Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Facultatea de Litere
I.D.D.
Main Trends in
Modern British Drama
Course tutor:
dr. Ioana Mohor-Ivan
Galati 2009
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
Cuprins:
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
3.2.3. Playwrights: Maeterlinck and
Claudel 23
3.3. British symbolist drama 23
3.3.1. Oscar Wilde 24
3.3.2. W.B. Yeats 25
3.3.3. T.S. Eliot 26
3.3.4. Christopher Fry 29
3.4. Task 29
MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 47
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
Obiective:
prelegerea,
conversaţia euristică,
explicaţia,
dezbaterea,
studiul de caz,
problematizarea,
metode de lucru în grup, individual şi frontal,
metode de dezvoltare a gândirii critice,
portofoliul,
studiul bibliografiei.
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
CHAPTER 1 – ELEMENTS OF DRAMATIC DISCOURSE
Drama: a play written in prose or verse that tells a story through dialogue and
actions performed by actors impersonating the characters of the story.
Theatre:
b) drama as an art form, including the written text and the concrete
performance.
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
MELODRAMA: a suspenseful play filled with situations that appeal
excessively to the audience’s emotions. Justice triumphs in a
happy ending: the good characters (completely virtuous) are
rewarded and the bad characters (thoroughly villainous) are
punished.
SETTING: the time and place in which the action occurs; the
backdrop and set onstage that suggest to the audience the
surrounding in which a play’s action takes place.
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
CHAPTER 2 - REALISM/NATURALISM
AND THE BRITISH STAGE
Émile Zola (1840-1902): French novelist and critic, the founder of the
Naturalist movement in literature. Zola redefined Naturalism as
"Nature seen through a temperament." Among Zola's most important
works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which
included such novels as L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), about the suffering of
the Parisian working-class, NANA (1880), dealing with prostitution,
and GERMINAL (1885), depicting the mining industry. In his theatre
criticism he outlined the following:
• Theatre should be the “honest soldier of truth”, serving the
inquiring mind by analysing and reporting on man and society.
• Characters: ordinary people in their natural setting;
• Stage scenery: vivid background and environment;
• Setting, costumes, dialogue: life-like (appropriate to the given
situation and the character’s individuality)
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
o Caste (1867),
o Play (1868),
o School (1869),
o M.P. (1870),
o War (1871).
These plays (known as “cup-and-saucer” drama) were notable for
treating contemporary British subjects in settings that were realistic,
unlike the Victorian melodramas that were popular at the time. For
example, whereas previously a designer would put as many chairs
into a dining room scene as there were actors who needed to sit
down, Robertson would place on stage as many chairs as would
realistically be found in that dining room, even if some were never
actually used. In Ours, a pudding was made on stage and this caused
a major furor – people were not used to seeing such realistic tasks in a
stage setting. Also, the characters spoke in normal language and dealt
with ordinary situations rather than declaiming their lines. In addition,
the importance of everyday incidents, the revealing of character
through apparent "small talk", and the idea that what is not said in the
dialogue is as important as what is said are all Robertson trademarks.
Characteristics:
• Theatre had become a fashionable and respectable institution.
• Main audience: upper-middle class.
• The commercial stage: dominated by actor-managers.
• It aimed at projecting an idealised vision of upper-middle class
decorum, suavity, respectability
Society drama:
• A type of play whose subject-matter was socially restricted to the
lives of the upper middle-class.
• It demonstrated and endorsed a non-objectionable subject-matter
and morality.
• As such, it was conservative in matters of social conduct and
sexual morality.
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• A play that aims to be searching, serious and sophisticated in its
treatment of contemporary social issues, trying to offer a thorough-
going examination of society’s values.
• Nevertheless, its resolution supports the dominant code of the
upper middle-class ethos.
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
this unexpectedly catches up with her when her step-
daughter becomes engaged to one of her former seducers.
In opposing the marriage, Paula is forced to confess the
whole of her past history, and she commits suicide to save
herself and those she loves from shame.
The links with Shaw’s drama of ideas is most obvious in the work of
contemporaries like Harley Granville-Barker and John Galsworthy, but
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it also serves as a reference point for the plays written by John
Osborne in the second half of the twentieth-century. The political cast
of his theatre, seen as having a direct social function, may be seen to
reverberate in the realistic emphasis of “kitchen-sink” playwrights like
D.H. Lawrence or Arnold Wesker, intent on reforming society by
depicting its evils in naturalistic detail.
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Kahn. She returns from London to visit her family all of whom await
the arrival of Ronnie. During the two-week waiting period Beatie is full
of Ronnie's thoughts and words. To greet him the family gathers for a
huge Saturday afternoon tea. He doesn't turn up. Instead comes a
letter saying he doesn't think the relationship will work. The family
turns on Beatie. In the process of defending herself she finds, to her
delight, that she's using her own voice.
I’m Talking About Jerusalem (1960): Ada Kahn, marries Dave
Simmonds. They move to an isolated house in Norfolk where they
struggle through a back-to-the-land experiment. Dave makes furniture
by hand. Friends and family visit them throughout their 12 rural years
charting and commenting on the fortunes of their experiment. It
doesn't work, but they end gratified to have had the courage to try.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
1. Traditionalism vs modernism: A. W. Pinero’s The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray
2. G. B. Shaw: Thesis drama and Technique in Man and Superman
3. Naturalist Premises in J. Galsworthy’s The Silver Box
4. The “kitchen-sink” play: D.H.Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd
5. The “kitchen-sink” play: Arnold Wesker’s Roots.
6. John Osborne’s Alienation: Look Back in Anger.
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
CHAPTER 3 - SYMBOLISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
3.1. The Symbolist Movement
Wagner’s 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.
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In his turn, Nietzsche had justified Wagner’s 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 dithyramb 1, 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 Wagner’s “music-drama”,
which Nietszche considered to exercise a Dionysian influence in the modern
rational world.
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 L’Intruse (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. Pelléas and Mélisande (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, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-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
Mallarmé, and strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel wrote a series of
plays, like Partage de midi (1905), L’Annonce Faite à Marie (1905) and
L’Otage (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 Claudel’s peculiar
verse. Written for declamation, Caudel’s lines nevertheless have a variety
and subtlety that can fairly be compared with the Shakespearean blank
verse.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
CHAPTER 4 – EXPRESSIONISM AND THE BRITISH STAGE
4.1. The Expressionist Movement
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
4.2. European developments
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. Lawrence’s 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
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 O’Casey, W.H. Auden and
Christopher Isherwood.
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champion, in a wheelchair, bitterly destroys his trophy in utter
disappointment.
O’Casey’s next plays are overtly expressionist, with minor figures
being one-dimensional representatives of social classes or political forces
matched by an 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 girl’s 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 playwright’s
familiar characterization of Dublin’s 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 Ireland’s fight for the “joy
of life” in the face of clerical, social and political oppression.
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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 man’s 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 hero’s 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 Scott’s 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 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.
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.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
CHAPTER 5 - EPIC THEATRE AND BRITISH VARIANTS
Although Brecht’s 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 Osborne’s 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 Brecht’s 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 Brecht’s political analysis that the plays were designed to express, and
its effects may be best seen in the directorial output of the time.
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5.2.1.2. Joan Littlewood
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 Bolt’s 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 Brecht’s ambiguities. John Osborne’s 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 Wesker’s Chips with
Everything (1962) also assumed an episodic structure which concentrated on
the ironies of life in the Air Force, while Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of
the Sun (1964), which dealt spectacularly with Pizzaro’s conquest of the Inca
of Peru used a formal epic structure to mask the symbolical and allegorical
thrust of the play.
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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.
Arden’s 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 Goethe’s Götz 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. Armstrong’s Last Goodnight (1965)
distances the theme of imperialism into a 13 th 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 Arden’s 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.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama
MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Main Trends in Modern British Drama