Revision lecture

EN302: European Theatre

O What’s the rubric for the exam?
O Can I write about the same texts in the exam as I
did in my coursework essays?
O Can I write about texts we haven’t studied on the
module?
O Can I bring the texts into the exam?
O Should I refer to secondary criticism?
O How should I organise my time during the exam?
O How will the exam be marked?
O What sorts of topics will the exam cover?
O Where can I find past papers?
What’s the rubric for the exam?
O The rubric will read as follows:
O Time allowed: 2 hours
O Answer TWO of the following questions.
O Read carefully the instructions on the answer
book and make sure that the particulars are
entered on each book.
O Do not substantially repeat material from
assessed essays, or between sections on the
exam
What’s the rubric for the exam?
O Please note: You may be penalised up to 20 marks from your
overall exam mark if it is evident that you are in violation of
the rubric of the exam paper.
O Pay attention! Some questions will ask for discussion of “two
or more plays”, while others will ask you to consider “two or
more dramatists”. Others will be more specific, asking you to
consider, for example, only Greek plays, or only Naturalist
dramas.
O Answer the question that is asked, not the question you
wanted to answer!
Can I write about the same texts in the exam
as I did in my coursework essays?
O Technically, yes – but we strongly advise against it. What
you cannot do is “substantially repeat material from
assessed essays”. Under the pressure of exam conditions,
you might not remember exactly what you wrote in your
essays.
O Bear in mind that if your overall degree mark falls on a
borderline between degree classifications, your entire body
of assessed work will be sent to the external examiner. An
examiner might look less favourably on a student who
keeps writing about the same texts!
Can I write about texts we haven’t
studied on the module?
O As long as the question allows it. Some
questions specify that you should write about
“plays by writers on this module” – others do
not. Do bear in mind that the module is about
European theatre, though!
 Can I bring the texts into the
exam?
O No, you are not permitted to bring the texts into the exam.
Memorising some key quotations will therefore be
helpful, but committing huge chunks of the texts to
memory may not be the best use of your revision time!
The same goes for secondary sources.
O Students whose first language is not English are permitted
to use a bilingual dictionary. For further details, see
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/academicoffice/quali
ty/categories/examinations/policies/a_materials/
 Should I refer to secondary
criticism?
O It is not essential to refer to secondary criticism in the exam –
the most important thing is to construct a persuasive
argument. But it can help!
O It would be sensible to ensure that you are familiar with the
work of some of the key theorists covered on the module.
These include (but are not limited to):
O Aristotle (esp. Poetics)
O Zola (esp. ‘Naturalism on the Stage’)
O Brecht (esp. Brecht on Theatre)
O Williams (esp. Modern Tragedy)
How should I organise my time
during the exam?
O You have two hours: that’s one hour for each question.
Both questions carry an equal number of marks, so
you would be ill-advised to spend longer on the first
question than you do on the second!
O Planning is everything. Spend an appropriate amount
of time brainstorming ideas and working out a rough
structure for your argument before you start writing
the essay. You can cross through any work you do not
wish to be marked.
How will the exam be marked?
O 2.ii: Work will be conscientious, attentive to subject matter
and title, and adequate in standard of presentation. The essay
must employ adequate Modern English grammar, syntax,
spelling, and punctuation.
O A 2:ii essay will:
O Show an understanding of the selected topic;
O Show reasonable knowledge of the text(s) being discussed;
O Present an argument backed up with analysis of appropriate
detail from the primary text(s);
O Engage with the themes and content of the module.
How will the exam be marked?
O 2.i: The best work will be highly competent in organisation and
presentation, showing appropriate and intelligent use of primary material.
The essay must employ a good standard of Modern English grammar,
syntax, spelling, and punctuation.
O A 2:i essay might:
O Incorporate perceptive analysis of well-chosen detail from the text(s) being
discussed;
O Present arguments in which evidence leads lucidly to conclusions;
O Be organised into an effective overall structure;
O Make effective and expressive use of English;
O Signpost its overall argument effectively so that the structure of the whole
essay is clear to the reader;
O Integrate analysis of the text(s) with discussion of broader cultural, historical
and/or theoretical issues.
How will the exam be marked?
O First class: Work will demonstrate intellectual maturity, eloquence, and/or
elements of exceptional insight in your engagement with the subject. It will
show some degree of originality.
O Some likely features of first-class work:

O Ambitious argument carried out successfully;

O Outstandingly perceptive commentary on a number of details of the
text(s);
O Highly developed organisation of overall argument;
O Very effective and persuasive argumentative writing;
O Convincing and vivid presentation of an engaged response to the text(s);
O Thorough and lucid engagement with difficult ideas;
O Outstandingly well-judged integration of the text(s) into discussion of
broader cultural, historical, and/or theoretical issues.
What sorts of topics will the exam
cover?
O Social and/or religious ethics
O The relationship between theatricality and life
O Dramatic genre, especially tragedy and/or comedy
O Naturalism and post-Naturalism
O Political theatre and/or the politics of theatre
O Adapting the drama of the past/intertextuality
O Representations of gender
O The relationship between language and the visual
O Specific productions
O ‘Topics’
 Drama and ethics
O ‘Playwright’ was synonymous with ‘teacher’ in Ancient Greek (didaskalos).
O Aristotle on comedy:
O ‘Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type, - not, however,
in the full sense of the word bad; for the ludicrous is merely a subdivision of the ugly. It
may be defined as a defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. Thus, for
example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not cause pain.’
O Henri Bergson (‘Laughter’, 1900):
O ‘Always rather humiliating for the one against whom it is directed, laughter is really and
truly a kind of social “ragging”. … In laughter we always find an unavowed intention to
humiliate, and consequently correct our neighbour.’ (1900: 148)
O Moral of Tartuffe:
O ‘Learn to distinguish between virtue, / Real and feigned.’ (p. 72)
 Drama and ethics
O Molière’s ‘Preface’ to Tartuffe (23 March 1669) describes
the play as ‘a skilful poem which, by agreeable lessons,
reprimands men’s defects’:
O ‘If the mission of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I fail to see
why some should be privileged. In the State, this one is of an
importance much more dangerous than all the others; and we have
seen that the theatre is a great force for correction.’
O ‘It is a great blow to vice to expose it to everyone’s laughter. We
can easily stand being reprehended, but we cannot stand being
mocked. We are willing to be wicked, but we will not be
ridiculous.’
 Drama and agency
O Do dramatic characters have agency, or are they
driven by unseen forces?
O Conflict between gods in classical tragedy;
O Revenge / classical gods / Christian God in The
Spanish Tragedy;
O God-as-audience and power of prophecy vs. freedom
to ‘overcome the stars’ (p. 36) in Life Is A Dream;
O Determinism and entrapment: society, heredity,
physiology and psychology in Naturalism and beyond.
 Drama and agency
O Zola published his manifesto on this subject in 1881, in an essay titled
‘Naturalism on the Stage’.
O He claimed to be reflecting the scientific and rational spirit of the age
in which he lived; ‘the impulse of the century,’ he argued, ‘is toward
naturalism’ (1881: 5):
O ‘I am waiting for someone to put a man of flesh and bones on the stage, taken
from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie. … I am
waiting for environment to determine the characters and the characters to act
according to the logic of facts combined with logic of their own disposition. … I
am waiting, finally, until the development of naturalism already achieved in the
novel takes over the stage, until the playwrights return to the source of science
and modem arts, to the study of nature, to the anatomy of man. (1881: 6)
 Conflict
O Agon / thesis and antithesis:
O Antigone and Creon are forced to choose between family and state.
O Pentheus must choose between order and chaos: ‘When I come out,
I’ll either be fighting, or I’ll put myself in your hands.’ (p. 405)
O The women in The Rover must choose between their romantic
desires and society’s expectations of them; we could read a similar
agon in Hedda Gabler.
O Melchior is offered an ambiguous choice at the end of Spring
Awakening; in choosing the Masked Man, perhaps he makes the
opposite choice to the ones made by the protagonists at the ends of
both Hedda Gabler and Yerma.
Aristotle’s definition of tragedy
O “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language
embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several
kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of
action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the
proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions.” (Part VI)
O “Every Tragedy […] must have six parts, which parts
determine its quality – namely, Plot, Character, Diction,
Thought, Spectacle, Song. …most important of all is the
structure of the incidents.” (Part VI)
Aristotle’s definition of tragedy
O Aristotle valued a “structural union of the parts […] such
that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole
will be disjointed and disturbed” (Part VIII).
O “Of all plots and actions the episodic are the worst. I call a
plot ‘episodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one
another without probable or necessary sequence.” (Part IX)
O “… the most powerful elements of emotional interest in
Tragedy – Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and
Recognition scenes [Anagnorisis] – are parts of the plot.”
(Part VI)
 Modern tragedy
O Raymond Williams’ Modern Tragedy (1966)
analyses some of the ways in which various
modern plays might be conceived as having
adapted the conventions of classical tragedy.
O Williams defines tragedy as ‘the conflict
between an individual and the forces that
destroy him’ (2006: 113).
 Liberal Tragedy
O For example, Williams describes Ibsen’s drama as
‘Liberal Tragedy’:
O ‘…the hero defies an opposing world, full of lies and
compromises and dead positions, only to find, as he
struggles against it, that as a man he belongs to this
world, and has its destructive inheritance in himself.’
(2006: 124)
O In this view, society is at fault: it is seen as false and
oppressive, a trap from which it is impossible to
escape.
 Liberal Tragedy
General Gabler’s memory
Regional location
Oppressive
environment Social class /
expectations
HEDDA
Tesman / Judge Brack’s
identity as GABLER
‘leverage’
‘wife’

Threat of scandal
Intellectual boredom

Impending motherhood Patriarchy

 Private Tragedy
O Strindberg’s drama, on the other hand, belongs to a category that
Williams calls ‘Private Tragedy’, a form which ‘begins with bare
and unaccommodated man’:
O ‘All primary energy is centred in this isolated creature, who desires and
eats and fights alone. Society is at best an arbitrary institution, to prevent
this horde of creatures destroying each other. And when these isolated
persons meet, in what are called relationships, their exchanges are forms of
struggle, inevitably. Tragedy, in this view, is inherent.’ (2006: 133)
O The association between love and destruction is ‘so deep that it is not, as
the liberal writers [like Ibsen] assumed, the product of a particular history:
it is, rather, general and natural, in all relationships.’ (2006: 134)
 Private Tragedy
Environment, Environment,
heredity, body, heredity, body,
psyche, etc. psyche, etc.

MISS JULIE JEAN

CHRISTINE

Environment, heredity, body, psyche, etc.

 Private Tragedy
Jean’s
heredity, body,
psyche, etc.
JEAN (suggests
Strindberg)
are better
equipped for
survival… or
are they?
MISS JULIE
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
O Williams describes the ‘deadlock’ of liberal tragedy:
O The hero ‘sees what has to be done, and tries to do it. He is left to
struggle alone, is misunderstood and is broken. He also breaks others,
in his own fall.’ (2006: 172)
O He argues that this deadlock, ‘familiar to us from Ibsen’, is
‘transformed by Chekhov into a new condition: that of stalemate’:
O ‘In a deadlock, there is still effort and struggle, but no possibility of
winning: the wrestler with life dies as he gives his last strength. In a
stalemate, there is no possibility of movement or even the effort at
movement; every willed action is self-cancelling.’ (2006: 172)
O Williams on Three Sisters: ‘The breakdown of meaning is now so
complete that even the aspiration to meaning seems comic.’ (2006:
174)
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
HAMM: We’re not beginning to… to… mean something?
CLOV: Mean something! You and I, mean something!
(Brief laugh.)
Ah that’s a good one!
HAMM: I wonder.
(Pause.)
Imagine if a rational being came back to earth, wouldn’t he be
liable to get ideas into his head if he observed us long enough.
(Voice of rational being.) Ah, good, now I see what it is, yes,
now I understand what they’re at! (Beckett, p. 108)
Tragic Deadlock and Stalemate
O Peter Brook on Beckett:
O ‘Beckett does not say ‘no’ with satisfaction; he forges his merciless ‘no’
out of a longing for ‘yes’ and so his despair is the negative from which
the contour of its opposite can be drawn. …When we attack Beckett for
pessimism it is we who are the Beckett characters trapped in a Beckett
scene. When we accept Beckett’s statement as it is, then suddenly all is
transformed. There is after all quite another audience, Beckett’s
audience; those in every country who do not set up intellectual barriers,
who do not try too hard to analyse the message. This audience laughs
and cries out – and in the end celebrates with Beckett; this audience
leaves his plays, his black plays, nourished and enriched, with a lighter
heart, full of a strange irrational joy.’ (1990: 66)
 Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
O Brecht:
We ask you expressly to discover
That what happens all the time is not natural.
For to say that something is natural
In such times of bloody confusion
Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness
Of inhuman humanity is to
Regard it as unchangeable. (The Exception and the Rule, p. 37)

O ‘For art to be “un-political” means only to ally itself

with the “ruling” group.’ (1977: 196).
 Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
O As Brecht argued in his Short Organum for the
Theatre:
O The theatre as we know it shows the structure of society
(represented on the stage) as incapable of being influenced
by society (in the auditorium). … Shakespeare’s great
solitary figures, bearing on their breast the star of their fate,
carry through with irresistible force their futile and deadly
outbursts; they prepare their own downfall; life, not death,
becomes obscene as they collapse; the catastrophe is
beyond criticism. (1977: 189)
 Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
O According to Brecht, it was the role of the theatre to
debunk such notions. As ‘the Philosopher’, Brecht’s
spokesperson in The Messingkauf Dialogues, puts it:
THE PHILOSOPHER. The causes of a lot of tragedies lie
outside the power of those who suffer them, so it seems.
THE DRAMATURG. So it seems?
THE PHILOSOPHER. Of course it only seems. Nothing
human can possibly lie outside the powers of humanity,
and such tragedies have human causes. (Brecht 1965: 32)
 Brecht’s rejection
of ‘dramatic theatre’
O ‘The dramatic theatre’s spectator says: Yes, I have felt like that
too – Just like me – It’s only natural – It’ll never change – The
sufferings of this man appal me, because they are inescapable –
That’s great art; it all seems the most obvious thing in the world
– I weep when they weep, I laugh when they laugh.’
O ‘The epic theatre’s spectator says: I’d never have thought it –
That’s not the way – That’s extraordinary, hardly believable –
It’s got to stop – The sufferings of this man appal me, because
they are unnecessary – That’s great art: nothing obvious in it – I
laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh.’ (1977: 71)
Drama and postmodernism
O Some of the plays we studied towards the end of
the module might be read as being radically
sceptical of drama’s ability to ‘tell the truth’
about the world.
O Note the epigraph to Attempts on Her Life, from
postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard:
O ‘No one will have directly experienced the actual
cause of such happenings, but everyone will have
received an image of them.’ (p. 198)
Drama and postmodernism
O Scenario 11, ‘Untitled (100 Words)’, is often
misinterpreted as Crimp’s explanation of how to read
his play:
O ‘With respect to you I think she’d find the whole concept of
‘making a point’ ludicrously outmoded. If any point is
being made at all it’s surely the point that the point that’s
being made is not the point and never has in fact been the
point. It’s surely the point that the search for a point is
pointless and that the whole point of the exercise – i.e. these
attempts on her own life – points to that.’ (p. 250-1)
Drama and postmodernism
O Are we meant to agree on the critic’s definition of our own
context?
O ‘… the context of a post-radical, of a post-human world where the
gestures of radicalism take on new meaning in a society where the radical
gesture is simply one more form of entertainment i.e. one more product –
in this case an artwork – to be consumed.’ (p. 256)
O Paul Taylor seemed to think so, asking: ‘Is it, for all its extraordinary
flights of eloquent writing, a play that is just cleverly knowing and darkly
comic about its own ingenious futility?’ (Independent, 14 March 1997)
O Is this right? Is Crimp, as he has described himself, ‘anti-ideological’?
O How do playwrights like Beckett and Churchill compare?
Where can I find past papers?
O Here! http
://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/exampapers/
 References
O Brecht, Bertolt (1965) The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willett,
Chatham: W. & J. Mackay & Co.
O Brecht, Bertolt (1977) Brecht on Theatre, trans. J. Willett, London: Eyre
Methuen
O Brook, Peter (1990) The Empty Space, London: Penguin.
O Strindberg, August (1888) ‘Preface to Miss Julie’, in Meyer, M. [trans.]
(2000) Strindberg, Plays: One, London: Methuen Drama, pp. 91-103.
O Williams, Raymond (2006) Modern Tragedy, Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press.
O Zola, Emile (1881) ‘Naturalism on the Stage’, in Cole, T. [ed.] (2001)
Playwrights on Playwriting: from Ibsen to Ionesco, New York: Cooper
Square Press, pp. 5-14.