ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THEATRE AND

PERFORMANCE
Realism
Aleks Sierz
Rose Bruford College

INTRODUCTION
For today’s theatregoers, the terms realism and naturalism are often
confused, and the reason for this is that there is considerable overlap
between the two. Realism, like naturalism, refers to shows that create
an illusion of real life on stage. Audiences talk about a ‘realistic’ situation
or a ‘real’ style of acting. To be realistic means the representation of
credible characters, a plausible plot, and recognisably everyday
language and settings. The idea is that good art should try to represent
daily reality as closely as possible, as opposed to overtly symbolic,
clearly artificial or blatantly theatrical ways of telling a story. During the
20th century, realism became the chief acting style in cinema and
television, as well as on stage. This is now the default mode of most
mainstream Anglo-American theatre. So although there are many
similarities between naturalism and realism, the theatrical history and
precise meaning of the two terms differs. While realism is a general term
that can be used to describe any play that depicts ordinary people in
everyday situations, naturalism is a specific kind of realism.

HISTORY
While each generation has often claimed to create a more realistic theatre
than that of the previous one, in modern theatre the history of realism starts
in the middle of the 19th century, when theatre makers aimed to replace
the artificial romantic style, and the exaggerated gestures of melodrama,
with more accurate depictions of ordinary people in believable situations.
Realism then revolutionised theatre in every aspect, from its scenery to its
acting style, from playwriting to performers’ make-up, although this was a
gradual process. It usually involved substituting life-like dialogue for verse




declamation, plots about everyday situations for mythical stories, and
recognisable characterisation for heroic romantic posturing.

In 1848, the wave of democratic revolutions that swept through Europe

focused the minds of artists on depicting ordinary people, mainly as a
reaction against the idealistic portrayals of reality common in classicism
and romanticism. This was seen as a more democratic way of doing art
than the representation of mythological gods or heroic individuals. Such
was the context for the emergence not only of realism, but also of social
realism: instead of creating idealised and beautiful images, the artists who
advocated social realism concentrated more on the ugly realities of
ordinary life, and especially on the condition of the urban poor. Often,
these paintings and novels were motivated by left-wing or liberal
sympathies and implicitly advocated the reform of bad living conditions. So
social realism was, from the beginning, a political as well as an aesthetic
project and, gradually, the theatre became influenced by these powerful
trends.

In Britain, an early attempt at theatrical realism was the staging of Society

by TW Robertson (1829—71) in 1865 by Marie Wilton (1831—1921), manager
of the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. A former burlesque performer,
she staged other plays by this playwright, who specialised in everyday
comedies featuring ordinary people. One of her actors was Squire Bancroft
(1841—1926), who appeared in Robertson’s masterpiece Caste (1867). After
its success, Wilton and Bancroft married, and together they pioneered a
new kind of play which become known as cup-and-saucer drama. Its
dialogue was conversational and understated, thus breaking with the
conventions of broad farce and barnstorming melodrama. The settings
were domestic, and the actors were trained to speak naturally, rather than
to declaim. Instead of painted flats, the Bancrofts developed the realistic
box set with three walls, and their sets had real-life furnishings such as, for
example, working doors with real door handles. Domestic activities — such
as making a roly-poly pudding — took place on stage.

In Europe, the move away from melodrama, stereotypical characters and

stilted dialogue to ‘the most realistic style’ was led by Henrik Ibsen (1828—
1906), a Norwegian playwright who is often called the father of modern
realism (Innes, 2000). Ibsen broke with convention by creating three-
dimensional, middle-class characters and serious plays about

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contemporary issues. His dramas — such as The Pillars of Society (1877),
Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), Hedda Gabler (1890) and
especially A Doll’s House (1897) — tackled social problems such as
corruption in business, abuse of power, sexual hypocrisy and moral
selfishness.

Ibsen was joined by Russian realist playwrights, especially Anton Chekhov

(1860—1904). His four major plays — The Seagull (1896), Uncle Vanya
(1899), The Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904) — are
exemplary models of realism in modern theatre. The dialogue is
conversational, the action understated and the subtext of the dialogues is
as important as what is being said. Chekhov used understatement,
moments of anti-climax and broken conversations, as well as subtly implied
feeling, to create a sense of verisimilitude. In this, he was greatly helped
by his collaboration with the Moscow Art Theatre, run by Vladimir
Nemirovich-Danchenko (1858—1943) and Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863—
1938). Stanislavsky made the first serious steps to systematically develop
realistic acting in both theory and practice. As well as working with
Chekhov, Stanislavsky directed plays by another Russian realist playwright,
Maxim Gorki (1868—1936), whose social realism represented the poverty
of working class life. In rehearsals for his production of Gorki’s The Lower
Depths (1902), Stanislavsky sent his actors into the Moscow slums to
prepare for their roles as beggars and drunks.

The growth of realism was helped by a handful of small alternative theatres.

The Moscow Art Theatre, for example, was influenced by André Antoine
(1858—1943) and his Thèâtre Libre (Free Theatre) in Paris. Set up in 1887
with a group of amateur actors, the Thèâtre Libre specialised in short runs
of controversial plays that other theatres were afraid to stage for fear of
censorship or moral backlash. One of the most important was Émile Zola’s
Thérèse Raquin in 1887, as well as Ibsen’s Ghosts , whose story about
marital infidelity and hereditary syphilis resulted in it being banned in most
of Europe. Antoine aimed at creating realistic sets with enormous attention
to detail. His box sets were accurate reconstructions of rooms, complete
with, for example, windows that worked even if they were not used. He
included real-life props such as beef carcasses in The Butchers (1888) or
live chickens in The Earth (1902). He sometimes rehearsed actors on stage
with a temporary ‘fourth wall’ blocking off the playing space from the
auditorium. This would then be removed for performances, but the actors

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would continue to play to one another, making the performance look and
sound more realistic.

Antoine’s ideas affected thinking all over Europe, and influenced several
companies, such as Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne (Free Stage) in Berlin, set
up in 1889, which supported the provocative plays of Gerhart Hauptmann,
and Jack Grein’s Independent Theatre Society (ITS) in London, set up in
1891. The ITS, and later its successor the Stage Society, produced
controversial shows such as Ibsen’s Ghosts, as well as the work of British
realist playwrights like George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker and
Arthur Wing Pinero, whose work the critic William Archer called ‘the school
of Robertsonian realism’, an allusion to the pioneering work of the
Bancrofts. These playwrights used the form of the well-made play to
explore contemporary social issues, and examples of this kind of Problem
Play include Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893, about the Woman
Question) and Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902, about prostitution).

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the type of realism called social
realism was developed by the new Russian regime into socialist realism,
which became the official art form of the Soviet Union and depicted
idealised heroic and unrealistic images of workers and farmers. It was a
form of state propaganda. Then, after World War II, left-liberal social realism
was revived in the West and became fashionable in British theatre after the
success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, which led to a new
wave of Angry Young Men and the genre of kitchen-sink drama, whose
practitioners included playwrights such as Arnold Wesker and John Arden.
British cinema also took up the aesthetics of social realism in the Free
Cinema movement, which put ordinary people with ordinary problems onto
the big screen. Examples include Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
(1962), This Sporting Life (1963), and, on BBC television, Cathy Come Home
(1966).

THEORY
The terms realism and naturalism are often confused, and the reason for
this is that there is considerable overlap between the two. But although

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naturalism has a theory, which was developed by novelist Émile Zola
(1840—1902), there is no one theory of realism. Since the mid-nineteenth
century, young theatre-makers have defined realism in opposition to
established practitioners, whose work they claimed is too unrealistic or too
artificial. In almost every new generation, theatre-makers create new
theatre conventions which they see as more real than previous
conventions.

Despite the absence of one single theory of realism, this trend in theatre
was a response to changes in economy, society and culture. Most accounts
agree that the development of realism was greatly influenced by French
culture of the early 19th century: realist painters such as Gustave Courbet
(1819—77) and realist novelists such as Honoré de Balzac and Gustav
Flaubert. Courbet used the word realism as the title for a manifesto he
wrote for an exhibition of his works in 1855. In Russia, the painter Ilya Repin
and the novelist Leo Tolstoy pioneered the idea of social realism. All were
influenced by the expansion of science in general, and photography in
particular. Commercial photography began in the 1840s and the ability to
depict reality so directly soon had an effect on all the arts. At the same
time, the forces of industrialisation and urbanisation created a climate in
which new ideas about the human condition could flourish. Crucial to this
was the influence of the three giants of modern thought: Charles Darwin,
Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Although realist theatre was originally avant-garde, it gradually became —

over the course of the early 20th century — the mainstream aesthetic of
British and American theatre. As such, it has been constantly challenged
by other avant-garde movements, which all question how realistic realism
is, and which suggest that their particular theatre style is more realistic
because it conveys truths that are, in some way, beyond the reach of
everyday reality. So symbolist playwrights argue that poetry and fantasy
have more truth value than mundane reality; and surrealists believe that
they convey the truth of dreams and of the unconscious. But perhaps the
most profound challenge to mainstream realism came from Bertolt Brecht
(1898—1956). To simplify, Brecht argued that his conception of epic theatre
was distinct from realist theatre, especially psychological realism (which
solicits the audience to identify with stage characters), because it
prioritises detachment and rational thought about the politics of the drama

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rather than absorption (getting lost) in the action. He saw realism as mere
escapism.

Another more recent attack on realism and on social realism came from
post-dramatic theatre, which ‘registers a dissatisfaction with drama’s two
fundamental processes: the representation of the external world and the
structuring of time’, (Barnett). Popularised by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his
book Postdramatic Theatre (German 1999; English translation 2006), the
term post-dramatic theatre includes a wide range of contemporary forms,
including devised work and live art. Examples from the canon include Peter
Handke’s Offending the Audience (1966), Heiner Müller’s The
Hamletmachine (1977), and in British theatre, Martin Crimp’s Attempts on
Her Life (1997) and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (2000). All of these plays
radically question the established conventions of theatrical realism.

PRACTICE
Ibsen and Chekhov are key figures in the advance of European realism,
although their work has also sometimes been interpreted as examples of
naturalism. In 1883, Ibsen wrote to director and theatre manager August
Lindberg, who was about to premier Ibsen’s Ghosts in Helsingborg,
Sweden, giving a good description of the aims of realism: ‘The effect of the
play depends a great deal on making the spectator feel as if he [sic] were
actually sitting, listening, and looking at events happening in real life’
(Ibsen, cited in Innes, 2000, p.76). By real life, he meant psychological
realism.

In A Doll’s House, Ibsen adapted standard theatre conventions of his time

in order to achieve greater psychological and emotional realism. He turned
the traditional five-act play into the more compact three acts, with the story
told by a small number of characters (five) and taking place in a single
location over about 60 hours. This creates a realistic framework which
focuses the audience on the psychology of the characters rather than on
the action and thus creates realism by means of greater intensity of feeling.
Instead of the generalised emotions and stereotypical psychology of
melodrama, Ibsen creates realistic and individual mental states.

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When the play premiered in 1879 in Copenhagen, Erik Boegh, Danish
playwright and critic, noted that it was innovative because of its simplicity
of action and its ‘everyday’ dress, and that it broke decisively with the
traditions of melodrama: ‘Not a single declamatory phrase, no high
dramatics, no drop of blood, not even a tear’ (Worrall, cited in Ibsen, 2008,
xxvi). Ibsen uses the classic devices of the standard well-made play,
especially the idea of the woman with a past and of the unopened letter,
to create suspense, but he then turns these conventions on their head.
Having led the audience to believe that the story will have a conventionally
happy ending and that Nora will be reconciled to her husband, he instead
shows how middle-class marriage is based on hypocrisy and on women
pretending to be childlike. The play’s realistic ending, when the ‘miracle’
that Nora expects from her husband — his understanding of why she stole
money on his behalf — fails to materialise, is a triumphant example of
psychological realism. In the end, she chooses to leave her husband and
her children, slamming the door as she departs. It may not be happy, but it
is emotionally realistic.

Likewise, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard is a good example of

psychological realism. The characters appear to be true to life and
believable because they are complex and not stereotypes. As Chekhov
said, ‘The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they
say; his only job is to be an impartial witness’ (Chekhov, cited in Innes, 2000,
p. 137). In other words, his idea of realism was to create characters who
have contradictions, who think about the people around them and about
their situation, and who sometimes act unreasonably. They are objectively
complex individuals. One way of conveying this complexity is through the
use of subtext. Subtext is the unsaid meaning underneath the words
spoken by characters. At the end of the play, as the household is breaking
up, while the audience expects Lopakhin to propose marriage to Varya
(and know that this potential marriage is on the minds of both characters),
Lopakhin starts talking nervously about the weather and the distances he
needs to travel while she fusses about with the luggage. Although they are
talking about mundane everyday things, they are both thinking about
whether or when Lopakhin will propose (in the end he does not). This is a
good example of subtext and psychological realism. Another realistic
technique that Chekhov uses is that of indirect action, which means that
important plot incidents happen offstage. Instead of seeing these
incidents, the audience learns about them by watching characters

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discussing them onstage. Lopakhin’s speech at the end of Act III,
recounting the sale of the cherry orchard, is the most important example
of indirect action in the play: although the audience does not see the sale,
the entire play revolves around this offstage action.

FURTHER READING

Bentley, E. (1976). The theory of the modern stage: An introduction to

modern theatre and drama. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Carlson, M. (1993). Theories of the theatre: A historical and critical survey,

from the Greeks to the present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Cash, J. (2017). Realism and Naturalism Theatre Conventions. [online] The

Drama Teacher. Available at: http://www.thedramateacher.com/realism-
and-naturalism-theatre-conventions/ [Accessed 8 Jun. 2017].

Chekhov, A. (1995). The cherry orchard. London: Methuen Student Edition.

Dramaonlinelibrary.com. (2017). Post-dramatic theatre - Drama Online.

[online] Available at: http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/genres/post-
dramatic-theatre-iid-2516 [Accessed 8 Jun. 2017].

Dramaonlinelibrary.com. (2017). Naturalistic/realistic drama - Drama Online.

[online] Available at:
http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/genres/naturalistic-realistic-drama-iid-
2495 [Accessed 8 Jun. 2017].

Gale, M. and Deeney. J (2010). The Routledge Drama Anthology and

Sourcebook: From modernism to contemporary performance. London:
Routledge.

Ibsen, H. (2008). A doll’s house. London: Methuen Student Edition.

Innes, C. (2000). A sourcebook on naturalist theatre. London: Routledge.

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Megson, C. (2010). The Methuen drama book of naturalistic plays . London:
Methuen Drama.

Routledgeperformancearchive.com. (2017). Stanislavski, Konstantin -

Routledge Performance Archive . [online] Available at:
https://www.routledgeperformancearchive.com/browse/practitioners/stani
slavski-konstantin [Accessed 8 Jun. 2017].

Styan, J L. (1983). Modern drama in theory and practice volume 1: Realism

and naturalism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.