Suport Curs DRAMA IDD

THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MODERN BRITISH DRAMA
OPTIONAL COURSE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
FOR
4TH YEAR STUDENTS IN ENGLISH
COURSE TUTOR: DR. IOANA MOHOR-IVAN

Ioana Mohor-Ivan The Theory and Practice of Modern British Drama 2
CONTENTS
1. ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE
2. REALISM/NATURALISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
3. EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
4. EPIC THEATRE AND THE BRITISH STAGE
5. SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
6. SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE
DRAMA: a play written in prose or verse that tells a story through dialogue
and actions performed by actors impersonating the characters of the story.
DRAMATIC ILLUSION: the illusion of reality created by drama and
accepted by the audience for the duration of the play
THEATRE: a) the building in which a play is performed
 arena stage: a stage surrounded on all sides by the audience;
actors make exists and entrances through the aisles.
 thrust stage: a stage extending beyond the proscenium arch,
usually surrounded on three sides by the audience.
 proscenium stage: a stage having an arched structure at the
front from which a curtain often hangs. The arch frames the
action onstage and separates the audience from the action.
b) drama as an art form, including the written text and the
concrete performance
TRAGEDY: serious drama in which a protagonist, traditionally of noble
position, suffers a series of unhappy events culminating in a catastrophe
such as death or spiritual breakdown.
COMEDY: a type of drama intended to interest and amuse rather than to
concern the audience deeply. Although characters experience various

discomfitures, the audience feels confident that they will overcome their ill-
fortune and find happiness in the end.
TRAGICOMEDY: play that combines elements of tragedy and comedy.
Tragedies also include a serious plot in which the expected tragic
catastrophe is replaced by a happy ending.
MELODRAMA: a suspenseful play filled with situations that appeal
excessively to the audience’s emotions. Justice triumphs in a happy ending:
the good characters (completely virtuous) are rewarded and the bad
characters (thoroughly villainous) are punished.
PLOT: the events of a play or narrative. The sequence and relative
importance a dramatist assigns to these events.
CHARACTER: any person appearing in a drama or narrative.
SETTING: the time and place in which the action occurs; the backdrop and
set onstage that suggest to the audience the surrounding in which a play’s
action takes place.
DIALOGUE: spoken interchange or conversation between two or more
characters.
2. REALISM/NATURALISM
AND THE BRITISH STAGE
Realism in the last half of the 19th-century began as an experiment to make

theatre more useful to society. It was in conscious rebellion against the
generally romantic forms of drama that characterized the 19TH century stage,
namely closet dramas, historical costume plays (spectacle dramas),
melodramas, and well-made plays.
1. The nineteenth-century theatrical background
• Closet drama: a literary composition written in the form of a play

(usually as a dramatic poem), but intended – or suited – only for
reading in a closet (a private study). Under the influence of the
German Sturm und Drang, the English Romantic poets wrote “closet
tragedies”, in which they glorified figures of heroic
proportions.Examples: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Byron’s
Manfred
• Historical costume drama: Grand opera-style productions of
historical plays (mainly revivals of Shakespeare), which placed their
main emphasis on strong emotional contrasts and spectacular
effects.Some 19th-century playwrights like Sheridan Knowles and
Thomas Talfourd attempted to write high tragedy in the manner of
Shakespeare.
• Melodrama: A sensational drama of strong emotions and unequivocal
moral sentiment that had grown in the 18th and 19th centuries to
provide popular entertainment for the urban poor. Ancestors:

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Jacobean blood and thunder, the gothic
novel. Melodrama simplified its antecedents for a mainly illiterate
population who needed a clear morality-play opposition between good
and evil, and stereotypical characters they could sympathise, hate, or
laugh at. It influenced the style of performance (stock companies of
actors repeating their stereotypes), the costumes and make-up
indicating the social and moral condition of the characters, the scenery
signalling a necessary quality of vice, peril, or security.
• The well-made play: An adaptation of melodrama for the literate,
upper-middle class audience of the established theatre. Originators:
Eugène Scribe and Victorien Sardou in mid-nineteenth-century Paris
(hence the alternative name of “Scribean melodrama”.) They codified
the structure of their plays as EXPOSITION – DEVELOPMENT –
DISCOVERY – CRISIS – DENOUMENT. The well-made play relies
for effect on the suspense generated by its logical, cleverly
constructed plot, rather than on characterisation, psychological
accuracy or social themes.
2. The naturalist movement:
It opposed romantic situations and characterisation, aiming to put on stage

only what could be verified by observing ordinary life.
a) Zola: early theory

Émile Zola (1840-1902): French novelist and critic, the founder of the
Naturalist movement in literature. Zola redefined Naturalism as
"Nature seen through a temperament." Among Zola's most important
works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which
included such novels as L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), about the suffering
of the Parisian working-class, NANA (1880), dealing with
prostitution, and GERMINAL (1885), depicting the mining industry.
In his theatre criticism he outlined the following:
• Theatre should be the “honest soldier of truth”, serving the
inquiring mind by analysing and reporting on man and society.
• Characters: ordinary people in their natural setting;
• Stage scenery: vivid background and environment;
• Setting, costumes, dialogue: life-like (appropriate to the given
situation and the character’s individuality)
b) Henrik Ibsen (1826 – 1906): the “father of modern drama”
• Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of

the most important playwrights of all time, considered largely
responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama (the "father of
modern drama.”) Victorian-era plays were expected to be moral
dramas with noble protagonists pitted against darker forces; every
drama was expected to result in a morally appropriate conclusion,
meaning that goodness was to bring happiness, and immorality
pain. Ibsen challenged this notion and the beliefs of his times and
shattered the illusions of his audiences by introducing a critical eye

and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality.
• Ibsen’s naturalist plays:
• The Pillars of Society (1877): moral story of Counsel
Bernick, introducing the theme that lies rot and corrode
their originators.
• A Doll’s House (1879): story of Nora Helmer’s
emancipation from the patriarchal mores of her society
• Ghosts (1881): a scathing commentary on Victorian
morality, in which a husband's philandering has tragic
outcomes on the members of the Alvig family.
• An Enemy of the People (1882): challenges the Victorian
belief according to which the community was a noble
institution that could be trusted.
c) André Antoine, the Theatre Libre and a new production style
André Antoine (1858 – 1943) was a French actor-manager, who

founded in 1887 the Théâtre Libre in Paris, in order to realize his
ideas as to the proper development of dramatic art. His work had
enormous influence on the French stage, as well as similar companies
like the Independent Theatre Society in London and the Freie Buhne
in Germany. The Théâtre Libre focused on a more naturalist style of
acting and staging, performing works by Zola and other naturalist
writers and plays by contemporary German, Scandinavian, and
Russian naturalists. The productions employed: realistic costuming
and acting, unobtrusive stage-movement, realistic furnishings and

props, convincing sound and lightning effects.
d) Stanislavsky and a new acting style
• Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 – 1938) was a Russian actor and

theatre director, co-founder (with Vladimir Nemirovich-
Danchenko) of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in1897.
• The MAT was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in
contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of
theatre at the time. It also differed from the other independent
theaters since it emphasized theatrical production instead of just
neglected plays.
• Stanislavski's innovative contribution to modern European and
American drama is realistic acting.
• Building on the ensemble playing and the naturalistic staging of
Antoine and the independent theatre movement, Stanislavski
organized his realistic techniques into a coherent and usable
'system’, which was as important to the development of socialist
realism in the USSR as it was to that of 'psychological realism' in
the United States (the American 'Method’.)
• He developed the so-called “psycho-technique” that requests the
following:
o The actor’s body and voice should be trained thoroughly to
respond to every demand.
o Actors should be skilled observers of reality in order to

build a role.
o Actors should use inner justification for everything done
on stage.
o If actors are not merely to play themselves, they must
analyze the script thoroughly and define their character’s
motivations in each scene. They must discover their
characters "objective."
o On stage, actors must experience the action as it unfolds
moment to moment as if it’s happening for the "first time."
o Actors must continually strive to perfect understanding and
proficiency.
e) Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904): the “theatre of mood”
Russian playwright and one of the great masters of modern short

story, Chekhov combined in his work the dispassionate attitude of a
scientist and doctor with the sensitivity and psychological
understanding of an artist. Chekhov portrayed often life in the Russian
small towns, where tragic events occur in a minor key, as a part of
everyday texture of life. His characters are passive by-standers in
regard to their lives, filled with the feeling of hopelessness and the
fruitlessness of all efforts.
• Plays:
o The Seagull (1894): centres on the romantic and artistic
conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue

Nina, the fading leading lady Irina Arkadina, her son, the
experimental playwright Konstantin Treplyov, and a
famous middle-aged story-writer Trigorin.
o Uncle Vanya (1900): a melancholic story of Sonia, her
father Serebryakov and his brother-in-law Ivan (Uncle

Vanya), who see their dreams and hopes passing in
drudgery for others.
o Three Sisters (1901): a naturalistic play about the decay
of the privileged class in Russia and the search for

meaning in the modern world. It describes the lives and
aspirations of the Prozorov family, the three sisters
(Olga, Masha, and Irina) and their brother Andrei.
o The Cherry Orchard (1904): concerns an aristocratic
Russian family as they return to the family's estate just

before it is auctioned to pay the mortgage. The story
presents themes of cultural futility — both the futility of
the aristocracy to maintain its status and the futility of
the bourgeoisie to find meaning in its newfound
materialism.
• The “theatre of mood”:
o It fragments the well-made play, scattering exposition
throughout, excising action.
o Lack of focus on a leading character (employs a larger
cast of highly individualised characters meant as a
microcosm of society)
o Subtext: the surface of the dialogue seems innocuous or

meandering, but implies deep meanings, which forces
the spectator to constantly probe, analyse, ask what is
implied by what is being said.
3. Realism in Britain:
a) Domestic realism: Robertson’s “cup-and-saucer” drama
The trend towards a home-grown realistic drama began in England in

the 1860s, with the plays of T. W. Robertson (1829 – 1871). The son
of a provincial actor and manager, Tom Robertson belonged to a
family famous for producing actors. Though he never managed to
become a successful actor himself, he wrote a number of plays,
mostly comedies, which achieved popularity:
o Ours (1866),
o Caste (1867),
o Play (1868),
o School (1869),
o M.P. (1870),
o War (1871).
These plays (known as “cup-and-saucer” drama) were notable for

treating contemporary British subjects in settings that were realistic,
unlike the Victorian melodramas that were popular at the time. For
example, whereas previously a designer would put as many chairs into

a dining room scene as there were actors who needed to sit down,
Robertson would place on stage as many chairs as would realistically
be found in that dining room, even if some were never actually used.
In Ours, a pudding was made on stage and this caused a major furor –
people were not used to seeing such realistic tasks in a stage setting.
Also, the characters spoke in normal language and dealt with ordinary
situations rather than declaiming their lines. In addition, the
importance of everyday incidents, the revealing of character through
apparent "small talk", and the idea that what is not said in the dialogue
is as important as what is said are all Robertson trademarks.
b) The late 19th-century Victorian Stage
Characteristics:
• Theatre had become a fashionable and respectable institution.
• Main audience: upper-middle class.
• The commercial stage: dominated by actor-managers.
• It aimed at projecting an idealised vision of upper-middle class
decorum, suavity, respectability
Society drama:
• A type of play whose subject-matter was socially restricted to the
lives of the upper middle-class.
• It demonstrated and endorsed a non-objectionable subject-matter
and morality.
• As such, it was conservative in matters of social conduct and

sexual morality.
The Impact of Ibsen

• The staging of A Doll’s House (1889) and Ghosts (1891) by the
minority theatre outraged a great part of the public opinion.
• Clement Scott (drama critic for the Daily Telegraph): “suburban”;
“an open drain”; “a loathsome sore unbandaged”; “ a dirty act done
publicly”; “ a lazar house with all its doors and windows opened”.
• Some playwright, nevertheless, started a process of assimilation,
producing a compromise between the outspokenness of Ibsen and
the conventional society drama. They developed a variant of
society drama known as “the problem play”.
The problem play:

• A play that aims to be searching, serious and sophisticated in its
treatment of contemporary social issues, trying to offer a thorough-
going examination of society’s values.
• Nevertheless, its resolution supports the dominant code of the
upper middle-class ethos.
Henry Arthur Jones (1851 – 1934) and Arthur Wing Pinero

(1855-1934)
• Jones successfully began his dramatic career writing Melodrama.
Inspired by Ibsen, he moved into more serious drama. He is
credited, along with Pinero, for the new movement in England
toward Realism. Both writers were provocative enough for

scandal, but acceptable to the censors and his public.
• Jones’s Mrs Dane's Defence (1900) is illustrative of the new
trend:
o The story focuses on Mrs. Dane's betrothal to Lionel,
adopted son to Sir Daniel who is a famous judge. Rumors
have been spread by a scandal-monger that the young widow
Mrs. Dane is actually Felicia Hindermarsh, involved in a
tragic scandal following an affair with a married man in
Vienna. Before Sir Daniel gives his consent to the marriage
of his son to her he wants to get at the truth of matters,
ultimately to clear the rumors and reinstate Mrs. Dane's
reputation. Mrs. Dane can produce plausible evidence of her
identity and everyone involved is quite convinced of her
innocence. Yet in the end Sir Daniel's professional approach
leads to the unveiling of the real identity of Mrs. Dane in a
famous cross-examination scene, in which a slip of the
tongue by Mrs. Dane alerts Sir Daniel of an inconsistency in
her story, and allows him to draw the confession out of her
that she is indeed Felicia Hindermarsh. The truth is kept
secret, though,and Mrs. Dane's reputation in Sunningwater
can be reinstated. Nevertheless, they all decide she should
leave the village after her marriage with Lionel has become
impossible and she complies.
• Actor and a leading playwright of the late Victorian and Edwardian

eras in England, Pinero made an important contribution toward
creating a self-respecting theatre by helping to found, along with
Jones, a “social” drama that drew a fashionable audience. His
problem-plays helped create public acceptance for the significant
changes and radical thinking of Ibsen.
• In 1893 the production of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, his best-
known work, raised protest because of its sympathetic portrayal of
a woman with a questionable past, but its popularity changed
producers’ attitudes towards this new “Ibsenesque" drama.
o The plot focuses on Paula Tanqueray, who has concealed
part of her past from her respectable husband, Aubrey, but
this unexpectedly catches up with her when her step-
daughter becomes engaged to one of her former seducers. In
opposing the marriage, Paula is forced to confess the whole
of her past history, and she commits suicide to save herself
and those she loves from shame.
c) Championing Ibsen: George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Shaw was born in Dublin. His father was an unsuccessful middle-

class businessman; his mother was a good singer that eventually
left her husband, and with her two daughters went to live in
London as a music teacher. In 1876 Shaw followed her to London,
intent to earn his living by writing. His first publications were
serial novels and criticism for a number of English periodicals. In
1879 he joined the Zetetical Society, a discussion club whose

members had debates about economics, science and religion. It
was here that he met Henry George, a socialist who sustained the
importance of economics in society and the necessity of land
nationalization. Shaw accepted his theories, read Karl Marx’s “Das
Capital” and joined the Fabian society, a group which preached the
evolutionary socialism. He worked for this society editing books,
writing pamphlets, and displaying his dialectical ability in many
public discussions. Shaw befriended William Archer, a Scottish
journalist and dramatic critic who introduced him to the work of
Ibsen. Both decided to introduce Ibsen into England, in the hope
that the Norwegian’s example would bring a healthy change in the
British literature. Shaw conducted a crusade supporting the new
kind of drama, where the dramatist was at once an ethical
philosopher and a social reformer. He set the role of the dramatist
in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), a collection of lectures
on Ibsen’s drama that he had previously delivered at the meetings
of the Fabian society. The tract is as much an advocacy of Ibsen’s
genius as it is a manifesto for Shaw’s future work as a playwright.
In compliance with its ideas, Shaw launched in 1892 Widowers’
Houses, his first play which, although criticized for his theme (a
vigorous attack on slum landlordism), launched him as a dramatist.
Like Mrs. Warren’s Profession (written 1893), which expounded
the economic basis of modern prostitution, and The Philanderer
(written 1893), it was considered too strong to pass the censor and
confined to private performance. Arms and the Man (1894) which
wittily subverts the conventional view of heroism and male

gallantry, was the first of Shaw’s plays to be presented publicly.
There followed, among others, Candida (1897), a re-writing of
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, The Devil’s Disciple (1897), a parody of
melodrama, and The Man of Destiny (1897), a parody of
Napoleon. Shaw owned his emergence into fame to the seasons
organised by Harley Granville-Barker and J. E. Vedrenne at the
Royal Court Theatre between 1904 and 1907. It was here that plays
like John Bull’s Other Island (1904), a provocative thrust at the
Irish question, and Man and Superman (1905), in which he
expounded his theory of the life-force – the force that impels
humanity to procreation, the supreme end of all the species, the
main agent of which is the woman, who selects and pursues her
lover in order ensure the instinctive regeneration of the race.
Caesar and Cleopatra (1907), or Pygamlion (1910) maintained
Shaw’s growing reputation for mischief and iconoclasm. In the
1920s, Shaw wrote some of his most serious plays, Heartbreak
House (1920), Back to Methuselah (1922) and Saint Joan (1923).
Of his later plays, the best include Too Good to Be True (1932)
and In Good King Charles’s Golden Days (1939). In 1925 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
Characteristics of the Shavian drama:
• Though his ideas were seldom original, since he generally

borrowed them from economists and philosophers (like Marx or
Nietzsche), Shaw was able to infuse into them the spirit of

English comedy, creating a sort of drama that could be
“committed” and “comic” at the same time.
• Although initially influenced by Ibsen’s anti-romantic theatre,
his plays were also the product of two precise ‘lines of interest
and experience’:
• Years and years of public speaking, which provide him with
a deep knowledge of the audience’s expectations, with the
plays aiming to subvert them;
• His musical education and his love for opera, which led him
to create roles for actors with a particular attention to voice
contrast, like an opera without music.
• The result of these ‘ingredients’ was a new type of play,
whose features may be summarized as follows:
o Their purpose is not so much to make people laugh,
but to make them realize the absurdity of certain
prejudices and reconsider their ideas and attitudes
o Since debate is one of their main features, his plays
are also called discussion plays

o The plot is always static, but enlivened by mental
actions, with the vigorous and brilliant dialogues
providing them.
o Problems are also faced by different points of view,
through the so-called dialectic of confrontation.
o The situations and characters, although not always
lifelike and somewhat lacking in psychological

analysis, are often used to embody an idea or a point

of view that the play wants to illustrate – hence the
name of “thesis drama”, or drama of ideas.
d) Shavian Influences:
The links with Shaw’s drama of ideas is most obvious in the work of
contemporaries like Harley Granville-Barker and John Galsworthy,
but it also serves as a reference point for the plays written by John
Osborne in the second half of the twentieth-century. The political cast
of his theatre, seen as having a direct social function, may be seen to
reverberate in the realistic emphasis of “kitchen-sink” playwrights like
D.H. Lawrence or Arnold Wesker, intent on reforming society by
depicting its evils in naturalistic detail.
Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946)
• Actor, director, playwright and scholar, Barker was responsible for

Shaw’s breakthrough to public acceptance as the initiator and main
driving force of the Court Theatre Venture.
• As a playwright, Barker shows a Shavian commitment to
intelligent debate. Nevertheless, his characters habitually act on the
basis of unconscious instincts, which by definition cannot be
verbalised. Hence a subtler form of realism evolved in his plays,
which are characterised by an almost introvert tone and place their
emphasis on the psychological aspects of generic problems. Their
endings are characteristically left open with unfinished

conversations, while the thesis (or message) that they aim to
illustrate is left for the spectators to define.
• Plays:
-The Marrying of Anne Leete(1900)
-The Voysey Inheritance(1905)
-Waste(1907)
-The Madras House(1909)
John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
• Novelist and playwright, Galsworthy remains best known as the

author of The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921) and its sequels, A
Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter. He won the Nobel Prize
in Literature in 1932.
• His first play, The Silver Box (1906) was specifically written to be
performed at the Court Theatre, became an immediate success. He
followed it with a series of plays including Strife (1909), Justice
(1910), The Eldest Son (1912), The Fugitive (1913), The Skin
Game (1920), Loyalties (1922) and Exiled (1929).
• His principles as a playwright are outlined in the prefaces to the
collected editions of his plays. Here he considers that the aim of
the dramatist is to display impartiality and objectivity by setting
before the public the phenomena of life and character, selected and
combined, but not distorted by his own outlook, so that the
audience can draw the moral by themselves. Moreover, each play
should be informed by a controlling idea – the cohesive ideology

of the playwright himself. It is this “idea” that becomes the
ordering principle in Galsworthy’s drama: the workings of society
(or, better said, the playwright’s understanding of how society
works) characteristically order the action of the plays and
determines their plotting strategies.
• Because Galsworthy is a moralist, his plays continually attack
social injustice and the double standards of class and gender. As
such, his drama becomes clearly didactic, working for reform
through an overt criticism of contemporary social issues, and is
designed to have an immediate impact upon the public.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)
• Lawrence was the son of a miner in Nottinghamshire, whose

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

include Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in
Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Their major
theme is human relationships in the modern world where the
natural harmony between men and men, men and women has been
destroyed by industry and modern civilization. Lawrence
developed this theme by exploring the emotional lives and sexual
instincts of his characters and showing the great harm that modern
industrial civilization has done to human nature, combining thus
psychological analysis and social criticism.
• The same theme is present in his plays, the best known of which
are A Collier’s Friday Night (1909), The Widowing of Mrs.
Holroyd (1911) and The Daughter-in-law (1911), collectively
known as The Nottinghamshire Trilogy. All three have a strong
autobiographical basis, exploring the marriage of a strong and
willed woman who thinks herself superior to her husband (as in his
own family), while the increasingly destructive effect of
educational or cultural pretensions defines the theme.
• They are working-class plays which document the wretchedness of
working-class existence and the evil of middle-class values,
providing a sharp contrast to the sanitized image of the worker
characteristic of more traditional plays. Along with this comes an
emphasis on the basic daily activities representative for the
working-class, anticipating thus the “kitchen-sink” play (a play
that portrays the lives of ordinary people) that came into fashion
into the 1950s.
3. EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
Expressionism
“Expressionism” designates a general movement in the arts during and just

before World War I which expresses extreme feelings of personal, familial
and general social breakdown. “Apocalyptic” is the adjective frequently
used of this highly subjective movement in which artists figure frequently as
protagonists projecting their sufferings over a fractured world. As usual
with new movements, the fundamental drive behind “expressionism” was a
drive towards freedom. In the main, this “freedom” meant a break away with
the constraints of naturalism, seen as a restrictive, determinist, positivist,
materialist and reactionary programme, which took people to be products of
the environment.
The term was first applied to painting, being coined by Julien Auguste
Hervé in 1901 as a useful word to distinguish early impressionist painting
from the more energetic individualism of Van Gogh and Matisse, both artists
trying to go beyond the mere depiction of an external reality in order to
convey their private experiences, inner ideas or visions, i.e., in Hervé’s
words, to “to express [themselves] with force”.
As often, a useful general term was soon shared by other art forms, so
that it became soon applied to music (e.g. the work of the composers Alban
Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), architecture (e.g. the visions of the architect
Erich Mendhelson), film (e.g. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari)
poetry (e.g. the imagistic lyric verse of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land), or
fiction (e.g. the ‘Nightown’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses or the
nightmarish stories of Franz Kafka), yet it found itself particularly at home

with drama, where “expressionist” came soon to identify any play or
production which departed from realism and tried to show life in a very
personal, idiosyncratic manner, where the form of the play could be seen to
express its content.
Among the forerunners of the movement, the Swedish playwright

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

concentrated, caricatural, questing, strange, is the dominant form of
expressionism. In keeping with this, its characteristic setting has clusters of
powerful primary colours, with heavy flickering shadows and strong
lighting. The characters lose their individuality, becoming stereotyped and
caricatured, with nameless designations like ‘the dreamer’, ‘the father’, ‘the
son’, etc, while the dialogue is poetic and febrile, in order to break the
sympathetic feeling directly.
The expressionist movement within the theatre was first associated
with the mood gripping the German drama in the 1910s and 1920s. German
expressionism began as a drama of protest, reacting against the pre-war
authority of the family and community, the rigid lines of social order. It was
a drama of violent conflicts like those established between youth and old
age, freedom and authority, and it followed Nietsche in glorifying the
individual and idealizing the creative personality. With the advent of Freud
and Jung, German expressionism undertook the challenge to disclose and
reproduce the hidden states of mind, and in so doing it boldly treated taboo
subjects, such as incest and paricide. For example, Walter Hasenclaver’s
The Son (1914), which is considered the first representative expressionist
play, is an ecstatic drama in which the Son desires freedom from a
domineering burgher Father, bringing thus very close the father-dominated
world of Freud. Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord (1915) is another rather crude
dramatization of Freudian theory: the protagonist of the play is a young man
who makes love to his mother and stabs his father. Reinhard Sorge’s The
Beggar (1917) is also protesting against the dominance of the family. In an
act of symbolic liberation, the son poisons both his mother (who obsessively
loves him) and his father (who has a mad obsession woth the planet Mars) to
be then wedded to a new person, a ‘vital force’ towards which he reaches
out.
Nevertheless, the impact of World War I and the mass slaughter of

men in the trenches began to undermine this personal and subjective content
and hastened the introduction of a more sophisticated concern for man and
society (often reacting against the industrialization of society and the
mechanization of life), while the skills of Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller
brought more discipline to the movement.
Thus, Georg Kaiser’s From Morning to Midnight (1916), one of the

crucial texts of the movement, is a vivid episodic play about the collapse of
modern industrial society. Its protagonist is a bank cashier who revolts
against the world. An idealist searching for the absolute, he repudiates
society, embezzles money and flees into a symbolic snowfield where he has
a conversation with Death. He plunges on, offering high prizes to winners of
a six-day bicycle race, but the people are too tame for his vision. He
continues to travel, seeking his brothers in a Salvation Army Hall, where he
finds people confessing their sins. He confesses himself, and throws his
money into the hall in an ecstasy of abnegation. But the ‘saved’ throw
themselves on the money, and the cashier looses faith. He can now trust only
one person, a girl, but she calls the police and he shoots himself.
Ernst Toller’s The Conversion (1917-8) depicts the “Struggle of Man”,

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

Germany, so that its most triumphant playwright was the American Eugene
O’Neill. Though O’Neill had started as a realist, in the 1920s he also moved
to expressionism, producing two masterpieces of the genre. Emperor Jones
(1920) depicts the flight of its eponymous hero through the forest.
Abandoned by his subjects in the first scene, Jones falls prey to visions
(rendered by vivid colour, light, music and movement) and slowly sinks into
his psyche (moving from sense impressions through personal memory to the
non-personal archetypes of Jung.) Death and solitude are the fundamental
concerns of the play, while Emperor Jones, like Strindberg’s Stranger, wants
to become the master of his fate, seeking his ultimate freedom by carrying a
silver bullet for final use on himself. The Hairy Ape (1921) presents the
psychic vs. the physical disparity of the stoker Yank. Yank works in somber
and violent stokehold in the bowels of a ship until he wakes up to
consciousness of himself when a top-deck passenger, Mildred, faints at the
sight of him. Seeking freedom as well, he goes on a similar journey to that
of Kaiser’s Cashier, but can never find a language to convince the others of
his pain, and is always hemmed in by iron bars, whether in the stokehold, in
prison, or in the zoo, where he finally dies.
British Expressionism
In Britain, Expressionism was felt over a period of time within the work of
individual and very different artists, especially those of European structure.
Thus, in D.H. Lawrence’s later novels one can detect a move towards the
exploration of extreme states, the deeper, rawer realms of the psyche. For
example, in Women in Love (1920) the landscapes, without losing their
naturalism , reflect the intense psychological states of his characters. But
Lawrence, expressionist in his painting and to a certain extent in his fiction,
never became an expressionist in his drama. The second British author, one
might include here is T. S. Eliot, whose long poem, The Waste Land (1921)
employed fragmented semi-dramatic techniques to convey states of personal
and social breakdown. Though his early attempt at drama, Sweeney
Agonistes: A Fragment of an Agon, also displays an expressionistic
grotesqueness, a preoccupation with murder and violence, and typological
characterization, this style is faintly recognizable in his later plays, which
move towards symbolism and myth.
Thus, inter-war British playwrights whose work may be accurately
labeled as Expressionistic in character are Sean O’Casey, W.H. Auden and
Christopher Isherwood.
Sean O’Casey (1880-1953) developed from naturalistic techniques -

employed in his early Dublin trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, 1923, Juno
and the Paycock, 1924, The Plough and the Stars, 1926) where graphic
depictions of his working-class environment are set against the background
provided by the violent course of events leading to the Irish independence –
towards expressionism, starting with his 4th play, The Silver Tassie (1928),
which juxtaposes overt symbolism with realistic incident and was rejected
by the Abbey Theatre on these very grounds, leading to the playwright’s
subsequent self-exile in England.
The Silver Tassie is a war parable, in which the story of Harry
Heegan, a young and promising football player crippled in the trenches,
illustrates the simple theme of youthful joy of life wantonly destroyed. The
first act, set in the familiar O’Casey world of Dublin’s tenements, shows
Harry, on leave from World War I, leading his football team to victory and
the trophy of the silver tassie (cup). It was the second act, a macabre
theatrical poem, expressionist in technique and enacted in a battle-scared
landscape, which abandons the exploration of character in order to expose
the futility of a foolish war, which upset those who expected from the
playwright nothing but urban realism. The remaining two acts return Harry
to Ireland. Maimed and bitter, he cannot reconcile himself to his changed
circumstances. The climactic final act, which takes place at the football
club’s dance, forces a recognition of how much has been lost and how little
gained: while those who have not been to war enjoy the spoils of the victory,
the crippled ex-football champion, in a wheelchair, bitterly destroys his
trophy in utter disappointment.
O’Casey’s next plays are overtly expressionist, with minor figures

being one-dimensional representatives of social classes or political forces
matched by an equally didactic purpose. Within the Gates (1934) is a satire
on the Depression, as well as an attempt at a modern morality play. The
action presents a Strindbergian dreamer, while the play itself is his vision.
The four scenes set in Hyde Park – a pastoral image extended by having a
chorus of young girls and boys representing its trees and flowers – pass from
winter to spring and from morning to night, meant thus as symbolic of the
cycles of life itself. The action surrounds a Young Woman – the
compassionate prostitute of melodrama – who is in search of her salvation,
while other characters – that are unrealistic and come in great number – are
merely caricatures. Among them there are: a well-intentioned Bishop (who,
nevertheless, is also the former seducer of the girl’s mother), a Guardsman
(who is shown as presently seducing a Nursemaid), two Evangelists ( who
are also voyeurs), a Salvation Army Officer (who is also attracted to the girl
he is supposed to save.) Just before her death, the Young Woman moves into
a joyful dance with the Dreamer, with the play closing on this symbolic
moment of dancing. Of the plays of his last period, Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy
(1949) is still expressionistic in treatment, but mixes this with the
playwright’s familiar characterization of Dublin’s low life, becoming thus
overtly allegorical. Woven through the scenes of the play – which present a
series of incidents like the ugly behaviour of a belligerent priest, the cruelty
shown to a “young gay girl”, the false piety of the elderly, the never-ending
quest for money – is the central figure of the Cock, which is symbolic of
Ireland’s fight for the “joy of life” in the face of clerical, social and political
oppression.
The collaboration of W. H. Auden (1907 – 1973) and Christopher

Isherwood (1904-1986) resulted in three plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin
(1936), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1939), which mark
them off as the other chief representatives of German expressionism on the
inter-war English stage, as well as of the poetic revival characterizing the
1930s British theatre.
The Dog Beneath the Skin is a political fable which mixes a symbolic
quest with expressionist techniques and satiric pastiche. The protagonist of
play is an up-right hero, Alan Norman, a villager chosen by his lot to set out
on the quest for the missing Sir Francis Crewe (a lost saviour prince)
accompanied by a mysterious stray dog. Its episodic plot presents Alan as
the innocent abroad, passing through a benighted and corrupt European
civilization (represented by a court politely mourning the dissidents
ceremonially shot, a night-town of brothels and drug-sellers, a pleasure park,
a hospital, an asylum where the lunatics respond to the broadcasts of the
country’s dictator). In the end, Alan discovers that the ideal hero, who was
the object of his quest, has been with him all the time in the shape of the
dog. Together they return to their village, where, instead of acting as the
saviour of the established social order, Sir Frances rejects his inheritance and
calls on the villagers to join him in the coming war against the
Establishment.
Instead of a symbolic quest, The Ascent of F6 presents a symbolic
mountain climbing, which, nevertheless, turns also into an allegorical drama
in which an individual embarks on a quest for a mother figure and seeks in
the process to liberate both himself and society. The hero, a sacrificial
saviour-figure with the morality-play name of Ransome, is the leader of an

expedition which sets out to plant the flag on an yet uncolonised peak. The
journey, though motivated by power manouvering and international
economic rivalry, is in fact one into the subcounscious: through a country
populated by an amalgam of African natives, Tibetan monasteries and
supernatural monsters, mountain-climbing becomes a symbol of spiritual
achievement and self-conquest. At the summit, Randsome dies confronting a
veiled “Demon”, the symbol of all man’s destructive tendencies, but a dream
sequence, in the form of a trial where the hero first accuses then tries to
protect the Demon, climaxes in the unveiling of the monster – revealed as
the hero’s mother who starts to sing an escapist lullaby as her son dies. In
the 1930s, the real life analogues of both plot and hero must have been clear
to the audience: on the one hand, the international competition recalled
Scott’s race to the South Pole, while, on the other, Ransome could be seen as
a fictive counterpart of T.E. Lawrence, as a national hero who had rejected
society and had combined a life of action and literary contemplation.
The confusing structure of On the Frontier, their last play, is set
against the background of an European war between two imaginary
countries, Westland and Ostria, which is fuelled by a mad demagogue
Leader and by a cynical businessman, Valerian. Alternating with the main
scenes which involve the politicians, the play shows the lives of two
ordinary families – shown simultaneously on stage with an invisible
‘frontier” line dividing the scene – as they are affected by war.
After the Second World War such kind of drama fostered in the 1930s
became the province of radio where the direct appeal to the ear and the
imagination made this medium an appropriate one for its subjective lyricism,
freeing the plays from the physical limitations of the stage and the crudity of
visual symbolism.
Clear links to Auden and Isherwood’s drama are discernable both in Louis
Mac Niece’s Christopher Colombus (1944) – which is the inverse story of
the explorer, with solo-voices representing abstract qualities -, and The Dark
Tower (1946) – which, like The Dog Beneath the Skin, employs a quest-
theme, with a naïve hero being seduced in his search through the
phantasmagorical wasteland of society- and Dylan Thomas’s Under
Milkwood (1953). The structure of Under Milkwood, a “play for voices”, is
given by the progress of one day, from pre-dawn darkness to dusk again,
while its main character, Blind Captain Cat, shares the narration with two
other voices, who describe the town, alternating the change of viewpoint, or
simply varying the voice trimble or giving “stage directions”. It is a static
narrative, in which the descriptive passages are not supplementing the main
action, but rather supplement the narrative with vocal illustration, while the
dialogue caries from extended passages to the mosaic of short speeches from
different characters, briefly introduced by the narrators (as they dream, in the
morning, in the afternoon, or as they settle for night.)
These plays, written for broadcasting, can thus be seen to make full
use of the freedom of the new medium, where the scene changes and other
verbal effects automatically create the “stream-of-conciousness” which
subordinates analysis to synthesis and appeals to more primitive elements in
the listeners.
Epic theatre
The period between the wars saw a number of adaptations and developments
of earlier forms. If earlier reactions against naturalist theatre included the
expressionist movement and the verse drama, another reaction arouse out of
a rapidly growing technology which had created the new medium of the
cinema as a formidable challenge for the theatre, and was directed against
expressionism’s focus on emotion, wishing the stage to embrace the larger
social context of the epic. Epic theatre emerged thus in the post World War
I Weimar Germany out of the work of two of the most ambitious and
innovative directors of the century, Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht,
though it was the latter’s work to become part of the classic repertoire of
world theatre and exert the most powerful influence on contemporary
writing and production.
Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) was a left-wing radical for whom the
theatre was an important public medium, which could tell political truths and
effect political change. His dramatic aims were utilitarian: to influence
voters, or to clarify Communist policy, and the standards of authenticity and
contemporaneity carried over in his productions for the Proletarian Theatre,
which he founded in 1920. There he developed a form of agit-prop (i.e.
theatre pieces devised to ferment political action/agitation and propaganda)1
suitable for the German context. Apart from choosing subjects of
contemporary relevance, Piscator also made radical use of the new medium
of documentary film, whose realism he strove to incorporate into his multi-
1
Agit-prop theatre originated in the aftermath of the Russian revolution as a substitute for newsprint. Its
aim was to spread information and the party line through a widely dispersed and illiterate population. The
typical form of this type of theatre were the short sketches which illustrated political commentary.
media productions. Thus he incorporated cinema screens into the set, using
old film footage and new documentary to accompany the action, in an
attempt to reveal the historical processes behind the public events. He use
slide projections of newspaper clippings and captions were projected
between scenes. For example, in the historical revue Despite All (1925),
which presented a political panorama of events between the outbreak of war
in 1914 and the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1918, he
employed a simultaneous montage of authentic speeches, news-extracts,
photographs and film-sequences. Another striking innovation was his use of
stage structures of great imaginative complexity. Toller’s Hurrah, We Live
(1927) was performed on a four-storey structure, a multiple stage on which
the various levels of society could be seen in ironic juxtaposition. This
technological staging was extended to the fullest in the production of Alexei
Tolstoi’s Rasputin (1927), which used a revolving hemisphere –
symbolizing both the globe and mechanization – with scenes played within
its opening segments, film and photographs integrated with the action, and
texts or dates projected on screens flanking the stage. One element could
comment on another, gaining an effect of objectivity or linking cause and
effect. In Hasek’s The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik (1928) he
notoriously employed two treadmill stages, using animated cartoons as a
backdrop to actors and scenery moving across the stage as if on a moving
carpet. Although the technology was too ambitious to be financially viable,
Piscator’s productions provided a model of epic theatre that influenced
Brecht, who collaborated on both Rasputin and Schweik, as well as
containing all the techniques of the modern documentary drama.
Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) appropriated much from Piscator’s epic

theatre, though his writings on the nature of acting, play-construction and the
social purpose of drama claim the term for his own theatre.
His first works to be staged, Baal (1919), Drums in the Night (1922)
and In the Cities Jungle (1923) were still recognizably expressionist. It was
with the writing of his anti-militaristic Man is Man (1925) that he began to
develop his ideas and formal dramatic structures, which later became the
basis for his epic theatre. Like Piscator’s productions, this play was
concerned with the question of individual liberty, and the way in which
organized society and military force could reshape human behaviour: Galy
Gay is taken to pieces and put together again as someone else, recalling the
character transformations effected by fascism and challenging the old
assumptions of liberal humanism that man has an integral identity.
Nevertheless, his first popular success came with The Threepenny Opera
(1928), his remake of John Gay’s Beggars’ Opera, and the parody opera The
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), which appropriated and
mocked the conventions of the Broadway musical, Viennese operetta and the
romanticism of early Verdi. With musicians on stage, the use of placards to
give spectators an objective perspective on the action, the separation of
dialogue from song and a harshly cynical presentation of the material to
prevent emotional empathy, these works may be seen as the first consciously
developed examples of his famous “alienation” techniques, meant to
prevent the audience’s hypnotic identification with the story. To be more
specific, Brecht administered a series of shocks by projecting words onto a
downstage half-curtain two and a half meters high; he split the stage in two,
illuminating with footlights a semi-circular apron built out over the orchestra
pit, building thus a bridge between stage and audience and creating a forum
where statements could be made. Moreover, the forestage became a place
where the characters could gather to dance, sing and, like the Greek chorus,
respond verbally and gesturally to the series of tragic and appalling events
enacted on the main stage. To avoid the emotional intensity of romantic
opera, Brecht organized collisions between music, story and setting. For
example, songs could be used to provide an ironic commentary on the
action, or reading a projected title could interrupt the tendency of plot or
music to flood the mind with feeling, Like in the Elizabethan theatre, the
actors addressed the audience directly, doing away with the fourth-wall
convention and calling thus attention to the obvious aritificiality of the stage
action. At the same time, a new style of acting was evolved in which the
performers demonstrated the actions of their characters instead of identifying
with them.
It was in the essays written at this time that Brecht formulated the
principles of his “non-Aristotelian” drama. If the Greek critic had declared
tragedy a higher form of art than epic partly because of its economy and
concentration (a brief crisis, centring on a single place and time), Brecht’s
alternative theory considered that epic theatre should present an episodic
narrative, covering a broad historical sweep (in the manner of Elizabethan
history play) and often involving a journey. Later Brecht was to modify
these principles into a theory of “dialectal theatre”, expecting his audience to
observe critically, draw conclusions and participate in an intellectual
argument with the work at hand. In order to achieve this confrontational
relationship between drama and audience, the political issues raised by the
plays had to be abstracted and presented in historically or geographically
distant contexts where their essential nature could be displayed. This

“distancing” effect meant thus that a given social system could be
examined from the standpoint of a social system from another period or
place.
All his major plays, The Life of Galileo (1938), Mother Courage and
her Children (1939), The Good Person of Setzuan (1940), or The Caucasian
Chalk Circle (1945) illustrate Brecht’s approach to his dramatic material at
its clearest. For example, Mother Courage, written in 1939 and first
produced in Zurich in 1941, which has become a classic of modern theatre,
is a powerful antiwar play, which, nevertheless, distances contemporary
events in the context of the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany
during the 17th century. As such, Brecht’s interest may be seen to extent
beyond the immediate causes underlying both the Second World War and
the Thirty Years War into making a statement against war entirely,
regardless of its cause. In order to achieve this, he deliberately avoided
making his play realistic, employing a number of alienation techniques like:
the use of an essentially barren stage setting; the structuring of the play in
scenes that avoid any sense of continuity in the action; the use of high
intensity, cruel lightning which spotlights the action in an unnatural way; the
use of slide projections of headings accompanying each of the twelve scenes
in order to provide another break in the continuity of the action and to
remind the audience of the presence of the playwright and the fact that they
are seeing a play. The plot concerns Mother Courage herself who,
accompanied by her three children, lives off the war by selling goods to the
soldiers, with no concern for who is winning or losing, and even hoping for
the war to go on to secure her livelihood. But, as Mother Courage continues
to pull her wagon across field after field, learning how to survive, she also
loses her children, one by one, to the war. One son, Eilif, is seduced into
joining the army by a recruitment officer, and is led into battle thinking that
war is a heroic adventure. The other son, Swiss Cheese, opts for a
paymaster’s uniform, but he also perishes in the war that offers no
protection. The daughter, Katrin, is likewise a victim of the violence of war.
One Swedish officer rapes her, and Katrin becomes mute, another violent
treatment leaves a terrible scar on her face, which leaves the young woman
unmarriageable. Eventually she too looses her life while sounding an alarm
to war the sleeping town of an imminent attack. The end of the play shows
Mother Courage, left alone, picking up her wagon and finding that she can
maneuver it herself. The curtain drops as she circles the stage, with
everything around her consumed by war. As Brecht intended his character,
Mother Courage should be seen as a reflection of society’s wrong values:
she conducts business on the battle field, paying no attention to the moral
question of war and ultimately failing to see that it is the war that causes her
anguish. Nevertheless, audiences and critics alike have tended to treat her as
a survivor, almost a biblical figure, a model for one who endures all the
terrors of war and yet remains a testament for the resilience of humankind.
British Epic Equivalents
Although Brecht’s plays had first appeared on the English stage in the 1930s
in private club productions, in was only in the 1950s that his plays and
theories made a powerful impact, following the outstanding visit that the
“Berliner Ensemble” (the acting company founded by the German director
in 1948) paid to London in 1956, the same year with Osborne’s premiere of
Look Back in Anger.
Vividly contrasting with the naturalistic approach that had dominated
the British stage since Shaw, the productions of Brechtian plays like Mother
Courage or The Caucasian Circle offered an anti-illusionistic model that
proved a revelation for audiences, critics and playwrights themselves.
Nevertheless, since his theoretical writing were not available in translation,
the politics of Brecht’s theatre was obscured, his subsequent influence on the
British stage remaining to a great extent restricted to production values and
ways of acting, i.e. the purely stylistic aspect of the epic theatre.
Thus, a wide range of superficially Brechtian drama appeared on the
English stage in the 1960s and 1970s. This tended to severe epic techniques
from Brecht’s political analysis that the plays were designed to express, and
its effects may be best seen in the directorial output of the time.
For example, Peter Brook (1925 - ) borrowed Brecht’s methods in his
production of King Lear (1962), which displayed a stark and severe set, with
rusted metallic sheets flanking a bare stage, otherwise uniformly lit with a
harsh white light in the characteristic style. The costumes were of heavy,
worn leather, in imitation of Brecht’s production of Coriolanus, and the
props were few and simple: one great stone throne for Lear was all that
supplied the opening scene. Moreoever, the king’s part was played by Paul
Scofield with cold detachment, all colour drained from his lines.
Other British directors like George Devine (1910-65), John Dexter
(1925-), or William Gaskill (1930 -) were also attracted to Brecht, with
Joan Littlewood (1914-) setting the pace.
One of the most influential post-war British directors and producers,
Littlewood had been associated before the Second World War with the
Workers’ Theatre Movement, a left-wing touring company which was to
become a pioneering example for the fringe companies of the 1960s due to
its use of agit-prop techniques borrowed from the German theatre. In 1953,
after years of road playing in village halls and community centres,
Littlewood settled her company, renamed as Theatre Workshop, at the
Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London, where the director was to put into
practice her most ambitious programmes, combining contemporary
documentary drama with classic productions of little known plays,
encouraging new playwrights like Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney and
staging what were to become seminal plays. Until 1973, the year of her last
Stratford production, the company managed to retain many characteristics
marking it off from the West End, i.e. commercial, theatre. One of the most
important features was that the company remained an ensemble, forged over
many years since the 1930s, where decisions were arrived at collectively
after discussion and no stars existed, the roles were swapped around and
training was continuous. Another characteristic was that the text was never
regarded as a sacred, inviolable object, nor was the writer put on a pedestal:
during rehearsals, the company improvised and altered the text, seeking to
increase the directness and immediacy of the production. A further
characteristic of her productions was the synthesis of different elements like

dance, music and mime, often drawing upon the ingredients of music-hall
and popular theatre in an attempt to increase the audience’s sense of
participation and involvement. Other means used to lessen the “mystique”
surrounding the theatrical event included: the removal of footlights, having
performers mingling with the audience at the bar after the show, and
organizing special meetings during which members of the audience could
question the performers about their interpretation and playing of roles.
Like Brecht, Littlewood wanted to create a popular theatre for a
working-class audience, and her productions exhibited a characteristically
Brechtian style of energy and vulgarity, such as Oh, What a Lovely War
(1963) – a musical satire about the First World War set within a seaside
concert party framework, and one of the Theatre Workshops greatest
successes - proves. According to the company’s practice, the script was
evolved communally, using, like a documentary, authentic speeches and
ballads of the time to make up the material of the play. Nevertheless, the
carnage of the war was presented in terms of a “pierrot show of fifty years
ago”, identifying thus Brecht’s distancing effect with the popular tradition.
On the one hand, the pierrot constume focused on the wider thematic
significance of the juxtaposed scenes which made up the play, while, on the
other, it reminded the character’s representative status, replacing thus the
“great men” theory of history with the common man’s perspective, as
represented by the clowns. The audience was also emplaced in the
communal style of production, at times cast as troops in the trenches by
using a ‘plant’ to set up a dialogue with the soldiers on the stage, at other
times called to join in the choruses of the songs. Nevertheless, such overt
theatricality was always counterpointed by documentary fact – by having

real photographs from the war projected on a screen behind the actor, using
slides of posters and advertisements from the era to set the action in the
context of the period, or have a newspanel giving a running commentary on
the scenes with dates and statistics. Such devices had the effect of
contrasting the stark reality with the songs, dance, mime and sketches of the
performers.
Apart from such directorial ventures, other new plays of the 1960s
flirted with fashion and adopted a superficially epic form. Such is the case
with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960), which put forward Sir
Thomas Moore as a man of great conscience, prepared to risk everything
against the despotism of the king. But, unlike Mother Courage, or Galileo,
Moore was too much master of his fate to provide much of a commentary on
society, and the episodic scenes, linked by the commentary of a Common
Man, were uninformed by Brecht’s ambiguities. John Osborne’s Luther
(1961) echoed Galileo in style and intention, enhanced by the play using an
episodic structure and ‘gestic’ tableaux like the grouping of peasants with a
cart and a dead body. But the complexity of the central figure, which
simultaneously linked an Oedipus complex with a terrible problem of
digestion, put the emphasis more on the man, and less on his historical
context, such as epic theatre demanded. Arnold Wesker’s Chips with
Everything (1962) also assumed an episodic structure which concentrated on
the ironies of life in the Air Force, while Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of
the Sun (1964), which dealt spectacularly with Pizzaro’s conquest of the
Inca of Peru used a formal epic structure to mask the symbolical and
allegorical thrust of the play.
Probably the first British dramatist to attempt to create a homegrown

epic theatre equivalent remains John Arden (1930 - ), who not only
demonstrates a real understanding of Brecht’s intentions, but has also
persisted in testing epic techniques on the English stage.
As a result of seeing Mother Courage performed in London in 1956,
Arden discarded the realistic style he had used in his fist success, Live Like
Pigs (1957) – a play which depicts a cosy suburban family who have their
lives violently disrupted by a family of gypsies house in the same tenement
by the local council – and showed his real colour in 1959 with Sg
Musgrave’s Dance, a play regarded now as a modern classic.
Sg Musgrave’s Dance is an anti-war parable, in which Arden
repeatedly disconcerts his audience with unexpected and paradoxical
developments. The plot, set in Victorian times, concerns Sg Musgrave and
his three soldiers, who return to the native town of a comrade who has been
killed in a colonial war. As such, at the time of its production, when the
British troops were fighting freedom forces in Cyprus, the play had an
obvious contemporary political relevance. Nevertheless, though the soldiers’
intention is most honourable (to show the townspeople the results of
Victorian militarism and convert them to pacifism), the audience,
sympathising with their ends, are repelled by their behaviour: not only the
group turn out to be deserters, but their pacifism becomes highly
questionable when they kill one of their number, because he has tried to go
off with a local girl. Musgrave himself is a true anti-hero: too much of a
fanatic, who must preach his message at gunpoint and threaten the citizens
with a gatling gun. The play also makes use of song, direct address and other
epic devices, while a dialectical structure stands at its back, refusing to

comfort the spectator or confirm him in his beliefs.
Arden’s subsequent plays are also attuned to the Brechtian model. The
Happy Haven (1960) centres again on anarchic individualism, which causes
a group of joyous old folk rise against the doctors and staff in the nursing
home. Ironhand (1963), a play which updates Goethe’s Götz von
Berlichingen, presents the robber baron defending his way of life against the
extension of law, the rise of an amoral politician and the dominance of the
new middle-class the latter represents. Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1965)
distances the theme of imperialism into a 13th century Scottish context, while
lsland of the Mighty (1965) is an epic Arthurian romance. Such plays which
attempt to represent complex issues in a broad social and chronicle drama
demonstrate that Arden’s concerns are similar to those of Brecht (i.e. social
and historical), with situations representative of forms of social interaction,
and characters tending towards the stereotypical. At the same time, Arden
also uses song and separates his scenes to make ‘gestic’ statements, yet,
unlike his mentor, he proves a more realistic writer who mainly uses the
fourth wall convention to project a rapidly moving plot, and his songs are
not so much separate as incorporated into the action.
Apart from Arden, Edward Bond (1934 - ) is also considered as one
of the mist successful Brechtian playwrights in English. After naturalist
beginnings in plays like The Pope’s Wedding (1962) or Saved (1965), his
banished Early Morning (1968) – which rests upon the massive alienation
effect of a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence
Nightingale which accentuates their Victorian milieu -, and the censored
Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) - which focuses on violence and
injustice, distancing the horror with oriental masks – show Bond adopting
Brechtian techniques. Nevertheless, like Arden, Bond’s theatre may also be
considered as a cross between the epic model and a more mainstream British
naturalism, for his plays are more realistic, less caricatural and comic, and
they do not employ song and commentary. One constant theme which runs
through them is related to the subject of violence, which, in the playwright’s
opinion, characterizes the contemporary society. While plays like Saved,
Early Morning, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Lear (1971) and The Sea
(1973) set to examine its causes, show its psychological effects and suggest
radical pacifism as the sole way of breaking out of its vicious circle, later
ones like Bingo (1974), The Fool (1976) or The Woman (1978) question the
function of drama and the role of the dramatist in inspiring constructive
action to change things. This theme provides intellectual consistency to a
work which otherwise might look eclectic, ranging from realism to
Brechtian parables, Restoration parody, or Shakespearean revisionism.
Lear, for example, is a cunning and effective reinterpretation of the
Shakespearean prototype. According to Bond, Shakespeare’s King Lear is an
anatomy of human values which ultimately teaches us how to survive in a
corrupt world. In opposition to this, Bond’s play aims to show people how to
act responsible in order to change it. The Shakespearean paradigm is
observed in what concerns Lear’s movement to sanity from madness, vision
through blindness, self-knowledge through suffering, as well as in the play
revitalizing certain patterns of imagery and in the metaphorical language
used by the main character. Nevertheless, Bond constructs wholly new
social contexts for Lear’s actions, which are replete with anachronisms,
relating thus the narrative to contemporary issues, because the playwright is
interested in 20th-century political forces and in the process of political

discovery that leads the old king from an opening scene in which he shoots a
worker in order to enforce the speedy building of a wall meant to defend his
kingdom to a final scene in which he himself is shot for trying to dig up the
same wall. Through the dramatic metaphor of the wall (simultaneously a
symbol of defence and entrapment), the play foregrounds Bond’s sense of
violent social restriction as an uncontrollable self-generating circle of
aggression. Lear’s fear and belief in natural evil first alienates him from his
daughters, and then prove self-confirming once Bodice and Fontanelle
decide to violently replace the old king, only to continue as slaves to power
and perpetuate thus its repressive social institutions. Though Cordelia is first
portrayed as a sympathetic character, who support her husband’s charitable
sheltering of the king, she ends like a Stalinist figure who resembles the
daughters she supplants, because her counterrevolution continues to destroy
men in the name of duty, perpetuating thus both the wall and the vicious
circle of violence and suffering. While this lack of any conventionally good
character becomes one of Bond’s most effective departures from the
Shakespearean prototype, the note of optimism on which the play ends is
related to the change that occurs in Lear himself: transformed into a critical
social prophet, the king dies as he tries to tear down the wall he himself
erected against his enemies. It is a triumphant moment of exemplary action
meant to teach people that their individual acts can affect history. As such,
action is presented as quintessentially human and preferable to stoic
resignation in the face of suffering.
5. SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
Symbolism
Symbolism in the theatre is probably as old as theatre itself, but as a
technical and critical term it came into specialized use during the last
decades of the 19th century, associated with the French symbolist movement
which emerged in reaction against the descriptive precision and objectivity
of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism. In the manifesto of
the movement published in September 1886 in an article in Le Figaro, Jean
Moréas decreed that symbolic poetry ‘cherche à vêtir l’idée d’une forme
sensible’, while Stéphane Mallarmé, in Oeuvres complete (1891) explained
symbolism as ‘the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an état
d’âme’. The progenitors of the movement, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine,
Rimbaud, or Valéry, sought in their turn to discover ‘the secret of poetry’,
building their ideas upon a latter-day theory of the mystical and the occult,
the irrational and the world of fantasy and dream.
It was also Mallarmé who urged the creation of a new drama that
would reflect the mental or spiritual life, rather than the crude world of the
senses. Thus, for the theatre, at the time when naturalism was at its peak in
Europe, symbolism provided an alternative in a powerful and unpredictable
mode of playwriting which sought a justification in myth and ritual in order
to achieve the visionary quality missed in realism. Aiming to convey the
yearnings of human life freed from its material conditions, symbolist
playwrights would often try to fuse the arts of poetry, painting, music and
dance, taking their lead from an outstanding man of the theatre, Richard
Wagner, and a philosopher (of the theatre, among other matters), Friedrich
Nietzsche.
Wagner’s parallel interests in both music and drama had resulted not
only in the production of his major operas such as Tristan and Isolde (1865)
or Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), but also in an impressive body of
theoretical writings - The Art Work of the Future (1849), Opera and Drama
(1851), and The Purpose of the Opera (1871) -on the form and nature of
what he considered to be the performing art of the future, the so-called
“music-drama”, where language could be extended by sound in order to
create a fuller emotional statement. This Gesamtkunswerk (or “total art
form”) was to give a vital expression of the instinctive life, drawing upon
archetype and myth, dream and the supernatural.
In his turn, Nietzsche had justified Wagner’s ideas in his own account
on The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), where the origins
of Greek tragedy were identified with the moment in which the ritual
celebrations of Dionysus (representing all that was emotional and irrational
in man) expressed into the song of the dithyramb2, had found the
embodiment of dance which had imposed an Apollinian form upon them
(characterized by lucidity, reasonableness and harmony.) Thus, the duality
and tension between the instinctive and the rational, music and dance, which
had led to the birth of tragedy, could only be recuperated in Wagner’s
“music-drama”, which Nietszche considered to exercise a Dionysian
influence in the modern rational world.
Such theories were to be further developed by Adolphe Appia (1862-
1928), the Swiss theorist and designer who renovated theatrical and operatic
2
Form of hymn or choral lyric in which Dionysus was honoured.
scenography. His central ideas, outlined in Music and Theatrical Production

(1899) and The Work of Living Art (1921), advocated a new stagecraft,
which eliminated two-dimensional scene painting and substituted a kind of
sculptural movement, a musical control of the actor’s body in space, fusing
the whole through use of light. The rhythm of stage movement where the
actor’s gestures and movements, akin to dance, spatialised the time units of
music under a play of light and colour, were to achieve a synaesthesia able
to express a platonic reality, an essence of beauty and perfection behind
appearances.
Appia’s theories had much in common with the “eurithmics” of Emile
Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950), the “rhythmic gymnastics” advocated as the
art of the new performer, trained to use the movement of his body like an
instrument, on the assumption that rhythm was the physical expression of
abstract time and space.
Another seminal figure for the course taken by symbolist theatre was
Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), the British stage designer, editor,
founder of a school of acting and dramatic theorist. His ideas, which
developed alongside those of Appia, are chiefly expressed in On the Art of
Theatre (1911) and The Marionette (1918). Craig also argued for an abstract
and ritualistic theatre that would have an equivalent spiritual significance to
the tragedy of classical Greece or the Japanese noh drama3, and against the
3
A serious and subtle dance drama that evolved in Japan in the 14 th century out of earlier songs, dances and
sketches. It was originally performed by priest-performers attached to Budhist temples. Noh plays were
lyric dramas and were intended for aristocratic audiences, differing from the popular kabuki. In noh
performance movement, music and words create an ever-shifting web of tension and ambiguity. A noh text
contains prose and poetry sections. Prose is delivered in a sonorous voice which rises gradually and evenly
in pitch, then drops at the end of a phrase. Poetry sections are sung and they make up the bulk of the text. In
the central narrative module of a play the major character dances a crucial event from his or her past to a
song sung by the Chorus. The vocal pattern is overlaid on rhythm played by musicians on drums and flute.
The noh stage consists of a raised dancing platform, covered by a temple-like roof supported by pillars at
the four corners, which helps to focus the audience’s attention on the performance. At one side is a balcony
which accommodates the chorus, while upstage there is a smaller platform occupied by the musicians. The
literary elements of drama as well as realism. Like the Swiss, Craig also
believed in the need to create a production as a whole, with all its parts,
including the actor, subordinated to the vision of a single man, the director,
who, like a composer, worked to achieve harmony of the various theatre
languages. With light and rhythmic movement seen as the basis of the new
drama, Craig pursued the notion of a flexible stage by means of which an
endless variation of architectural shapes could be created during a
performance. In attempting to realize this, he invented movable screens to
substitute for scenery and attacked conventional acting, apparently
demanding the elimination of the personality – ego- of the human actor,
substituted with his Über-Marionette (i.e. a super-puppet), a masked
performer submitted to his place in the overall shape, whose perfect stillness
of body and gravity of expression was capable of symbolizing, indicating or
demonstrating a truth.
The contemporary dramatist with whom both Appia and Craig shared
most was the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949).
Maeterlinck was fascinated by dimensions that make life elusive, such as
mysterious forces and blindness. Only though contemplation, absolute
silence and inactivity could these be made visible. As such, his plays are
characterized by their lack of action, or conflict, and by their suggestive
force. His early plays, like Les Aveugles (1890) or L’Intruse (1891), are
one-act dramas of silences, shadowy characters, and an immovable scene,
where the disconnected, allusive and repetitive prose dialogue is broken by
long pauses. Pelléas and Mélisande (1893) is typical of his next series of
actors, between two and six in number, wear masks and elaborate costumes, entering and leaving on a long
slanting walk from stage left. There is little or no scenery except for the framework with the roof and three
symbolic trees in front of the slanting walk, representing heaven, earth and humanity.
metaphysical tragedies. Set in an indeterminate medieval world of dream

and fantasy, the play is an atmospheric, fairy tale allegory in which Love
combats Death and loses and where the scenes exist to present symbols as
much as to develop the simple plot, in which the main characters
accidentally meet, fall in love and have to account for it with their lives, but
only after they have kissed each other in joy and defiance of death.
Thresholds, gates, fountains, forest, or castle communicate a powerful sense
of mystery and the opera Debussy created out of it in 1902 asserted the
continuing power of musical and scenic non-naturalist tradition.
Another strong advocate of the movement was the French symbolist
actor and director, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe (1869-1940), who is also
responsible for the break-through to public recognition of the religious plays
of the French diplomat Paul Claudel (1868-1955). A friend and disciple of
Mallarmé, and strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel wrote a series of
plays, like Partage de midi (1905), L’Annonce Faite à Marie (1905) and
L’Otage (1909), which dramatized his Catholic faith and repeated, in a
variety of ways, the theme of human love transformed into the spiritual and
the divine. Their style and tone is symbolist, lyrical and ritualistic, with little
action and much poetry, as they rely for their power partly on Claudel’s
peculiar verse. Written for declamation, Caudel’s lines nevertheless have a
variety and subtlety that can fairly be compared with the Shakespearean
blank verse.
BRITISH SYMBOLIST DRAMA

Though the naturalistic definition of modernism promoted by Shaw and

Archer – concentrating on social issues and appealing to reason –
automatically tended to depreciate the spiritual aspect of existence,
dramatists like Wilde, Yeats or Eliot, disdaining everyday reality and the
realism that reflected it, committed themselves to symbolism as an anti-
naturalistic mode of playwriting able to convey “the permanent and the
universal”, the archetypal or the transcendental dimensions of life.
a) Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Wilde’s early apprentice plays unsuccessfully explored the realm of

melodrama and verse tragedy, commonplaces of the 19th century stage.
Thus, Vera: or, The Nihilists (1883) is a melodrama about a group of
Russian revolutionary terrorists (or idealists – as Wilde poses the
alternatives.) His second play, The Duchess of Padua (1891) is a costume
tragedy in blank verse, first staged, like Vera, in New York. It was not until
1892, the year after the publication of his controversial novel, The Picture of
Dorian Gray, that Wilde began to find his own voice in drama. There
followed the series of his social comedies, brilliant and witty plays whose
success lay in parodying the existing modes. Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
can formally be considered a text-book example of the well-made play, in
which the heroine’s reputation rests on the discreet recovery of a fan. A
Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) are, in terms
of plot and subject-matter, problem plays of the kind the contemporary
drama of Pinero and Jones offered. What subverts the tone and ethos of such
models is Wilde’s dialogue. His upper-class dandies and dowagers have
made so merry with the values that the plays purport to uphold that the
saving of a marriage has, by the time it is achieved, little more significance
than the saving of a cigarette card. Nevertheless in these plays the stagey
contrivances are a constraint and Wilde gives no indication of relishing the
mechanical plotting of his well-made plays. It is quite otherwise with his
masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where a stylized plot
matches the verbal epigrams of the play. By the doubling of characters,
mirror situations, multiplying revelations, the play becomes a parody
pastiche of contemporary melodrama, with its plot elements exaggerated
into absurdity, while the contrariness of the title – i.e. the importance of not
being earnest – is sustained throughout the play. With the sensational trial in
1895 and the playwright’s subsequent imprisonment in Reading Gaol,
Wilde’s dramatic career came to an end, though Salomé (1892), an one-act
play on a biblical theme, written in French the same year with Lady
Windermere’s Fan and banned from production by the Chamberlain’s Office
because of its use of scriptural characters, was finally staged in Paris in
1896 by Lugné-Poe.
Salomé not only represents the counterpart to Wilde’s social
comedies, explicitely rejecting the morality that the society reflected in them
represented, but it also ranks as the earliest and most complete British
example of symbolist drama. The legend of the beautiful Jewish princess
and her destructive love for John the Baptist, which recurs in the writings of
French symbolists like Mallarmé, Massnettet, and is employed by
Maeterlinck himself in La Princess Maligne (1889), is reworked by Wilde in
a play which becomes the antithesis of naturalist theatre, replacing plot and
characterization by the aesthetic values of colour, musical rhythm and dance.
All characters seem to move in a dream, in which their desire and fatal
yearning lead to the inevitable denoumént. Salomé seduces the imagination
of the Young Syrian, then of Herod – the Tetrach of Judea and her
stepfather, while she, herself, is hypnotized by Jokanaan, the prophet, who
repulses her. As the horrified Syrian kills himself at her feet, the Princess
swears that she will kiss Jokanaan’s lips. The climax of the play is
represented by Salomé’s dance of the seven veils. Herod offers her three
inducements to dance, but the reward Salomé wants is the Prophet’s head.
Again, Herod offers her three bribes to give up her demand, but the Princess
cannot be persuaded and is finally offered the head on a silver salver. But
this victory is also her defeat. Kissing the mouth, she discovers that “love
hath a bitter taste”, while Herod’s desire turns into disgust and orders his
soldiers to crush Salomé with their shields. As such, Salomé’s dance and her
killing (which represents a significant change from the Biblical source)
becomes a celebration of the destruction of the social establishment
represented by Herod, literally breaking the succession to his authoritarian
rule.
The overt artifice of stylized speech and simplified action, the
recurring motifs and repetitive patterns make the play overtly symbolic.
Thus it becomes the expression of a purely subjective reality patterned by
leit-motifs of colour and symbol, built up musically with incantatory
repetitions, alternating shouts and whispers, while its strongest moments are
powerfully ritualistic.
b) William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Where Wilde’s Salomé remains a period piece associated with fin-de-siécle

aestheticism, W. B. Yeats’s drama has been seen as the model for British
avant-garde theatre.
The major figure behind the rise of the Irish dramatic movement,
Yeats’s drama was part of a larger design which hoped to revive a national
culture in a country where legendary subjects still seemed to have life in
themselves, as well as to bring back poetry to the theatre, the poetry that it
had missed in Ibsen and the naturalist school. Because his conscious aim
was to “create for a few people who love symbol a play that will be more a
ritual than a play, and leave upon the mind an impression like that of
tapestry, where the forms only half-reveal themselves and the shadowy
folds” (Hinchliffe, 20), Yeats turned away from the naturalist stage towards
other forms of drama which could convey a different kind of reality, caught
up in myth, in the drama of the past and in the supernatural.
The model at hand was the Japanese Noh play being translated by
Ezra Pound and, possibly, by Yeats himself. Both Arthur Walley and
Fenellosa had insisted that these plays were analogous to Greek and
Elizabethan theatre in their religious origins and could be used as models to
restore drama to its original power, evoking a sacred presence with all the
devices of ceremony, dance, poetry and scenery – a ritual that came close to
fulfilling Yeats’s own dramatic ambitions. As mentioned before, the aims
and repertoire of the Noh play were firmly established by the fifteenth
century and the isolation of Japan as well as the patronage of the richest and
most powerful families ensured its survival as an art form. The words may
not be very important (and are, anyway, muffled by the masks) but the finest
poetry is used in combination with music, masks and dancing. The
avoidance of realism is complete, everything inessential is excluded and the

subjects are those basic emotions – love, hate and jealousy – which inspire
most drama. The technical demands upon both performers and audience
ensure that it is a minority theatre, but it offered Yeats a theatre form of
historical importance which did more than merely represent life.
The sequence of Yeats’s “Plays for Dancers”, including At the
Hawks’ Well (1916), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1916), The Dreaming of
the Bones (1917) and Calvary (1920) is illustrative of the elements that the
playwright borrowed from the Noh: a framing chorus, separated from the
action, strictly limited gesture and non-naturalistic movement, and a
minimal action culminating in a dance. As such, character was presented at
the point where individualization merges with type, while acting was
stylized and the performers were apt to remain still for long moments of
great muscular tension. In these conditions, the words could work to greater
effect and ensure that the play achieve a symbolic concentration able to
communicate a state almost of trance.
At the Hawks’ Well exhibits a typical structure for Yeats’s “Plays for
Dancers”. A short play in verse, telling the story of the young Cuchulain and
his wish to drink from the well of immortality, it has only three characters
listed as: the Young Man (Cuchulain), the Old Man, the Guardian of the
Well (a dancer’s part played by a girl who never speaks.) The scenery is
reduced to a single blank screen at the rear, and a patch of blue fabric on the
floor standing for the well. Musical accompaniment is limited to rhythmic
instruments: drum, gong, zither. The stage curtain is replaced by a square of
cloth, on which a golden hawk – the dominant image of the play – has been
painted. Ceremonially unfolded and refolded by the Musicians, it also
provides the cover under which the actors take their positions at the
beginning of the play, and exit at the end. The inner play is equally austere:
Cuchulain, the vigorous and aspiring man of action, arrives at the well
whose waters are said to give immortality. There he meets the old man who,
though has watched it for more than fifty years, has missed each of its
upsurgings of magic water, being enchanted into sleep by the Guardian’s
dance. The Guardian herself is possessed by the hawk spirit of the Woman
of the Sidhe, whom Cuchulain has already met and antagonized. Then the
action of the play shows the process that the Old Man has described: the
Guardian’s premonition of possession presage the arrival of the water of life;
she rises and dances, her dance lulling the old man to sleep and luring
Cuchulain away off stage. Afterwards, his disappointment is realized to the
sound of the warrior women of Aoife, roused by the goddess to religious war
against the intruder. While the Old Man appeals to him to remain by the well
and wait for another upsurge of water, Cuchulain leaves, choosing a
wandering combative life and embracing thus his heroic destiny.
c) T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
T. S. Eliot acknowledged and built on Yeats’s contribution to modern poetic

drama, even if at one point he suggested in his critical writings that Yeats’s
“Plays for Dancers”, which had renounced popular appeal being intent for a
select few, “an audience like a secret society” (Hodgson, 80), did not solve
the problems encountered by the modern verse dramatist. For Eliot,
Shakespeare was the model to be followed, as a playwright whose plays had
been able to appeal for all kinds of audience, both unsophisticated and
educated. As he wrote in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, “in a
play by Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest
auditor, there is the plot, for the more thoughtful – the character and conflict
of character; for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more
musically sensitive, the rhythm; and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and
understanding, a meaning which reveals itself gradually.” (Styan) Thus
Eliot’s solution was to incorporate in his plays a multiplicity of levels of
appreciation in order to pursue his goal of writing a successful poetic drama
for the 20th-century audience. As such Eliot adapted the popular forms of
drama of his time (the detective play, or the drawing-room comedy format)
in order to render his serious, spiritual themes.
Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play commission by The Religious
Drama Society fir the 1935 Canterbury Festival and Eliot’s first dramatic
success, treated a Christian martyrdom as if it was a murder, so that, despite
its static form and medieval subject, it was subsequently transferred on the
commercial stage. The structure of the play builds up the story of Thomas
Becket, the 12th century martyr, through Chorus, priests, Tempters and
Thomas himself. Divided in two parts, it starts with Becket’s arrival at his
Cathedral from France, determined to resist the submission of Church to
State (which Henry demands.) Four Tempters appear to test Henry’s
decision, and the last of them is the most difficult to resist, insinuating that
pride is motivating the Archbishop. But the Chorus of the women of
Canterbury (who express the related anguish of the whole community)
enable Thomas, through their pleads, to overcome the paralysis of will
induced by the last Tempter. In the second part, the four knights, intent to
punish Thomas, arrive at the Cathedral, and their physical threat implicates
the audience in the brutality and political expedience of the murder. The play
ends on the Chorus’s concluding thanksgiving to Thomas’s testimony
through martyrdom. Thus, Becket’s death is presented as an imitation of
Christ’s own martyrdom, for Becket becomes the Christian subject who
renounces his own free will in order to subject to the pattern designed for
him by God’s will. The imagery and rhythms of the Choral verse are
designed to carry the audience through the same spiritual progression as
Thomas himself, while the use of colloquial prose in the Knights’ direct
address to the public reinforces the identification between the two by
breaking through the temporal distance and implying thus that the 20th-
century loss of faith is no less guilty of Becket’s death than the historical
characters themselves.
In his next plays, Eliot rejected the overtly religious drama (as
preaching to the already converted) and turned, instead, to secular topics in
order to “allow a Christian mentality to permeate the theatre, to affect it, and
to influence audiences who might be obdurate to plays of direct religious
appeal” (Lemming). As such, Eliot’s social (or drawing-room) comedies,
while continuing to experiment with the choral form, turn to Greek myth in
order to establish a parallel to the surface action, in order to achieve “a
doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once” (Innes), a
metaphoric quality which is the characteristic of poetic/symbolist drama.
The Family Reunion (1938) is paralleled by the events and characters
of Aeschylus’s The Orestia. Clytemnestra finds an equivalent in Amy the
dominant mother, while Harry parallels Orestes, the returning son
responsible for his mother’s death. The plays borrows a misleading detective
frame, with a confession of murder (the hero, who returns home to attend his
mother’s birthday celebration, is convinced to have murdered his wife, and

he confesses this to his half-incredulous and half-panicked relatives),
questioning of the suspect, and a possible witness to the crime, as well as the
appearance of a police agent. But Harry’s guilt is imaginary. He is simply
repeating inherited patterns, for his dream of pushing his wife overboard, at
sea, is a projection of his father’s plan to drown Harry’s pregnant mother in
a well on the estate. Where Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Harry’s
father was persuaded not to dispose of Amy because this would have meant
killing his unborn child. Moreover, the net that traps him is the web of
family responsibilities, and instead of being butchered with an axe, his life is
sapped by his wife’s implacable will to preserve the status quo. The sins are
those of omission, and the curse lies in repeating the past rather than a
developing pattern of vengeance. Similarly, it is Harry’s refusal to
perpetuate the hell of unreality (as symbolized by the country estate of
Wishwood) that kills Amy, destroyed by his departure. But instead of
fleeing in guilt, like Orestes, Harry’s exit is to be seen as a triumph, while
the tragedy is that of his mother, of a person living on will alone. Such
hidden parallels are signaled by breaking naturalistic expectations, and, in
turn, the unnatural actions of the characters are justified by their
correspondence to the myth. The dialogue, reflecting the various levels of
the action, switches between colloquial and heightened verse, visionary
trances, unconscious utterance and chanted incantation, while the classical
figures of the pursuing Fate are listed explicitly in the cast as “The
Eumenides” – tangible embodiments of the myth, who, at first, haunt Harry
as avengers of his wife, but later come to personify his spiritual change.
Yet, even with the shifts of consciousness in the play, the coexistence
of two such different dimensions of reality proved incongruous on the stage,
so that, with his next play, The Cocktail Party ( 1949), Eliot resolved this
“failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation”
(Innes) by concealing the plot’s mythical origins.
The preliminary basis for the play was Euripides’s Alcestis. But here
the Eumenides are disguised as a psychiatrist, colonial envoy , and
interfering unofficial aunt, interacting with the social group they manipulate.
This concealed mythical level is replaced by an external shaping of
experience through the imposition of a geometrical symmetry on the surface
plot. Not only the missing wife has a lover, but the latter one is in love with
the mistress of the husband, whom he selects as a confidant, forming thus a
quadrilateral equation. In addition, the action is circular, beginning with the
end of one party, and ending with the preparations for another.
The Confidential Clerk (1953) takes this to an extreme. The model is
Euripides’s Ions, but the plot follows it in that Eliot has three dubiously
parented young people in the play (a husband and a wife each have a
misplaced illegitimate child, and both recognize him in the tile figure; he, in
turn, is revealed to have lost his real father, and chooses his clerical
predecessor, whose own child was lost in the war, as his true spiritual
parent.) Where the original myth had a single child – the son of Apollo,
believed dead by his mother who tries to kill him when adopted by her
husband – Eliot adds an illegitimate daughter and a second unacknowledged
son, accentuating thus the parallelism to a farcical level, the automatic
association being not with a classical archetype, but rather with Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Earnest.
Increasingly, in Eliot’s later plays, the mythical subtext becomes

more tenuous and, as the social mode comes to dominate, the verse takes on
the attributes of ordinary conversation. His last play, The Elder Statesman
(1958) resembles Oedipus at Colonus only in the fact that the aged
protagonists of both plays go away led by loving daughters and, after
resisting messengers from the past, die reconciled with the gods. But the plot
of The Elder Statesman, where two blackmailers appear out of Lord
Claverton’s past demanding not money but acknowledgement of their
existence, while the Lord’s own guilty secret (running over the body of a
man already killed by another driver) is equally imaginary reduces the
motivation for the spiritual conversion of its protagonists, who lack any
convincing personal reality.
Eliot’s plays can thus be seen as a progressive series of experiments,
each tackling the dramaturgical problems revealed by his previous attempt to
create a specifically modern form of poetic drama.
The most direct influence of his poetic drama is to be found with

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

DRAMA
1. Traditionalism vs modernism: A. W. Pinero’s “The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray”
2. G. B. Shaw: Thesis drama and Technique in “Man and Superman”
3. Naturalist Premises in J. Galsworthy’s “The Silver Box”
4. The “kitchen-sink” play: D.H.Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs.
Holroyd.
5. The “kitchen-sink” play: Arnold Wesker’s Roots.
6. John Osborne’s Alienation: Look Back in Anger.
7. Expressionist devices in Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie.
8. The radio play: Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood.
9. Edward Bond’s epic theatre: Lear.
10. The British Brecht: John Arden and “Sg Musgrave’s Dance”
11. Symbolism and theatre: Oscar Wilde’s Salome
12. Symbolism and myth in W.B.Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well.
13. Symbolism and religious drama: T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the

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

7. TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH DRAMA.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. ANDERSON, MICHAEL et. al. (1971) Crowell’s Handbook of

Contemporary Drama, New York: Thomas J. Crowell Company.
2. BENHAM, MARTIN (ed.) (1992) The Cambridge Guide to Theatre,

Revised Edition, Cambridge, New York, Victoria: Cambridge U.P.
3. BIRCH, DAVID (1991) The Language of Drama. Critical Theory

and Practice, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan
Education Ltd. (The Language of Literature).
4. BROWN, JOHN RUSSELL (1982) A Short Guide to Modern British

Drama, London: Heinemann Educational Books.
5. CASE, SUE ELLEN (1988) Feminism and Theatre, London and

Basingstoke: Macmillan.
6. CAVANAGH, JOHN (1989) British Theatre: A Bibliography. 1901 to

1985, Mottisfont: Motley Press.
7. CHAMBERS, COLLIN; PRIOR, MIKE (1987) Playwrights’ Progress:

Patterns of Post-War Drama, Oxford: Amber Lane Press.
8. CLARK, IAN (1989) Edwardian Drama: A Critical Study, London,

Boston: Faber and Faber.
9. DAVIES, ANDREW (1987) Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and

Experimental Theatre in Britain, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd.
10. DRAIN, RICHARD (ed.) (1995) Twentieth Century Theatre: A

Sourcebook, London and New York: Routledge.
11. ELSOM, JOHN (1976) Post-War British Theatre, London, Henley and Boston: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
12. GASCOIGNE, BAMBER (1974) Twentieth Century Drama, London:

Hutchinson University Library.
13. HARTNOLL, PHYLLIS (1968) A Concise History of the Theatre, London: Thames and
Hudson.
14. HINCHLIFFE, ARNOLD P. (1974) British Theatre:1950-1970, Oxford: Basil Blackwell

(Drama and Theatre Studies).
15. HINCHLIFFE, ARTHUR P. (1977) Modern Verse Drama, London: Methuen & Co.
16. HODGSON, TERRY (1992) Modern Drama: From Ibsen to Fugard, London:
B.T.Batsford.
17. HUNT, HUGH; RICHARDS, KENNETH; TAYLOR, JOHN RUSSELL (1978)

The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 7. 1880 to the Present Day,
London: Methuen and Co. Ltd.; New York: Barnes and Noble Books.
18. INNES, CHRISTOPHER (1992) Modern British Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.
19. JACOBUS, LEE A. (ed.) (1989) The Bedford Introduction to Drama, New York: St.
Martin’s Press.
20. JENKINS, ANTHONY (1991) The Making of Victorian Drama, Cambridge, New
York, Port Chester: Cambridge U.P.
21. LEEMING, GLENDA (1989) Poetic Drama, Houndmills, London: Macmillan

Education (Macmillan Modern Dramatists).
22. RABEY, DAVID IAN (1986) British and Irish Political Drama in
the Twentieth Century: Implicating the Audience, London
and Basingstoke: Macmillan.
23. SALGADO, GAMINI (1980) English Drama: A Critical Introduction,

London: Edward Arnold.
24. STYAN, J.L. (1981) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol.
3. Expressionism and Epic Theatre, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge
U.P.
25. STYAN, J.L. (1991) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol.1.
Realism and Naturalism, Cambridge et al.: Cambridge U.P.
26. STYAN, J.L. (1992) Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol.2.
Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd, Cambridge et al.,
Cambridge U.P.
27. TAYLOR, JOHN RUSSELL (1974) A Dictionary of the Theatre,

Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
28. WANDOR, MICHELINE (1993) Drama Today: 1970-1990, London:

Longman and The British Council.
29. WORTH, KATHERINE J. (1973) Revolutions in Modern English

Drama, London: G. Bell and Sons.

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THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF MODERN BRITISH DRAMA

OPTIONAL COURSE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

4TH YEAR STUDENTS IN ENGLISH

COURSE TUTOR: DR. IOANA MOHOR-IVAN

1. ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE

2. REALISM/NATURALISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

3. EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

4. EPIC THEATRE AND THE BRITISH STAGE

5. SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

6. SUGGESTED ESSAY TOPICS

1. ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE

and actions performed by actors impersonating the characters of the story.

DRAMATIC ILLUSION: the illusion of reality created by drama and

accepted by the audience for the duration of the play

THEATRE: a) the building in which a play is performed

 arena stage: a stage surrounded on all sides by the audience;

actors make exists and entrances through the aisles.

 thrust stage: a stage extending beyond the proscenium arch,

usually surrounded on three sides by the audience.

 proscenium stage: a stage having an arched structure at the

action onstage and separates the audience from the action.

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

TRAGEDY: serious drama in which a protagonist, traditionally of noble

position, suffers a series of unhappy events culminating in a catastrophe

such as death or spiritual breakdown.

COMEDY: a type of drama intended to interest and amuse rather than to

concern the audience deeply. Although characters experience various

fortune and find happiness in the end.

TRAGICOMEDY: play that combines elements of tragedy and comedy.

Tragedies also include a serious plot in which the expected tragic

catastrophe is replaced by a happy ending.

MELODRAMA: a suspenseful play filled with situations that appeal

excessively to the audience’s emotions. Justice triumphs in a happy ending:

characters (thoroughly villainous) are punished.

PLOT: the events of a play or narrative. The sequence and relative

importance a dramatist assigns to these events.

CHARACTER: any person appearing in a drama or narrative.

action takes place.

DIALOGUE: spoken interchange or conversation between two or more

Realism in the last half of the 19th-century began as an experiment to make

1. The nineteenth-century theatrical background

• Closet drama: a literary composition written in the form of a play

provide popular entertainment for the urban poor. Ancestors:

2. The naturalist movement:

It opposed romantic situations and characterisation, aiming to put on stage

a) Zola: early theory

b) Henrik Ibsen (1826 – 1906): the “father of modern drama”

• Ibsen is held to be the greatest of Norwegian authors and one of

shattered the illusions of his audiences by introducing a critical eye

c) André Antoine, the Theatre Libre and a new production style

André Antoine (1858 – 1943) was a French actor-manager, who

and acting, unobtrusive stage-movement, realistic furnishings and

d) Stanislavsky and a new acting style

• Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863 – 1938) was a Russian actor and

o Actors should be skilled observers of reality in order to

e) Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904): the “theatre of mood”

Russian playwright and one of the great masters of modern short

conflicts between four theatrical characters: the ingenue