Twentieth Century Theatre
& the Theatre of the Absurd
Photos in this lecture come from the film version of
Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are Dead

What are the essential qualities of theatre?
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It is live; it is shared; it is communal
Each performance is unique, susceptible to change and therefore dangerous
 Unpredictable things could happen – someone forgets a line, drops something, the lights go out, or something happens in the audience.
It is the co-existence of the there and then and the here and now
 While in the audience, we perceive what is happening on the stage as the time period portrayed, yet we sit there in our time watching it all happen.

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Theatre has explored itself in relation to our in response to film and TV
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Are these media [film & TV] ‘theatre’? They are the media through which most of us experience naturalistic, mimetic performance.
 The response is no
– theatre is not finished like a film or TV show.
Even when TV is live, we are at home alone, not part of a group audience. Also, film and TV look more real
– there is much more pretend in theatre.
Theatre in twentieth century is no longer a mainstream source of live entertainment and leisure
 Other live entertainments are more popular, such as concerts, sports, comics, etc…

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Directors became important and had a great influence on the course of theatre in the 20 th century.
 They often rewrote parts of scripts and completely reinterpreted a play into a different time period for example.
Performers also asserted themselves as creative artists, not merely interpretative artists.
 Performers had a say in their roles and lines rather than just acting what was on a written page.

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Realism
 popular as it mimics television and movies
 However, Playwrights felt they could do more with the field
Symbolism and Expressionism
 more pronounced in theatre than in TV or film
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 share the characteristics of dreams look to the common unconscious of humankind
Distortion, Fragmentation or blending of characters occurs
Use of silence, repetition, & consciously symbolic lighting effects.

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A reaction to the disappearance of the religious dimension form contemporary life
 Authors felt that life is meaningless; there is no hope of salvation – thus their plays reflected these ideas.
An attempt to restore the importance of myth and ritual to our age, by making man aware of the ultimate realities of his condition
 Not everything is scientific and can be figured out – so plays showed illogic of life.
Shows that language is unreliable
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There are so many clichés in language that it doesn’t convey real human thought
 Language in plays can be purposefully confusing. As in Hamlet, language means something and sometimes nothing

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 Often the characters forget who they are!
 However frantically characters perform only underlines the fact that cannot do anything to change their existence