Modern Theatre Styles

Realism 1850’s- 1905

Causes - Industrial Revolution, urbanization, disillusionment, Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859)- although Darwin really influences Naturalism more later

Description - Realism is a dramatic exercise of these beliefs/issues. It’s plays focus on the lower class, social problems, and living conditions. Sets are realistic and very detailed to show environmental impact on the characters. Plots support the theory that we are controlled by genes as well as the environment.Drama creates reality.

Realism (continued)

• Examples include - A Doll’s House (1879),The Ice Man Cometh (1933), and The Cherry Orchard (1904) Playwrights - Thomas Robertson (Britain), Henrick Ibsen (Scandinavia), Anton Chekhov (Russia), and Eugene O’Neil (USA)

• Director - Konstantin Stanislavsky

Naturalism (1880s-1914)• Realism to the Extreme- “Life that has NOT been

changed by art.” Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine “scientifically” the underlying forces (nature vs nurture) influencing the characters

• Mankind has little free will. Strongest will survive, might is right. Females not expected to think.

• Works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, etc. Very pessimistic and frequently

criticized for being too blunt.Colloquial speech/dialect.

Naturalism (continued)

• Examples include- August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888), Emile Zola’s Therese Raquin, Henri Becque’s The Vultures (1882)

• "I am waiting for someone to put a man of flesh on the stage, taken from reality, scientifically analyzed, and described without one lie. I am waiting for someone to rid us of fictitious characters, of these symbols of virtue and vice which have no worth as human data. 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.” Emile Zola (father of Naturalism)

Reactionary Theatre

• With WW1 came a rebellion against realism and naturalism and it’s sense of helplessness and scientific basis. This rebellion fueled a lot of different modern genres (slides to follow)

Symbolism (1890s-1920s)

• Causes - Impressionistic painters, non-realistic themes, Edgar Allen Poe, romanticism

• Description: Putting poetry, beauty, music, and the exploration of dreamlike forces on stage. “Art for Art’s Sake”, no social agenda. happy ending, bubble gum stories,sets are used as vehicles for expression, not illusion.

Symbolism (continued)

• Examples include: Peter Pan, Big, almost anything Disney as well as The Blue Bird

• Playwrights include: Maurice Maeterlinck and the later works of Anton Chekhov

• Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama Axel (1890) is a definitive Symbolist play; in it, two aristocrats fall in love while trying to kill each other, only to agree to mutually commit suicide because nothing in life could equal their fantasies.

Expressionism (1910s-late 1920s)• Causes: Freud published his beliefs that our subconscious

drive and inner compulsions are what make us who we are Einstein published The Theory of Relativity stating “the

truth is subjective depending on where you are standing”.

• Description: Nightmarish in style, truth is found not in the external world, but in the subjective realm of your own mind, desires and visions. Plots are episodic and play on tension. Sets are purposely distorted and highly symbolic. Time is not a constantExamples include:Anything by Tim Burton, Amadeus, Dracula, The Diviners

Expressionism (continued)

• Oskar Kokoschka's 1909 playlet, Murderer, The Hope of Women is often called the first expressionist drama. In it, an unnamed man and woman struggle for dominance. The Man brands the woman; she stabs and imprisons him. He frees himself and she falls dead at his touch. As the play ends, he slaughters all around him (in the words of the text) "like mosquitoes."

Epic Theatre (1910s to 1950s)• Causes: Society’s focus on social problems.

Expressionist production techniques, society’s trend toward theatricalism. Largely a reaction against other popular forms of theatre, particularly the realism pioneered by Stanislavski. Disliked the shallow spectacle, manipulative plots, and heightened emotion of melodrama; but where Stanislavski attempted to mirror real human behaviour through his “Method”, and to immerse the audience totally into the world of the play, Brecht saw this as another form of escapism. Social/political focus.

• Biggest Advocate - Bertolt Brecht

Epic Theatre (continued)• Epic theatre assumes that the purpose of a play, more than

entertainment or the imitation of reality, is to present ideas and invites the audience to make judgments on them. Characters are not intended to mimic real people, but to represent opposing sides of an argument, archetypes, or stereotypes. The audience should always be aware that it is watching a play, and should remain at an emotional distance from the action; Brecht described this ideal as the Verfremdungseffekt - variously translated as "alienation effect", "Defamiliarization effect", or "estrangement effect". It is the opposite of the suspension of disbelief: "It is most important that one of the main features of the ordinary theatre should be excluded from [epic theatre]: the engendering of illusion."

Epic Theatre (continued)• Common production techniques in epic theatre include simplified,

non-realistic set designs and announcements or visual captions that interrupt and summarize the action. Brecht used comedy to distance his audiences from emotional or serious events and was heavily influenced by musicals and fairground performers, putting music and song in his plays. Acting in epic theatre requires actors to play characters believably without convincing either the audience or themselves that they are truly the characters. Actors often address the audience directly out of character ("breaking the 4th wall") and play multiple roles. Brecht thought it was important that the choices the characters made were explicit, and tried to develop a style of acting wherein it was evident that the characters were choosing one action over another. For example, a character could say, "I could have stayed at home, but instead I went to the shops."

Epic Theatre (continued)

• Playwright - Bertold Brecht• Examples: Mother Courage and

Her Children, Hair, Rent,The Caucasion Chalk Circle

Absurdism (late 1890s to 1960s)• Causes - All previous anti-realistic movements that

supported the meaninglessness of language, society’s rules, and the chaotic nature of our world.

• Description: Tended to support the idea that anything man or society made was illegitimate as a source of grounding or direction. Many times the sets of absurd plays look logical and ‘normal’, but the action taking place within it are completely illogical and absurd. Truth is found in chaos and there is no attempt to find order in anything. Wants each person to assign their own value system to everything

Absurdism (continued)

• Playwrights: Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Christopher Durang

• Examples: Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, The Zoo Story,Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Beyond Therapy, Six Characters in Search of an Author, Rhinoceros

Theatre of Cruelty (1920s-1970)• Causes:WW1 and 2, Balinese Theatre, Edward Allen

Poe Playwright/Director/Inventor - Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)Theatre should affect the audience as much as possible, uses a mixture of strange and disturbing forms of lighting, sound and performance. In one production that Artaud did about the plague he used sounds so realistic that some members of the audience were sick in the middle of the performance.

• By cruelty, he meant not sadism or causing pain, but a violent, physical determination to shatter the false reality. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language, halfway between thought and gesture. Artaud described the spiritual in physical terms, and believed that all expression is physical expression in space.

• Artaud put the audience in the middle of the 'spectacle' (his term for the play), so they would be 'engulfed and physically affected by it'. He often referred to this layout as like a 'vortex' - a constantly shifting shape - 'to be trapped and powerless'.Imagination to Artaud, is reality; dreams, thoughts and delusions are no less real than the "outside" world. Reality appears to be a consensus, the same consensus the audience accepts when they enter a theatre to see a play and, for a time, pretend that what they are seeing is real. Artaud saw suffering as essential to existence, and thus rejected all utopias.

Existentialism (1944-1961)

• Causes: Developed in France after WW2 as a response to a meaningless world in which freedom of choice is denied.Personal experience and responsibility are all-important.

• Influences- Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sarte(1905-1080), Woody Allen

• Description: individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to deities or authorities creating it for them.Generally thinks that the absence of a transcendent force (such as God) means that the individual is entirely free, and, therefore, ultimately responsible. It is up to humans to create personal responsibility outside any branded belief system. In existentialist views, personal responsibilities of being is the only way to rise above humanity's absurd condition of much suffering and inevitable death.

Existentialism

• Examples: No Exit, The Flies, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Clockwork Orange, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Experimental Theatre (1960s-late 1970s)• Causes: the 60s, hippy movement, Vietnam

War, Theatre of Cruelty• Description:Often confrontational theatre, the

actor would often shout in the audiences� faces about various social crimes. Movement saw itself as a new American pacifist order

• Founded - Ellen Stewart 1962• Examples - Hair, Oh! Calcutta!