19th and 20th Century Theatre: Summary Notes

I. 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

II. 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. 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

IV. 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

5. Scientific method applied to art

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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!

Maeterlinck’s The Intruder

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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

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

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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

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

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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:

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

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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 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.”

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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.”

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

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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

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

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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)

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

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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

iv. an antiliterary and alogical bias

v. breaking down of barriers between arts

iii. 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 blood-red 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.

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

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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

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

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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.

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.

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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. 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

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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

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

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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

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

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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;

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)

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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

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

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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.

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

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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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