Origins:
Ritual theatre consists of the enactments of myths and
archetypal stories in order to heal. Performances are used to resolve issues,
and deal with traumatic events. Ritual theatre segued into Ancient Greek
theatre as, being one of the earliest forms of healing, the benefits were seen
and it was developed first into Dionysian rites, and then into theatre more
comparable to contemporary theatre.
Some argue that ritual was the origin of theatre (this is
known as ritual theory), postulating that drama was used in the conveying of
beliefs and stories before written language was developed, and that theatre was
devised of a gradual transition from the importance of theatre being
utilitarian, to its artistic merit. However, particularly with Ancient Greek theatre
(as specified previously) and the morality plays of medieval theatre; it is
clear that ritual theatre’s original intentions were, to some extent, withheld.
European
theatre:
Greek
theatre-
Greek theatre, most developed in Athens, is the root of the Western tradition; theatre is in origin a Greek word. It was part of a broader culture of theatricality and performance in classical
Greece that included festivals, religious rituals,
politics, law, athletics and gymnastics, music, poetry, weddings, funerals, and symposia. Participation in the
city-state's many festivals- and attendance at the City
Dionysia as an audience member (or even as a participant
in the theatrical productions) in particular- was an important part of citizenship. Civic participation also involved the evaluation of the rhetoric of orators evident in performances in
court or political assembly,
both of which were understood as analogous to the theatre and increasingly came
to absorb its dramatic vocabulary. The theatre of ancient Greece
consisted of three types of drama: tragedy, comedy, and satyr.
Athenian tragedy, the oldest surviving form of
tragedy, is a type of dance/drama that formed an
important part of the theatrical culture of the city-state. Having emerged
sometime during the 6th century BC, it flowered during the 5th century BC (from
the end of which it began to spread throughout the Greek world) and continued
to be popular until the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
No tragedies from the 6th century and only 32 of the more than a thousand that
were performed in during the 5th century have survived. We have complete texts of
playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. The origins of tragedy
remain obscure, though by the 5th century it was institutionalized in competitions (agon)
held as part of festivities celebrating Dionysus (the god of wine and fertility). As contestants in the City
Dionysia's competition (the most prestigious of the festivals to stage drama),
playwrights were required to present a tetralogy of plays (though the individual works were not necessarily connected by
story or theme), which usually consisted of three tragedies and one satyr play.
The performance of tragedies at the City Dionysia may have begun as early as
534 BC; official records (didaskaliai)
begin from 501 BC, when the satyr play was introduced. Most Athenian tragedies
dramatize events from Greek
mythology, though ‘The Persians’, which stages the Persian response to news of their military defeat at the Battle
of Salamis in 480 BC, is the notable exception in the
surviving drama. When Aeschylus won first prize for it at the City Dionysia in
472 BC, he had been writing tragedies for more than 25 years, yet it is the
earliest example of drama to survive. More than 130 years later, the
philosopher Aristotle analyzed 5th-century Athenian
tragedy in the oldest surviving work of dramatic
theory, his Poetics
(c. 335 BC).
Features of a traditional Aristotelian tragedy:
Megalopsychia-
A
greatness, an incredibly good person.
Hubris-
Excessive
pride (a common fatal flaw).
Hamartia-
The action
the tragic hero takes, due to their fatal flaw that leads to their downfall.
Fatal flaw-
An aspect
of the tragic hero's character that eventually leads to their
downfall.
Peripeteia-
A sudden,
dramatic change in fortune.
Agnorisis-
When the
character discovers/ realises something important and the plot so far is
revealed to them.
Antagonist-
A character
(or institution/ group of characters) that oppose a protagonist.
Villain-
An evil
character who the protagonist must battle against and who must contribute to
the tragic hero's fall.
Machiavellian-
A character
who is prepared to behave in an immoral way to achieve what they want.
Malcontent-
A character who is
dissatisfied because of some unfair treatment, often as a result of a decision
made by the protagonist.
Athenian comedy is conventionally divided
into three periods, "Old Comedy", "Middle Comedy", and
"New Comedy". Old Comedy survives today largely in the form of the
eleven surviving plays of Aristophanes, while Middle Comedy is largely lost (preserved only in relatively
short fragments in authors such as Athenaeus of Naucratis). New Comedy is known
primarily from the substantial papyrus fragments of plays by Menander. Aristotle defined comedy as a representation of laughable people that
involves some kind of error or ugliness that does not cause pain or
destruction.
Roman
theatre-
Western theatre developed and expanded
considerably under the Romans. The Roman historian Livy wrote that the Romans first
experienced theatre in the 4th century BC, with a performance by Etruscan actors. Beacham argues that
Romans had been familiar with "pre-theatrical practices" for some
time before that recorded contact. The theatre of ancient Rome
was a thriving and diverse art form, ranging from festival performances of street
theatre, naked dancing, and acrobatics, to the staging
of Plautus's broadly appealing situation comedies, to the high-style, verbally elaborate tragedies of Seneca. Although Rome had a native
tradition of performance, the Hellenization of Roman culture
(historical spreading of Ancient Greek culture) in the 3rd century BC had a
profound and energizing effect on Roman theatre and encouraged the development
of Latin literature of the highest quality for
the stage.
Following the expansion of the Roman
Republic (509–27 BC) into several Greek territories
between 270–240 BC, Rome encountered Greek drama. From the later years of the
republic and by means of the Roman
Empire (27 BC-476 AD), theatre spread west across
Europe, around the Mediterranean and reached England; Roman theatre was more
varied, extensive and sophisticated than that of any culture before it. While
Greek drama continued to be performed throughout the Roman period, the year 240
BC marks the beginning of regular Roman drama. From the beginning of the
empire, however, interest in full-length drama declined in favor of a broader
variety of theatrical entertainments.
The first important works of Roman
literature were the tragedies and comedies that Livius Andronicus wrote
from 240 BC. Five years later, Gnaeus
Naevius also began to write drama. No plays from either
writer have survived. While both dramatists composed in both genres, Andronicus was most appreciated for his tragedies and Naevius for his
comedies; their successors tended to specialize in one or the other, which led
to a separation of the subsequent development of each type of drama. By the
beginning of the 2nd century BC, drama was firmly established in Rome and a guild of writers (collegium poetarum)
had been formed.
The Roman comedies that have survived are all fabula palliata (comedies based on
Greek subjects) and come from two dramatists: Titus
Maccius Plautus (Plautus) and Publius Terentius Afer (Terence).
In re-working the Greek originals, the Roman comic dramatists abolished the
role of the chorus in dividing the drama into episodes and introduced musical accompaniment to its dialogue (between one-third of the dialogue in the comedies of Plautus and
two-thirds in those of Terence). The action of all scenes is set in the
exterior location of a street and its complications often follow from eavesdropping. Plautus, the more popular of the two, wrote between 205 and 184 BC and
twenty of his comedies survive, of which his farces are best known; he was admired for the wit of his dialogue and his use of a variety of poetic
meters. All of the six comedies that Terence wrote
between 166 and 160 BC have survived; the complexity of his plots, in which he
often combined several Greek originals, was sometimes denounced, but his
double-plots enabled a sophisticated presentation of contrasting human
behavior.
No early Roman tragedy survives, though it was
highly regarded in its day; historians know of three early tragedians: Quintus
Ennius, Marcus Pacuvius and Lucius
Accius. From the time of the empire, the work of two
tragedians survives; one is an unknown author, while the other is the Stoic
philosopher Seneca. Nine of Seneca's tragedies
survive, all of which are fabula
crepidata (tragedies adapted from Greek originals); his Phaedra, for example, was based on Euripides' Hippolytus.
Historians do not know who wrote the only extant example of the fabula
praetexta (tragedies based on Roman subjects), ‘Octavia’, but in former times it was mistakenly attributed to Seneca due to his
appearance as a character in the tragedy.
Transition
and early medieval theatre, 500–1050-
As the Western Roman Empire
fell into decay through the 4th and 5th centuries, the seat of Roman power
shifted to Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire,
today called the Byzantine Empire. While surviving evidence
about Byzantine theatre is slight, existing records show that mime, pantomime, scenes or recitations from tragedies and comedies, dances, and other entertainments were very popular. Constantinople had two
theatres that were in use as late as the 5th century. However, the true
importance of the Byzantines in theatrical history is their preservation of
many classical Greek texts and the compilation of a massive encyclopedia called
the Suda, from which is derived a large amount of contemporary information on
Greek theatre.
From the 5th century, Western
Europe was plunged into a period of general disorder
that lasted (with a brief period of stability under the Carolingian Empire
in the 9th century) until the 10th century. As such, most organized theatrical
activities disappeared in Western
Europe. While it seems that small nomadic bands
traveled around Europe throughout the period, performing wherever they could
find an audience, there is no evidence that they produced anything but crude
scenes. These performers were denounced by the Church during the Dark Ages as they were viewed as
dangerous and pagan.
By the Early
Middle Ages, churches in Europe began staging dramatized versions of particular biblical events on
specific days of the year. These dramatizations were included in order to
vivify annual celebrations. Symbolic objects and actions; vestments, altars, censers, and pantomime performed by priests recalled
the events which Christian ritual celebrates. These were extensive sets of
visual signs that could be used to communicate with a largely illiterate
audience. These performances developed into liturgical
dramas, the earliest of which is the ‘Whom do you Seek’ (Quem-Quaeritis)
Easter trope, dating from ca. 925. Liturgical drama was sung responsively by
two groups and did not involve actors impersonating characters. However,
sometime between 965 and 975, Æthelwold of Winchester composed the Regularis Concordia (Monastic Agreement)
which contains a playlet complete with directions for performance.
Hrosvitha (c. 935 – 973), a canoness in northern
Germany, wrote six plays modeled on Terence's comedies but using religious subjects. These six plays; ‘Abraham’, ‘Callimachus’, ‘Dulcitius’, ‘Gallicanus’,
‘Paphnutius’, and ‘Sapientia’;
are the first known plays composed by a female dramatist and the first
identifiable Western dramatic works of the post-classical era. They were first
published in 1501 and had considerable influence on religious and didactic
plays of the sixteenth century. Hrosvitha was followed by Hildegard of Bingen
(d. 1179), a Benedictine abbess, who wrote a Latin musical drama called Ordo Virtutum
in 1155.
High
and late medieval theatre, 1050–1500-
As the Viking invasions ceased in the middle of the 11th century, liturgical
drama had spread from Russia to Scandinavia to Italy. Only in Muslim-occupied Spain
were liturgical dramas not presented at all. Despite the large number of liturgical
dramas that have survived from the period, many churches would have only
performed one or two per year and a larger number never performed any at all.
The Feast
of Fools was especially important in the development of
comedy. The festival inverted the status of the lesser clergy and allowed them
to ridicule their superiors and the routine of church life. Sometimes plays
were staged as part of the occasion and a certain amount of burlesque and comedy crept into these performances. Although comic episodes had to truly
wait until the separation of drama from the liturgy, the Feast of Fools
undoubtedly had a profound effect on the development of comedy in both
religious and secular plays.
Performance of religious plays outside of the
church began sometime in the 12th century through a traditionally accepted
process of merging shorter liturgical dramas into longer plays which were then
translated into vernacular (idiomatic) and performed by
laymen. ‘The Mystery of Adam’ (1150) gives credence to this
theory as its detailed stage direction suggest that it was staged outdoors. A
number of other plays from the period survive, including ‘La Seinte Resurrection’ (Norman), ‘The Play of the Magi Kings’
(Spanish), and ‘Sponsus’ (French).
The importance of the High
Middle Ages in the development of theatre was the economic and political changes that led to the
formation of guilds and the growth of towns. This
would lead to significant changes in the Late
Middle Ages. In the British
Isles, plays were produced in some 127 different
towns during the middle Ages. These vernacular Mystery
plays were written in cycles of a large number of
plays: York (48 plays), Chester (24), Wakefield (32) and Unknown (42). A larger number of plays survive from France and Germany in this period and some type
of religious dramas were performed in nearly every European country in the Late
Middle Ages. Many of these plays contained comedy, devils, villains and clowns.
The majority of
actors in these plays were drawn from the local population. For example, at Valenciennes in
1547, more than 100 roles were assigned to 72 actors. Plays were staged on pageant wagon
stages, which were platforms mounted on wheels used to move scenery. Often
providing their own costumes, amateur performers in England were exclusively
male, but other countries had female performers. The platform stage, which was
an unidentified space and not a specific locale, allowed for abrupt changes in
location.
Morality plays emerged as a distinct
dramatic form around 1400 and flourished until 1550. The most prevalent
morality play is ‘The Castle of Perseverance’ which depicts mankind's progress from birth to death. However, the most famous morality play
and perhaps best known medieval drama is ‘Everyman’. ‘Everyman’ receives Death's summons, struggles to escape and finally resigns himself to
necessity. Along the way, he is deserted by Kindred, Goods, and Fellowship – only Good Deeds goes with him to the grave.
There were also a number of secular performances
staged in the Middle Ages, the earliest of which is ‘The Play of the Greenwood’ by Adam de
la Halle in 1276. It contains satirical scenes and folk material such as faeries and other supernatural
occurrences. Farces also rose dramatically in popularity after the 13th century. The
majority of these plays come from France and Germany and are similar in tone and
form, emphasizing sex and bodily excretions. The best known playwright of farces is Hans
Sachs (1494–1576) who wrote 198 dramatic works. In
England, The Second Shepherds' Play
of the ‘Wakefield Cycle’ is the best known early
farce. However, farce did not appear independently in England until the 16th
century with the work of John
Heywood (1497–1580).
A significant forerunner of the development of Elizabethan drama was the Chambers of Rhetoric
in the Low Countries. These societies were
concerned with poetry, music and drama and held contests to see which society could compose the best drama in
relation to a question posed.
At the end of the Late
Middle Ages, professional actors began to appear in England and Europe. Richard III and Henry VII both maintained small
companies of professional actors. Their plays were performed in the Great
Hall of a nobleman's residence, often with a raised
platform at one end for the audience and a "screen" at the other for
the actors. Also important were Mummers'
plays, performed during the Christmas season, and court masques. These masques were
especially popular during the reign of Henry
VIII who had a House of Revels built and an Office of Revels established in 1545.
The end of medieval drama came about due to a
number of factors, including the weakening power of the Catholic
Church, the Protestant Reformation
and the banning of religious plays in many countries. Elizabeth
I forbid all religious plays in 1558 and the
great cycle plays had been silenced by the 1580s. Similarly, religious plays
were banned in the Netherlands in 1539, the Papal
States in 1547 and in Paris in 1548. The abandonment of these plays destroyed the international
theatre that had thereto existed and forced each country to develop its own
form of drama. It also allowed dramatists to turn to secular subjects and the
reviving interest in Greek and Roman theatre provided them with
the perfect opportunity.
Commedia dell'arte & Renaissance-
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Commedia dell'arte troupes performed lively improvisational playlets across Europe for
centuries. It originated in Italy in the 1560s. Commedia dell'arte was an actor-centered theatre, requiring
little scenery and very few props. Plays did not originate from written drama
but from scenarios called lazzi,
which were loose frameworks that provided the situations, complications, and
outcome of the action, around which the actors would improvise. The plays utilized
stock characters, which could be divided into
three groups: the lovers, the masters, and the servants. The lovers had
different names and characteristics in most plays and often were the children
of the master. The role of master was normally based on one of three
stereotypes: Pantalone, an elderly Venetian
merchant; Dottore, Pantalone's friend or rival, a pedantic doctor or lawyer who acted far more intelligent than he really was; and
Capitano, who was once a lover character, but evolved into a braggart who boasted of his exploits in love and war, but was often terrifically
unskilled in both. He normally carried a sword and wore a cape and feathered
headdress. The servant character (called Zanni) had only one recurring role:
Arlecchino (also called Harlequin). He was both cunning and
ignorant, but an accomplished dancer and acrobat. He typically carried a wooden
stick with a split in the middle so it made a loud noise when striking
something. This "weapon" gave us the term "slapstick".
A troupe typically consisted of 13 to 14
members. Most actors were paid by taking a share of the play's profits roughly
equivalent to the size of their role. The style of theatre was in its peak from
1575 to 1650, but even after that time new scenarios were written and
performed. The Venetian playwright Carlo
Goldoni wrote a few scenarios starting in 1734, but
since he considered the genre too vulgar, he refined the topics of his own to
be more sophisticated. He also wrote several plays based on real events, in
which he included commedia
characters.
English
Elizabethan theatre-
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Renaissance theatre derived from several
medieval theatre traditions, such as the mystery plays that formed a part of
religious festivals in England and other parts of Europe during the middle ages.
Other sources include the "morality
plays" and the "University drama" that
attempted to recreate Athenian tragedy. The Italian tradition of Commedia dell'arte, as well as the elaborate masques frequently presented at court, also contributed to the shaping of
public theatre.
Since before the reign of Elizabeth I, companies
of players were attached to households of leading
aristocrats and performed seasonally in various locations. These became the
foundation for the professional players that performed on the Elizabethan stage.
The tours of these players gradually replaced the performances of the mystery
and morality plays by local players, and a 1572 law eliminated the remaining
companies lacking formal patronage by labelling them vagabonds.
The City of London authorities were generally
hostile to public performances, but its hostility was overmatched by the
Queen's taste for plays and the Privy Council's support. Theatres sprang up in
suburbs, especially in the liberty of Southwark, accessible across the Thames
to city dwellers but beyond the authority's control. The companies maintained
the pretense that their public performances were mere rehearsals for the
frequent performances before the Queen, but while the latter did grant
prestige, the former were the real source of the income for the professional
players.
Along with the economics of the profession, the
character of the drama changed toward the end of the period. Under Elizabeth,
the drama was a unified expression as far as social class was concerned: the
Court watched the same plays the commoners saw in the public playhouses. With
the development of the private theatres, drama became more oriented toward the
tastes and values of an upper-class audience. By the later part of the reign of
Charles I, few new plays were being written for the public theatres, which
sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades.
Puritan opposition to the stage
(informed by the arguments of the early Church Fathers who had written screeds
against the decadent and violent entertainments of the Romans) argued not only
that the stage in general was pagan (supporting ritual theory), but that any play that represented a
religious figure was inherently idolatrous. In 1642, at the outbreak of the English
Civil War, the Protestant authorities banned the
performance of all plays within the city limits of London. A sweeping assault
against the alleged immoralities of the theatre crushed whatever remained in
England of the dramatic tradition.
Restoration
spectacular-
The Restoration
spectacular, or elaborately staged "machine play", hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences
with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special
effects such as trapdoor tricks, "flying" actors, and fireworks. These shows have always had a bad reputation as a vulgar and
commercial threat to the witty, "legitimate" Restoration
drama; however, they drew Londoners in unprecedented
numbers and left them dazzled and delighted.
With roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French
opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called
"English opera". However, the variety of them is so untidy that most
theatre historians despair of defining them as a genre at all. Only a handful of works of this period are usually accorded the term
"opera", as the musical dimension of most of them is subordinate to
the visual. It was spectacle and scenery that drew in the crowds, as shown by
many comments in the diary of the theatre-lover Samuel
Pepys. The expense of mounting ever more elaborate
scenic productions drove the two competing theatre companies into a dangerous
spiral of huge expenditure and correspondingly huge losses or profits. A fiasco
such as John Dryden's ‘Albion and Albanius’ would leave a company in serious debt,
while blockbusters like Thomas
Shadwell's ‘Psyche’ or Dryden's ‘King Arthur’ would put them in comfort for
a long time.
Neoclassical
theatre-
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Neoclassicism was the dominant form of
theatre in the 18th century. It demanded decorum and rigorous adherence to the classical
unities. Neoclassical theatre as well as the time
period is characterized by its grandiosity. The costumes and scenery were
intricate and elaborate. The acting is characterized by large gestures and
melodrama. Neoclassical theatre encompasses the Restoration, Augustan, and Johnstinian
Ages. In one sense, the neo-classical age directly follows the time of the
Renaissance.
In theatres of the early 18th century sexual
farces of the Restoration were superseded by politically satirical comedies, and
in 1737 Parliament passed the Stage Licensing Act which introduced state
censorship of public performances and limited the number of theatres in London
to two.
Nineteenth-century
theatre-
Theatre in the 19th century is divided into two
parts: early and late. The early period was dominated by melodrama and Romanticism.
Beginning in France, melodrama became the most popular theatrical form. August von Kotzebue's
‘Misanthropy and Repentance’
(1789) is often considered the first melodramatic play. The plays of Kotzebue
and René Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt established melodrama as the dominant dramatic form of the early 19th
century.
In Germany, there was a trend toward historic accuracy in costumes and settings, a revolution in theatre
architecture, and the introduction of the theatrical form of German Romanticism.
Influenced by trends in 19th-century philosophy
and the visual arts, German writers were
increasingly fascinated with their Teutonic past and had a growing sense of nationalism. The plays of Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Friedrich Schiller,
and other Sturm und Drang playwrights, inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides
to moral behavior.
In Britain, Percy Bysshe Shelley
and Lord
Byron were the most important dramatists of their
time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century).
In the minor theatres, burletta and melodrama were the most popular. Kotzebue's plays were translated into English
and Thomas Holcroft's ‘A Tale of
Mystery’ was the first of many English melodramas. Pierce
Egan, Douglas William Jerrold,
Edward Fitzball, and John Baldwin Buckstone initiated a trend towards more
contemporary and rural stories in preference to the usual historical or
fantastical melodramas. James Sheridan Knowles
and Edward Bulwer-Lytton
established a "gentlemanly" drama that began to re-establish the
former prestige of the theatre with the aristocracy.
The later period of the 19th century saw the
rise of two conflicting types of drama: realism and non-realism, such as Symbolism and precursors of Expressionism.
Realism began earlier in the 19th century in
Russia than elsewhere in Europe and took a more uncompromising form. Beginning
with the plays of Ivan Turgenev (who used "domestic
detail to reveal inner turmoil"), Aleksandr Ostrovsky (who was Russia's
first professional playwright), Aleksey Pisemsky (whose ‘A Bitter Fate’ (1859) anticipated Naturalism), and Leo
Tolstoy (whose ‘The Power of Darkness’ (1886) is "one of the
most effective of naturalistic plays"), a tradition of psychological
realism in Russia culminated with the establishment of the Moscow Art Theatre
by Konstantin Stanislavski
and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko.
The most important theatrical force in later
19th-century Germany was that of Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and his Meiningen Ensemble,
under the direction of Ludwig Chronegk. The Ensemble's productions are often
considered the most historically accurate of the 19th century, although his
primary goal was to serve the interests of the playwright. The Meiningen
Ensemble stands at the beginning of the new movement toward unified production
(or what Richard Wagner would call the Gesamtkunstwerk) and the rise of the director (at the expense of the actor) as the dominant artist in theatre-making.
Naturalism, a theatrical movement born
out of Charles Darwin's ‘The Origin of Species’ (1859) and contemporary
political and economic conditions, found its main proponent in Émile
Zola. The realization of Zola's ideas was hindered
by a lack of capable dramatists writing naturalist drama. André
Antoine emerged in the 1880s with his Théâtre Libre that was only open to members and therefore was exempt from censorship.
He quickly won the approval of Zola and began to stage Naturalistic works and
other foreign realistic pieces.
In Britain, melodramas, light comedies, operas,
Shakespeare and classic English drama, Victorian burlesque,
pantomimes, translations of French farces and, from the 1860s, French operettas,
continued to be popular. So successful were the comic
operas of Gilbert and Sullivan,
such as ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ (1878) and ‘The Mikado’ (1885), that they greatly expanded the audience for musical theatre.
This, together with much improved street lighting and transportation in London
and New York led to a late Victorian and Edwardian theatre building boom in the
West End and on Broadway. Later, the work of Henry Arthur Jones
and Arthur Wing Pinero
initiated a new direction on the English stage. While their work paved the way,
the development of more significant drama owes itself most to the playwright Henrik
Ibsen.
Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. He wrote twenty-five plays, the most famous of which are ‘A Doll's House’ (1879), ‘Ghosts’ (1881), ‘The Wild Duck’ (1884), and ‘Hedda Gabler’ (1890). In addition, his
works ‘Rosmersholm’ (1886) and ‘When We Dead Awaken’ (1899) evoke a sense of
mysterious forces at work in human destiny, which was to be a major theme of symbolism and the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd".
After Ibsen, British theatre experienced
revitalization with the work of George Bernard Shaw,
Oscar
Wilde, John
Galsworthy, William Butler Yeats,
and Harley Granville Barker.
Unlike most of the gloomy and intensely serious work of their contemporaries,
Shaw and Wilde wrote primarily in the comic
form. Edwardian musical comedies
were extremely popular, appealing to the tastes of the middle class in the 1890s and catering to the public's preference for escapist entertainment
during World War I.
Twentieth-century
theatre-
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While much 20th-century theatre
continued and extended the projects of realism and Naturalism, there was also a great deal
of experimental theatre
that rejected those conventions. These experiments form part of the modernist and postmodernist movements and included forms of political
theatre as well as more aesthetically orientated work.
Examples include: Epic theatre, the Theatre of Cruelty,
and the Theatre of the Absurd.
The term theatre practitioner
came to be used to describe someone who both creates theatrical performances and who produces a theoretical discourse that informs their practical
work. A theatre practitioner may be a director, a dramatist, an actor, or, characteristically, often a combination of these traditionally
separate roles. "Theatre practice" describes the collective work that
various theatre practitioners do. It is used to describe theatre praxis from Stanislavski's
development of his system through Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics,
Bertolt Brecht's epic and Jerzy
Grotowski's poor
theatre, down to the present day, with contemporary
theatre practitioners including Augusto
Boal with his Theatre of the Oppressed,
Dario
Fo's popular theatre,
Eugenio Barba's theatre
anthropology and Anne
Bogart's viewpoints.
Other key figures of 20th-century theatre
include: Antonin Artaud, August
Strindberg, Anton
Chekhov, Frank Wedekind, Maurice Maeterlinck,
Federico García Lorca,
Eugene O'Neill, Luigi
Pirandello, George Bernard Shaw,
Gertrude Stein, Ernst
Toller, Vladimir Mayakovski, Arthur
Miller, Tennessee Williams,
Jean
Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel
Beckett, Harold
Pinter, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heiner
Müller, and Caryl
Churchill.
A number of aesthetic movements continued or emerged in the 20th century, including:
- Naturalism
- Realism
- Dadaism
- Expressionism
- Surrealism and the Theatre of Cruelty
- Theatre of the Absurd
- Postmodernism
- Agitprop
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