality, utility,
  or pleasure.
• It was popularized in France, and the philosopher
  Victor Cousin, who coined the phrase lart pour
  lart (art for arts sake) in 1818.

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Aestheticism (art movement)

• the movements ideal the cultivation of refined
  sensibility
• In England, the artists of the Pre-Raphaelite
  Brotherhood (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, etc), from
  1848, had sown the seeds of Aestheticism, and
  their work exemplified it in expressing a
  yearning for ideal beauty through conscious
  medievalism.
• The attitudes of the movement were also
  represented in the writings of Oscar Wilde and
  Walter Pater

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Aestheticism (art movement)

• Contemporary critics of Aestheticism included
  William Morris and John Ruskin, who questioned
  the value of art divorced from morality.
• Aestheticism shared certain affinities with the
  French Symbolist movement, fostered the Arts and
  Crafts Movement, and sponsored Art Nouveau.

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art-for-arts-sake

• a slogan translated from the French lart pour
  lart, which was coined in the early 19th century
  by the French philosopher Victor Cousin. The
  phrase expresses the belief held by many writers
  and artists, especially those associated with
  Aestheticism, that art needs no justification,
  that it need serve no political, didactic, or
  other end.
• 
  (Britannica Online Encyclopedia)

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The Dandy

• The original meaning of the word was a fop,
  someone ostentatiously well-dressed, and it
  tended to extend to smart ways of behaving and
  talking. A dandy looked elegant, was socially
  sophisticated, and knew it. On the other hand he
  showed no interest in matters of conscience or
  morality. (Jim Hunter, 2000 18)
• In matters of grave importance, style, not
  sincerity, is the vital thing (Gwendolen in
  Earnest, p. 34569)

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George Bernard Shaw (GBS)(?? ??? ?, 1856-1950)

• Irish-born English playwright
• Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925

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George Bernard Shaw(1856-1950)

• Shavian play of ideas or thesis drama (???)
  ??? ??? ??
• The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1890)
• plays unpleasant Mrs Warrens Profession (1902),
  etc.
• plays pleasant Arms and the Man (1894)
  farcical comedy, Candida (1897), etc.
• three plays for puritans The Devils Disciple
  (1897), etc.
• Other major works Man and Superman (1903), Major
  Barbara (1905), Pygmalion (1912) an antitype of
  the popular Cinderella story, etc.

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Shaws contribution

• Shaw, an Ibsenite, or a fervent apostle of
  Ibsens, grew to be the true colossus of the new
  theatre.
• He began his literary career as a novelist,
  working also as a critic of music and drama.
• The beginning of modern drama in England can be
  dated in 1890 when Shaw gave his lecture on The
  Quintessence of Ibsenism, which marks a
  watershed between traditionalism and new
  politicized forms of drama. (Innes, 2002 3)

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Shaws contribution

• Playwrights like Ibsen or Shaw attacked the
  social codes of their society conventional
  drawing-room comedy probably reaffirmed the
  social code of the upper classes that formed its
  audience. (Martin Esslin, 1976 29)
• Shaws brilliant and amusing demonstration of his
  socialist point of view contributed much to the
  rise of left-wing thinking in Britain and
  elsewhere. (Martin Esslin, 1976 98)

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Shaws contribution

• Shaws campaign to promote the new drama
• Transforming drama into a vehicle for ideas
• His preface and sense of ethical purpose provide
  a model for Edward Bond
• His intellectual comedy, and the verbal
  brilliance he shares with Wilde, look forward to
  Tom Stoppard (Innes, 2002 51)

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Pygmalion (1912) My Fair Lady (1964)

• an antitype of the popular Cinderella story

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Pygmalion in Ovids Metamorphoses

• ?????(Ovid)??????(Metamorphoses) ??? ??????
  ??? ???? ??? ??? ??? ???? ? ?? ???? ?. ??? ??? ??
  ??? ??, ? ?? ??? ???? ??? ?.

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G. B. Shaws Pygmalion (1912) - synopsis

• Based on Ovids tale of Pygmalion in
  Metamorphoses.
• It tells the story of Henry Higgins, a professor
  of phonetics, who makes a bet with his friend
  Colonel Pickering that he can successfully pass
  off a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, as a
  refined society lady by teaching her how to speak
  with an upper class accent and training her in
  etiquette.
• In the process, Higgins and Doolittle grow close,
  but she ultimately rejects his domineering ways
  and declares she will marry Freddy a young,
  poor, gentleman.

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Pygmalion (1912) the first production

• His Majestys Theatre, London on April 11, 1914
• Starring Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza and Sir
  Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Henry Higgins
• It was directed by Shaw himself.

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J. M. Synge (? ??? ?, 1871-1909)

• Irish playwright
• Folklore collector, Irish Literary Revival,
  Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre
• Riders to the Sea (1904) ????? ????
• The Playboy of the Western World (1907) ??????
  ?????

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Riders to the Sea (1904)

• A one-act tragedy, the play is set in the Aran
  Islands, and like all of Synge's plays it is
  noted for capturing the poetic dialogue of rural
  Ireland.
• Synge's plays helped set the Abbey house style
  for the following four decades.
• The stylised realism of his writing and plays of
  peasant life were the main staple of the
  repertoire until the end of the 1950s.

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Synges Legacy and Influence

• Sean O'Casey, the next major dramatist to write
  for the Abbey Theatre, knew Synge's work well and
  attempted to do for the Dublin working classes
  what his predecessor had done for the rural poor.
  
• Brendan Behan indebted to Synge.
• Samuel Beckett was a regular audience member at
  the Abbey in his youth and particularly admired
  the plays of Yeats, Synge and O'Casey.

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Riders to the Sea (1904) plot synopsis

• Maurya has lost her husband, father-in-law, and
  five sons to the sea. As the play begins Nora and
  Cathleen receive word that a body that may be
  their brother Michael has washed up on shore in
  Donegal, far to the north.
• Bartley is planning to sail to Connemara to sell
  a horse, and ignores Maurya's pleas to stay. As
  he leaves, he leaves gracefully. Maurya predicts
  that by nightfall she will have no living sons,
  and her daughters chide her for sending Bartley
  off with an ill word.

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Riders to the Sea (1904) plot synopsis

• Maurya goes after Bartley to bless his voyage,
  and Nora and Cathleen receive clothing from the
  drowned corpse that confirms it as their brother.
  
• Maurya returns home claiming to have seen the
  ghost of Michael riding behind Bartley and begins
  lamenting the loss of the men in her family to
  the sea, after which some villagers bring in the
  corpse of Bartley, who has fallen off his horse
  into the sea and drowned.

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Luigi Pirandello (??? ????, 1867-1936)

• Italian playwright
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1934)
• Metadrama ????
• Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)
  ???? ?? 6?? ?????
• Satirical tragi-comedy

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Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921)

• In modern drama, playwrights have become more
  conscious than ever of the potential of that
  tension between illusion and reality, fact and
  fiction, in the theatrical experience.
• Pirandello used it in Six Characters in Search of
  an Author by going so far as to show us the
  actors as they really are as private individuals
  assembled for a rehearsal, then the characters as
  imagined by the author, and then these characters
  as portrayed by those actors. (Martin Esslin,
  1976 91)

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Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921)(continued)

• a movement in the early 20th century called
  theatricalism or anti-illusionism.
• rejected realist drama and substituted the
  dreamlike, the expressive, and the symbolic.
• disapproved of realism because it had abandoned
  the defining tools of drama, such as poetry,
  interaction between actors and audience,
  soliloquies, asides and bare stages.
• The theatricalists thought realism could not
  depict the inner life of human beings.

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Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1921)(continued)

• The play demonstrates these ideas in several
  ways. The focus of the play is on the
  interactions of the six characters with the real
  actors in the theater. This suggests that human
  beings cannot distinguish between the real and
  the apparent the distinction itself is
  illusory. Reality is merely what one happens to
  believe in at the moment.
• The Father character argues that fictional
  characters are more real than living ones,
  since they are fixed eternally, while a living
  person is constantly changing and subject to
  time.