Universitatea Dunarea de Jos din Galati Facultatea de Litere

Main Trends in Modern British Drama (2): Beyond Realism

(An optional course in English literature for 3rd year students in English)

Course tutor: dr. Ioana Mohor-Ivan

Galati 2010

Cuprins:
CHAPTER 1: SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE 1.1. The symbolist movement 1.2. European developments 3.2.1. Theory: Wagner and Nietzsche 3.2.2. Stagecraft and Production: Appia and Craig 3.2.3. Playwrights: Maeterlinck and Claudel 1.3. British symbolist drama 3.3.1. Oscar Wilde 3.3.2. W.B. Yeats 3.3.3. T.S. Eliot 3.3.4. Christopher Fry 1.4. Task CHAPTER 2: EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE 2.1. The Expressionist movement 2.2. European developments 2.2.1. Strindbergs dream play 2.2.2. German Expressionism 2.2.2.1. Georg Kaiser 2.2.2.2. Ernst Toller 2.3. American Expressionism: Eugene ONeill 2.4. British Expressionism 2.4.1. Sean OCasey 2.4.2. Auden and Isherwood 2.4.3. The radio play 2.4.3.1. Louis MacNiece 2.4.3.2. Dylan Thomas 2.5. Task CHAPTER 3: EPIC THEATRE AND BRITISH VARIANTS 3.1. From Expressionism to Epic Theatre 3.1.1. Erwin Piscator 3.2.2. Bertold Brecht 3.2. British Epic Equivalents 3.2.1. Brechtian Directors 3.2.1.1. Peter Brook 3.2.1.2. Joan Littlewood 3.2.2. Pseudo-brechtian Plays 3.2.3. Brechtian playwrights 3.2.3.1. John Arden 3.2.3.2. Edward Bond 3.3. Task MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 2 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage

CHAPTER 1 - SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

1.1. The Symbolist Movement

Symbolism in the theatre is probably as old as theatre itself, but as a technical and critical term it came into specialized use during the last decades of the 19th century, associated with the French symbolist movement which emerged in reaction against the descriptive precision and objectivity of realism and the scientific determinism of naturalism. In the manifesto of the movement published in September 1886 in an article in Le Figaro, Jean Moras decreed that symbolic poetry cherche vtir lide dune forme sensible, while Stphane Mallarm, in Oeuvres complete (1891) explained symbolism as the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an tat dme. The progenitors of the movement, such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, or Valry, sought in their turn to discover the secret of poetry, building their ideas upon a latter-day theory of the mystical and the occult, the irrational and the world of fantasy and dream. It was also Mallarm who urged the creation of a new drama that would reflect the mental or spiritual life, rather than the crude world of the senses. Thus, for the theatre, at the time when naturalism was at its peak in Europe, symbolism provided an alternative in a powerful and unpredictable mode of playwriting which sought a justification in myth and ritual in order to achieve the visionary quality missed in realism. Aiming to convey the yearnings of human life freed from its material conditions, symbolist playwrights would often try to fuse the arts of poetry, painting, music and dance, taking their lead from an outstanding man of the theatre, Richard Wagner, and a philosopher (of the theatre, among other matters), Friedrich Nietzsche.

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Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage

1.2. European developments

1.2.1. Theory: Wagner and Nietzsche

Wagners parallel interests in both music and drama had resulted not only in the production of his major operas such as Tristan and Isolde (1865) or Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), but also in an impressive body of theoretical writings - The Art Work of the Future (1849), Opera and Drama (1851), and The Purpose of the Opera (1871) -on the form and nature of what he considered to be the performing art of the future, the so-called music-drama, where language could be extended by sound in order to create a fuller emotional statement. This Gesamtkunswerk (or total art form) was to give a vital expression of the instinctive life, drawing upon archetype and myth, dream and the supernatural. In his turn, Nietzsche had justified Wagners ideas in his own account on The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), where the origins of Greek tragedy were identified with the moment in which the ritual celebrations of Dionysus (representing all that was emotional and irrational in man) expressed into the song of the dithyramb1, had found the embodiment of dance which had imposed an Apollinian form upon them (characterized by lucidity, reasonableness and harmony.) Thus, the duality and tension between the instinctive and the rational, music and dance, which had led to the birth of tragedy, could only be recuperated in Wagners music-drama, which Nietszche considered to exercise a Dionysian influence in the modern rational world.

1.2.2. Stagecraft and Production: Appia and Craig

Such theories were to be further developed by Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), the Swiss theorist and designer who renovated theatrical and operatic scenography. His central ideas, outlined in Music and Theatrical Production (1899) and The Work of Living Art (1921), advocated a new stagecraft, which eliminated two-dimensional scene painting and substituted a kind of sculptural movement, a musical control of

Form of hymn or choral lyric in which Dionysus was honoured.

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Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage the actors body in space, fusing the whole through use of light. The rhythm of stage movement where the actors gestures and movements, akin to dance, spatialised the time units of music under a play of light and colour, were to achieve a synaesthesia able to express a platonic reality, an essence of beauty and perfection behind appearances. Appias theories had much in common with the eurithmics of Emile Jacques Dalcroze (1865-1950), the rhythmic gymnastics advocated as the art of the new performer, trained to use the movement of his body like an instrument, on the assumption that rhythm was the physical expression of abstract time and space. Another seminal figure for the course taken by symbolist theatre was Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), the British stage designer, editor, founder of a school of acting and dramatic theorist. His ideas, which developed alongside those of Appia, are chiefly expressed in On the Art of Theatre (1911) and The Marionette (1918). Craig also argued for an abstract and ritualistic theatre that would have an equivalent spiritual significance to the tragedy of classical Greece or the Japanese noh drama2, and against the literary elements of drama as well as realism. Like the Swiss, Craig also believed in the need to create a production as a whole, with all its parts, including the actor, subordinated to the vision of a single man, the director, who, like a composer, worked to achieve harmony of the various theatre languages. With light and rhythmic movement seen as the basis of the new drama, Craig pursued the notion of a flexible stage by means of which an endless variation of architectural shapes could be created during a performance. In attempting to realize this, he invented movable screens to substitute for scenery and attacked conventional acting, apparently demanding the elimination of the personality ego- of the human actor, substituted with his ber-Marionette (i.e. a super-puppet), a masked performer
A serious and subtle dance drama that evolved in Japan in the 14th century out of earlier songs, dances and sketches. It was originally performed by priest-performers attached to Budhist temples. Noh plays were lyric dramas and were intended for aristocratic audiences, differing from the popular kabuki. In noh performance movement, music and words create an ever-shifting web of tension and ambiguity. A noh text contains prose and poetry sections. Prose is delivered in a sonorous voice which rises gradually and evenly in pitch, then drops at the end of a phrase. Poetry sections are sung and they make up the bulk of the text. In the central narrative module of a play the major character dances a crucial event from his or her past to a song sung by the Chorus. The vocal pattern is overlaid on rhythm played by musicians on drums and flute. The noh stage consists of a raised dancing platform, covered by a temple-like roof supported by pillars at the four corners, which helps to focus the audiences attention on the performance. At one side is a balcony which accommodates the chorus, while upstage there is a smaller platform occupied by the musicians. The actors, between two and six in number, wear masks and elaborate costumes, entering and leaving on a long slanting walk from stage left. There is little or no scenery except for the framework with the roof and three symbolic trees in front of the slanting walk, representing heaven, earth and humanity.
2

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Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage submitted to his place in the overall shape, whose perfect stillness of body and gravity of expression was capable of symbolizing, indicating or demonstrating a truth.

1.2.3. Playwrights: Maeterlinck and Claudel

The contemporary dramatist with whom both Appia and Craig shared most was the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949). Maeterlinck was fascinated by dimensions that make life elusive, such as mysterious forces and blindness. Only though contemplation, absolute silence and inactivity could these be made visible. As such, his plays are characterized by their lack of action, or conflict, and by their suggestive force. His early plays, like Les Aveugles (1890) or LIntruse (1891), are one-act dramas of silences, shadowy characters, and an immovable scene, where the disconnected, allusive and repetitive prose dialogue is broken by long pauses. Pellas and Mlisande (1893) is typical of his next series of metaphysical tragedies. Set in an indeterminate medieval world of dream and fantasy, the play is an atmospheric, fairy tale allegory in which Love combats Death and loses and where the scenes exist to present symbols as much as to develop the simple plot, in which the main characters accidentally meet, fall in love and have to account for it with their lives, but only after they have kissed each other in joy and defiance of death. Thresholds, gates, fountains, forest, or castle communicate a powerful sense of mystery and the opera Debussy created out of it in 1902 asserted the continuing power of musical and scenic non-naturalist tradition. Another strong advocate of the movement was the French symbolist actor and director, Aurlien-Marie Lugn-Poe (1869-1940), who is also responsible for the break-through to public recognition of the religious plays of the French diplomat Paul Claudel (1868-1955). A friend and disciple of Mallarm, and strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel wrote a series of plays, like Partage de midi (1905), LAnnonce Faite Marie (1905) and LOtage (1909), which dramatized his Catholic faith and repeated, in a variety of ways, the theme of human love transformed into the spiritual and the divine. Their style and tone is symbolist, lyrical and ritualistic, with little action and much poetry, as they rely for their power partly on Claudels peculiar verse. Written for declamation, Caudels lines nevertheless have a variety and subtlety that can fairly be compared with the Shakespearean blank verse. 6 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage

1.3. British Symbolist Drama

Though the naturalistic definition of modernism promoted by Shaw and Archer concentrating on social issues and appealing to reason automatically tended to depreciate the spiritual aspect of existence, dramatists like Wilde, Yeats or Eliot, disdaining everyday reality and the realism that reflected it, committed themselves to symbolism as an anti-naturalistic mode of playwriting able to convey the permanent and the universal, the archetypal or the transcendental dimensions of life.

1.3.1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Wildes early apprentice plays unsuccessfully explored the realm of melodrama and verse tragedy, commonplaces of the 19th century stage. Thus, Vera: or, The Nihilists (1883) is a melodrama about a group of Russian revolutionary terrorists (or idealists as Wilde poses the alternatives.) His second play, The Duchess of Padua (1891) is a costume tragedy in blank verse, first staged, like Vera, in New York. It was not until 1892, the year after the publication of his controversial novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that Wilde began to find his own voice in drama. There followed the series of his social comedies, brilliant and witty plays whose success lay in parodying the existing modes. Lady Windermeres Fan (1892) can formally be considered a textbook example of the well-made play, in which the heroines reputation rests on the discreet recovery of a fan. A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895) are, in terms of plot and subject-matter, problem plays of the kind the contemporary drama of Pinero and Jones offered. What subverts the tone and ethos of such models is Wildes dialogue. His upper-class dandies and dowagers have made so merry with the values that the plays purport to uphold that the saving of a marriage has, by the time it is achieved, little more significance than the saving of a cigarette card. Nevertheless in these plays the stagey contrivances are a constraint and Wilde gives no indication of relishing the mechanical plotting of his well-made plays. It is quite otherwise with his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), where a stylized plot matches the verbal epigrams of the play. By the doubling of characters, mirror situations, multiplying revelations, the play becomes a 7 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage parody pastiche of contemporary melodrama, with its plot elements exaggerated into absurdity, while the contrariness of the title i.e. the importance of not being earnest is sustained throughout the play. With the sensational trial in 1895 and the playwrights subsequent imprisonment in Reading Gaol, Wildes dramatic career came to an end, though Salom (1892), an one-act play on a biblical theme, written in French the same year with Lady Windermeres Fan and banned from production by the Chamberlains Office because of its use of scriptural characters, was finally staged in Paris in 1896 by Lugn-Poe. Salom not only represents the counterpart to Wildes social comedies, explicitely rejecting the morality that the society reflected in them represented, but it also ranks as the earliest and most complete British example of symbolist drama. The legend of the beautiful Jewish princess and her destructive love for John the Baptist, which recurs in the writings of French symbolists like Mallarm, Massnettet, and is employed by Maeterlinck himself in La Princess Maligne (1889), is reworked by Wilde in a play which becomes the antithesis of naturalist theatre, replacing plot and characterization by the aesthetic values of colour, musical rhythm and dance. All characters seem to move in a dream, in which their desire and fatal yearning lead to the inevitable denoumnt. Salom seduces the imagination of the Young Syrian, then of Herod the Tetrach of Judea and her stepfather, while she, herself, is hypnotized by Jokanaan, the prophet, who repulses her. As the horrified Syrian kills himself at her feet, the Princess swears that she will kiss Jokanaans lips. The climax of the play is represented by Saloms dance of the seven veils. Herod offers her three inducements to dance, but the reward Salom wants is the Prophets head. Again, Herod offers her three bribes to give up her demand, but the Princess cannot be persuaded and is finally offered the head on a silver salver. But this victory is also her defeat. Kissing the mouth, she discovers that love hath a bitter taste, while Herods desire turns into disgust and orders his soldiers to crush Salom with their shields. As such, Saloms dance and her killing (which represents a significant change from the Biblical source) becomes a celebration of the destruction of the social establishment represented by Herod, literally breaking the succession to his authoritarian rule. The overt artifice of stylized speech and simplified action, the recurring motifs and repetitive patterns make the play overtly symbolic. Thus it becomes the 8 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage expression of a purely subjective reality patterned by leit-motifs of colour and symbol, built up musically with incantatory repetitions, alternating shouts and whispers, while its strongest moments are powerfully ritualistic.

1.3.2. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Where Wildes Salom remains a period piece associated with fin-de-sicle aestheticism, W. B. Yeatss drama has been seen as the model for British avantgarde theatre. The major figure behind the rise of the Irish dramatic movement, Yeatss drama was part of a larger design which hoped to revive a national culture in a country where legendary subjects still seemed to have life in themselves, as well as to bring back poetry to the theatre, the poetry that it had missed in Ibsen and the naturalist school. Because his conscious aim was to create for a few people who love symbol a play that will be more a ritual than a play, and leave upon the mind an impression like that of tapestry, where the forms only half-reveal themselves and the shadowy folds (Hinchliffe, 20), Yeats turned away from the naturalist stage towards other forms of drama which could convey a different kind of reality, caught up in myth, in the drama of the past and in the supernatural. The model at hand was the Japanese Noh play being translated by Ezra Pound and, possibly, by Yeats himself. Both Arthur Walley and Fenellosa had insisted that these plays were analogous to Greek and Elizabethan theatre in their religious origins and could be used as models to restore drama to its original power, evoking a sacred presence with all the devices of ceremony, dance, poetry and scenery a ritual that came close to fulfilling Yeatss own dramatic ambitions. As mentioned before, the aims and repertoire of the Noh play were firmly established by the fifteenth century and the isolation of Japan as well as the patronage of the richest and most powerful families ensured its survival as an art form. The words may not be very important (and are, anyway, muffled by the masks) but the finest poetry is used in combination with music, masks and dancing. The avoidance of realism is complete, everything inessential is excluded and the subjects are those basic emotions love, hate and jealousy which inspire most drama. The technical demands upon both performers and audience ensure that it is a minority theatre, but 9 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage it offered Yeats a theatre form of historical importance which did more than merely represent life. The sequence of Yeatss Plays for Dancers, including At the Hawks Well (1916), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1916), The Dreaming of the Bones (1917) and Calvary (1920) is illustrative of the elements that the playwright borrowed from the Noh: a framing chorus, separated from the action, strictly limited gesture and nonnaturalistic movement, and a minimal action culminating in a dance. As such, character was presented at the point where individualization merges with type, while acting was stylized and the performers were apt to remain still for long moments of great muscular tension. In these conditions, the words could work to greater effect and ensure that the play achieve a symbolic concentration able to communicate a state almost of trance. At the Hawks Well exhibits a typical structure for Yeatss Plays for Dancers. A short play in verse, telling the story of the young Cuchulain and his wish to drink from the well of immortality, it has only three characters listed as: the Young Man (Cuchulain), the Old Man, the Guardian of the Well (a dancers part played by a girl who never speaks.) The scenery is reduced to a single blank screen at the rear,

and a patch of blue fabric on the floor standing for the well. Musical accompaniment is limited to rhythmic instruments: drum, gong, zither. The stage curtain is replaced by a square of cloth, on which a golden hawk the dominant image of the play has been painted. Ceremonially unfolded and refolded by the Musicians, it also provides the cover under which the actors take their positions at the beginning of the play, and exit at the end. The inner play is equally austere: Cuchulain, the vigorous and aspiring man of action, arrives at the well whose waters are said to give immortality. There he meets the old man who, though has watched it for more than fifty years, has missed each of its upsurgings of magic water, being enchanted into sleep by the Guardians dance. The Guardian herself is possessed by the hawk spirit of the Woman of the Sidhe, whom Cuchulain has already met and antagonized. Then the action of the play shows the process that the Old Man has described: the Guardians premonition of possession presage the arrival of the water of life; she rises and dances, her dance lulling the old man to sleep and luring Cuchulain away off stage. Afterwards, his disappointment is realized to the sound of the warrior women of Aoife, roused by the goddess to religious war against the intruder. While the Old Man 10 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage appeals to him to remain by the well and wait for another upsurge of water, Cuchulain leaves, choosing a wandering combative life and embracing thus his heroic destiny.

1.3.3. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

T. S. Eliot acknowledged and built on Yeatss contribution to modern poetic drama, even if at one point he suggested in his critical writings that Yeatss Plays for Dancers, which had renounced popular appeal being intent for a select few, an audience like a secret society (Hodgson, 80), did not solve the problems encountered by the modern verse dramatist. For Eliot, Shakespeare was the model to be followed, as a playwright whose plays had been able to appeal for all kinds of audience, both unsophisticated and educated. As he wrote in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, in a play by Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest auditor, there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character; for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive, the rhythm; and for auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding, a meaning which reveals itself gradually. (Styan) Thus Eliots

solution was to incorporate in his plays a multiplicity of levels of appreciation in order to pursue his goal of writing a successful poetic drama for the 20th-century audience. As such Eliot adapted the popular forms of drama of his time (the detective play, or the drawing-room comedy format) in order to render his serious, spiritual themes. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a play commission by The Religious Drama Society fir the 1935 Canterbury Festival and Eliots first dramatic success, treated a Christian martyrdom as if it was a murder, so that, despite its static form and medieval subject, it was subsequently transferred on the commercial stage. The structure of the play builds up the story of Thomas Becket, the 12th century martyr, through Chorus, priests, Tempters and Thomas himself. Divided in two parts, it starts with Beckets arrival at his Cathedral from France, determined to resist the submission of Church to State (which Henry demands.) Four Tempters appear to test Henrys decision, and the last of them is the most difficult to resist, insinuating that pride is motivating the Archbishop. But the Chorus of the women of Canterbury (who express the related anguish of the whole community) enable Thomas, through 11 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage their pleads, to overcome the paralysis of will induced by the last Tempter. In the second part, the four knights, intent to punish Thomas, arrive at the Cathedral, and their physical threat implicates the audience in the brutality and political expedience of the murder. The play ends on the Choruss concluding thanksgiving to Thomass testimony through martyrdom. Thus, Beckets death is presented as an imitation of Christs own martyrdom, for Becket becomes the Christian subject who renounces his own free will in order to subject to the pattern designed for him by Gods will. The imagery and rhythms of the Choral verse are designed to carry the audience through the same spiritual progression as Thomas himself, while the use of colloquial prose in the Knights direct address to the public reinforces the identification between the two by breaking through the temporal distance and implying thus that the 20thcentury loss of faith is no less guilty of Beckets death than the historical characters themselves. In his next plays, Eliot rejected the overtly religious drama (as preaching to the already converted) and turned, instead, to secular topics in order to allow a Christian mentality to permeate the theatre, to affect it, and to influence audiences who might be obdurate to plays of direct religious appeal (Lemming). As such, Eliots social (or drawing-room) comedies, while continuing to experiment with the choral form, turn to Greek myth in order to establish a parallel to the surface action, in order to achieve a doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once (Innes), a metaphoric quality which is the characteristic of poetic/symbolist drama. The Family Reunion (1938) is paralleled by the events and characters of Aeschyluss The Orestia. Clytemnestra finds an equivalent in Amy the dominant mother, while Harry parallels Orestes, the returning son responsible for his mothers death. The plays borrows a misleading detective frame, with a confession of murder (the hero, who returns home to attend his mothers birthday celebration, is convinced to have murdered his wife, and he confesses this to his half-incredulous and halfpanicked relatives), questioning of the suspect, and a possible witness to the crime, as well as the appearance of a police agent. But Harrys guilt is imaginary. He is simply repeating inherited patterns, for his dream of pushing his wife overboard, at sea, is a projection of his fathers plan to drown Harrys pregnant mother in a well on the estate. Where Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Harrys father was 12 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage persuaded not to dispose of Amy because this would have meant killing his unborn child. Moreover, the net that traps him is the web of family responsibilities, and instead of being butchered with an axe, his life is sapped by his wifes implacable will to preserve the status quo. The sins are those of omission, and the curse lies in repeating the past rather than a developing pattern of vengeance. Similarly, it is Harrys refusal to perpetuate the hell of unreality (as symbolized by the country estate of Wishwood) that kills Amy, destroyed by his departure. But instead of fleeing in guilt, like Orestes, Harrys exit is to be seen as a triumph, while the tragedy is that of his mother, of a person living on will alone. Such hidden parallels are signaled by breaking naturalistic expectations, and, in turn, the unnatural actions of the characters are justified by their correspondence to the myth. The dialogue, reflecting the various levels of the action, switches between colloquial and heightened verse, visionary trances, unconscious utterance and chanted incantation, while the classical figures of the pursuing Fate are listed explicitly in the cast as The Eumenides tangible embodiments of the myth, who, at first, haunt Harry as avengers of his wife, but later come to personify his spiritual change. Yet, even with the shifts of consciousness in the play, the coexistence of two such different dimensions of reality proved incongruous on the stage, so that, with his next play, The Cocktail Party ( 1949), Eliot resolved this failure of adjustment between the Greek story and the modern situation (Innes) by concealing the plots mythical origins. The preliminary basis for the play was Euripidess Alcestis. But here the Eumenides are disguised as a psychiatrist, colonial envoy , and interfering unofficial aunt, interacting with the social group they manipulate. This concealed mythical level is replaced by an external shaping of experience through the imposition of a geometrical symmetry on the surface plot. Not only the missing wife has a lover, but the latter one is in love with the mistress of the husband, whom he selects as a confidant, forming thus a quadrilateral equation. In addition, the action is circular, beginning with the end of one party, and ending with the preparations for another. The Confidential Clerk (1953) takes this to an extreme. The model is Euripidess Ions, but the plot follows it in that Eliot has three dubiously parented young people in the play (a husband and a wife each have a misplaced illegitimate child, and both recognize him in the tile figure; he, in turn, is revealed to have lost his real father, and chooses his clerical predecessor, whose own child was lost in the 13 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage war, as his true spiritual parent.) Where the original myth had a single child the son of Apollo, believed dead by his mother who tries to kill him when adopted by her husband Eliot adds an illegitimate daughter and a second unacknowledged son, accentuating thus the parallelism to a farcical level, the automatic association being not with a classical archetype, but rather with Wildes The Importance of Being Earnest. Increasingly, in Eliots later plays, the mythical subtext becomes more

tenuous and, as the social mode comes to dominate, the verse takes on the attributes of ordinary conversation. His last play, The Elder Statesman (1958) resembles Oedipus at Colonus only in the fact that the aged protagonists of both plays go away led by loving daughters and, after resisting messengers from the past, die reconciled with the gods. But the plot of The Elder Statesman, where two blackmailers appear out of Lord Clavertons past demanding not money but acknowledgement of their existence, while the Lords own guilty secret (running over the body of a man already killed by another driver) is equally imaginary reduces the motivation for the spiritual conversion of its protagonists, who lack any convincing personal reality. Eliots plays can thus be seen as a progressive series of experiments, each tackling the dramaturgical problems revealed by his previous attempt to create a specifically modern form of poetic drama.

1.3.4. Christopher Fry (1907 1993)

The most direct influence of Eliots poetic drama is to be found with Christopher Fry (1907-1993), whose lyric comedies A Phoenix Too Frequent (1946), The Ladys Not for Burning (1948), Venus Observed (1950), The Dark Is Light Enough ((1954) and A Yard of Sun (1970) represented the high point of modern attempts to revive verse drama. Recalling Anouilhs piece roses, Fry relies on mood to achieve

imaginative unity, each comedy being keyed to a particular season: bitter-sweet April transition (The Ladys Not for Burning), the sensuality of summer (A Phoenix Too Frequent and A Yard of Sun), autumnal ripeness and decay (Venus Observed), the nostalgia of winter (The Dark Is Light Enough). The integration of poetic mood and action correspond with his thematic aim to infuse life with spirituality. But his 14 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 1 - Symbolism and the British Stage extravagant language and imagery lead to an artificial heightening of the dramatic context, undermining individual characterization. This made his work seem dated as soon as Osborne and Wesker introduced new standards of authenticity in the late 1950s.

Task:

Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the argumentative type:

1. Symbolism and theatre: Oscar Wildes Salome 2. Symbolism and myth in W.B.Yeatss At the Hawks Well. 3. Symbolism and religious drama: T.S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral. 4. Greek myth in T.S.Eliots The Cocktail Party.

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage

CHAPTER 2 EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE

2.1. The Expressionist Movement

Expressionism designates a general movement in the arts during and just before World War I which expresses extreme feelings of personal, familial and general social breakdown. Apocalyptic is the adjective frequently used of this highly subjective movement in which artists figure frequently as protagonists projecting their sufferings over a fractured world. As usual with new movements, the fundamental drive behind expressionism was a drive towards freedom. In the main, this freedom meant a break away with the constraints of naturalism, seen as a restrictive, determinist, positivist, materialist and reactionary programme, which took people to be products of the environment. The term was first applied to painting, being coined by Julien Auguste Herv in 1901 as a useful word to distinguish early impressionist painting from the more energetic individualism of Van Gogh and Matisse, both artists trying to go beyond the mere depiction of an external reality in order to convey their private experiences, inner ideas or visions, i.e., in Hervs words, to to express [themselves] with force. As often, a useful general term was soon shared by other art forms, so that it became soon applied to music (e.g. the work of the composers Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), architecture (e.g. the visions of the architect Erich Mendhelson), film (e.g. Robert Wienes The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) poetry (e.g. the imagistic lyric verse of T.S. Eliots The Waste Land), or fiction (e.g. the Nightown episode of James Joyces Ulysses or the nightmarish stories of Franz Kafka), yet it found itself particularly at home with drama, where expressionist came soon to identify any play or production which departed from realism and tried to show life in a very personal, idiosyncratic manner, where the form of the play could be seen to express its content.

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage This led to the following characteristics being shared by expressionist plays:

The dream structure, disjointed, concentrated, caricatural, questing, strange, is the dominant form of expressionism. In keeping with this, its characteristic setting has clusters of powerful primary colours, with heavy flickering shadows and strong lighting. The characters lose their individuality, becoming stereotyped and caricatured, with nameless designations like the dreamer, the father, the son, etc.

The dialogue is poetic and febrile, in order to break the sympathetic feeling directly.

2.2. European developments

2.2.1. Strindbergs dream play

Among the forerunners of the movement, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849-1912) ranks as the most important. Though he began as one of the pioneers of early naturalism with plays such as The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1898) and Creditors (1889), after a period of mental crisis he wrote another twentynine plays in which he moved towards expressionism, disregarding the strict demands of realism and using materials that resembled dreams, or nightmares. For example, in A Dream Play (1902), the main character is a dreamer, while his imagination (in the form of dreams) designs the patterns, fancies, absurdities and improvisations which make up the play. The Ghost Sonata (1907) is an ironic psychological allegory which uses the same dream-like action to explore the protagonists encounter with death, seen as a painful awakening from a life of sleepwalking illusion.

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage

2.2.2. German Expressionism

The expressionist movement within the theatre was first associated with the mood gripping the German drama in the 1910s and 1920s. German expressionism began as a drama of protest, reacting against the pre-war authority of the family and community, the rigid lines of social order. It was a drama of violent conflicts like those established between youth and old age, freedom and authority, and it followed Nietsche in glorifying the individual and idealizing the creative personality. With the advent of Freud and Jung, German expressionism undertook the challenge to disclose and reproduce the hidden states of mind, and in so doing it boldly treated taboo subjects, such as incest and paricide. For example, Walter Hasenclavers The Son (1914), which is considered the first representative expressionist play, is an ecstatic drama in which the Son desires freedom from a domineering burgher Father, bringing thus very close the father-dominated world of Freud. Arnolt Bronnens Vatermord (1915) is another rather crude dramatization of Freudian theory: the protagonist of the play is a young man who makes love to his mother and stabs his father. Reinhard Sorges The Beggar (1917) is also protesting against the dominance of the family. In an act of symbolic liberation, the son poisons both his mother (who obsessively loves him) and his father (who has a mad obsession with the planet Mars) to be then wedded to a new person, a vital force towards which he reaches out.

Nevertheless, the impact of World War I and the mass slaughter of men in the trenches began to undermine this personal and subjective content and hastened the introduction of a more sophisticated concern for man and society (often reacting against the industrialization of society and the mechanization of life), while the skills of Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller brought more discipline to the movement.

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage

2.2.2.1. Georg Kaiser

Thus, Georg Kaisers From Morning to Midnight (1916), one of the crucial texts of the movement, is a vivid episodic play about the collapse of modern industrial society. Its protagonist is a bank cashier who revolts against the world. An idealist searching for the absolute, he repudiates society, embezzles money and flees into a symbolic snowfield where he has a conversation with Death. He plunges on, offering high prizes to winners of a six-day bicycle race, but the people are too tame for his vision. He continues to travel, seeking his brothers in a Salvation Army Hall, where he finds people confessing their sins. He confesses himself, and throws his money into the hall in an ecstasy of abnegation. But the saved throw themselves on the money, and the cashier looses faith. He can now trust only one person, a girl, but she calls the police and he shoots himself.

2.2.2.2. Ernst Toller

Ernst Tollers The Conversion (1917-8) depicts the Struggle of Man, which is the plays subtitle. Here the Man undergoes suffering in factory and prison before a personal transfiguration compels him to publish his manifesto on behalf of fraternity and humanity. The Tranfiguration (1919) is a dream-sequence which presents graphic images of war and it follows the protagonists conversion from patriotism to militant pacifism. Tollers later works are characteristic of the new objectivity (the Neue Sachlichkeit) towards which expressionism moved when its social concerns came to the fore. While The Machine Wreckers (1922) is a historical parable about the Luddites which attacks the processes of capitalism, Hoppla Wir Leben (Hurray, We Live) (1927) portrays the gap between idealism and political reality through the fate of its protagonist, a revolutionary who, released after several years in prison, cannot stand the discrepancy between the grotesque reality and the ideals he suffered for and commits suicide.

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage

2.3. American Expressionism: Eugene ONeill

It was mainly through the theatre that expressionism traveled from Germany, so that its most triumphant playwright was the American Eugene ONeill. Though ONeill had started as a realist, in the 1920s he also moved to expressionism, producing two masterpieces of the genre. Emperor Jones (1920) depicts the flight of its eponymous hero through the forest. Abandoned by his subjects in the first scene, Jones falls prey to visions (rendered by vivid colour, light, music and movement) and slowly sinks into his psyche (moving from sense impressions through personal memory to the non-personal archetypes of Jung.) Death and solitude are the fundamental concerns of the play, while Emperor Jones, like Strindbergs Stranger, wants to become the master of his fate, seeking his ultimate freedom by carrying a silver bullet for final use on himself. The Hairy Ape (1921) presents the psychic vs. the physical disparity of the stoker Yank. Yank works in somber and violent stokehold in the bowels of a ship until he wakes up to consciousness of himself when a top-deck passenger, Mildred, faints at the sight of him. Seeking freedom as well, he goes on a similar journey to that of Kaisers Cashier, but can never find a language to convince the others of his pain, and is always hemmed in by iron bars, whether in the stokehold, in prison, or in the zoo, where he finally dies.

2.4. British Expressionism

In Britain, Expressionism was felt over a period of time within the work of individual and very different artists, especially those of European structure. Thus, in D.H. Lawrences later novels one can detect a move towards the exploration of extreme states, the deeper, rawer realms of the psyche. For example, in Women in Love (1920) the landscapes, without losing their naturalism , reflect the intense psychological states of his characters. But Lawrence, expressionist in his painting and to a certain extent in his fiction, never became an expressionist in his drama. The second British author, one might include here is T. S. Eliot, whose long poem, The Waste Land (1921) employed fragmented semi-dramatic techniques to convey states of personal and social breakdown. Though his early attempt at drama, Sweeney Agonistes: A Fragment of an Agon, also displays an expressionistic 21 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage grotesqueness, a preoccupation with murder and violence, and typological characterization, this style is faintly recognizable in his later plays, which move towards symbolism and myth. Thus, inter-war British playwrights whose work may be accurately labeled as Expressionistic in character are Sean OCasey, W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood.

2.4.1. Sean OCasey

Sean OCasey (1880-1953) developed from naturalistic techniques employed in his early Dublin trilogy (The Shadow of a Gunman, 1923, Juno and the Paycock, 1924, The Plough and the Stars, 1926) where graphic depictions of his working-class environment are set against the background provided by the violent course of events leading to the Irish independence towards expressionism, starting with his 4th play, The Silver Tassie (1928), which juxtaposes overt symbolism with realistic incident and was rejected by the Abbey Theatre on these very grounds, leading to the playwrights subsequent self-exile in England. The Silver Tassie is a war parable, in which the story of Harry Heegan, a young and promising football player crippled in the trenches, illustrates the simple theme of youthful joy of life wantonly destroyed. The first act, set in the familiar OCasey world of Dublins tenements, shows Harry, on leave from World War I, leading his football team to victory and the trophy of the silver tassie (cup). It was the second act, a macabre theatrical poem, expressionist in technique and enacted in a battle-scared landscape, which abandons the exploration of character in order to expose the futility of a foolish war, which upset those who expected from the playwright nothing but urban realism. The remaining two acts return Harry to Ireland. Maimed and bitter, he cannot reconcile himself to his changed circumstances. The climactic final act, which takes place at the football clubs dance, forces a recognition of how much has been lost and how little gained: while those who have not been to war enjoy the spoils of the victory, the crippled ex-football champion, in a wheelchair, bitterly destroys his trophy in utter disappointment. OCaseys next plays are overtly expressionist, with minor figures being onedimensional representatives of social classes or political forces matched by an 22 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage equally didactic purpose. Within the Gates (1934) is a satire on the Depression, as well as an attempt at a modern morality play. The action presents a Strindbergian dreamer, while the play itself is his vision. The four scenes set in Hyde Park a pastoral image extended by having a chorus of young girls and boys representing its trees and flowers pass from winter to spring and from morning to night, meant thus as symbolic of the cycles of life itself. The action surrounds a Young Woman the compassionate prostitute of melodrama who is in search of her salvation, while other characters that are unrealistic and come in great number are merely caricatures. Among them there are: a well-intentioned Bishop (who, nevertheless, is also the former seducer of the girls mother), a Guardsman (who is shown as presently seducing a Nursemaid), two Evangelists ( who are also voyeurs), a Salvation Army Officer (who is also attracted to the girl he is supposed to save.) Just before her death, the Young Woman moves into a joyful dance with the Dreamer, with the play closing on this symbolic moment of dancing. Of the plays of his last period, Cock-a-Doodle-Dandy (1949) is still expressionistic in treatment, but mixes this with the playwrights familiar characterization of Dublins low life, becoming thus overtly allegorical. Woven through the scenes of the play which present a series of incidents like the ugly behaviour of a belligerent priest, the cruelty shown to a young gay girl, the false piety of the elderly, the never-ending quest for money is the central figure of the Cock, which is symbolic of Irelands fight for the joy of life in the face of clerical, social and political oppression.

2.4.2. Auden and Isherwood

The collaboration of W. H. Auden (1907 1973) and Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) resulted in three plays: The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936), The Ascent of F6 (1937) and On the Frontier (1939), which mark them off as the other chief representatives of German expressionism on the inter-war English stage, as well as of the poetic revival characterizing the 1930s British theatre. The Dog Beneath the Skin is a political fable which mixes a symbolic quest with expressionist techniques and satiric pastiche. The protagonist of play is an upright hero, Alan Norman, a villager chosen by his lot to set out on the quest for the missing Sir Francis Crewe (a lost saviour prince) accompanied by a mysterious stray 23 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage dog. Its episodic plot presents Alan as the innocent abroad, passing through a benighted and corrupt European civilization (represented by a court politely mourning the dissidents ceremonially shot, a night-town of brothels and drug-sellers, a pleasure park, a hospital, an asylum where the lunatics respond to the broadcasts of the countrys dictator). In the end, Alan discovers that the ideal hero, who was

the object of his quest, has been with him all the time in the shape of the dog. Together they return to their village, where, instead of acting as the saviour of the established social order, Sir Frances rejects his inheritance and calls on the villagers to join him in the coming war against the Establishment. Instead of a symbolic quest, The Ascent of F6 presents a symbolic mountain climbing, which, nevertheless, turns also into an allegorical drama in which an individual embarks on a quest for a mother figure and seeks in the process to liberate both himself and society. The hero, a sacrificial saviour-figure with the morality-play name of Ransome, is the leader of an expedition which sets out to plant the flag on an yet uncolonised peak. The journey, though motivated by power manouvering and international economic rivalry, is in fact one into the subcounscious: through a country populated by an amalgam of African natives, Tibetan monasteries and supernatural monsters, mountain-climbing becomes a symbol of spiritual achievement and self-conquest. At the summit, Randsome dies confronting a veiled Demon, the symbol of all mans destructive tendencies, but a dream sequence, in the form of a trial where the hero first accuses then tries to protect the Demon, climaxes in the unveiling of the monster revealed as the heros mother who starts to sing an escapist lullaby as her son dies. In the 1930s, the real life analogues of both plot and hero must have been clear to the audience: on the one hand, the international competition recalled Scotts race to the South Pole, while, on the other, Ransome could be seen as a fictive counterpart of T.E. Lawrence, as a national hero who had rejected society and had combined a life of action and literary contemplation. The confusing structure of On the Frontier, their last play, is set against the background of an European war between two imaginary countries, Westland and Ostria, which is fuelled by a mad demagogue Leader and by a cynical businessman, Valerian. Alternating with the main scenes which involve the politicians, the play

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage shows the lives of two ordinary families shown simultaneously on stage with an invisible frontier line dividing the scene as they are affected by war.

2.4.3. The radio play

After the Second World War such kind of drama fostered in the 1930s became the province of radio where the direct appeal to the ear and the imagination made this medium an appropriate one for its subjective lyricism, freeing the plays from the physical limitations of the stage and the crudity of visual symbolism.

2.4.3.1. Louis MacNiece

Clear links to Auden and Isherwoods drama are discernable both in Louis MacNieces Christopher Colombus (1944) which is the inverse story of the explorer, with solo-voices representing abstract qualities -, and The Dark Tower (1946) which, like The Dog Beneath the Skin, employs a quest-theme, with a nave hero being seduced in his search through the phantasmagorical wasteland of society.

2.4.3.2. Dylan Thomas

The structure of Dylan Thomass Under Milkwood (1953), a play for voices, is given by the progress of one day, from pre-dawn darkness to dusk again, while its main character, Blind Captain Cat, shares the narration with two other voices, who describe the town, alternating the change of viewpoint, or simply varying the voice trimble or giving stage directions. It is a static narrative, in which the descriptive passages are not supplementing the main action, but rather supplement the narrative with vocal illustration, while the dialogue caries from extended passages to the mosaic of short speeches from different characters, briefly introduced by the narrators (as they dream, in the morning, in the afternoon, or as they settle for night.) These plays, written for broadcasting, can thus be seen to make full use of the freedom of the new medium, where the scene changes and other verbal effects

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Chapter 2 Expressionism and the British Stage automatically create the stream-of-consciousness which subordinates analysis to synthesis and appeals to more primitive elements in the listeners.

Task:

Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the argumentative type:

1. Expressionist devices in Sean OCaseys The Silver Tassie. 2. Expressionism and the radio play: Dylan Thomass Under Milkwood.

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Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants

CHAPTER 3 - EPIC THEATRE AND BRITISH VARIANTS

3.1. From Expressionism to Epic Theatre

The period between the wars saw a number of adaptations and developments of earlier forms. If earlier reactions against naturalist theatre included the expressionist movement and the verse drama, another reaction arouse out of a rapidly growing technology which had created the new medium of the cinema as a formidable challenge for the theatre, and was directed against expressionisms focus on emotion, wishing the stage to embrace the larger social context of the epic. Epic theatre emerged thus in the post World War I Weimar Germany out of the work of two of the most ambitious and innovative directors of the century, Erwin Piscator and Bertold Brecht, though it was the latters work to become part of the classic

repertoire of world theatre and exert the most powerful influence on contemporary writing and production.

3.1.1. Erwin Piscator

Erwin Piscator (1893-1966) was a left-wing radical for whom the theatre was an important public medium, which could tell political truths and effect political change. His dramatic aims were utilitarian: to influence voters, or to clarify Communist policy, and the standards of authenticity and contemporaneity carried over in his productions for the Proletarian Theatre, which he founded in 1920. There he developed a form of agit-prop (i.e. theatre pieces devised to ferment political action/agitation and propaganda)1 suitable for the German context. Apart from choosing subjects of contemporary relevance, Piscator also made radical use of the new medium of documentary film, whose realism he strove to incorporate into his
1 Agit-prop theatre originated in the aftermath of the Russian revolution as a substitute for newsprint. Its aim was to spread information and the party line through a widely dispersed and illiterate population. The typical form of this type of theatre were the short sketches which illustrated political commentary.

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Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants multi-media productions. Thus he incorporated cinema screens into the set, using old film footage and new documentary to accompany the action, in an attempt to reveal the historical processes behind the public events. He use slide projections of newspaper clippings and captions were projected between scenes. For example, in the historical revue Despite All (1925), which presented a political panorama of events between the outbreak of war in 1914 and the deaths of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in 1918, he employed a simultaneous montage of authentic speeches, news-extracts, photographs and film-sequences. Another striking innovation was his use of stage structures of great imaginative complexity. Tollers Hurrah, We Live (1927) was performed on a four-storey structure, a multiple stage on which the various levels of society could be seen in ironic juxtaposition. This technological staging was extended to the fullest in the production of Alexei Tolstois Rasputin (1927), which used a revolving hemisphere symbolizing both the globe and mechanization with scenes played within its opening segments, film and photographs integrated with the action, and texts or dates projected on screens flanking the stage. One element could comment on another, gaining an effect of objectivity or linking cause and effect. In Haseks The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik (1928) he notoriously employed two treadmill stages, using animated cartoons as a backdrop to actors and scenery moving across the stage as if on a moving carpet. Although the technology was too ambitious to be financially viable, Piscators productions provided a model of epic theatre that influenced Brecht, who collaborated on both Rasputin and Schweik, as well as containing all the techniques of the modern documentary drama.

3.1.2. Bertold Brecht

Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) appropriated much from Piscators epic theatre, though his writings on the nature of acting, play-construction and the social purpose of drama claim the term for his own theatre. His first works to be staged, Baal (1919), Drums in the Night (1922) and In the Cities Jungle (1923) were still recognizably expressionist. It was with the writing of his anti-militaristic Man is Man (1925) that he began to develop his ideas and formal dramatic structures, which later became the basis for his epic theatre. Like Piscators 28 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants productions, this play was concerned with the question of individual liberty, and the way in which organized society and military force could reshape human behaviour: Galy Gay is taken to pieces and put together again as someone else, recalling the character transformations effected by fascism and challenging the old assumptions of liberal humanism that man has an integral identity. Nevertheless, his first popular success came with The Threepenny Opera (1928), his remake of John Gays Beggars Opera, and the parody opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), which appropriated and mocked the conventions of the Broadway musical, Viennese operetta and the romanticism of early Verdi. With musicians on stage, the use of placards to give spectators an objective perspective on the action, the separation of dialogue from song and a harshly cynical presentation of the material to prevent emotional empathy, these works may be seen as the first consciously developed examples of his famous alienation techniques, meant to prevent the audiences hypnotic identification with the story. To be more specific, Brecht administered a series of shocks by projecting words onto a downstage half-curtain two and a half meters high; he split the stage in two, illuminating with footlights a semi-circular apron built out over the orchestra pit, building thus a bridge between stage and audience and creating a forum where statements could be made. Moreover, the forestage became a place where the characters could gather to dance, sing and, like the Greek chorus, respond verbally and gesturally to the series of tragic and appalling events enacted on the main stage. To avoid the emotional intensity of romantic opera, Brecht organized collisions between music, story and setting. For example, songs could be used to provide an ironic commentary on the action, or reading a projected title could interrupt the tendency of plot or music to flood the mind with feeling, Like in the Elizabethan theatre, the actors addressed the audience directly, doing away with the fourth-wall convention and calling thus attention to the obvious aritificiality of the stage action. At the same time, a new style of acting was evolved in which the performers demonstrated the actions of their characters instead of identifying with them. It was in the essays written at this time that Brecht formulated the principles of his non-Aristotelian drama. If the Greek critic had declared tragedy a higher form of art than epic partly because of its economy and concentration (a brief crisis, centring on a single place and time), Brechts alternative theory considered that epic theatre should present an episodic narrative, covering a broad historical sweep (in the 29 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants manner of Elizabethan history play) and often involving a journey. Later Brecht was to modify these principles into a theory of dialectal theatre, expecting his audience to observe critically, draw conclusions and participate in an intellectual argument with the work at hand. In order to achieve this confrontational relationship between drama and audience, the political issues raised by the plays had to be abstracted and presented in historically or geographically distant contexts where their essential nature could be displayed. This distancing effect meant thus that a given social system could be examined from the standpoint of a social system from another period or place. All his major plays, The Life of Galileo (1938), Mother Courage and her Children (1939), The Good Person of Setzuan (1940), or The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945) illustrate Brechts approach to his dramatic material at its clearest. For example, Mother Courage, written in 1939 and first produced in Zurich in 1941, which has become a classic of modern theatre, is a powerful antiwar play, which, nevertheless, distances contemporary events in the context of the Thirty Years War which devastated Germany during the 17th century. As such, Brechts interest may be seen to extent beyond the immediate causes underlying both the Second World War and the Thirty Years War into making a statement against war entirely, regardless of its cause. In order to achieve this, he deliberately avoided making his play realistic, employing a number of alienation techniques like: the use of an essentially barren stage setting; the structuring of the play in scenes that avoid any sense of continuity in the action; the use of high intensity, cruel lightning which spotlights the action in an unnatural way; the use of slide projections of headings accompanying each of the twelve scenes in order to provide another break in the continuity of the action and to remind the audience of the presence of the playwright and the fact that they are seeing a play. The plot concerns Mother Courage herself who, accompanied by her three children, lives off the war by selling goods to the soldiers, with no concern for who is winning or losing, and even hoping for the war to go on to secure her livelihood. But, as Mother Courage continues to pull her wagon across field after field, learning how to survive, she also loses her children, one by one, to the war. One son, Eilif, is seduced into joining the army by a recruitment officer, and is led into battle thinking that war is a heroic adventure. The other son, Swiss Cheese, opts for a paymasters uniform, but he also perishes in the war that 30 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants offers no protection. The daughter, Katrin, is likewise a victim of the violence of war. One Swedish officer rapes her, and Katrin becomes mute, another violent treatment leaves a terrible scar on her face, which leaves the young woman unmarriageable. Eventually she too looses her life while sounding an alarm to war the sleeping town of an imminent attack. The end of the play shows Mother Courage, left alone, picking up her wagon and finding that she can maneuver it herself. The curtain drops as she circles the stage, with everything around her consumed by war. As Brecht intended his character, Mother Courage should be seen as a reflection of societys wrong values: she conducts business on the battle field, paying no attention to the moral question of war and ultimately failing to see that it is the war that causes her anguish. Nevertheless, audiences and critics alike have tended to treat her as a survivor, almost a biblical figure, a model for one who endures all the terrors of war and yet remains a testament for the resilience of humankind.

3.2. British Epic Equivalents

Although Brechts plays had first appeared on the English stage in the 1930s in private club productions, in was only in the 1950s that his plays and theories made a powerful impact, following the outstanding visit that the Berliner Ensemble (the acting company founded by the German director in 1948) paid to London in 1956, the same year with Osbornes premiere of Look Back in Anger. Vividly contrasting with the naturalistic approach that had dominated the British stage since Shaw, the productions of Brechtian plays like Mother Courage or The Caucasian Circle offered an anti-illusionistic model that proved a revelation for audiences, critics and playwrights themselves. Nevertheless, since his theoretical writing were not available in translation, the politics of Brechts theatre was obscured, his subsequent influence on the British stage remaining to a great extent restricted to production values and ways of acting, i.e. the purely stylistic aspect of the epic theatre. Thus, a wide range of superficially Brechtian drama appeared on the English stage in the 1960s and 1970s. This tended to severe epic techniques from Brechts political analysis that the plays were designed to express, and its effects may be best seen in the directorial output of the time. 31 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

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3.2.1. Brechtian Directors 3.2.1.1. Peter Brook

For example, Peter Brook (1925 - ) borrowed Brechts methods in his production of King Lear (1962), which displayed a stark and severe set, with rusted metallic sheets flanking a bare stage, otherwise uniformly lit with a harsh white light in the characteristic style. The costumes were of heavy, worn leather, in imitation of Brechts production of Coriolanus, and the props were few and simple: one great stone throne for Lear was all that supplied the opening scene. Moreoever, the kings part was played by Paul Scofield with cold detachment, all colour drained from his lines.

Other British directors like George Devine (1910-65), John Dexter (1925-), or William Gaskill (1930 -) were also attracted to Brecht, with Joan Littlewood (1914-) setting the pace.

3.2.1.2. Joan Littlewood

One of the most influential post-war British directors and producers, Littlewood had been associated before the Second World War with the Workers Theatre Movement, a left-wing touring company which was to become a pioneering example for the fringe companies of the 1960s due to its use of agit-prop techniques borrowed from the German theatre. In 1953, after years of road playing in village halls and community centres, Littlewood settled her company, renamed as Theatre Workshop, at the Theatre Royal, Stratford in East London, where the director was to put into practice her most ambitious programmes, combining contemporary documentary drama with classic productions of little known plays, encouraging new playwrights like Brendan Behan and Shelagh Delaney and staging what were to become seminal plays. Until 1973, the year of her last Stratford production, the company managed to retain many characteristics marking it off from the West End, i.e. commercial, theatre. One of the most important features was that the company remained an ensemble, forged over many years since the 1930s, where decisions 32 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants were arrived at collectively after discussion and no stars existed, the roles were swapped around and training was continuous. Another characteristic was that the text was never regarded as a sacred, inviolable object, nor was the writer put on a pedestal: during rehearsals, the company improvised and altered the text, seeking to increase the directness and immediacy of the production. A further characteristic of her productions was the synthesis of different elements like dance, music and mime, often drawing upon the ingredients of music-hall and popular theatre in an attempt to increase the audiences sense of participation and involvement. Other means used to lessen the mystique surrounding the theatrical event included: the removal of footlights, having performers mingling with the audience at the bar after the show, and organizing special meetings during which members of the audience could question the performers about their interpretation and playing of roles. Like Brecht, Littlewood wanted to create a popular theatre for a working-class audience, and her productions exhibited a characteristically Brechtian style of energy and vulgarity, such as Oh, What a Lovely War (1963) a musical satire about the First World War set within a seaside concert party framework, and one of the Theatre Workshops greatest successes - proves. According to the companys practice, the script was evolved communally, using, like a documentary, authentic speeches and ballads of the time to make up the material of the play. Nevertheless, the carnage of the war was presented in terms of a pierrot show of fifty years ago, identifying thus Brechts distancing effect with the popular tradition. On the one hand, the pierrot constume focused on the wider thematic significance of the juxtaposed scenes which made up the play, while, on the other, it reminded the characters representative status, replacing thus the great men theory of history with the common mans perspective, as represented by the clowns. The audience was also emplaced in the communal style of production, at times cast as troops in the trenches by using a plant to set up a dialogue with the soldiers on the stage, at other times called to join in the choruses of the songs. Nevertheless, such overt theatricality was always counterpointed by documentary fact by having real photographs from the war projected on a screen behind the actor, using slides of posters and advertisements from the era to set the action in the context of the period, or have a newspanel giving a running commentary on the scenes with dates and statistics. Such devices had the effect of contrasting the stark reality with the songs, dance, mime and sketches of the performers. 33 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

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3.2.2. Pseudo-epic plays

Apart from such directorial ventures, other new plays of the 1960s flirted with fashion and adopted a superficially epic form. Such is the case with Robert Bolts A Man for All Seasons (1960), which put forward Sir Thomas Moore as a man of great conscience, prepared to risk everything against the despotism of the king. But, unlike Mother Courage, or Galileo, Moore was too much master of his fate to provide much of a commentary on society, and the episodic scenes, linked by the commentary of a Common Man, were uninformed by Brechts ambiguities. John Osbornes Luther (1961) echoed Galileo in style and intention, enhanced by the play using an episodic structure and gestic tableaux like the grouping of peasants with a cart and a dead body. But the complexity of the central figure, which simultaneously linked an Oedipus complex with a terrible problem of digestion, put the emphasis more on the man, and less on his historical context, such as epic theatre demanded. Arnold Weskers Chips with Everything (1962) also assumed an episodic structure which concentrated on the ironies of life in the Air Force, while Peter Shaffers The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), which dealt spectacularly with Pizzaros conquest of the Inca of Peru used a formal epic structure to mask the symbolical and allegorical thrust of the play.

3.2.3. Brechtian playwrights

3.2.3.1. John Arden

Probably the first British dramatist to attempt to create a homegrown epic theatre equivalent remains John Arden (1930 - ), who not only demonstrates a real understanding of Brechts intentions, but has also persisted in testing epic techniques on the English stage. As a result of seeing Mother Courage performed in London in 1956, Arden discarded the realistic style he had used in his fist success, Live Like Pigs (1957) a play which depicts a cosy suburban family who have their lives violently disrupted by a family of gypsies house in the same tenement by the local council and showed 34 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants his real colour in 1959 with Sg Musgraves Dance, a play regarded now as a modern classic. Sg Musgraves Dance is an anti-war parable, in which Arden repeatedly disconcerts his audience with unexpected and paradoxical developments. The plot, set in Victorian times, concerns Sg Musgrave and his three soldiers, who return to the native town of a comrade who has been killed in a colonial war. As such, at the time of its production, when the British troops were fighting freedom forces in Cyprus, the play had an obvious contemporary political relevance. Nevertheless, though the soldiers intention is most honourable (to show the townspeople the results of Victorian militarism and convert them to pacifism), the audience, sympathising with their ends, are repelled by their behaviour: not only the group turn out to be deserters, but their pacifism becomes highly questionable when they kill one of their number, because he has tried to go off with a local girl. Musgrave himself is a true anti-hero: too much of a fanatic, who must preach his message at gunpoint and threaten the citizens with a gatling gun. The play also makes use of song, direct address and other epic devices, while a dialectical structure stands at its back, refusing to comfort the spectator or confirm him in his beliefs. Ardens subsequent plays are also attuned to the Brechtian model. The Happy Haven (1960) centres again on anarchic individualism, which causes a group of joyous old folk rise against the doctors and staff in the nursing home. Ironhand (1963), a play which updates Goethes Gtz von Berlichingen, presents the robber baron defending his way of life against the extension of law, the rise of an amoral politician and the dominance of the new middle-class the latter represents. Armstrongs Last Goodnight (1965) distances the theme of imperialism into a 13th century Scottish context, while lsland of the Mighty (1965) is an epic Arthurian romance. Such plays which attempt to represent complex issues in a broad social and chronicle drama demonstrate that Ardens concerns are similar to those of Brecht (i.e. social and historical), with situations representative of forms of social interaction, and characters tending towards the stereotypical. At the same time, Arden also uses song and separates his scenes to make gestic statements, yet, unlike his mentor, he proves a more realistic writer who mainly uses the fourth wall convention to project a rapidly moving plot, and his songs are not so much separate as incorporated into the action.

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Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants

3.2.3.2. Edward Bond

Apart from Arden, Edward Bond (1934 - ) is also considered as one of the mist successful Brechtian playwrights in English. After naturalist beginnings in plays like The Popes Wedding (1962) or Saved (1965), his banished Early Morning

(1968) which rests upon the massive alienation effect of a lesbian relationship between Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale which accentuates their Victorian milieu -, and the censored Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) - which focuses on violence and injustice, distancing the horror with oriental masks show Bond adopting Brechtian techniques. Nevertheless, like Arden, Bonds theatre may also be considered as a cross between the epic model and a more mainstream British naturalism, for his plays are more realistic, less caricatural and comic, and they do not employ song and commentary. One constant theme which runs through them is related to the subject of violence, which, in the playwrights opinion, characterizes the contemporary society. While plays like Saved, Early Morning, Narrow Road to the Deep North, Lear (1971) and The Sea (1973) set to examine its causes, show its psychological effects and suggest radical pacifism as the sole way of breaking out of its vicious circle, later ones like Bingo (1974), The Fool (1976) or The Woman (1978) question the function of drama and the role of the dramatist in inspiring constructive action to change things. This theme provides intellectual consistency to a work

which otherwise might look eclectic, ranging from realism to Brechtian parables, Restoration parody, or Shakespearean revisionism. Lear, for example, is a cunning and effective reinterpretation of the Shakespearean prototype. According to Bond, Shakespeares King Lear is an anatomy of human values which ultimately teaches us how to survive in a corrupt world. In opposition to this, Bonds play aims to show people how to act responsible in order to change it. The Shakespearean paradigm is observed in what concerns Lears movement to sanity from madness, vision through blindness, self-knowledge through suffering, as well as in the play revitalizing certain patterns of imagery and in the metaphorical language used by the main character. Nevertheless, Bond constructs wholly new social contexts for Lears actions, which are replete with anachronisms, relating thus the narrative to contemporary issues, because the playwright is interested in 20th-century political forces and in the process of political 36 Main Trends in Modern British Drama

Chapter 3 Epic Theatre and British Variants discovery that leads the old king from an opening scene in which he shoots a worker in order to enforce the speedy building of a wall meant to defend his kingdom to a final scene in which he himself is shot for trying to dig up the same wall. Through the dramatic metaphor of the wall (simultaneously a symbol of defence and entrapment), the play foregrounds Bonds sense of violent social restriction as an uncontrollable self-generating circle of aggression. Lears fear and belief in natural evil first alienates him from his daughters, and then prove self-confirming once Bodice and Fontanelle decide to violently replace the old king, only to continue as slaves to power and perpetuate thus its repressive social institutions. Though Cordelia is first portrayed as a sympathetic character, who support her husbands charitable sheltering of the king, she ends like a Stalinist figure who resembles the daughters she supplants, because her counterrevolution continues to destroy men in the name of duty, perpetuating thus both the wall and the vicious circle of violence and suffering. While this lack of any conventionally good character becomes one of Bonds most effective departures from the Shakespearean prototype, the note of optimism on which the play ends is related to the change that occurs in Lear himself: transformed into a critical social prophet, the king dies as he tries to tear down the wall he himself erected against his enemies. It is a triumphant moment of exemplary action meant to teach people that their individual acts can affect history. As such, action is presented as quintessentially human and preferable to stoic resignation in the face of suffering.

Task:

Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the argumentative type:

1. Edward Bonds epic theatre: Lear. 2. The British Brecht: John Arden and Sg Musgraves Dance

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Minimal Bibliography

MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Banu, G., M. Toniza, Arta teatrului, Ed. Nemira, 2004. Barba, E., O canoe de hrtie tratat de antropologie teatral, Unitext, 2003. Birch, D., The Language of Drama, Macmillan, 1991 Borie, M., Antonin Artaud. Teatrul i ntoarcerea la origini, Editura Polirom/Unitext, 2004. Brown, J.R., The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, OUP, 1995. Caufman-Blumenfeld, O., Teatrul european-teatrul american: influente, Ed.

Universitatii Al.I. Cuza, Iasi, 1998. Chambers, C., Prior,M., Playwrights Progress. Patterns of Post-War British Drama, Amber Lane Press, London, 1997. Davies, A., Other Theatres: The Development of Alternative and Experimental Theatre in Britain, Macmillan Education Ltd, 1987. Elsom, J., Cold War Theatre, Routledge, 1992. Hodgson, T., Modern Drama from Ibsen to Fugard, B.T. Batsford, London, 1992. Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: 1890-1990, Cambridge UP, 1992. Styan, J.L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol. 3. Expressionism and Epic Theatre, Cambridge U.P., 1982. Styan, J.L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol.1. Realism and Naturalism, Cambridge U.P., 1991. Styan, J.L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Vol.2. Symbolism, Surrealism and the Absurd, Cambridge U.P., 1992. Ubersfeld, A., Termeni cheie ai analizei teatrului, Ed. Institutul European, 1999. Wardle, I., Theatre Criticism, Routledge, 1992

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