Transcript 07 Drama Theatre in Context

Theatre in Context
Lecture on Drama
The Middle Ages
• origins of theatre: myths, rites
• the Middle Ages: everyday theatre: mimes
and minstrels
• liturgical drama
esp. at Easter (also other church festivals)
• Mystery plays: religious theatre for the
people from sacred drama to profane
(pro fano = ‘before the temple’
from church to marketplace
Later medieval developments
• Miracle Plays: Medieval plays treating
the lives of saints, or Bible stories.
• Morality Plays: Allegorical medieval
plays, like Everyman, that depict the
eternal struggle between good and evil
that transpires in this world, using
characters like Vice, Virtue, Wisdom
Commedia dell'arte
Italian popular comedy of the 15th to 17th cc.
Featured performances improvised from
scenarios by a set of stock characters, and
repeated from play to play and troupe to
troupe.
Scenario: in general, the prose description of a
play's story. In the commedia dell'arte, the
written outlines of plot and characters from
which the actors improvised the particular
actions of a performance.
Stock characters
Masque
Spectacular theatrical form, especially of
the Renaissance and the Neoclassical
periods, usually associated with court
theatres or special events. Emphasis was
put on costumes and effects, with much
music and dancing; amateur actors
frequently performed
The London scene
Bankside: medieval centre of dissipation
brothels and bear baiting within the
estates of the Bishops of Winchester
in 1546 Henry VIII had brothels closed
17th c.: reopened, together with theatres
Bankside
London theatres
GLOBE (1598-99) now Park Street. Sign: Hercules
+World. Used only in summer: no roof except for
stage & galleries
In the winter: Blackfriars Theatre (1578) as private
theatre for choir boys to practise; Farrant on
ground floor, theatre upstairs
Shakespeare: shareholder and player
HOPE in Bear Gardens: former bear and bull
baiting arena (modelled on Swan + movable
stage)
The Globe
Further London theatres
ROSE (1586-87, 1st Bankside playhouse) in
Rose Lane: octagonal building of wood
and plaster, partly thatched;
built by Henslowe; played Marlowe's plays;
SWAN in Paris Gardens (flint stones and
wooden coloumns)
sometimes used for fencing matches
17th century
1642: Puritans ban theatres - even demolish
them - for moral reasons
baroque: opera
Restoration: she-tragedies with a woman in the
leading role
even Dryden's All for Love's Anthony: heart
torn by feelings which he cannot control or
understand
male characters: unambiguous heroism:
rather unconvincing
Heroic drama
John Dryden (1631-1700) exponent of the golden
mean in art, politics and morality,
Poet Laureate from 1668
Heroic couplet (a closed and balanced pair of rhyming
iambic pentameters)
against blank verse in much English drama
works against dramatic illusion
Italian and French influence
audience face actors, rather than surround them:
criticism presented outside the space of audience
blank verse vs heroic couplet
blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant
Shakespeare "As You Like It" II.vll. 139-43
heroic couplet: 2 iambic pentameters
Blank verse vs heroic couplet
heroic couplet: 2 rhyming iambic pentameters
(vs blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter)
And since that plenteous autumn now is past,
Whose grapes and peaches have indulged your
taste,
Take in good part, from our poor poet's board,
Such rivelled fruits as winter can afford.
Dryden, All for Love, “Prologue”
http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/what-isheroic-couplets/
The Age of Restoration
The term Restoration period is applied to the decades
from 1660 (the year Charles II was re-established as
monarch) to the end of the century.
Between 1660 and 1700 over 500 plays were written in
England, more than half of them comedies.
The Age of Restoration
In 1642, six years before the execution of Charles I in
1649, the Parliament closed the theatres in England.
A few years later Oliver Cromwell was proclaimed Lord
Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland,
and Ireland. His government was fiercely Puritan in
religion and in administration.
Until the Restoration of Charles II to the throne in
1660, there was very little of theatre in England.
Restoration Drama
During this time the influence of French theatre, and
through it, Italian notions of theatre architecture, was
experienced by English actors and royalists in exile.
Charles II, the king, had been in France during the
greater part of the Protectorate, together with many of
the royalist party, all of whom were familiar with Paris
and its fashions. Upon the return of the court French
influence was felt, particularly in the theatre.
Restoration Drama
In August, 1660, Charles issued patents for two
companies of players, and performances immediately
began.
Theatre was beginning to focus more on the
mechanics of scenery and spectacle. The plays
themselves were often masques in which costume,
dance and clever scenery and scene changes were
more emphasized than acting and plot.
Restoration Drama
Theatres began to display the proscenium style of
architecture, although the forestage remained the
principal place where the acting took place, and the
area behind the proscenium was reserved for the
display of scenery changes which were slid into view
by means of panels on tracks.
During this time theatre was designed specifically for
the royal pleasure. Theatres began to be roofed in.
Restoration Drama
It was at the time of the Restoration of the Crown in
England, that women first began to appear on stage (a
convention borrowed from the French), instead of
female roles being played by boys and young men.
Theatres were again licensed and controlled
by the state, yet there occurred a broadening of
theatre's appeal – first to property owners and
merchants, and ultimately to the masses.
Nell Gwynn (1650-1687), was one of the first actresses
(and the mistress of Charles II).
Restoration Drama
This period also saw the
first professional woman
playwright, Aphra Behn
(1640-1689).
Age of Restoration
Language
The earlier Renaissance drive to enrich vocabulary was
superseded by efforts at refinement and regulation of
language. The language of polite conversation, with its
emphasis on clarity and precision, was set as a
standard.
Chief spokesman for the new spirit was John Dryden
(1631-1700). He brushed aside the grammar and syntax
of Shakespeare as no more than one could expect
from a popular writer.
Restoration Drama
The Puritan closing of the theatres in 1642 did not
mean the absolute disappearance of the English
drama. Plays were performed in the private residences
of country gentlemen. Some actors attempted public
performances surreptitiously. Another and more
effective circumvention of the authorities consisted of
drolls, brief excerpts from dramas that could be quickly
presented at fairs before a raid could be launched.
Restoration Drama
Yet the theatrical tradition was essentially broken. Most
actors of the Caroline stage were dead or out of
practice when the Restoration gave the stage a new
birth.
Upon his resumption of the throne in 1661 Charles II
granted two patents, assigning the monopoly of
London theatrical performances to the King’s
Company, and to the Duke of York’s Company.
Restoration Drama
The Audience
The Restoration theatre was entirely the court’s
preserve. Charles II was the first English monarch who
regularly attended the public theatre (even though he
had his own private theatre at Whitehall). He personally
interested himself in the preparation of scripts and in
the running of the acting companies.
Restoration Drama
The Audience
The spectators at the two theatres were exclusively
courtiers and their hangers-on. Two theatres were
sufficient for the metropolis of London.
Performances started at three-thirty or four in the
afternoon. The aristocrats looked upon the playhouse
as a social assembly where they had an opportunity to
disport themselves.
An Entry from the Diary of Samuel Pepys
Monday 18 February 1666/67
Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of
York’s play-house, expecting a new play, and so stayed
not no more than other people, but to the King’s house,
to “The Mayd’s Tragedy;” but vexed all the while with
two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased
to hear their discourse, he being a stranger. And one of
the ladies would, and did sit with her mask on, all the
play, and, being exceeding witty as ever I heard
woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I
believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality. He would fain
know who she was, but she would not tell;
Pepys, cont.
yet did give him many pleasant hints of her
knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at
work to find out who she was, and did give him leave
to use all means to find out who she was, but pulling
off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also
making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more
pleasant ‘rencontre’ I never heard. But by that means
lost the pleasure of the play wholly, to which now and
then Sir Charles Sedley’s exceptions against both
words and pronouncing were very pretty. So home and
to the office, did much business, then home, to supper,
and to bed.
Restoration Drama
The Theatre
William Davenant, head of the Duke of York’s
Company, abandoned the Renaissance English stage
in favour of the French one. The theatres were indoors.
The forestage still projected into the audience but was
significantly cut. The curtain was Davenant’s
innovation. He also introduced painted backdrops.
Gallants were seldom permitted on the stage, yet were
on display in boxes set on either side of the forestage
(apron).
Restoration Drama
The Actors
The limited patronage necessitated small professional
companies and plays with relatively few roles.
Performers obtained salaries. Boy apprentices
vanished, and while a few males still took women’s
roles, the first actresses appeared on stage. The very
first was Mrs. Margaret Hughes, playing the role of
Desdemona for the King’s Company in 1660.
Restoration Comedy
The aftermath of Puritanism manifested itself in bawdy
comedies, self-conscious indecency on stage where
bedroom and assignation scenes were blatant and
adultery was a commonplace representation.
Restoration Comedy
The kind of drama which prevailed during the
Age of Restauration, often referred to as
comedy of manners, chiefly concerned with
presenting a society of elegance and
stylishness.
Its characters were gallants, ladies and
gentlemen of fashion and ranks, fops, rakes,
social climbers and country bumpkins.
The tone was witty, urbane, licentious.
The plot dealt with the intricacies of sexual
and marital intrigue, with adultery and
cuckoldry.
Restoration Comedy
The main goal of these comedies of manners in
the period of Restoration is to entertain and to
mock society. The audience was supposed to
laugh at themselves.
However, many critiques of marriage that we see
in the play are devastating, and the game of love
is not much more hopeful. Although the endings
are happy and the man invariably gets the
woman, we see marriages without love.
Restoration Comedy
Typically, one of the major themes of
restoration comedy is marriage and the
game of love. The plot would involve a
dashing, witty hero trying to have sex with
as many women as possible without
getting into trouble, with funny
consequences. Restoration comedies
include bawdy humour, witty dialogues,
recursive cross-dressing.
Restoration Comedy
Women were allowed to perform on stage
for the first time, and the mostly male
audiences were attracted by the idea of
seeing women acting out seduction
scenes and the possibility of seeing a bit
of shapely leg on stage. Clothes were
often several sizes too small so as to
emphasize the curves of their bodies.
Restoration Comedy
Chief representatives and plays:
William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1672 or 1673);
The Plain Dealer (1674)
George Etheredge: The Man of Mode (1676)
William Congreve: The Double Dealer (1694); Love for
Love (11695); The Way of the World (1700)
John Vanbrugh: The Provoked Wife (1697)
George Farquhar: The Beaux’ Strategem (1707)
Thomas Shadwell: The Libertine (1676), The
Volunteers, or Stockjobbers (1693)
Comedy of Manners
A genre which has for its main subjects and themes
the behaviour and deportment of people living under
specific social codes. It is preoccupied with the codes
of the middle and upper classes and is often marked by
elegance, wit and sophistication.
Restoration comedies provide outstanding instances.
Later examples of the genre are Oscar Wilde’s The
Importance of Being Ernest (1895) or Noël Coward’s
Private Lives (1930).
William Wycherley (1640-1706)
The Country Wife
Plot summary by Robin Bates
http://www.betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/?p=1169
In Wycherley’s play, the one person who wants to tell the
truth is pressured to be silent so that the society can
continue to teeter along. Here’s the plot.
The lead character is Horner, a predatory rake who wants
to cuckold as many husbands as he can. Because the
husbands are so leery of him, however, he has a doctor
(Quack) leak the news that he has been rendered
impotent by venereal disease. Since he is now “safe,” Sir
Jasper Fidget wants Horner to chaperone his wife as he
goes about his business. Horner more than obliges.
http://youtu.be/ROI9FhR6URI
The Country Wife, cont.
But Horner also has an affair with Marjorie Pinchwife, the
country wife of the title, who is innocent to the ways of
the city and who believes that two people who love each
other should be together. She likes Horner much better
than her jealous husband and is prepared, in a burst of
sincerity, to publicly declare Horner her lover and leave
her husband for him. In doing so, of course, she would
reveal that he has been faking his disease.
Suddenly, the whole society is in danger of imploding. Sir
Jasper will be revealed to have been a cuckold, as will
Pinchwife. Their wives, meanwhile, will lose their
“honor,” as will all the other women that Horner has been
“chaperoning.”
The Country Wife, cont.
So what do they do? Do they admit that the husbands are
neglecting or abusing their wives and that the wives
prefer outer appearance to inner virtue? Do they
question the drive for gratification and look to spiritual
connection with another human being over mere sexual
trysts? Do they view the threatened crisis as an
opportunity to rethink their priorities?
Or do they persuade the one truthful, trusting, and noncynical character, the country wife, to tell a lie so that
society can continue on as before?
Marjorie realizes she is condemned to a loveless marriage.
In all likelihood she will learn how to counterfeit virtue
and tell lies while engaging in clandestine affairs. She
has been trained to be corrupt like the rest of them.
William Congreve (1670-1729)
The Way of the World
The play is based around the two lovers Mirabell and
Millamant. In order for the two to get married and receive
Millamant's full dowry, Mirabell must receive the blessing
of Millamant's aunt, Lady Wishfort. Unfortunately, she is
a bitter lady, who despises Mirabell and wants her own
nephew, Sir Wilful, to wed Millamant.
Mirabell and Millamant, equally strong-willed, discuss in
detail the conditions under which they would accept each
other in marriage (otherwise known as the "proviso
scene"), showing the depth of feeling for each other.
Mirabell finally proposes to Millamant and Millamant
accepts.
The Way of the World, cont.
The love expressed in the play tends to be centred
on material gain rather than the love of the
partner. This can be seen in the scene where
Millamant and Mirabell effectively carry out a
pre-nuptial agreement, Millamant insisting on
having all manner of liberties and powers, quite
unusual for the time.
None of the characters in the play can really be
seen as 'good', and as such it is difficult to find a
hero or heroine, or indeed anybody whom one
would find deserving of sympathy.
William Congreve: The Way of the World
ACT IV. – SCENE V.
MRS. MILLAMANT, MIRABELL.
MILLA. […] My dear liberty, shall I leave thee? My faithful
solitude, my darling contemplation, must I bid you then
adieu? Ay-h, adieu. My morning thoughts, agreeable
wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye DOUCEURS, ye
SOMMEILS DU MATIN, adieu. I can't do't, 'tis more than
impossible—positively, Mirabell, I'll lie a-bed in a
morning as long as I please.
MIRA. Then I'll get up in a morning as early as I please.
MILLA. Ah! Idle creature, get up when you will. And d'ye
hear, I won't be called names after I'm married; positively
I won't be called names.
MIRA. Names?
The Way of the World, cont.
MILLA. Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love,
sweet-heart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which
men and their wives are so fulsomely familiar—I shall
never bear that. Good Mirabell, don't let us be familiar or
fond, nor kiss before folks, like my Lady Fadler and Sir
Francis; nor go to Hyde Park together the first Sunday in
a new chariot, to provoke eyes and whispers, and then
never be seen there together again, as if we were proud
of one another the first week, and ashamed of one
another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a
play together, but let us be very strange and well-bred.
Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great
while, and as well-bred as if we were not married at all.
The Way of the World, cont.
MIRA. Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto
your demands are pretty reasonable.
MILLA. Trifles; as liberty to pay and receive visits to and
from whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I
please, and choose conversation with regard only to my
own taste; to have no obligation upon me to converse
with wits that I don't like, because they are your
acquaintance, or to be intimate with fools, because they
may be your relations. Come to dinner when I please,
dine in my dressing- room when I'm out of humour,
without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate; to
be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never
presume to approach without first asking leave. And
lastly, wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door
before you come in. These articles subscribed, if I
continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees
dwindle into a wife.
The Way of the World, cont.
[…]
MIRA. Then we're agreed. Shall I kiss your hand upon the
contract?
Comedy of manners
Summary
the social habits (manners and mores) of a
given society, usually the dominant one at the
time, typically the upper classes
Often cold caricature,
witness to lack of
moral standards in society at the time
Restoration comedy: 1660 to early 18th century
sexual and marital intrigue
(Comedy of manners: term not restricted to
drama)
Heroic Drama
- A form of tragedy which was fashionable at the
beginning of the Restoration period.
- Its themes were love and honour, its mode grand,
rhetorical and declamatory, at its worst bombastic.
- The chief influence was French classical drama,
especially the works of Pierre Corneille (1616-1684).
- It was staged in a spectacular and operatic fashion.
- John Dryden’s The Indian Queen (1664), The Indian
Emperor (1665) and All for Love (based on
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra) are good
examples.
Sentimental Comedy
The Age of Neoclassicism
Also known as the drama of sensibility, it followed on
from Restoration comedy and was a kind of reaction
against what was regarded as immorality and licence in
the latter.
As Oliver Goldsmith put it, in it “the virtues of private
life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed, and
the distresses rather than the frailty of mankind.”
Sentimental Comedy
The characters, both good and bad, were luminously
simple.
A chief instance is Oliver Goldsmith’s The Good
Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer, or The
Mistakes of a Night (1773).
Goldsmith, however, mocks sentimental comedy
continually, revealing sensiblity as hypocrisy.
Neoclassicist comedy of manners
Another exponent of neoclassicist comedy of manners was
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751–1816), an
Irish-born playwright and poet and long-term owner of the
London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. His masterpiece is The
School for Scandal (1777) in which he attacks
sentimentalism and criticizes frivolous and fraudulent
London high society.
Romanticism
(mainly in German theatre):
• need for historical consistency (no
precision, though) for imaginative &
plausible presentation (realism)
• mid-19th c. France: return to the tradition
of middle class dramas
• good acting: move with the natural
elegance of gentry
• touring companies disappear
New Historicism
Interrogate the relationship between history
and literature – especially concerning the
Renaissance and Romantic period
Victorian Drama
The Theatre Act of 1843 broke the monopoly of London
drama granted to Covent Garden and Drury Lane by the
Act of 1737. The modern theatre was free to develop.
The expansion was devoted to a popular clientele, lower
middle class and some of the working classes.
For them Victorian stage provided melodrama.
Victorian Drama
Plays were characterized by
• suspenseful plot (characterization was
subordinated to it)
• pseudo-realism (contemporary setting, persuasive
realism, elegant splendour)
• stereotyped figures (valiant seamen, virtuous
shopgirls, cruel mortgage holders, etc.)
• sentimentalism
• naive moral concepts (the virtuous are rewarded)
Stagecraft: electric lighting was first introduced in the
Savoy Theatre in1881
Oscar Wilde
(1856-1900)
In the guise of the „well-made play” of the period, i.e. neatly
and economically constructed play which works with
mechanical efficiency, Wilde’s dramas restored the
sparkling comedy of manners which disappeared with
Sheridan. His theatre is sometimes termed as the
epigrammatic theatre, since the dialogues move forward
by rapid exchanges of witty statements.
The Importance of Being Ernest (1895) – Wilde termed it “A
Trivial Comedy for Serious People”
Oscar Wilde and photographs from the
first production of the play
Twentieth-Century Drama
Strongly individualistic as opposed to the
epochs of previous drama
Emphasized sociological problems
Comedy of Ideas
A term loosely applied to plays which tend to debate, in
a witty and humorous fashion, ideas and theories.
George Bernard Shaw is an outstanding exponent in
Man and Superman (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma
(1906) and other plays.
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)
Staunch vegetarian, pacifist, antivivisectionist, socialist,
champion of the Irish over the English.
The chief Shavian quality is the ability to make people think
by compelling them to laugh.
His key technique was turning everything topsy-turvy and
forcing the audience to see the other half of the truth.
Lengthy speeches and prolonged stage conversations
G. B.Shaw
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Written in 1894, produced in 1902, privately. The censor
put ban on the play that was not lifted until 1924.
The satiric play is a dramatic representation of the Marxist
contention that virtue is impossible in a capitalistic society.
Vivie Warren, a modern independent girl is distressed
when she understands that her mother had escaped from
poverty by prostitution. She insists that her mother retire
from her position as the head of an international chain
of brothels, financed by a respectable gentleman, Sir
George Crofts. Mrs. Warren refuses, and Vivie renounces
her mother to live by honest work in London.
Verse Drama
Verse drama is a drama written as verse to be spoken;
another possible general term is poetic drama. For a
very long period, it was the dominant form of drama in
Europe.
During the twentieth century verse drama fell
almost completely out of fashion with dramatists
writing in English.
However the plays of T. S. Eliot, most notably Murder
in the Cathedral (1935), brought a revival of the form.
A postmodernist example is Serious Money (1987) by
Caryl Churchill.
Post-War Theatre
Reaction against the realist conventions dominating the
stage. (The opening of the curtain seemed to remove the
fourth wall of a fully furnished middle-class or upper
middle-class sitting-room. The dialogues had to seem
realistic.
The English stage was ruled by the commercial theatre,
management fulfilled their task of providing
entertainment which had a proven saleability. There was
no place for plays of questionably commercial values
regardless of their artistic merits.
By the mid-50s0 it seemed inevitable that English theatre
was about to be transformed.
Post-War Theatre
It was the English Stage Company at the Royal Court
Theatre that finally created opportunity for fresh
talent and experimental performances.
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was a
breakthrough, and the theatre added to their
repertoire plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter,
and others.
http://youtu.be/vxBS2GKRt9A
Angry Young Man Movement
Kitchen-Sink Drama
Middle and late 1950s trend
Main exponent on stage was John Osborne (1929-1994)
Look Back in Anger (1956) spoke for a generation of
discontented young men often with working-class
background, who were opposed to the establishment and
disillusioned by post-second world war social situation.
Jimmy Porter represents the anti-hero.
Look Back in Anger 1989 performance by the
Renaissance Theatre Company with Emma Thompson
and Kenneth Branagh, directed by Judy Dench
John Osborne
Kitchen-Sink Comedy
A term which became popular in Great Britain in the
middle and late 1950s. Often used derogatorily, it applied
to plays which, in a realistic fashion, showed aspects of
working-class life at the time. The implication was that the
play centred, metaphorically (or psychologically) and in
some cases literally, on the kitchen sink. The works of John
Osborne, Arnold Wesker were all so described. It is
doubtful if the term derives in any way from Wesker's play
The Kitchen because this was first presented in a
production without décor in 1958, and not given a full
production until 1961.
(Cuddon)
Comedy of Menace
A term denoting a kind of lay in which one or more
characters feel that they are threatened by some
obscure and frightening force, power, personality.
The fear and menace become a source of comdey,
albeit grim or black.
Harold Pinter exploited the possibilities of such
situation in his early plays.
Harold Pinter
(1930–2008)
Harold Pinter
Comedy of Menace / Memory Plays
Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production
of The Room in 1957. His early works, such as The
Birthday Part (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), and The
Caretaker (1959) were described by critics as "comedy
of menace".
Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal
(1978) became known as "memory plays".
Memory Plays
(1968–1982)
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter
wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore
complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic
vagaries, and other "quicksand-like" characteristics of
memory.
The Theatre of the Absurd
A term applied to many of the works of a group of
dramatists who were active in the 1950s: Samuel
Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet
and others.
The phrase 'theatre of the absurd' was probably
coined by Martin Esslin, who wrote The Theatre of the
Absurd (1961).
The Theatre of the Absurd
The origins of this form of drama are obscure, but it
would be reasonable to suppose that its lineage is
traceable from Roman mime plays, through to aspects
of comic business and technique in medieval and
Renaissance drama and commedia dell'arte, and
thence to the dramatic works of Alfred Jarry, August
Strindberg and Bertolt Brecht.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
The work of Jarry is vital and the possibilities of a
theatre of the absurd are already apparent in Ubu Roi
(1896). Almost certainly dadaism and surrealism
influenced the development of the theatre of the
absurd, and so have Antonin Artaud's theories on the
theatre of cruelty.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
An awareness of the essential absurdity of much
human behaviour has been inherent in the work of
many writers from Aristophanes to Cervantes to Swift
to Dickens.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
However, the concept of homo absurdas has acquired
a rather more specific meaning in the last hundred
years or so. This is partly, no doubt, owing to the need
to provide an explanation of man's apparently
purposeless role and position in a universe which is
popularly imagined to have no discernible reason for
existence.
Mathematically, a surd is that which cannot be
expressed in finite terms of ordinary numbers or
quantities. Hence irrational rather than ridiculous.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
The collection of essays The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
by Albert Camus and the existentialist philosophies of
the mid-20th century not independent of the two world
wars gave an impetus to the vision of human life as a
struggle with the irrationality of experience.
The Theatre of the Absurd
The plays themselves lack a formal logic and
conventional structure, so that both form and
content support (while emphasizing the difficulty of
communicating) the representation of what may be
called the absurd predicament.
(Cuddon)
Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989)
Samuel Beckett
Plays of the Middle Period
After World War II, Beckett used the French language
as a vehicle.
During the 15 years following the second world war
years Beckett produced four major full-length stage
plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting
for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame),
Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961).
These deal in a very blackly humorous way with
the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of
that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and
incomprehensible world.
http://youtu.be/BMz1-Kgz_DI
Late Plays
In the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's dramatic
works exhibited an increasing tendency towards
compactness. He reduced his plays to the utmost
essentials. These works are often described as
minimalist. The extreme example of this Breath (1969)
which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no
characters.
Postmodernist Drama
One of the he chief exponents of postmodernist drama
is Tom Stoppard (1937) British playwright.
His theatre has three main features:
• (1) brilliant language: verbal contests, verbal
punning
• (2) weird theatrical ideas: e.g. play around the action
of another play (Hamlet in Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern), double plot in Arcadia, the present
researching the past
• (3) an intellectual frame of reference: Wittgenstein
language philosophy, Chaos theory, Newton’s
physics, thermodynamics, both intellectually
entertaining and with serious moral considerations
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
The reverse of the play within the play scene in William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stoppard’s play is a play
around a play. Stoppard places two miner characters
from Hamlet into central position.
Ros and Guil are no heroes, not even separate
personalities. Taking two characters from a play, and
testing their actions against a plot we all know well,
Stoppard explores questions of predictability, i.e.
determinism and free will. Also, explores questions of
self-identity and possibilities of communication via
language.
Tom Stoppard
Arcadia (1993) brings together two time periods,
1809/12 and the present. The setting is Sidley Park, a
large country house owned by the Coverly family. The
scenes alternate until the very last one where the two
time periods appear simultaneously on a divided stage.
The present group of characters is doing research on
the past group of characters and their activities, but
their assumptions turn out to be almost wholly
mistaken.
Tom Stoppard
Stoppard parodied theatrical conventions in many
ways. The main plot of Jumpers (1972) is constituted
by a murder story, but the dialogues are occupied by a
series of very entertaining philosophical perception so
the murder case is almost completely ignored.
Tom Stoppard
Travesties concerns an English consular official, Henry
Carr as he reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the
First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce
when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the
rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian
Revolution, all of whom were living in Zürich at that
time. Carr's memories are couched in a Zürich
production of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of
Being Earnest in which he had a starring role.
Tom Stoppard
The Real Inspector Hound (1967)
Stoppard takes great pleasure in ironically subverting
dramatic conventions thus reacting against stage
realism. In the opening scene of this play he parodies
the pseudo-realistic dialogues in effort to to get across
basic information concerning the characters in the
play.
Tom Stoppard
Mrs Drudge the cleaning woman happens to be dusting the
phone when it rings. He answers “informatively”.
[The phone rings. MRS DRUDGE seems to have been
waiting for it do so and for the last few seconds has been
dusting it with an intense concentration. She snatches it up]
MRS DRUDGE [Into the phone.] Hello, the drawing-room of
Lady Muldoon's country residence one morning in early
spring? ... Hello!--the draw----Who? Who did you wish to
speak to? I'm afraid there is no one of that name here, this
is all very mysterious and I am sure it's leading up to
something, I hope nothing is wrong for us. Lady Muldoon
and her houseguests, are here cut off from the world,
including Magnus, the wheelchair-ridden half-brother of her
ladyship's husband Lord Albert Muldoon. Ten years ago, he
went out for a walk on the cliffs and was never seen againand all alone, for they had no children.