Twentieth Century Dramas: Characteristics and Movements

“Desire to unsettle, to shock, even to alienate the audience is the  hallmark of modern drama.”  

Chief Characteristics:

1.    Plays from Irish playwrights to reveal the deeper emotions of Ireland (Abbey Theatre)

2.    Existential or absurd plays about the who and why of human life and existence (Absurd Plays)

3.    the themes of colonization and loss of territory

4.    Sigmund Freud  and Carl Jung, influencing playwrights to incorporate myths into their plays

5.    the empowerment of female  characters in the drama

6.    dramas dealing with political and social problems, especially in  the hands  of Bernard Shaw

7.    plays with class consciousness, especially the conflict between upper class and poor class

8.    introducing new language and experimental ideas into dramas (avant garde theatre)

9.    Plays from anti-social and anti-art movements to condemn social and artistic conventions (Dadaism movement  as a reaction to World War I)

10. Realistic plays from Ibsen and Shaw versus symbolic plays from Eugene O’Neill from America, W.B. Yeats from Ireland

11. Surrealistic plays to release creative potential of the unconscious mind

12. plays of expressionism  to express people’s feelings and emotions rather than showing events or objects in a realistic way

13. Poetic dramas mostly ending with serious  tragedy, especially in the hands of T.S.Eliot and W.B.Yeats

Important Movements in Twentieth Century Dramas:

1.  The Abbey Theatre (1899):

Ø  Also known as Irish Literary Theater started by William B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge - first opening in Dublin, on 27 December 1904

Ø   Purpose: to reveal the deeper emotions of Ireland – “a theater in which the playwright's words were the most important thing, prevailing over the actor and the audience” - focused on the portrayals of Irish peasant life

Ø  It also included: Sean O’Casey, and Edward Martyn

Ø  Mainly to use poetic realism - unpleasant themes running through them, such as lust between a son and his step-mother or the murder of a baby to “prove” love

2. Realism / Problem Plays

Ø  plays by Henrik Ibsen George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville Barker, W. Somerset Maugham, Robertson Arthur Jones and John Galsworthy

Ø  Purpose: As a reaction to Victorian dramas, making the audience socially conscious and politically alert – dealing with problems of real life in a realistic manner

Ø  Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist as the pioneer and his A Doll’s House, as a good example of problem play

Ø  Chief themes: problems of marriage, justice, women’s empowerment, strife between capital and labour, removing  wrong notions about war, upper class life

3. Existentialism(or absurd plays)

Ø  Writers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Samuel Beckett as the pillars of existentialism

Ø  Based on the theory that humans are free and responsible for their own  actins in a world without meaning – the experiences of the individual are at the centre of understanding, not any moral or scientific thought

Ø  Based on the idea that there is no meaning for anything in the world beyond the meaning we give it

Ø  made famous in Paris in 1940s and 1950s by Jean-Paul  Sartre and Albert Camus

4. Avant-garde theatre:

Ø  Purpose: to introduce  new and experimental ideas, strange and disturbing forms, a different use of language in plays which are surprising and shocking

Ø  started with with Alfred Jarry and Ubu plays opposing bourgeois theatre

Ø  the term “the avant-garde” meaning new and modern ideas in art

Ø  associated with existential and absurd plays

5. Dadaism:

Ø  the movement started as a reaction to World War I and the horrors of Capitalism and eventually resulted in absurd themes

Ø  an anti-social and anti-art movement condemning social and artistic conventions

Ø  Tzara, a Romanian Jewish writer as a pioneer  of Dadaism – his famous play “The Gas Heart”(1921), a mockery of Traditional theatre, characters named after body parts such as Mouth, Ear, Nose, Eye, etc. as reminiscent of dismemberment of soldiers in WWI

Ø  a form of artistic anarchy with disconnected plots and ideas defying the social, political and cultural values of that time

6. SYMBOLISM:

Ø  known as Aestheticism, a stylized form of drama with dreams and fantasies

Ø  Experimented by numerous playwrights such  as Yeats from Ireland, Eugene O’Neil from America, August Strindberg from Sweden and Pinter from Britain,

Ø  Started with “the Symbolist Manifesto” by French Poet Jean More in 1886

Ø  Purpose: to use symbolism and present dialogue and style of acting in a non-realistic manner against the realistic dramas of the time

7. Surrealism:

Ø  the word surrealist first used by Apollinire to describe his 1917 play “The Breasts of Tiresias”

Ø  Antonin Artaud as an early surrealist

Ø  Purpose: to link the unconscious minds of performers and spectators in a sort of ritual event; to express emotions, feelings and the metaphysical not through language but through mythological, archetypal, allegorical vision closely related to the world of dreams

Ø  Purpose: to present ritualistic theatre experiments – to release creative potential of the unconscious mind by downplaying words, unexpected comparisons and juxtaposition of images

Ø  the theatre of cruelty as the subset of surrealism

Ø  Federico García Lorca’s plays The Public (1930), When Five Years Pass (1931), and Play Without a Title (1935).- Aragon's Backs to the Wall (1925) and Roger Vitrac's The Mysteries of Love (1927) and Victor, or The Children Take Over (1928). Gertrude Stein's opera Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938) as popular surrealistic plays

8. Expressionism:

Ø  as a reaction against materialism and rapid mechanization

Ø  aiming at subjective emotions rather objective reality through distortion, exaggeration or jarring application of formal elements

Ø  Oskar Kokoschka's “Murderer, the Hope of Women” as  the first fully Expressionist work for the theatre, which opened in1909 in Vienna

Ø  The first full-length Expressionist play The Son by Walter Hasenclever, first performed in 1916- In the 1920s

Ø  plays by Eugene O'Neill (The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones and The Great God Brown), Sophie Treadwell (Machinal), Lajos Egri (Rapid Transit) and Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine) as typical examples

Ø  dramatize the spiritual awakening and sufferings of their protagonists-

Ø  referred to as Stationendramen (station dramas), modeled on the episodic presentation of the suffering and death of Jesus in the Stations of the Cross

Ø  August Strindberg pioneering with his autobiographical trilogy “To Damascus” (1898-1904)

9. Poetic Plays:

Ø  As a revival of Elizabethan Dramas

Ø  W. B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, Stephen Philips and John Drink Water as famous playwrights of poetic plays

Ø  mostly associated with seriousness of tragedy