UNIT 3: THEATRE BETWEEN WARS

MODERNISM

 Between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II

 Great social and political changes that completely transformed the society of
old Europe.
- World War I and the subsequent end of the former Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
- The resentment of Germany
- The Russian Revolution
- Irish Independence and the Irish Civil War
- The partition of Ireland and the beginning of the Free State
- The Wall Street Crash of 1929 with its impact on European workers and the
middle class
- The rise of Nazism and the spread of Communism
- The Spanish Civil War

 Modernism: a revolution in the arts involving literature, architecture, design,

music, cinema, painting, and theatre
- Cosmopolitanism
- Everything had to be invented anew and, at the same time, European
culture had to be preserved for prosperity
- “Art for art’s sake” coexisted with the political commitment of artists
- Innovation and transformation of old literary styles
- Popular culture and high culture coexisted in the same authors

 The outbreak of the Second World War put an end to Modernism

THE IRISH QUESTION

 Late 19th century: “Irish Renaissance” or “Irish Literary Revival”

 Revive the old Gaelic culture and language and press for Irish Independence
 Irish National Theatre Society in 1904 – Abbey Theatre: to stage the most
innovative drama from other European countries and provide Irish playwrights
with a venue to stage their work in both English and Gaelic
 Playwrights: Lady Augusta Gregory, William Butler Yeats, John Millington
Synge, and Sean O’Casey
 Irish independence began with the Easter Rising of 1916
 The Irish War of Independence (1919-1921)
 Michael Collins signed a peace treaty in which, as a temporary solution, Ireland
would be divided, and the North would remain part of the British Crown
 Civil War (1922-1923) won by the pro-treaty faction – Michael Collins’ murder
  Eamon De Valera rises to power in the Irish Free State – very conservative
values

SEAN O’CASEY (1880-1964)

 One of Ireland’s most popular playwrights

 Born in Dublin to a Protestant family in a very poor Catholic area
 Committed to the cause of Irish independence and even involved in the
founding of the Irish Citizen Army
 Disillusioned with nationalism, turned to socialism and the workers’ struggle
 Moved to London in 1926
 His first plays were premiered at the Abbey Theatre and were a commercial
success
 The Dublin trilogy plays are considered his masterpiece: naturalism mingled
with music hall tragedy with comedy
 These plays do not share characters or plots, although the setting and themes
are common
 They express sympathy for the lower classes and a strong rejection of British
rule over Ireland and the murderous destruction of Irish nationalists
 After leaving Dublin, his plays tended towards expressionism

The later plays have been considered too didactic, with a lack of real plot and
characters somewhat devoid of humanity

Quotes about O’Casey’s plays:

- “Throughout O’Casey’s works, we find an evident compassion for the poor,

a determination to bring justice to public attention, and an irritation with
the forces of repression and inequality”.
(Moran, 2013:2)

- “[The Dublin trilogy were] not just popular, but recognized to be great in
the sense that Shakespeare’s plays are great: literary, human, profound,
tragic-comic and pleasurable”
(Frazier, 2011: 4)

Sean O’Casey.

Most important plays:

 The Dublin Trilogy:

 The Shadow of a Gunman (1923)
 Juno and the Paycock (1924)
  The Plough and the Stars (1926)
 The Silver Tassie (1927)
 Within the Gates (1933)
 Purple Dust (1940)
 Red Roses for Me (1942)
 Cock-A-Doodle Dandy (1949)
 The Bishop’s Bonfire (1955)
 The Drums of Father Nerd (1959)

The Shadow of a Gunman

 Set during the Irish War of Independence

 Strong criticism of the British army, but also of the cowardice and vanity of the
protagonist
 Women are presented as the strong gender

Juno and the Paycock

 Set during the Civil War

 Captain Boyle and his eternal companion, Joxer, embody the comic pair from
the music halls, with their slapstick routine and absurd dialogue
 The play’s ending, with Captain Boyle and Joxer in the kitchen, has been taken
up by Beckett in Waiting for Good and Fried in Translations.
 The play has comic senses, songs and music, melodrama, political discourse,
suspense and tragedy
 Feminist stance, denunciation of violence, suspense and tragedy
 O’Casey most popular play since its premiere. Alfred Hitchcock filmed a
version in 1930.

The Plough and the Stars:

 Set during the Easter Rising in 1916

 The strength of women is once again set against the vanity of men
 Hard criticism on Irish nationalism
 Riots on the premiere

POETIC DRAMA

► Revival of the Elizabethan tradition of poetic drama: T.S. Eliot

► Objected to naturalistic drama because it limited theatre to transient and
superficial themes, prose was prosaic and denied the archetypal or
transcendental dimension of humanity
 ► Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
► Another trend of poetic drama derived from German expressionism and music
hall: comic verse drama of Auden and Isherwood
► Bertolt Brercht’s had become the dominant continental influence by the 1930s

Bertolt Brecht and the epic theatre:

o Brecht’s theatre aims to make the audience think

o Techniques of alienation to make the spectator not identify with what
happening on stage: interruption of the story, banners, disappearance of the
fourth wall, participation of chorus etc.
o Humour, music and dance: Berlin cabaret of the turn of the century
o Marxist ideology
o Actors must be able to step out of character and break the stage illusion
o Avoid sentimentally, catharsis should not be the ultimate goal of theatre.

W.H Auden (1907-1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986):

 Plays in collaboration
The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936)
The Ascent of F6 (1937)
On the Frontier (1938)
 Designed to denounce the growing fascism in Britain
 Mixture of politically engaged drama and music hall as it appeared in Brecht’s
plays

Political theatrical organisations

The Worker’s Theatre Movement

- Founded in 1926
- Believed in the transformance potential of theatre
- Agitprop style that rejected the naturalistic genre
- Travelled throughout Britain to mobilise working-class audiences

The Unity Theatre

- Founded in 1936 out of the remain of the Worker’s Theatre Movement

- Troubled situation: unemployment and hunger marches caused by the
Depression, the Republican struggle in Spain, the rise of fascism in the form
of Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of
Fascists (the “Blackshirts”).