|
From British Drama 1890 to 1950: A Critical History By R. F. Dietrich |
Link to Title Page & Table of Contents
End of Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION:
A RENAISSANCE OF THE DRAMA
There is a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society:
a bounding grinding
collision of the New with the Old.
|
6. Figures 1-7 |
THE NEW DRAMA
|
There have been
two periods of great drama in British history, the first in the Renaissance,
Shakespeare’s age, and the second, confusingly called the “Renaissance of the
British Drama,” featuring George Bernard Shaw and the New Drama.1 It is this renaissance
of the modern period, roughly occupying the years 1890 to 1950, that is the subject of this book.
William Archer (1856-1924), the
most influential drama critic of the New Drama movement and translator of
Ibsen, thought of the ages between the Puritans’ closing of the theaters in
1642
and the creation of the New Drama in the 1890s as the dark ages of the
drama, with only a few glimmerings of light along the way—Congreve, Wycherly, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Robertson—to give hope for
the future. Throughout The Old Drama and the New (1923),
Archer used metaphors of light and dark or wasteland metaphors to contrast the
New Drama with the Old (“the whole century from about 1720 to 1820 was a dreary
desert broken by a single oasis—the comedies of Goldsmith and Sheridan”),
metaphors he applies to most of nineteenth-century drama for its
pleasure-seeking addiction to melodrama, low comedy, and other escapist fare.2
To read the diatribes
against the nineteenth-century theater by certain critics and dramatists of the
1890s is to be reminded that nothing really changes in popular culture. The
most debased of our own film and TV fare is a lineal descendant of
nineteenth-century popular theater, except that the ante on thrills and “laffs” has been considerably upped, making the Victorian
plays complained about by Archer seem tasteful and thoughtful. Yet there’s no
doubt that this escapist, often simplistically moralizing drama of the
nineteenth-century popular theater was of a decided mediocrity, not only
because it catered to the low tastes of a very undereducated and rather uncouth
audience but because it was virtually without literary value. This can partly
be attributed to the fact that without copyright laws protecting them
playwrights had gotten out of the habit of publishing their plays (except as
prompt books) and thus of thinking of them as literature, subject to criticism.
Archer’s insistence on literary quality had much to do with
the return of substance to British drama, as well as a return of improved
technique. Perhaps the most significant feature of this period is that
in it the literary drama overtook the old Theatrical Theater, making necessary
a critical approach fundamentally literary.
But Archer’s partisan condemnation
of nineteenth-century drama must be qualified in several ways. First, though
the nineteenth century was largely a desert for the drama,
it was the scene of a theatrical harvest, during which the theater as an
institution grew and flourished in the hands of great actors and
actor-managers, and all the arts and crafts of the theater were refined.
Second, though the drama of the times was mostly mediocre as literature, much
of it was first-rate as theater,
causing Britain’s growing middle class to flock to it for amusement, thus
sparking its physical and institutional development—around fifty theaters were
built in London alone between 18oo and 1890. It’s true that those seeking
greatness in the nineteenth-century theater found it mostly in the acting and
staging, and in revivals of Shakespeare and other classics, not in the
contemporary drama; but at least they found it. And those primarily seeking
entertainment were seldom disappointed. The thousand or so playwrights who
wrote between Shakespeare and Shaw, though now mostly forgotten, could at least
be generally counted on to amuse the populace according to the tastes of the
times, and occasionally even to elevate those tastes slightly. Another
consideration is that the theatricalism, abstraction,
and musical nature of much nineteenth-century drama has
been partially vindicated by the dramatic practices of twentieth-century drama,
though of course the difference is that the best twentieth-century drama made
these properties or qualities serve higher purposes. These qualifications
aside, Archer’s characterization of over two centuries of theater as desert or dark age had much validity, considering the standard set by
Shakespeare, and interested Victorians agreed that a dramatic revival was in
order. The alternative was to follow Matthew Arnold’s example in abandoning the
theater out of disgust.
But which exactly needed to be
revived—the drama or society? The word renaissance connotes the rebirth
of a people and thus might be thought too strong a term if applied only to the
drama. Most Victorians did not think of their age as especially benighted, at
least nothing a little reform and technological and
business progress couldn’t take care of. It may have been a dark age of
the drama, but in the novel and poetry and the other arts, and certainly in the
sciences and in business and industry, most Victorians considered theirs a
progressive, enlightened age. So it was hard to convince an otherwise
forward-looking people—industrializers of a world
empire and avid users of railroads, telegraphy, electricity, photography, and
telephones—that they were backward in much else besides this very specialized
and seemingly unimportant area known as the drama.
But George Bernard Shaw, this
era’s chief playwright, argued and demonstrated that, technological progress
notwithstanding, backwardness was so deeply entrenched in the moral, religious,
and governmental systems of the day that it was not too much to call the entire
age a dark age and to play its “progressiveness” as an ironic joke. For Shaw,
as well as Archer and many others, the word renaissance was not too ambitious
for the extreme measures that were needed to breathe new life into a morally
rotten society, and the drama, with its ancient roots in the life-worshipping
Greek religion of Dionysius, was precisely the means needed. As an institution
for the gathering of people together to commune on the issues of social health
and spiritual well-being, and to plumb the mysteries of human identity in a
riddling universe, employing thereby all the arts and crafts in a unifying
effort, the drama was ideally designed to be the focus of culture, as it had
been at its beginnings in ancient Greece. In fact, the health of a nation could
be determined by how central it made its drama and how seriously it took it.
For Shaw and Archer, a major diagnostic of Victorian society was its
trivialization of the theater. Only in a dark age would the spiritual light
that may illuminate the stage be allowed so nearly to go out.
A renaissance is a period of
enlightenment. The original Renaissance was awakened to the long-lost past of
the Greeks and Romans—its chief reality was that of ancient truth rediscovered,
as, for example, the way Aristotelian principles were henceforth applied to
drama. In contrast, the modern age, guided by science to be irreverent toward
the past and skeptical of received truth (as the maverick Galileo had been
skeptical of Aristotle), thought of itself as more concerned with present
reality, especially awakening to physical reality, since it could be
empirically verified. It supposed that the physical world was scientifically
knowable and controllable, and that therefore the future could be commanded
through the invention of new technologies and new methods. From about the
middle of the nineteenth century there was a gathering insistence that art follow
science in a more “realistic” investigation of the physical world, thereby
joining the March of Progress. And so the novel followed painting, to mention
two of the arts, in becoming more “realistic” and thus supposedly less
escapist. By the 1890s the New Drama as well was identified with “realism,”
with British experiments in “realism,” however timid, as early as the 1860s (T.
W. Robertson). On the continent, Émile Zola had
argued in 1873 that playwrights should be scientists too, “realistically” and
tough-mindedly examining in the laboratory of the stage the physical operation
of human society and human consciousness. And, from the seventies on, Henrik Ibsen, with his microscopic dissection of modern
Norwegian society and individual personality, had shown how best to do it in a
dramatic form. For Archer, Ibsen was the model for the future.
But the “realism” of an art based
on illusion, as is drama, was immediately challenged, even by some of those
playwrights labeled as “realists”—Ibsen himself fused “realism” with symbolism
and flirted with expressionism. Many artists argued that the use of
“nonrealistic” modes of expression did not necessarily mean that art was
escapist; rather, art’s approach to reality could only be through illusion (i.e., spiritual
reality)—a play, for example, was a “playing” with reality. And the
substitution of electric lights for gas lights in the eighties and nineties,
made possible by science’s regard for physical reality, did not necessarily add
to the stage’s spiritual illumination but actually seemed at times to obscure
its presentation of spiritual reality. A sign of the times, however, was that
the aggressively positivistic science of the day made people feel apologetic
about using a word like spiritual, though some playwrights
were less intimidated than others. And thus began a very complicated debate on
the nature of dramatic reality.
“Realism” as a dramatic style
refers to the appearance of lifelikeness (verisimilitude) in setting, costume,
dialogue, gesture, facial expression, and so on. A realistic play was to be a
photographic copy of common, observable experience (in practice, usually
middle-class domestic experience, to accord with the reality of the rise of the
bourgeoisie). The stage was to appear, not as a stage, but as a room or any
actual environment; props were to be seen, not as props, but as authentic parts
of a particular everyday environment. All the developing technology of the
modern theater—hydraulic machinery, cycloramas, lighting boards, etc.-—was
brought to bear in creating the illusion of authentic environment. A proscenium
arch separated the stage from the auditorium and framed the action taking place
on the stage in a three-sided box set. Some theaters (such as
As for the “realistic” play, no
authorial intrusion was allowed, and neither audience nor actors were
acknowledged for what they were. The idea was to achieve the illusion of
re-created life, in its immediacy and dense actuality. At its best (Ibsen and
Chekhov) it did indeed give the feeling that one was peering through an open
window into someone’s house and, unobserved, overhearing private conversation.
“Realism” at its best was very persuasive in making audiences believe that the
illusion they were seeing was not an illusion.
But of course that simply made “realism” the most outrageous of all of
the theater’s pretenses—one had to make-believe that one was not
in a theater and not looking at actors acting on a
stage. But it must have been a relief to those tired of plays that pointed the
moral, and owing to its relative subtlety, riveting to those wishing to know
what it all meant. The supposed neutrality or scientific objectivity of the
author, the indirectness of the characterization, and the relative
inconclusiveness of the action forced the viewer to pay close attention to the
details in order to form judgments, with much of the meaning of such plays
occurring in the subtext and accumulating gradually, almost imperceptibly,
detail by detail.
“Realism” at first was
associated with “social drama,” for its immediate goal was to display
accurately and authentically the social environment and behavior of the
day. But this association gave realism a reputation for being
superficial, for getting lost in relatively unimportant surface detail at the
expense of portraying the more important soul of things. That was why Ibsen
resisted “realism” for so long, preferring to go on writing obsolete heroic drama,
often in verse, rather than stoop to “mere photography.” But then it
dawned on this genius that the surface of life could be used in a poetic,
symbolic way, just as great photographers were learning that the camera need
not just copy life’s exterior but could interpret and poetically evoke the
hidden depths as well. Ibsen converted to “realism” when he found that he
could use the surface to suggest the deeps and so invented what came to be
called “psychological realism,” in which the picturing of society is employed
to suggest the underlying soul or psyche. And insofar as his plays penetrated
mundane appearances, reaching to the significance of things, they were examples
of “philosophical realism” as well, and of “critical realism” insofar as they saw
through the humbug of the day. It was a neat trick, this elevating of what
seemed a trivial and mundane art into a high art, but so many missed the trick
that Ibsen was often erroneously dismissed as a mere social realist, thus
leading other dramatists to become overtly “nonrealistic” in their expression
of the psychological deeps and intellectual heights in order to separate
themselves from what was thought a second-rate art.
The point to be underscored
is that as human reality is multidimensional, the word realism should not
have been limited to the imitation of our most superficial reality. This early
mistake in terminology plagues us like an original sin, accounting for the
quotation marks around “realism” and “nonrealism” to
this point, to signify that the standard notions of these terms have created a
false distinction, for “nonrealistic” plays are no less capable of showing us
reality than are “realistic” plays, and in fact the reality conveyed by
“nonrealistic” plays may be more significant. Theater departments often wisely
use the alternate terms representational and presentational, but English
departments, caught in the toils of literary history, seem to be stuck with the
confusing “realism” and “nonrealism.” Having
acknowledged the confusion, however, we may henceforth drop the annoying
quotation marks if we keep constantly in mind that “realism” and “nonrealism” are misnomers.
Another, related confusion in
terminology might just as well be mentioned here—that over the term naturalism,
which is used in at least three different ways. Naturalism
may refer to nothing more than the natural-looking or natural-sounding
quality of a play. Chekhov’s plays are often cited as naturalistic in
this sense, as his characters create the impression that they are as
disorganized, spontaneous, and inarticulate as life outside of art frequently
is. Shaw’s plays are not naturalistic in this sense,
for his characters are articulate well beyond what is considered natural.
In acting, Gerald du Maurier is particularly credited
with developing the most naturalistic style, which consisted mainly of giving
the appearance of not acting, a style Shaw had little use for. This sort of
naturalism, as a kind of hyperrealism, is just as often referred to as realism
pure and simple, the critics being hopelessly inconsistent.
Naturalism (sometimes
capitalized in this sense) may also refer to a particular philosophy of life
and/or to a particular literary-dramatic embodiment of that philosophy.
Naturalism as a philosophy refers to the Social Darwinist idea that human
beings are purely the product of heredity and environment, utterly determined
in their behavior by these shaping factors of the natural world. This philosophy
may be embodied in any kind of play, realistic or
nonrealistic; and a play may have characters in it who express a naturalistic
view without the play itself being totally, or at all, supportive of naturalism
as a philosophy. Literary naturalism refers to works that attempt to embody a
naturalistic philosophy in a very specific form, in which realistically
portrayed characters are obviously and entirely at the mercy of environment and
heredity. Typically, plays of this type (
The reactions against realism and
naturalism were various, some nonrealistic dramatic forms given names from the
past, such as fantasia, burlesque, allegory, and extravaganza, some having
names invented for them, such as symbolism and expressionism, and some seeming
to fit no particular category (most of Shaw’s plays). Of the new
forms, symbolism and expressionism most typified the modernist reaction against
realism and naturalism, having in common that they were evocations or
assertions of a reality beyond the ken of positivistic science. Symbolism
pointed to a spiritual reality behind appearances, and expressionism projected
outward an internal reality positivism overlooked.
Uncapitalized, symbolism merely refers to the use
of some things to represent other things, as a single chair on a stage might
represent all furniture, a tree might represent life, or a setting sun might
represent the coming of death. Symbolism capitalized refers to
the specific use of symbolism, conceived by a late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century literary movement (beginning with such poets as Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Valéry,
and finding its purest dramatic expression in the plays of Maeterlinck and
Yeats), to evoke a spiritual world beyond the five senses through an
associational technique that connects things in the material world with their
correspondences in the spiritual world. Symbolism in this sense employs
symbols in the least definite of ways to suggest unseen powers and emotional
realities, to evoke the “esoteric affinities” of the writer. Symbolism
was private and subjective in that the author’s system of association, the
particular way he evoked the archetypes, was his own; but Symbolism overcame
the implied chaos of subjectivism because the correspondences activated
universal archetypes, buried in the psyche of everyone, that, when properly
evoked, were capable of connecting individuals in a collective awareness.
Expressionism was usually a more
extreme assertion of private, subjective reality, of the sort posited by
psychoanalysis, though it too might appeal to universal archetypes.
Prototypical were Strindberg’s A Dream Play and The
Ghost Sonata, peopled by bizarre, rather abstract characters
involved in dreamlike action, the logic of which was emotional and
associational rather than rational. Expressionism flowered in the
Realism of the extreme purity
Archer wanted is an aberration in the theater, for the long tradition of the
theater, before and after that brief period of the realistic movement, has been
more nonrealistic than realistic, though many of the greatest dramatists seemed
to derive strength from an alloy of the two. From the Greeks to the New
Drama, the stage traditionally presented reality through the device of acknowledged
illusion; anything else seemed deceitful. And although the movement in
nineteenth-century drama was generally from a nonrealistic, or presentational,
mode to a realistic, or representational, mode, the movement in
twentieth-century drama to the present has been from a realistic mode not so
much back to a nonrealistic mode as to a latitudinarian attitude that anything
is possible in the theater and that the playwright is free to use realistic or
nonrealistic modes, separately or in combination, as appropriate to the
play. But this has only become clear in the last fifty years, the
postmodern era. In the period of our study, 1890 to 1950, the last half was largely characterized
by a reaction against realism, with the fifties and sixties capping it off with
the aggressively antirealistic Theater of the Absurd.
And so we come full circle.
Myron Matlaw,
in his Modern World Drama: An Encyclopedia, defines
realism thus:
REALISM is as loose a term in the drama as it is in the other arts.
It refers to any attempt at reproducing verisimilitude on the stage. Since this
could mean the representation of external or internal, physical or
psychological or philosophical—or even political, sociological, or
economic—-”realities,” and since these may be perceived in many different ways,
the term is almost meaningless. Instead of being a description of anything, it is popularly used as an evaluation, usually an approving value
judgment on the “truthfulness” of a work.3
“The term is almost meaningless,” says Matlaw. How dismayed Archer and some of the New Dramatists
would be to hear that this is the outcome of their struggle to force the drama
to be realistic. Yet Matlaw, in throwing up the
lexicographer’s arms at the futility of defining so slippery a word, is simply
being true to the spirit of his own postmodern age, an age in which not only
are the wisest scientists considerably less positive, not to mention less
positivistic, about reality than they used to be, but also we have considerably
less confidence about language’s relation to any reality outside itself.
From this skeptical postmodern perspective, then, latitudinarianism seems the
most becoming position to take. In any age it is difficult to empathize with
the heated arguments of the past if they are no longer of concern, but our
postmodern perspective makes it all the more difficult to cast ourselves back
to the 1890s and feel how burning the issue of realism was to the New
Dramatists (even as we grow cooler to the passionate arguments of Ionesco et
al. against realism). It seemed then
a life-and-death issue, at least for the drama.
The tone of William Archer’s plea for
realism in The Old Drama and the New is very telling. He obviously felt
beleaguered by those (such as Yeats) who would dismiss modern realistic drama
as inferior or degenerate. Archer’s object was to discover in the history of
drama a “guiding principle of evolution,” something that would help determine
“the essence of drama,” and that would provide “the basis for a rational
standard of values” by which the drama could be judged.4
Archer begins with the
assertion that the two sources from which drama arose were imitation (mimesis) and passion. By “passion” he signifies “the
exaggerated, intensified—in brief, the lyrical or rhetorical— expression of
feeling.”5
He cites song, dance, and heightened speech as examples, but eventually
includes almost any stage business that he considers not exactly imitative of
reality. Imitation is the essence of drama, and all the
lyrical-rhetorical exaggerative elements, which he associates with “the
primitive,” are impurities that need to be purged from drama and delivered to
the music hail, the opera, and the ballet, the proper homes for the hysterical
arts. The form that best accomplishes this purgation is modern realism,
imitation triumphant. “Who can doubt that the future belongs to it?”6
With such notions, Archer’s history of English drama could only be mostly a catalog of failure, for that drama—with its speeches in verse, its asides and soliloquies, its direct address to the audience, its moralizings, its raked stages, its acting outside the stage-picture on apron or thrust, its indulgence in wit and rhetorical flourish, its formulaic characterizations, its boys disguised as females, its grand style of acting—was seldom realistic in the way he wanted.
Of course Archer has to qualify
every condemnation of the passionate lyrical-rhetorical drama with the
exception of Shakespeare. “Consummate genius can express itself in any form and
can ennoble any form.”7 One
might draw the opposite conclusion that Shakespeare succeeded, not in spite of
his “passionate” form, but because of it, but Archer’s idealism is proof
against any such argument. Surprisingly, toward the end of his book
Archer offers Ibsen, heretofore the model for the rule of realism, as another
exception to the rule. “What he really did was, not to confine his genius
within the limits of realism, but to show that realism of externals—of
environment, costume, manners and speech—placed no limits upon the power of
genius to search the depths of the human heart, and to extract from common life
the poetry that lurks in it.”8 In other words, what made Ibsen great
was not his realism but his ability to get at the poetry (i.e., the passion)
beneath it. (Thomas Postlewait, in his Prophet
of the New Drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign, has
explained that this seeming contradiction was based in Archer’s split
personality. Archer was often very appreciative of individual plays of
the passionate-rhetorical type, including some of Shaw’s, but for the sake of
the theoretical consistency of his Ibsen campaign he consigned such plays to a
species more primitive than the New Drama, thus repressing a part of his own
appreciative nature and creating the false impression that he was a fanatic.)
Archer also refused to acknowledge
that that which excepts Shakespeare and Ibsen excepts
Shaw. The concluding chapters of Archer’s book are devoted mostly to
encomiums of what we would now consider minor playwrights—Arthur Wing Pinero,
Sydney Grundy, Henry Arthur Jones, Harley Granville Barker, James Galsworthy,
etc.-—at the expense of a just estimate of the period’s one giant, G. B.
Shaw. In an irony fitting of the New
Drama itself, Shaw as the playwright who best embodied Archer’s prophecy of a
New Drama got little credit from the prophet himself because he embodied it in
a way that Archer could not theoretically approve. But, then, Archer
began as Shaw’s friend, neighbor, and rival drama critic, and it must have been
a struggle just holding his own against the irrepressible Shaw. One wonders if Archer’s constant
reference to realism as “sober,” with its implication that passionate drama was
“drunken,” might not have been a sly joke at the expense of the teetotaling but rhetorically passionate Shaw.
At any rate, Archer ends by
congratulating imitation and lyrical-rhetorical passion on at last consummating
their divorce. “This divorce, so obviously inevitable, is a good and not a bad
thing—a sign of health and not of degeneracy.”9 This could only have been written in
the early twenties, for the triumph of realism that Archer here celebrates was
soon to turn into the gradual rout of realism. Nothing could dramatize the
issue more clearly than the fact that in the year The Old Drama and the New
was published, 1923, Shaw produced his Nobel Prize-winning play, Saint
]oan, as passionate, lyrical-rhetorical,
and nonrealistic a play as he had yet written. It was a harbinger of the turn
he was to take in his last phase toward open “extravaganza,” one of Archer’s
most despised forms; and of the turn other dramatists, following continental
trends (Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Pirandello, Lorca, Cocteau, Anouilh, Brecht)
and American trends (O’Neill, Rice, Wilder, Williams), were to take toward
nonrealistic drama in general. The final twenty-five years of our period
saw realistic plays, looking increasingly stodgy, balanced off with a variety
of fresh-looking nonrealistic plays, the most interesting perhaps being the
Balinese-No inspired heroic drama of W. B. Yeats, the expressionistic
experiments of Sean O’Casey, and the revival of verse drama in the hands of
Christopher Fry, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Isherwood. And then
in the fifties the top blew off, with Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter
providing the antirealistic dynamite. Yet, though by
the end of our period pure realism seemed an exhausted form, imitation was soon
to refresh itself by connecting with a new sort of social protest (John
Osborne’s Look Back in Anger) and by combining in hybrid forms (Peter
Nichols’s Joe Egg), the moral seeming to be, the opposite of the one
Archer drew, that imitation and passion are elements within drama seeking, not
exclusion of the other, but a proper, dynamic relationship. The model for the
future was Brechtian “epic theater” and Yeatsian “total theater,” in which audience involvement in
realistic and semirealistic episodes, and audience
“alienation” through nonrealistic dance, mime, ritual action, etc., alternated
or combined in an all-inclusive art.
Archer’s polemic necessarily
overstated the triumph of realism in his day; it was more a temporary
redressing of an imbalance created by the nineteenth-century’s inept
overindulgence in passionate, nonrealistic theater. Archer’s dedication to
realism was partly due to his sitting through too much frivolous song and dance
as a youth. But musicality was a peculiarity of nineteenth-century drama
caused by the historical accident that licensing laws dating from the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prohibited straight drama from being
performed in all but three major theaters (Covent Garden, Drury Lane, and, in
summers, the Haymarket), making it necessary for the “minor” theaters to adorn
their dramas with music during, before, and after the play. These laws were
repealed in 1843, making straight drama possible for all theaters, but the
habit of musical accompaniment to drama persisted because it suited popular tastes, and so
melodrama still announced the arrival of the villain with a thrilling piano,
driving the young Archer to long for someone to shoot the piano player. Or at
least drive him out of the “legitimate” theater into the music hall and the
opera hall. If Archer had only noticed that his beloved Ibsen, in A
Doll House, had merely put the piano player onstage, to accompany
Nora’s tarantella, he might not have labored so diligently to separate
imitation from passion.
John Russell Taylor sums up our
present attitude. “In drama what seems natural is natural—there are no
legitimate or illegitimate illusions, only illusion achieved or not achieved.10 Ironically, our present liberation from the need to promote
one kind of drama over another has actually been to the benefit of the
realists. As Shaw had pointed out in the thirties, Ibsen’s psychological dramas
would be served just as well by acting outside the proscenium, in styles
emphasizing their symbolism and expressionism; nowadays one is just as likely
to see Ibsen’s plays done in theater-in-the-round or on a thrust stage, which
gives them a whole new life. Our freedom from dispute on these matters also
allows us to appreciate old-fashioned realism, realism acted behind the
proscenium in a box set, without any sense that that was ever an embattled
form. Nowadays we care only that the theater artists do their jobs—that is,
create effective theater—and how they do it is their business. Variety is the
spice.
|
THE WELL-MADE PLAY AND THE
PROBLEM PLAY |
Realism was undoubtedly the
dominant trait of Archer’s New Drama, but it had two other features as well,
deriving from the development of two separate kinds of nineteenth-century
drama—the “well-made play” and the “problem play.” Archer often spoke of
realistic drama as though it automatically included the salient features of
these two kinds of play, which were its “technique” and its “subject
matter.” Archer began by saying that “the advance of dramatic art has
consisted, not merely in the negative process of casting out extraneous and
illogical elements, but also in the positive process of acquiring a technique
appropriate to the great end in view—that, namely, of interesting theatrical
audiences by the sober and accurate imitation of life.” He spoke of how
French playwrights of the nineteenth century had “discovered the central secret
of modern technique—the infinite ductility or malleability of dramatic
material. In other words, systematic ingenuity had, almost for the first time,
been applied to the ordering of plot. The art of keeping action always moving, and
freeing it from the frippery of irrelevant wit and the adipose tissue of wordy
rhetoric, had been invented and developed.”12
Though Archer had gotten
used to thinking of a certain plot construction as endemic to realism, realism
and the plot construction of the well-made play actually came from different
directions and were not mutually necessary. Given credit for fathering the
well-made play (or pièce bien faite) was Eugène
Scribe (1791-1861), fertile father of about five-hundred plays. Mass production
of plays on that scale requires machinery, and it was Scribe who, so to speak,
industrialized playwriting by creating a plot machine for keeping an audience
constantly intrigued. As John Russell Taylor puts it, Scribe “saw that all
drama, in performance, is an experience in time, and that therefore the first
essential is to keep one’s audience attentive from one minute to the next. . . . His
plays inculcated, not the overall construction of a drama . . . , but
at least the spacing and preparation of effects so that an audience should be
kept expectant from beginning to end.”13
Telling a story well, “so that there is not one moment in the
whole evening when the audience is not in a state of eager expectation, waiting
for something to happen, for some secret to be uncovered, some identity
revealed, some inevitable confrontation actually to occur,” is Scribe’s simple
secret (so ironically exploited by Beckett’s minimalist, plotless
Waiting
for Godot).14 It was left to Victorien
Sardou (1831-1908) to convert
Scribe’s machine for generating intrigue into a formulaic plot to give the
well-made play its reputation for tight construction. Sardou’s plot came
in parts—first, a quick exposition, introducing characters and filling in their
pasts, followed by an inciting event (a misunderstanding, a secret withheld, an
intercepted message, a visit from a mysterious stranger, etc.) that causes the
action to rise in tension, act by act in incremental steps, toward a scène à faire, a climactic confrontation that forces the
action to a crisis and a denouement, a resolution of maximum sensation. And
there was to be no wasted motion, no “fripperies” of poetry or rhetoric such as
a Shakespeare or a Shaw would indulge in. Eugène
Labiche (1815-88) and Georges Feydeau
(1862-1921) adapted the
“well-made” formula to comedy, putting the emphasis on bigger and bigger laughs
instead of on bigger and bigger thrills. In the well-made play, pattern
is all. Character and theme are subordinated to plot
intrigue. Though “well-madeness” became
identified with realism, it was originally intended to apply to any
form—farce, melodrama, heroic tragedy, whatever. Chekhov’s plays,
especially, illustrate that “well-madeness” is not
only not necessary to realism but may actually be counter to the assumptions of
realism, since life is seldom “well-made.”
Conjoining with the well-made play
in the New Drama was the "problem play." Shakespeare’s dark
comedies, such as Measure for Measure, have been called problem plays, so the
type has been around; but according to Archer, it was Sydney Grundy who first
used the term, disparagingly, after he gave up writing such plays (Shaw would
say it was because he wrote them poorly!).
However, it may have been
the Danish critic, George Brandes, early celebrator
of Ibsen’s genius, who in 1872 broached the idea of the problem play. Wrote Brandes, “What is alive in modern
literature shows in its capacity to submit problems to debate.”15 Supposedly, Ibsen later embodied
this best in the discussion between Nora and Torvald
at the end of A Doll House concerning modern middle-class marriage.
Such debate connected with realism in that it provided a way for drama to come
to grips with “real life” by dealing straightforwardly with social problems.
But Ibsen was misunderstood. To paraphrase a critic, to say that A
Doll House is about women’s liberation or that Ghosts is about
venereal disease or that An Enemy of the People is about
political corruption is like saying that “King
Lear is about housing for the elderly.”16 Those who misunderstood Ibsen wrote
plays about slum landlordism, prostitution, labor unrest, penal codes, class
warfare, the double standard, divorce, business corruption, etc., in such a
very limited and narrow way that they gave the problem play a bad name.
The reason even a Sydney Grundy might speak disparagingly about problem plays
is that such mundane matters—when dealt with at only a literal, local, topical
level rather than at a level that questions human identity and destiny, as in
Ibsen and Shaw—could easily degenerate into political tracts or propaganda
pieces. Problem plays became identified with thesis plays, didactically
presenting social problems for the sake of promoting a particular reform or
upholding convention. A favorite “problem” of New Dramatists such as
Jones and Pinero was the issue of whether a “fallen woman” could be allowed
back into respectable society, and the answer was always “no.” It’s ironic that
the sort of play Archer championed for its subtle, objective presentation of
reality was so often secretly moralizing, imposing ideals or ideology on
reality rather than “telling it like it is.”
SHAVIAN NEW DRAMA |
TOP
/ Table
of Contents
The ending that allowed no happy
solution to the fallen woman question was problematic when compared with
the sudden and miraculous reconciliations, conversions, and other providential
workings that marked the hasty denouements of melodrama, yet Shaw was quick to
point out that problem plays of the Pinero and Jones variety were phony, for
the conclusions were foregone, their unhappy endings not really following from
character and event but merely mechanically imposed by moral conventions,
ideology, external to the play. In The Quintessence of lbsenism
(1891), Shaw argued that Ibsen, on the other hand, in implying that the
quintessence of morality was that there is no quintessence, that there are no
easy or final solutions to the problems life poses, had meant that the
conventional ending was part of the problematics—that is, if a play’s ending,
simply as a matter of convention, automatically says no to the question of
whether a fallen woman can get back into society, that ending should not
resolve the issue, as Pinero and Jones would let it seem
to do; rather, it should expose an irreconcilable conflict between the
individual will and the conditions that seek to govern it. Understanding
Ibsen in this way, Shaw made “problem” the center of his own program for the
New Drama. “Problem” simply needed to be understood correctly. “Drama,” said Shaw, “is the presentation in parable of the conflict
between man’s will and his environment—in a word, of problem.”17 Shaw thought the dramatist should deal
with social issues, but only as the context for a dramatization of the larger,
universal conflict between private will and circumstance, showing the
individual struggle to realize an identity and a purpose in a mysterious
universe. Such problems are timeless, however localized by their time and
setting.
With the well-made play, however,
Shaw was not interested in saving a misunderstood form—he attacked it
wholesale. Well-made plays were merely “mechanical rabbits” leading the
audience like dogs on a merry chase, but to no lasting or significant
purpose. Shaw believed that plays should
grow organically, from character and situation, rather than have a ready-made
plot imposed on them. It was greater realism, he argued, to let life go
where it would rather than force it into an artificial, prejudging
mold. Further, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism
he declared that the discussion in dramatic form of a “problem” was the
technical novelty in Ibsen’s plays that should replace the old Scribean art of intrigue. For intrigue “Ibsen
substituted a terrible art of sharpshooting at the
audience” through a discussion technique that implicates the audience.18 And if discussion is allowed to follow
naturally from character, then the play, like life, will not be
“well-made.” The well-made play of “Sardoodledum”
(referring to Sardou) was a falsifying apparatus that Shaw saw as contradicting
all the assumptions of that realism to which it was allied.
Yet Shaw was not interested in
defending dramatic realism either. “Stage realism is a contradiction in terms,”
he said.19 It was not
Ibsen’s literary realism that made him great but his psychological,
philosophical, and critical realism. The Ibsen Shaw presents in The
Quintessence of Ibsenism is a visionary, much
akin to Ibsen’s own view of himself. His surface realism was subterfuge,
a cover-up and symbolic signpost for the poetic divination that was going on
behind the scenes.
Believing that great artists
express themselves authentically, not by fitting into a standard formula for
art, but by having an individual style, Shaw saw the appropriateness of Ibsen’s
style, expressive of his secretive, subversive character. In devising his
own style, that of an open, flamboyant extrovert, devoted to
frontal attack, Shaw felt he must acknowledge stage illusion for what it
was. “Neither have I ever been what you call a . . . realist. I was always in
the classic tradition, recognizing that stage characters must be endowed by the
author with a conscious self-knowledge and power of expression, and . . . a
freedom from inhibitions, which in real life would make them monsters of
genius. It is the power to do this that differentiates me (or Shakespeare) from
a gramophone and a camera.”20 Furthermore, the object of drama
for him was “the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the
musician. Anything that makes this expression more vivid, whether it be
versification, or an orchestra, or a deliberately artificial delivery of the
lines, is so much to the good for me, even though it may destroy all the
verisimilitude of the scene.“ 21
Shaw’s strategy was to make the
realistic well-made problem play ridiculous by showing its self-contradictions
and its failures to live up to its own model. The New Drama of this sort
having been exposed as fraudulent, the stage would thus have room for his own
New Drama, sometimes called the Drama of Ideas but a more complex thing than
that label suggests, as we’ll see later. His strategy succeeded admirably to
the extent that it certainly made room for his own plays and the plays of other
dramatists uncomfortable with realism, but the record is otherwise mixed.
A look at the drama of the twentieth century shows that Archer’s ideals seem to
be more in practice than Shaw’s until about 1930 and that from then on there is
a swing in Shaw’s direction, although in any given London season one could find
both sorts of plays.
So which was the real
New Drama—the realistic well-made problem play of Archer’s theory or Shaw’s
fabulous, passionate Drama of Ideas?
Archer’s type no doubt was in the majority (though, curiously, the few
plays Archer wrote himself do not fit his own theory). But as for quality
and lasting value, Shaw’s type clearly prevailed, if only because Shaw himself
was the best playwright. It also prevailed in the sense that there no
longer seems any question of pure realism being a superior art form or of there
being any constraint on dramatists wishing to write passionate drama. It
may also have prevailed because, in a contentious age, full of great battles
between Victorian and modern ideas and between rival theories of modernism, a
rhetorically passionate drama of ideas was a fitter vehicle for expressing the
age.
THE STAGE AND THE
AGE
|
TOP
/ Table
of Contents
Henrik
Ibsen as a young man, looking at what seemed a hopelessly corrupt and
wrong-headed society, declared that a total revolution was needed, one more
thorough than the biblical flood, which left survivors. In the next revolution,
he said, we must “torpedo the ark.”22
A quick glance at our period suggests
that the 1890-1950 era came surprisingly close to effecting complete
revolution, even to the sinking of more than one ark. It’s amazing how much
historical incident and social and technological change was crowded into this
period. It was a time of both gradual and cataclysmic transformations,
unprecedented in amount. So much so that even Shaw, one of the most
ardent advocates of change, complained toward the end of his long life of the
dizzying rapidity of change and in many of his late plays presented characters
who were victims of what we would now call “future shock,” the disease that
comes from having the future come at one too fast.23
Shaw’s exaggerative
persona, the clownish G. B. S., like Ibsen’s “torpedo” metaphor, was a sign of
how desperate a measure was thought needed to overcome Victorian inertia in
social-moral-religious concerns; but the “dynamite” personality Shaw devised to
explode Victorian conventions resulted in more than he bargained for (though of
course he was not the only “dynamitard”). For a
period conceived of as glacial in its movement at its beginning found itself
more and more resembling an avalanche. There is some moral here for those who
would “start the ball rolling,” but of course the moral wouldn’t be necessary
if societies didn’t try to keep balls from rolling altogether.
A simple contrast between
beginning and end is eloquent enough. In 1890 the horse and buggy still ruled the road; by 1950 automobiles
had chased the few horses left to the country, and airplanes made both look
like they were standing still. In 1890
The philosophical and scientific
underpinning for this social-political-technological change was the theory of
evolution. Charles Darwin in 1859 had given voice to the inklings of a half
century or more of scientific speculation on the origin of species, and by the
nineties his theory of evolution had won sufficient acceptance. An alternative theory, that of Lamarck, was preferred by some, but
Lamarckian and Darwinian were united in their understanding of life as evolving.
With change being the law of life, and a better or higher life apparently being
the result of change, some reasoned that the more change the better. Some
thereby deified Change and pursued it, in the form of novelty, for its own
sake. Soon people found themselves coping with “the tradition of the
new,” in which fad was required to replace fad at an ever-accelerating rate.24
Art forms tended not to last long,
for the modernist avant-garde was always moving on. The theater, too, though as
usual slower to change, eventually got caught up in the same frenzy, as
experimental theaters of the off-off-Broadway or “fringe” sort, following the
lead of Archer, Elizabeth Robins, and J. T. Grein in
the nineties, began to attract a select patronage and steal prestige from the
established theaters of London’s West End.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the
experimenters in staging was Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966), son of the
actress Ellen Terry. Reacting against the heavy sets of a too
literal-minded and literary-minded theater, he attempted to create a sparer,
more fluid, poetically suggestive, and psychologically attuned style, which
served well the aggressively antirealistic and antiliterary theater of a later generation. Craig’s
revolution can also be understood as part of a general trend to replace the old
actor-manager—who along with being the star was responsible for all the details
of production—with a nonacting manager or director
and other specialists, such as the artistic designer.
The most radical experimentation
in the drama was found mostly in the “little theaters” in the provinces
(Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Cambridge, Birmingham, Glasgow, etc.); in
suburban London (the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead,
the Royal Court Theatre in Sloan Square, the Old Vic below the South Bank,
etc.); in theater groups that moved about and hired halls (the Independent
Theatre of J. T. Grein, the
New Century Theatre of Archer and Elizabeth Robins, the Stage Society, etc.);
or in Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Their continental progenitors were Ole Bull’s
National Theatre in Norway in the 1850s, the Duke of Meiningen’s
company in the Germany of the 1870s and 1880s, Antoine’s Théâtre
Libre in Paris from 1887, Otto Brahm’s
Freie Bühne theater in
Berlin from 1889, and Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater from 1898.
Another consequence of
evolutionary theory that seriously affected the theater was the rationalization
of “social Darwinism,” used as a justification for a ruthless free-trade
economy that, following the law of the jungle, saw the strong get stronger and
the weak get eliminated. The doctrine of “survival of the fittest,” which in
business often meant the survival of the unscrupulous, seemed to justify
unfettering the competitive instincts from ethical constraints. When certain
men prided themselves on “being realistic,” they were not referring to literary
realism but to an acceptance of the desire for aggrandizement as an honest
basis for human society. This had a very sorry effect on the theater, for,
while the theater has usually been at the mercy of the box office, the
actor-managers, who still controlled most of the West End theaters in 1890 and
who, even at their worst, had some aesthetic sense and some fellow feeling for
the actors and artisans under their command, were gradually replaced by
businessmen, often in multiple-ownership syndicates, who, having no feeling for
the theater as a cultural institution with a special heritage, treated the
theaters they owned as they would any other piece of real estate—no sentiment
was allowed to mix with the cash flow. And, treating the actors as the
capitalist everywhere treated labor, they forced the Actors’ Association in 1919 to reorganize as a trade union
and theatrical agents to appear as middlemen. Although the modern period saw as
many theaters built as had the nineteenth century, many of the new theaters
were merely replacements for older theaters that had been razed or converted to
make way for more profitable ventures. Of course, capitalism’s Great War,
inviting bombardiers to compete for the most destructive “strikes,” made rubble
of a few theaters as well.
Newly built
The new theaters may have been
designed for a less showy, less histrionic sort of play, but at the beginning
of our period, the increasing wealth and social prestige of their patrons made
luxurious display, greater comfort, and ceremonial opportunity features of
theater construction. The backless benches of the nineteenth-century pit were
pushed farther and farther to the back and replaced by plush, expensive seats
called “stalls,” with the pit seats eventually disappearing altogether.
Proscenium arches were supported by groups of statuary or gilded pillars; boxes
were draped with colorful plush, their fronts embellished by vases, medallions,
frescoes, caryatids, and the like; and gorgeous crystal chandeliers hung from
decorated ceilings, adorned perhaps with gold leaf. Foyers, saloons,
smoking rooms, and buffets were found at the front of the house, lavishly
decorated in various historical styles. No expense was spared backstage
either in the use of stage machinery or any modern technology that would make
the show more impressive. As the period wore on, however, the increasing
democratization of the populace and the hardships of wartime and economic
depression toned things down considerably in the theater. When the talkies came
in, in the late twenties, some theaters were built in cinema style, with
straight lines replacing the curved auditorium, stage boxes eliminated, and
decoration reduced. Eventually virtue was found even in the
relative plainness of the “little theaters” of the suburbs and provinces.
At first the provincial theater
lost ground to the London theater when, with the increasing availability and
affordability of the railroads and other transportation, Britain’s far-flung
population was able and eager to get to London for a holiday.
London-based national newspapers carrying the drama reviews of Clement Scott,
William Archer, A. B. Walkley, Max Beerbohm, et al.
were persuasive of the attractions of
While one could still find
theaters in the 1890s that offered the multiple fare that had been standard
throughout the century—consisting of opening play, main piece, and closing
play, with variety acts before, after, and in between, lasting sometimes from 6:00 to after midnight—the majority of theaters, catering to the
advance of the dinner hour to 7:00 in polite society, had gone to a single play
offering, opening at 8:00 or thereabouts, and soon this was universal. A wider
adoption of the matinee further served the schedule of a more leisured
gentility and of a female populace more inclined to venture out.
Following the lead of T. W.
Robertson and the Bancrofts, the theater of our
period begins by being obsessed with respectability. Theater people wanted the
theater to be thought a proper place for ladies and gentlemen, on both sides of
the footlights. Fighting to free the theater of the ruffian clement that had
lowered the tastes of its audience throughout the century and of the bohemian
element that had caused its actors to be suspected of vagabondage, many theater
people craved above all else social acceptance, some as much for the elevation
of their art as for themselves. Success came when the leading actor of the day,
Henry Irving, was in 1895 the first actor to be knighted, soon followed by
Squire Bancroft in 1897. Then began the great push for a similar acceptance for
dramatists, led by Henry Arthur Jones’s campaign of probity, but not
consummated until W. S. Gilbert was knighted in 1907 and Arthur Wing Pinero in 1909. But far more knighthoods went to actors than to
dramatists over the years.
English-style realism was timely
to the actor’s quest for respectability. Though continental and American
realism often descended into the lower depths of the factory workers and
peasantry with unpleasant depictions, English realism, at first anyway, tended
to focus on the upper middle class and aristocracy. To look at the stage of a realistic English “society drama” was to see the latest
smart fashions in interior decorating, clothing, hair styling, manners, and
small talk. And as the acting of such a piece called for the sort of behavior
one would encounter in the day’s drawing rooms, the actors, cup-and-saucer in
hand, could, with properly clipped accents, downplay and understate in the best
tradition of the reserved British gentleman. Such understatement can
be made theatrical, but often it wasn’t. To those brought up on the grand
style of acting so prevalent during the century, as Archer had been, however,
the realistic cup-and-saucer school of acting seemed refreshing.
But all things pale, and among the
first to feel the paling of this relatively untheatrical
theater was Shaw, who as drama critic for the Saturday Review from
1895 to 1898 soon grew weary of staring into drawing rooms watching
insignificant people do and say insignificant things in an insignificant way,
compounding their insignificance by pretending they weren’t actors on a stage
engaged in an important ritual. For Shaw, the fashion show the actors
provided was no compensation (though the pretty actresses almost
sufficed). For him such plays were basically “a tailor’s advertisement
making sentimental remarks to a milliner’s advertisement in the middle of an upholsterer’s
and decorator’s advertisement.”25 The
fashionable, polite, well-bred, well-made, realistic drawing-room drama of the
day, though winning respectability for actors and dramatists, Shaw perceived as
simply watered-down melodrama, and he preferred his melodrama straight.
And so, with Shaw’s opposition,
which was buttressed by the staging experiments of Gordon Craig, by the heroic
acting style required by William Butler Yeats’s
mythic drama and Gilbert Murray’s Greek revivals, by the Irish “soul music” of
Synge and O’Casey, and of course by continental influences, no sooner was the
realistic school of acting
established than reaction against it set in. The history of the struggle
follows that of the drama, first a seeming triumph for realistic acting, then a
gradual retreat from it, moving toward a gradual acceptance of the view that a
well-trained actor had better be schooled in both methods if he is to be fit to
play the entire repertoire. Not the least of the successes of this period
was the establishment of several schools of acting where initiates could learn their trade, with Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s
The theater seems always plagued
and blessed by the need for star actors. Blessed because the star system gives
the most opportunity to the best actors to display their art (the age would
have been much the poorer if such names as Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Florence
Farr, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, George Alexander, Charles Wyndham, Mrs. Pat
Campbell, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Gerald Du Maurier,
Gertrude Lawrence, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson, Cedric Hardwicke, Beatrice
Lillie, Paul Scofield, John Gielgud, Laurence
Olivier, and Edith Evans, had not graced its playbills, billboards, and
marquees), plagued because the system exaggerates the importance of the star
actor at the expense of the play and of the acting ensemble. Our period is no
different in this tension. The dramatist’s drive throughout this period was to
restore literary worth to playwriting, and his enemy was always the star actor
who would sacrifice the written play to the display of a personal style. That had
precisely been the bane of nineteenth-century theater,
from the writer’s point of view. In modern times only Noel Coward, star of his
own plays, had it both ways. Perhaps the happiest of the nonacting
playwrights were ones, like Shaw, who wrote in plenty of personality and
theatricality and who had made peace with the popular theater by employing all
its “biz” and “shtick” in the interests of a higher drama. Yet even Shaw was
shut out of the commercial theaters for many years.
The struggle between the
requirements of the higher drama for disciplined ensemble acting and the
commercial theater’s need for stars was only one aspect of the war between
quality and quantity that marked the age. The only resolution to the dilemma of
the higher drama’s inability to attract audiences in sufficient quantities was
an endowed national theater. The need for such a theater had been noted for a
long time, but as far as the New Drama was concerned, an 1879 visit to
FIGURES |
Figure 1 (below) – The Haymarket Theatre,
1880; Bancroft’s picture-frame stage.
Courtesy of the Raymond Mander and Joe
Mitchenson Theatre Collection Ltd.
Figure 2 (below)---The National Theatre
on London's South Bank, opened in 1967.
Figure 3 (below)---Oscar Wilde, a less than ideal New
Dramatist.
Photo: Eliis and Walery,
Figure 4 (below)---Aubrey
Beardsley's drawing
of
a climactic scene from Wilde's Salomé
|
|
Figure 5 (below)---The
diabolical Shaw.
Figure 6 (below)---Punch cartoon portraying Shaw as
Pan
(like
Dionysius, a goat-footed deity representing the primacy of Nature),
which
could stand for Shaw's attempt to lure the drama back to
its
Greek origins as life-worship. Courtesy of Punch
Figure
7(below)--Design for a statue of "John Bull's Other Playwright:
After
Certain Hints by 'G.B.S.'" Punch
cartoon by E. T. Reed
Link to Chapter 2:
“‘Our Theatres in the Nineties’: Haunted by Ghosts”