19th and 20th Century Theatre: Summary Notes
I.
II.
Main features

In 19th and 20th centuries the world gets smaller and everyone sees what everyone else is
doing. Lots of the reason why artistic style changes escalate so frantically

19th century developments – Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism

Darwin contributes the notions that species and by extension societies can evolve and get
better, that heredity, environment, and chance are as important as human will

Psychiatry would have us believe that human motivation can be understood and
interpreted

Lots of advance in technology, too – stage machinery very sophisticated by mid-19th
century and electric light comes in at the end of the 19th century
What is realism?
1. Initially scandalous (like impressionism), taboo subjects and social criticism touch a
nerve, lack of simple moral judgments
2. Staging and writing style to convince the audience that the illusion of reality is
occurring on stage
3. Semblance of everyday life, no more prince or count so and so
4. Calls for social/political/personal change
5. Initially refusing to make value judgments
6. Complicated personalities molded by heredity and environment
7. Subscribes to some of the tenets of neoclassicism – no ghosts, no larger-than-life
characters, ordinary speech, costume, settings, no verse, rejection of stock characters
III.
IV.
Henrik Ibsen, the first great realistic writer

A Doll’s House and Hedda for bad marriages, An Enemy of the People for political
corruption, The Wild Duck for the need for imagination and illusion, Ghosts for moral
criticism and hereditary syphilis

Introduces discussion of series social/political/personal issues into the theatre

Now rather confused with melodrama, realistic trappings without social comment,
easy to root for (or against) characters
What is naturalism?
1. A subdivision, an extreme form of realism
2. Key figure – Emile Zola, advocated “scientific objectivity”
3. Slice of life – connotes laboratory and dissection
4. Rejection of the controlling hand of the artist, means get rid of stage contrivance,
make everything seem lifted “as is” from everyday life
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5. Scientific method applied to art
6. To describe without making value judgments
7. Fascination with the poor – lots of squalor, “For Esme!” (short story by J D Salinger)
 Insistence on showing the stark side of life,
 insistence on documentary style without editing
8. Some key points
 Reality, scientifically analyzed
 No poetic justice
 Heredity and environment (“I am waiting for the surroundings to determine
the characters”)
 No more fake plot turns
 No more rules and formulas, declamations, big words, grand sentiments
 Exact reproduction of life
 Realism has much more structure, highly wrought language, carefully plotted
scenes and climaxes, symbolism
V.
Symbolism as an artistic movement in the theatre
1. In France 1880-1910
2. Objective: To present, not mundane, day-to-day activities, but the mystery of being
and the cosmos, the infinite qualities of the human spirit
3. An attempt to get free from the bondage of surfacy, sordid naturalism and move into
the wonderland of the imagination.
4. A poetic theatre with symbolic images
5. To create a dream world where major goal is to evoke atmosphere and mood, not tell
a story
6. Characters not as individuals but as figures representative of the human condition
7. No realistic scenery
8. Short lived, no great plays, but one more link in stage’s ability to express anything
freely
9. Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) a Belgian, worked chiefly in French theatre,
writing symbolist poetry in the 1880s, interested in mysticism and the occult
 A kind of theatrical equivalent to Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun!
 Writes a tragedy, La Princesse Maleine, in 1889, that a critic says is more
tragic than Macbeth, more meaningful than Hamlet (reminiscent of John
Webster) ie undeserved praise!
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 Maeterlinck’s The Intruder
A blind old man and his family sit around a table under a single light; a sick
woman is in a room on the right, a baby who has yet to cry is in a room on the
left. As the evening goes on the old man’s sense of foreboding increases;
doors and windows open without people near them, a scythe is heard mowing
outside – the blind grandfather seems to sense the presence of some other
beings, intelligences. At the end the woman dies and the baby cries; all rush
into the sick room where there is a Nun administering sacraments, except for
the grandfather who gropes blindly towards the mysteries of life.
 Wrote essays, too; major ideas:
i.
Plays must penetrate beneath the surface of reality
ii.
The concrete and definable is unimportant compared with the inner life
of human beings and the universe, which is a mystery
iii.
Drama should deal with the ultimate reality of the soul rather than
transparent physical reality
iv.
Action should be supplanted by states of feeling; noted that much of
life is uneventful anyway
v.
Sees theatrical expression in “an old man sitting in his armchair at
night with a lamp beside him, giving unconscious ear to all the eternal
laws that reign about his house, interpreting, without comprehending,
the silence of doors and windows and the quivering voice of the light,
submitting with bent head to the presence of his soul and his destiny.”
So there!
vi.
Conflict is unnecessary in drama and there is no need to show us the
human will engaged in constant battle
vii.
Even theatrical dialogue is false with its eloquence and additional
significance (You can see Beckett and Pinter behind this)
viii.
Static drama is both possible and desirable
 Of course, Maeterlinck departed from his own ideas from time to time, and
came to believe that his theory of static drama “was a theory of his youth,
worth what most literary theories are worth – that is, almost nothing.”
 Gassner writes “it may be accurately said of Maeterlinck’s dramatic work in
general that there is less in it than meets the eye” Wins Nobel Prize in 1911!
 Gassner also says Synge was influenced by Maety
VI.
What was theatrical expressionism?
1. Word first used in France to differentiate Van Gogh and Gauguin from the
impressionists (who were trying to capture objects in light at a given moment).
2. Develops as a visual arts movement in Germany apx 1905
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3. Expressionist painters interested in strong inner feelings and portraying life as
modified and distorted by the painter’s vision of reality. Thus, in expressionism truth
or beauty resides in the mind rather than (with impressionism) in the eye; i.e., reality
distorted to communicate inner feelings
4. Also, a kind of socio-philosophic revolution. Opposed to realism and naturalism as
glorifiers of science, which they associated with technology and industry and
materialism
5. Disliked realism’s emphasis on external appearance as using an aspect of reality to
depict all of reality
6. Believed fundamental truth is to be found within man, his spirit, his soul, his desires,
and visions, and that external reality should be reshaped until it is brought into
harmony with these inner attributes so that we can achieve our highest aspirations.
Often socialist or pacifist
7. Not a wholly unified movement any more than absurdism would be later
8. Often divided into two branches: 1) mystic – those who sought to express a mystical
grasp of the inner spirit, or 2) activists – those who sought to transform society
9. Can be seen as a variant of romanticism, especially when it depicts human beings
struggling to free their spirit from the limitations of material existence. Often has a
messianic tone as it seeks the “regeneration of man.” You hear them speak of
transformation and of creating the “new man” again and again
10. Also, often a negative view of current society and call for destruction of materialism
and trappings of the old society. Seeking a world free from war, hypocrisy, hate
where social justice and love reign and artists are free to express themselves
11. About Expressionist plays:
 Message centered plays tend to be organized around a primary idea, theme, or
motif rather than cause-and-effect plotting.
i.
This series of related episodes is often called a station play, since it
resembles the stations of the cross, which underlines the attempt to
have Christ-like qualities in the protagonist
 The central character, often a Christ-like person, is sacrificed to materialism,
hypocrisy etc, “a vulnerable protagonist in a malevolent world” as Goldfarb
tells us
i.
Since the protagonist is often the only character to appear throughout
the play, he may serve as a unifying element second only to
thought/idea
ii.
Since the events of the play are often seen through the eyes of this
character, those events are often depicted very subjectively; often
distorted dreamlike
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 Playwrights working to reduce each element to the bare essentials: plots can
be demonstrations of an idea or argument
i.
Characters can be generic and often have no name – Man, Woman,
Clerk, Mister Mister
ii.
Dialogue is sometimes reduced to one or two-word sentences aka
“telegraphic” style
iii.
Gesture was succinct as well
 Distortion evident in every element, can be bizarre: corpses rise from graves,
a man carries his own head in a sack
i.
Distortion especially evident in visual aspects. Walls lean inward to
suggest oppression; trees become skeletons to predict death; color,
shape, size of objects distorted to emphasize departure from reality
ii.
Vivid light used to arouse mood or to isolate characters in a void
 Sharp contrasts throughout
i.
dialogue alternates between poetry and prose
ii.
beautiful passages and obscenities
iii.
telegraphic speeches and lengthy monologues
iv.
realistic scenes may fade into a dream
 Works permeated with a sense of dreamlike fantasy and magic; sometimes
ecstatic; sometimes frightening
 Overall impression is of allegory clothed in nightmare or vision
 Influenced by doctrines of democratic love, free verse forms of Walt
Whitman, writings of Freud and Jung on the unconscious, dramas by Buchner,
Wedekind, and late Strindberg and others, Goethe (especially Faust II which
dramatizes the search for spiritual fulfillment). Reinhardt is the first to direct
Faust II in 1911, he does a bunch of the Strindbergs too; whole movement
sometimes called Faustian
 Lots of plays where authoritarian, business, machine, military culture snuffs
out hope!
 Karel Capek’s R.U.R (1921) a late example from a Czech writer. Depicts a
wholly mechanized world in which men are served by Rossum’s Universal
Robots. When the robots seize power, it appears that the world is doomed to
total dehumanization, but unexpectedly the stirring love in two robots leads to
an act of self-sacrifice and the hope of a new humanitarianism is reborn.
 Few plays staged prior to end of WWI in 1917!
 What the directors did:
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i.
Distorted furniture and settings; huge chairs, prisoner in a bird cage,
changed lighting and costumes to reflect emotions
ii.
reduced scenery to essentials, a few set pieces. Have to be flexible for
all these shifts in locale. Often strange angles
iii.
light was very important; strong contrasts, shifts to match stream of
consciousness; several scenes happening at once, tight spots, shafts of
light, extreme angles, deep shadows, backlight, strange colors,
whatever would help build the nightmare!
iv.
makeup and costume distorted as well to the point of caricature –
bloated capitalists, medaled generals, diseased seekers after carnal
pleasure, starving workers
 Expressionism comes along at the right time to help develop lighting design
 Short lived, finished by 1920 or so, but has affected us ever since – Eugene
O’Neill
VII.
Three strands of modern (20th C) theatre: Absurdist, Epic Theatre, and Theatre of Cruelty
1. Theatre of the Absurd
 A movement that begins in Europe after WW II in response to the horrors of the war.
What if the world isn’t rational? How do you account for Hiroshima, Dresden,
Auschwitz? Kozinsky’s The Painted Bird. Grows out of skepticism about earlier
modes of perception, belief in the inadequacy of scientific observation and realism to
portray truth.
 Definition: plays that convey our sense of alienation and loss of bearings in an
illogical, unjust and ridiculous world.
 Predecessors:
i.
Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) - someone who has influence more than success, a kind of
patron saint for the absurdists.
 Writing plays during the 1890s. Character based on Jarry’s least favorite teacher,
a fellow that Jarry thought embodied all the basest human impulses. Ubu Roi - a
comedy about a man who becomes King of Poland, kills and tortures everyone
who opposes him, and is finally driven out but vows to continue his exploits
elsewhere.
 Opening night in Paris: Jarry in grotesque makeup and baggy suit delivers a
lecture before the performance.
 “The scenery was painted to represent by a child’s convention, indoors and out of
doors, and even the torrid, temperate, and arctic zones at once. Opposite to you,
at the back of the stage, you saw against the sky a small closed window and a
fireplace through which trooped in and out these clamorous and sanguinary
persons of the drama. On the left was painted a bed, and at the foot of the bed a
bare tree, and snow falling. On the right were palm trees, about one of which
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coiled a boa constrictor. A skeleton dangled from a gallows. Changes of scene
were announced by placard. A venerable gentleman in evening dress trotted
across the stage on the points of his toes between every scene and hung the new
placard on a nail. For battles, two men represented the opposing armies, but for
the slaughters Jarry bought 40 life-sized wicker mannequins which were
beheaded. To indicate that he was on horseback, Ubu wore around his neck a
cut-out of a horse’s head.”
 The actor playing Ubu didn’t know how to approach the role so the director told
him to imitate Jarry’s delivery style - no inflection or nuance, equal stress on
each syllable, stylized and jerky gestures. His costume was pear shaped.. After
Merdre! there was a 15 minute uproar; people walked out; fist fights began. Ubu
got there attention again with an improvised dance, but the uproar began again
with each obscenity. The play was performed twice.
 Jarry wrote 2 more Ubu plays and died relatively unknown in 1907. After WW I
people began to take an interest and his reputation grew. Founding of the
College of Pataphysics - the science of imaginary solutions. One critic calls Jarry
the Santa Claus of the Atomic Age.
 After WW I (1918) more skeptical reactions to realism, attempts to create 20th
century art:
ii.
Futurism - began in Italy 1909 popular through 1920s.
 Originally an Italian movement
 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) launches it in 1909 with a manifesto on
the front page of a Parisian newspaper; also mails hundreds of copies to
important people throughout Italy
 Like expressionists, futurists reject past and wish to transform humanity
 Expressionists associate past with soul-destroying materialism and industrialism
 Futurists, perhaps because they’re from industrially backward Italy, deplore
veneration of the past as a barrier to progress
 In fact, they glorify the energy and speed of the machine age and seek to embody
them in artistic forms
 In his poem “My Pegasus,” Marinetti celebrates the racing car above the winged
horse of Pericles
 He also says that museums and libraries are cemetery-like and good for the old
and dying “but we will have none of it, we, the young, the strong, and the living
Futurists.”
 He goes on “The oldest among us are thirty; we have, therefore, ten years at least
to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let others, younger and more valiant,
throw us into the waste basket like useless manuscripts.”
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 They value energy and aggression: “We wish to glorify War – the only health
giver of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist,
the beautiful Ideas that kill, the contempt for women.” IE the ideal futurist man
was an aggressive masculine fighter who forged ahead with this eye on the
future, caring nothing for the past.
 First movement to seek direct confrontation with audiences
 From 1910 they were giving performances during which they read manifestoes,
give concerts, read poems, do plays, and exhibit works of visual art, sometimes
simultaneously. Sometimes moving among spectators or using different parts of
the room sequentially or simultaneously
 Their militancy makes them the epitome of the new and dangerous in outlook and
art.
 They especially outrage audiences with their demands that libraries and museums
be destroyed as the first step towards a dynamic future.
 Sometimes they were welcomed; more often they were booed, pelted with fruit, or
provoked physical violence; some evenings ended in riots.
 Still they made themselves well-known in France, England, Russia, and Germany
through exhibitions writings, lectures, and demonstrations
 In their attempt to create art forms appropriate for a the machine age, they created:
i. “picture poems,” aka concrete poetry, out of type of varying size arranged in
configurations designed to arouse sensations of movement
ii. Kinetic sculptures with moving parts to introduce movement and energy into a
static form
iii. The collage form of assemble works from fragments from newspapers, scraps
of cloth, etc, with the goal of “painting” with any material (along with the
cubists)
iv. Claiming that modern utilitarian objects like wine racks and kitchen utensils
are more beautiful than paintings or sculptures of the old masters, they entered
these in exhibitions
v. In music, they developed the bruitisme, translated as dynamic sound, based on
the belief that since all movement produces sound, noise is a reflection of the
“volcanic soul of life.” So, they orchestrate ordinary sounds and abstract noise
to make music more suitable to modern life.
vi. They had one “noise symphony” depicting the “awakening of the capital”
through the sounds of pot covers, rattles, typewriters, and other similar
“instruments.” One of these was called a “noise organ” and frequently used in
their concerts
 Marinetti and others publish several manifestoes about theatre
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i. Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (1911)

Denounces contemporary practice and calls for innovation
ii. The Variety Theatre (1913)

Praises the music halls, nightclubs, and circus as superior to traditional
theatre as a model for the future as long as it’s done by capturing the spirit
of popular forms rather than merely imitating them. They loved the
carefree, spontaneous atmosphere, the rapid succession of vaudeville
attractions, interaction of audience and performers, mingling of elements
from different media, and overall energy of the performance
iii. The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (1915)

This last essay condemns traditional drama for being lengthy, analytic, and
static, and proposes a “synthetic” drama instead. This must be brief “To
compress into a few minutes, into a few words and gestures, innumerable
situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and symbols. . . . Our acts
can also be moments only a few seconds long.”
 For their plays attempting to capture the dynamism of modern life they use the
adjectives – alogical, unreal, and autonomous (conforming to its own laws only).
 76 of these plays do get done in Italy in 1915-1916; they varied widely
 Distillations of Shakespeare plays into a few moments, to make fun of how
traditional drama takes too much time on expositions and logical progression
 Usually they tried to capture the essence of some mood, situation, or sensation.
 Francesco Canguillo’s Detonation (1915) – curtain opens on a deserted road at
night; silence; a gunshot is heard and the curtain falls
 He also writes one called Lights (1919) where the stage is dark and actors planted
in the audience start calling for lights in hopes of provoking the rest of the
audience to join in
 Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli write Sempronio’s Lunch (1915) - Sempronio
moves from age 5 to 90 as he eats under conditions that reflect the passage of
time and life
 Same writers do one called Gray+Red+Violet+Orange (1915) where a character
accuses a member of the audience of murder
 Giacomo Balla’s Disconcerted States of Mind (1916) – a white stage, 4 persons
perform 4 disconnected scenes - each one repeats a different number 12 times each character repeats a different letter of the alphabet 12 times - each performs a
different action (raising his hat, reading his newspaper, blowing his nose, looking
at his watch) - each tries to convey a different state (sadness, quickness, pleasure,
denial)
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 Marinetti writes one called Feet (1915) where the curtain is raised just enough to
reveal the actors’ feet and in 7 disconnected scenes accompanied by telegraphic
dialogue they perform distillations of typical conditions such as anxiety,
violence, work, and various kinds of love.
 He also writes Simultaneity (1915) depicting two different places in which parallel
actions proceed at the same time – one is life of a typical middle-class family, the
other a coquette; his The communicating Vases (1916) does the same thing with
three settings and actions.
 Freaky yes, but lots of experiments with brevity, discontinuity, abstraction,
alogicality, and simultaneity. Time is indefinite or telescoped; nonverbal sound
and symbolic lighting are used; media are intermingled; puppets sometimes used.
Clear-cut story, logical progression, psychological characterization are
minimized or ignored
 Declines rapidly after 1930 but leaves legacy that will be picked up (but not
acknowledged) in the 1950s; like, attempts to rescue theatrical art from a
museumlike atmosphere through
i. direct confrontation and intermingling of performers and audiences
ii. exploitation of modern technology to create multimedia presentations
iii. use of simultaneous and multiple focus
iii.
iv.
an antiliterary and alogical bias
v.
breaking down of barriers between arts
Dadaism - Zurich, Switzerland during WW I, 1916
 a child’s first syllable ; name chosen at random from a French dictionary, baby
talk for anything to do with horses, but sometimes taken to be a child’s first word
 Participants disgusted by the Great War.
 Insanity seems to be the world’s true state. Artists must respond with calculated
madness, chaos, imbalance, discord.
 Rejected the past. Simultaneous presentations of such works as: anti-artistic
paintings, chance poems made from cut up words drawn from a hat, rubbish
collages, sound poems, noise music, several people reciting poems at once.
Exchanges of mutual insults between audience and performers. 1920 Tzara’s
“Vaseline Symphonique” was pelted with eggs.
 For one exposition they rented a glassed-in court which could only be reached
through a public urinal. Inside, a young girl, dressed for her first communion,
recited obscene poems. One art work had a skull emerging from a pool of bloodred liquid with a hand sticking out of it. Another wood sculpture had a hatchet
attached to it in case anyone wanted to attack it. The police closed the show.
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 In January 1920 at Lugne-Poe’s Theatre de l'Oeuvre there’s a program with the
following works:
 Tzara’s The First Celestial Adventure of Mr Fire-Extinguisher
 Andre Breton’s If You Pease
 Frances Picabia’s Cannibal Manifesto
 Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes’s The Silent Canary (in which a man teaches
his compositions to a canary who sings them “beautifully and silently”)
 The evening concluded in an exchange of mutual insults between audience
and performers
 A sequel evening including Mr FE’s Second Celestial Adventure and Tzara’s
Vaseline Symphonique (described by one critic as a “cacophony of inarticulate
sounds”) provoked the public to throw eggs at the performers
 1923, Tzara’s The Gas Heart in which actors impersonating various parts of the
head – the neck, mouth, nose, ear, eyebrow – spoke disconnected dialogue in
tones of polite conversations provokes a pitched battle between supporters and
detractors of Dada
 The Dadaists were such individuals that they fell out among themselves; many
had become surrealists by the mid-1920s. Tzara and Andre Breton fall out
in1922, and Breton publishes the Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
iv.
Surrealism - 1925-1940, mostly in France
 Grows out of dadaism, but tries to base work on specific principles, where dada
rejected everything
 First to use the term, surrealism. Apollinaire (1917) in his play The Breasts of
Tiresias - a vaudeville-like spoof about women’s emancipation. Set in Zanzibar.
A woman finds her life too confining and releases her breasts which float away
like balloons. She becomes Tiresias. Her husband sets about creating a family,
learns some way to create children and engenders 40,000 offspring. As this goes
on, the people of Zanzibar (one actor) don’t talk but play music on pots and pans.
 Great theorist - Andre Breton - an orderly in psychiatric wards during WW I with
a strong interest in Freud’s theories of the subconscious.
 Surrealism as an attempt to make the subconscious mind the source of the artist’s
most significant perceptions. Tried to create art where truth emerges when the
superego’s censorship and the ego’s logic are neutralized. Automatic writing.
 More successful in painting. Often mingled familiar with strange Dali’s melting
clocks. Detailed objects in a dream landscape.
 Lots of dissension. Does not survive WW II.
v.
Absurdism
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 In the face of all this destruction, how can there be a God? Are there no absolute
values? Have people given up their personal responsibilities to blindly follow the
likes of Hitler? the Collaborators? Where do our standards come from?
 Philosophical basis
 Existentialism - (in text) reaction against Neoclassic idea that absolute truth
can be identified. Existence precedes essence; we create ourselves as we go
along, we define ourselves by our choices. Shift of concern from defining
species to just defining yourself.
 Sartre (b. 1905 - 1980) - popular in 50s and 60s - trying to draw logical
conclusions from a consistent atheism. An odd optimism. Rejects authority of
state and human institutions. The universe has no intrinsic meaning. This
realization provokes despair from which we can only rise through choice and
action, by accepting our freedom. Since our choice is all we have, we must
involve ourselves in social, moral, and political action.
 Camus - 1913-1960 - the world has no rational explanation; we are all exiles,
aliens, strangers. Absurdity results from a gap between an inborn human desire
for clarity and order and the irrationality of the world. Cannot capitulate to
absurdity; since there are no absolutes we must create our own order out of the
chaos. Dies in a car crash.
 Both Camus and Sartre wrote plays but they used traditional play forms.
Absurdists reject these.
 Eugene Ionesco - human beings struggling to retain their humanity in an
increasingly mechanistic world, Samuel Beckett - human beings in limbo
estranged from each other playing with hollow phrases, Jean Genet underworld characters as heroes who refuse to follow society’s meaningless
rituals, Harold Pinter - human motive as mysterious often menacing. (All these
except Pinter are French; France had the extra burden of dealing with the Vichy
government which collaborated with the Nazi occupation).
 Characteristics:
1. A similar point of view concerning the absurdity of the human condition.
Plays as dramatizations of inner sense of the absurdity and futility of
existence.
2. Rejection of traditional plot structure. Most traditional plots based on logical
cause and effect which assumes an orderly understandable universe. Linear
exposition, complication, climax, denouement. Absurdist plots intentionally
invalidate this perception; often the only logic to a situation is that there is no
logic. Plots can be circular. Sometimes seen as rituals for which the original
purpose is obscure. Sometimes use Serial Structure which book identifies as a
series of individual events offered as a single presentation with or without
some unifying principle.
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3. Plot illogicality is mirrored in language. Rational language debased and
replaced by clichés and irrelevant remarks. Plays may be long on talk but short
on logical meaning. Non sequitur - Latin for it does not follow.
4. Repetitious or meaningless activities are substituted for logical action
Realistic motivation replaced with automatic or inappropriate behavior. Often
characters have no past background whatsoever and are depicted in very
general terms. Text notes contrast between Godot and Oedipus in terms of
lack of past information in the former and exhaustive detail in the latter.
Sometimes characters merge into other characters
5. Time and place are generalized. Plays occur in some symbolic, metaphorical
location or in a void. Consideration of the whole stage picture is necessary to
understanding the play - the tree in Godot. Time is as flexible as a dream.
6. Traditional distinctions of dramatic form disappear. Serious subject matter
may be handled with irony and comedy. Traditional comic subjects may be
treated as pathetic ominous or violent.
7. Despite rejection of ordinary logic, structure, and theatrical devices the plays
are trying to make intellectual, conceptual statements about the human
condition. Their subject is human entrapment in an illogical, hostile,
impersonal, and indifferent existence.
 Waiting for Godot - 2 acts with identical structures. 2 drifters meet in an
unspecified place to wait for Godot. They’re visited by a master and a slave who
converse with them and depart. A young boy arrives to tell them Godot will
surely come tomorrow. In the meantime, they try various activities (from
vaudeville routines to intellectual debates to consideration of suicide) to stave off
despair. When the play ends, they’re still waiting. Human beings as derelicts
adrift in an impersonal universe, passing the time in circular exchanges. The 2
characters who rush around fare no better than the two who remain stationary. No
revelations, no answers - the play just explores their condition. At least Beckett
puts a couple leaves on the tree for Act II. Bert Lahr was in the first major US
production. Steve Martin and Robin Williams did it in the late 80s.
2. Bertolt Brecht and Epic Theatre
 Bertolt Brecht - German writer, director, theorist. Career from 1920s-1950s. Founded
The Berliner Ensemble. Had served as an orderly in a military hospital in WW I
 Collaborates with Kurt Weill who was part of a trend towards simplicity in music that
reacted against the complexity of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler.
 Influenced by Stravinsky’s (and others’) attempts to return to more simple music
 1915 – Stravinsky wrote a piece called Renard, a chamber opera intended to be played
“by clowns, dancers, or acrobats, preferably on a trestle stage with the orchestra place
behind it.” A devaluation of the virtuoso orchestra. Interested in music as film scores,
dances, settings for poems and other texts and as training for amateur performers.
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Stravinsky appearing at annual German music festival in Baden-Baden to promote new
music (Neue Musik) in the 20s; Brecht and Weill worked there as well
 Flees Germany 1933; nomadic existence all over Europe, spends mid-40s in US,
returns to East Germany after WWII starts Berliner ensemble
 Comes to despise codification of his theories - a good point theorists don’t want to be
pigeonholed by academics and students
Epic theatre

Reaction against Wagnerian theatre where all elements are fused to create hypnotic
effect on audience through empathic response (Gesamtkunstwerk). Says that’s
fundamentally passive.

Calls it culinary theatre where the audience turns its minds off and gobbles. Wants an
audience to watch critically, to be ready to take action when the play ends

Aristotle divides poetry into lyric, dramatic, and epic. The theatre has it wrong by
following the narrow dramatic format. The Epic is preferable - larger scope, more
characters, more content, loved Shakespeare

Wants us aware that we’re watching a reflection of reality on stage not reality itself –
that the real problems lie outside the theatre

Theatre should not treat contemporary subjects in a lifelike manner, but should make
actions “strange,” the process of sufficiently distancing the spectator from the play
that he can watch it critically. translation a problem.

Verfremsdungeffect/Alienation - call attention to the make-believe world of the
theatre.

Manipulation of aesthetic distance - Involve the audience emotionally, then jar them
out of their empathetic response to make them think critically

Wrote plays that took a dialectic approach to an important main point or argument.
Plays constructed to lead audience through process of exploration and thought and get
you to leave the theatre thinking

Historification - plays set in other places and times to emphasize the “pastness of
events.” If spectators had lived there, they would have taken positive action.

Tons of devices for an anti-illusionist theatre where spectators are reminded of the
play. Wagner hides the mechanics of production – Brecht flaunts them:
o Songs where the lyrics are about moral degradation and the music is lighthearted
to force the audience to consider both elements separately
o movie screens
o captions - each scene reduced to a basic main point, that point projected as scene
title
o slides
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o chorus
o off-stage narrators to bridge gaps between scenes
o actors stepping out of character
o half curtain
o a vista scene changes, all lights clearly visible
o fragments of scenery as opposed to complete sets
o musicians onstage with actors

actors encouraged to present rather than imitate characters (in rehearsals Brecht would
ask actors to say “he said” before reciting lines in order to encourage them to
comment on, rather than live their parts)

no clear cut heroes

Theatre not a synthesis; each element should make its own comment; in fact Brecht
called for a radical separation of elements

A didactic attempt to fuse Marxist thought and theatrical art. Marxism hopeful belief
that economic factors will eventually force the formation of better economic and
government systems, that each old system, as it becomes decrepit, will generate and
succumb to its successor until perfection is achieved.

The world is changeable and theatre can help. Often his plays have an unresolved
conclusion and demand that the audience “find out the end yourselves.” “Change
human nature or the world, which one?”

The Threepenny Opera, Galilleo, Mother Courage, Good Person of Szechuan.
Sometimes his plays are so good they disregard his theories

Brecht - theatre as extroverted attempt to influence and describe societal force

Artaud - theatre is an introverted examination of internal, subterranean forces,
concerned for the threatened psyche
3. Antonin Artaud and Theatre of Cruelty
 Antoin Artaud (1895-1948) - an actor and theorist, roots with surrealists - expelled by
Breton, bouts of mental illness (believed that “international dark forces” sought to
destroy him); institutionalized most of the last decade of his life. Wrote The Theatre
and Its Double - manifesto of mid-1930s
 Theorist no success as director, interest in primitive culture, finding myths that
resonate now
 Fascinated with primitive ritual, eastern theatre
 Wants theatre to resume the centrality it had in ancient Greece in terms of religion,
ecstacy
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 The great myths of the Greeks, Christians, etc have lost their power to affect us
sufficiently; new myths must arise out of something like a plague that destroys
repressive social forms.”
 Order must collapse; anarchy must prevail for people to give vent to all their buried
disordered impulses. This should happen not in the street but in the theatre! Theatre
can free us from our ferocity!
 Artaud sought a “new language of theatre” that treated the audience as a mental patient
in need of healing. The world is sick, a madman in need of shock treatment
 The theatre should serve a near-psychiatric function for the whole society (not just
individuals)
 Sees the world as hungry, and, since culture never fed anyone, wants to forge a culture
whose force supplies needs as elemental as hunger – shamanistic
 Peoples’ important problems are buried in the subterranean reaches of their minds and
cause internal divisions and divisions between people that lead to hatred, violence, and
disaster
 Argues for a theatre that does not “numb us with ideas for the intellect but stirs us to
feeling by stirring up pain”
 Advocates a Theatre of Cruelty to break down the audience’s defenses, to force the
audience to confront itself
 Use of moral (not physical) cruelty of stage versions of great dark myths to transform
and heal the audience at the subconscious level; the canon is dead, “a cruelty which
acts as well upon the spectator and should not allow him to leave the theatre intact, but
exhausted, involved, perhaps transformed.”
 To achieve something like a religious experience in which a true communion--the
elimination of all divisions--is reached.
 To operate directly on the senses, bypassing the rational mind, to create a new
language of the theatre; “carried along by the paroxysms of a violent physical action
which no sensitivity can resist, the spectator finds his overall nervous system becoming
sharpened and refined.”
 Concrete suggestions:
i.
replace theatre with remodeled barns, factories, airplane hangars;
ii.
put audience in swivel chairs and surround them with action on catwalks, along
the walls;
iii.
rejects scenery in favor of hieroglyphic actors, ritualistic costumes, puppets 30
feet tall, musical instruments as tall as a man, “objects of unheard of form and
purpose.”
iv.
Wants lighting to have a “vibrating, shredded” effect;
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v.
in notes on The Cenci, he suggests that a scene set in a torture chamber should
“give off the noise of a factory at peak production.”
vi.
Preferred non-verbal sound – yelps, barks, to create harmonies and dissonances, a
language addressed to the senses (he felt most of us were impervious to rational
discourse but “few can resist physical surprise, the dynamism of cries and violent
movements, visual explosions, etc”
vii.
To force the spectators to confront themselves and through the process cleanse
themselves and find harmony
 Art as the salvation of mankind
 Marat/Sade – an attempt to apply Artaud’s theories by Peter Brook and the RSC.
Actors portraying inmates in 1812 portraying historical figures from 1801 in a play
within a play written by the Marquis de Sade to enact the narcoleptic Charlott
 Cordet’s murder of Jean Paul Marat, who you’ll remember from David’s painting of
him dead in his bath
20th Century Theatre – Summary notes (from another source)
I.
Theatre of the Absurd
Definition: plays that convey our sense of alienation and loss of bearings in an illogical,
unjust and ridiculous world.
II.
Predecessors of Theatre of the Absurd
a. Alfred Jarry (1873-1907) Ubu Roi (1896) the Santa Claus of the Atomic Age.
b. Futurism - began in Italy circa 1909 popular through 1920s.
 attempted to rescue theatrical art from the museum
 advocated direct confrontation and intermingling of performers and audiences
 wanted to use modern technology and multimedia
 multifocus entertainment
 antiliterary and alogical
 advocated breaking of barriers between arts
c. Dadaism - Zurich, Switzerland during WW I, 1916, rejection of artisitic tradition
d. Surrealism - 1925-1940

Surrealism - an attempt to make the subconscious mind the source of the
artist’s most significant perceptions.

Apollinaire The Breasts of Tiresias (1917)

Andre Breton (1896-1966) - chief theorist
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III.
Absurdism: Continued
a. Philosophical basis
 Existentialism - Existence precedes essence; we create ourselves as we go
along, we define ourselves by our choices.
 Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905 - 1980)- trying to draw logical conclusions from a
consistent atheism
 Albert Camus - 1913-1960 - Absurdity results from a gap between an inborn
human desire for clarity and order and the irrationality of the world.
b. The playwrights
 Eugene Ionesco - human beings struggling to retain their humanity in an
increasingly mechanistic world
 Samuel Beckett - human beings in limbo estranged from each other playing
with hollow phrases
 Jean Genet - underworld characters as heroes who refuse to follow society’s
meaningless rituals, Harold Pinter - human motive as mysterious often
menacing.
IV.
Characteristics of Theatre of the Absurd
a. Plays as dramatizations of inner sense of the absurdity and futility of existence
b. Rejection of traditional plot structure
c. Plot illogicality is mirrored in language. Non sequitur - Latin for it does not follow.
d. Repetitious or meaningless activities are substituted for logical action
e. Time and place are generalized
f. Traditional distinctions of dramatic form disappear
g. The plays are trying to make intellectual, conceptual statements about the human
condition.
h. Representative Example:
 Waiting for Godot (1953) by Samuel Beckett - two acts with identical
structures - Two drifters meet in an unspecified place to wait for Godot They’re visited by a master and a slave who converse with them and depart A young boy arrives to tell them Godot will surely come tomorrow - In the
meantime, they try various activities (from vaudeville routines to intellectual
debates to consideration of suicide) to stave off despair - When the play ends,
they’re still waiting - Human beings as derelicts adrift in an impersonal
universe, passing the time in circular exchanges - The two characters who rush
around fare no better than the two who remain stationary - No revelations, no
answers - the play just explores their condition - At least Beckett puts a couple
leaves on the tree for Act II.
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V.
Epic Theatre
a. Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)- German writer, director, theorist.
 Reaction against culinary theatre where the audience turns its minds off and
gobbles.
 Theatre should make actions “strange,” verfremsdungeffect/alienation
 Manipulation of aesthetic distance
 Historification
 Theatre not a synthesis; each element should make its own comment
 Alienation techniques, a didactic attempt to fuse Marxist thought and
theatrical art.
 Writes The Threepenny Opera, Galilleo, Mother Courage, Good Person of
Szechuan
VI.
Antoin Artaud (1895-1948) - The Theatre and Its Double (1938)
a. Wants theatre to resume the centrality it had in ancient Greece in terms of religion,
ecstacy
b. Peoples’ important problems are buried in the subterranean reaches of their minds and
cause internal divisions and divisions between people that lead to hatred, violence,
and disaster
c. Argues for a theatre that does not “numb us with ideas for the intellect but stirs us to
feeling”
d. Theatre of Cruelty - sought a “new language of theatre” that treated the audience as a
mental patient in need of healing.
e. To force the spectators to confront themselves and through the process cleanse
themselves and find harmony
f. To operate directly on the senses, bypassing the rational mind, to create a new
language of the theatre
VII.
Summary
a. Absurdists – theatre as an exploration of existentialism in performance, style and
language
b. Brecht - theatre as extroverted attempt to influence and describe societal forces
c. Artaud - theatre is an introverted examination of internal, subterranean forces
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