Download Theatre in Context

Drama
The Changing Historical
Context of Theatre
The Middle Ages
• origins of theatre: myths, rites
• the Middle Ages: everyday theatre: mimes and
minstrels
• liturgical drama
esp. at Easter (also other church festivals)
• Mystery plays: religious theatre for the people
from sacred drama to profane
(pro fano = ‘before the temple’
from church to marketplace
Later medieval developments
• Miracle Plays: Medieval plays treating
the lives of saints, or Bible stories.
• Morality Plays: Allegorical medieval plays,
like Everyman, that depict the eternal
struggle between good and evil that
transpires in this world, using characters
like Vice, Virtue, Wisdom
Commedia dell'arte
Italian popular comedy of the 15th to 17th cc.
Featured performances improvised from
scenarios by a set of stock characters, and
repeated from play to play and troupe to
troupe.
Scenario: in general, the prose description of a
play's story. In the commedia dell'arte, the
written outlines of plot and characters from
which the actors improvised the particular
actions of a performance.
Stock characters
Masque
• Spectacular theatrical form, especially of the
Renaissance and the Neoclassical periods (16th
to 17th centuries)
• Involved music and dancing, singing and acting
• Emphasis on stage design, costumes and effects
much music and dancing
• Courtly entertainment, associated with court theatres
or special events
• Amateur actors frequently performed
• Henry VIII, Charles I performed in the masques at
their courts
Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English playwright wrote
several masques
e.g. The Satyr, The Masque of Blackness
William Shakespare (1564–1616) used the genre or
variants of it is some of his plays
an interlude in The Tempest, in Romeo and
Juliet
the dumbshow in Hamlet
Inigo Jones (1573–1652)
English architect
working in the Italian Renaissance style
theatrical designer for several masques
in collaboration with Ben Jonson
A lady masquer and an Indian torchbearer
The London scene
Bankside: medieval centre of dissipation
brothels and bear baiting within the
estates of the Bishops of Winchester
in 1546 Henry VIII had brothels closed
17th century - reopened, together with
theatres
Bankside
London theatres
GLOBE (1598-99) now Park Street. Sign: Hercules
+World. Used only in summer: no roof except for
stage & galleries
In the winter: BLACKFRIARS THEATRE (1578) as
private theatre for choir boys to practise; Richard
Farrant (1525–1580) English composer on ground
floor, theatre upstairs
Shakespeare: shareholder and player
HOPE (1613–1614) in Bear Gardens: former bear
and bull baiting arena (modelled on Swan +
movable stage)
The Globe
Further London theatres
ROSE (1586-87, 1st Bankside playhouse) in
Rose Lane
octagonal building of wood and plaster,
partly thatched
played Christopher Marlowe's (1564–
1593) plays
SWAN (ó1595) in Paris Gardens (flint stones
and wooden columns)
sometimes used for fencing matches
The Age of Restoration
The term is applied to the decades from 1660
when Charles II was re-established as
monarch to the end of the century.
Between 1660 and 1700 over 500 plays were
written in England, more than half of them
comedies.
th
17
century
1642: Puritans ban theatres - even demolish
them - for moral reasons
the theatrical tradition was essentially broken
upon his resumption of the throne in 1661
Charles II granted two patents, assigning the
monopoly of London theatrical performances
to the King’s Company
and to the Duke of York’s Company.
The Age of Restoration
In 1642, the Parliament closed the theatres in
England.
Oliver Cromwell Lord Protector of the
Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and
Ireland, fiercely Puritan in religion and in
administration.
Until the Restoration of Charles II to the
throne in 1660, there was very little of theatre
in England.
Restoration Drama
During the years of the Protectorate Charles II, the
king, had been in France, together with many of
the royalist party
the influence of French theatre
Italian notions of theatre architecture
theatres were licensed and controlled by the court
Restoration Drama
August 1660 – Charles II issued patents for two
companies of players
performances immediately began
mechanics of scenery and spectacle
masques were performed
costume, dance and clever scenery and scene
changes were more emphasized than acting and plot.
Restoration theatre
New, the proscenium style of architecture
the forestage still projected into the audience but
was significantly cut; it remained the principal place
where the acting took place
the area behind the proscenium was reserved for the
display of scenery changes (slid into view by means
of panels on tracks)
theatres began to be roofed in
Restoration theatre
William Davenant (1606-1668), head of the Duke of
York’s Company
abandoned the Renaissance English stage in favour of
the French one
the curtain was Davenant’s innovation
also introduced painted backdrops
Restoration Drama
The Actors
limited patronage necessitated small professional
Companies and plays with relatively few roles.
performers obtained salaries
boy apprentices vanished, the first actresses
appeared on stage (a convention borrowed from the
French)
the very first was Mrs. Margaret Hughes, playing
the role of Desdemona for the King’s Company in
1660
Restoration Comedy
mostly male audiences - attracted by the idea of
seeing women acting out seduction scenes
clothes were often several sizes too small so as
to emphasize the curves of their bodies.
Nell Gwynn (1650-1687) was one of the first actresses (and
the mistress of Charles II).
Restoration Drama
The first professional
woman playwright,
Aphra Behn (1640-1689).
Age of Restoration
Language
Renaissance period - to enrich vocabulary
Restration - efforts at refinement and regulation of
language
the language of polite conversation
emphasis on clarity and precision set as a
standard
Heroic drama
John Dryden (1631-1700) exponent of the golden
mean in art, politics and morality,
Poet Laureate from 1668
Heroic couplet (a closed and balanced pair of
rhyming iambic pentameters)
against blank verse in much English drama
works against dramatic illusion
Italian and French influence
audience face actors, rather than surround them:
criticism presented outside the space of audience
Heroic Drama
A form of tragedy fashionable at the beginning of the
Restoration period.
its themes were love and honour
its mode grand, rhetorical and declamatory
the chief influence was French classical drama,
especially the works of Pierre Corneille (1616-1684).
staged in a spectacular and operatic fashion
John Dryden’s All for Love 1677), based on
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Restoration Drama
baroque: opera
Restoration: she-tragedies with a woman in
the leading role
even Dryden's All for Love's Anthony: heart
torn by feelings which he cannot control or
understand
male characters: unambiguous heroism:
rather unconvincing
blank verse vs heroic couplet
blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant
(Shakespeare, As You Like It, II.vii. 139-43)
Blank verse vs heroic couplet
heroic couplet: 2 pair-rhymed iambic pentameters
And since that plenteous autumn now is past,
Whose grapes and peaches have indulged your taste,
Take in good part, from our poor poet's board,
Such rivelled fruits as winter can afford.
(John Dryden, All for Love, “Prologue”)
http://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/what-isheroic-couplets/
Restoration Drama
The Audience
The Restoration theatre - the court’s preserve.
Charles II was the first English monarch who
regularly attended the public theatre (even though
he had his own private theatre at Whitehall).
Restoration Drama
The Audience
The spectators at the two theatres were exclusively
courtiers and their hangers-on
Performances started at three-thirty or four in the
afternoon
The aristocrats looked upon the playhouse as a social
assembly where they had an opportunity to disport
themselves
Gradual broadening of the theatre's appeal to layers
of society
An Entry from the Diary of Samuel Pepys
Monday 18 February 1666/67
Thence away, and with my wife by coach to the Duke of
York’s play-house, expecting a new play, and so stayed
not no more than other people, but to the King’s house,
to “The Mayd’s Tragedy;” but vexed all the while with
two talking ladies and Sir Charles Sedley; yet pleased
to hear their discourse, he being a stranger. And one of
the ladies would, and did sit with her mask on, all the
play, and, being exceeding witty as ever I heard
woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I
believe, a virtuous woman, and of quality. He would fain
know who she was, but she would not tell;
Pepys, cont.
yet did give him many pleasant hints of her
knowledge of him, by that means setting his brains at
work to find out who she was, and did give him leave
to use all means to find out who she was, but pulling
off her mask. He was mighty witty, and she also
making sport with him very inoffensively, that a more
pleasant ‘rencontre’ I never heard. But by that means
lost the pleasure of the play wholly, to which now and
then Sir Charles Sedley’s exceptions against both
words and pronouncing were very pretty. So home and
to the office, did much business, then home, to supper,
and to bed.
Restoration Comedy
Chief representatives and plays:
William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1672 or
1673); The Plain Dealer (1674)
George Etheredge: The Man of Mode (1676)
William Congreve: The Double Dealer (1694); Love
for Love (11695); The Way of the World (1700)
John Vanbrugh: The Provoked Wife (1697)
George Farquhar: The Beaux’ Strategem (1707)
Thomas Shadwell: The Libertine (1676), The
Volunteers, or Stockjobbers (1693)
Restoration Comedy
comedy of manners - concerned with presenting a
society of elegance and stylishness
characters - gallants, ladies and gentlemen of fashion
and ranks, fops, rakes, social climbers and country
bumpkins
tone - witty, urbane, licentious
plot - dealt with the intricacies of sexual and marital
intrigue, with adultery and cuckoldry
Restoration Comedy
comedies of manners - to entertain and to mock
Society - preoccupied with the codes of the middle
and upper classes and is often marked by elegance,
wit and sophistication
the audience was supposed to laugh at themselves
the endings are happy and the man invariably gets
the woman, yet we see marriages without love, the
game of love is not much more hopeful
bawdy humour, witty dialogues, recursive cross
dressing
Comedy of Manners
Later examples of the genre
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Ernest (1895)
Noël Coward: Private Lives (1930).
William Wycherley (1640-1706)
The Country Wife
Plot summary
Horner is a predatory rake who wants to cuckold as many
husbands as he can. He has a doctor (Quack) leak the news that he
has been rendered impotent by venereal disease. Since he is “safe,”
Sir Jasper Fidget wants Horner to chaperone his wife as he goes
about his business. But he also has an affair with Marjorie
Pinchwife, the Innocent country wife who believes that two people
who love each other should be together. She likes Horner better than
her jealous husband and is prepared to publicly declare Horner her
lover and leave her husband for him. Thus she would reveal that he
has been faking his impotence. The whole society is in danger of
imploding. So they persuade the only truthful and non-cynical
character to tell a lie so that society can continue on as before. The
country wife has been trained to be corrupt like the rest of them.
William Congreve (1670-1729)
The Way of the World
based around the two lovers Mirabell and
Millamant
in order to get married (and receive Millamant's
full dowry), Mirabell must receive the approval of
Millamant's aunt, Lady Wishfort
she is a bitter lady, who despises Mirabell and
wants her own nephew, Sir Wilful, to wed
Millamant
Mirabell and Millamant discuss in detail the
conditions under which they would accept each
other in marriage (known as the "proviso
scene"), showing the depth of feeling for each
other
Mirabell finally proposes to Millamant and
Millamant accepts
The love expressed in the play tends to be centred
on material gain rather than the love of the
partner.
This can be seen in the scene where Millamant and
Mirabell effectively carry out a pre-nuptial
agreement, Millamant insisting on having all
manner of liberties and powers, quite unusual for
the time.
None of the characters in the play can really be
seen as 'good', and as such it is difficult to find a
hero or heroine, or indeed anybody whom one
would find deserving of sympathy.
William Congreve
The Way of the World
Act IV. – Scene V.
Mrs Millamant, Mirabell
MILLA. […] My dear liberty, shall I leave thee? My
faithful solitude, my darling contemplation, must I bid
you then adieu? Ay-h, adieu. My morning thoughts,
agreeable wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye
DOUCEURS, ye SOMMEILS DU MATIN, adieu. I
can't do't, 'tis more than impossible—positively,
Mirabell, I'll lie a-bed in a morning as long as I please.
MIRA. Then I'll get up in a morning as early as I
please.
MILLA. Ah! Idle creature, get up when you will. And
d'ye hear, I won't be called names after I'm married;
positively I won't be called names.
MIRA. Names?
MILLA. Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love,
sweet-heart, and the rest of that nauseous cant, in
which men and their wives are so fulsomely
familiar—I shall never bear that. Good Mirabell, don't
let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks, like
my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis; nor go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke
eyes and whispers, and then never be seen there
together again, as if we were proud of one another the
first week, and ashamed of one another ever after. Let
us never visit together, nor go to a play together, but
let us be very strange and well-bred. Let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while, and as
MIRA. Have you any more conditions to offer?
Hitherto your demands are pretty reasonable.
MILLA. Trifles; as liberty to pay and receive visits to
and from whom I please; to write and receive letters,
without interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to
wear what I please, and choose conversation with
regard only to my own taste; to have no obligation
upon me to converse with wits that I don't like,
because they are your acquaintance, or to be intimate
with fools, because they may be your relations. Come
to dinner when I please, dine in my dressing- room
when I'm out of humour, without giving a reason. To
have my closet inviolate; to be sole empress of my teatable, which you must never presume to approach
without first asking leave. And lastly, wherever I am,
you shall always knock at the door before you come
in.
These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a
little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife.
[…]
MIRA. Then we're agreed. Shall I kiss your hand upon
the contract?
Sentimental Comedy
The Age of Neoclassicism
the drama of sensibility
it followed on from Restoration comedy
a kind of reaction against what was regarded as
immorality and licence in the latter
Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774): in it “the virtues of
private life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed,
and the distresses rather than the frailty of mankind”
Sentimental Comedy
simple, one-sided characters
Oliver Goldsmith:
The Good Natured Man (1768)
She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
Goldsmith however continually mocks sentimental
comedy, revealing sensiblity as hypocrisy
Neoclassicist comedy of manners
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751–1816)
an exponent of neoclassicist comedy of manners
owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
The School for Scandal (1777)
attacks sentimentalism but also criticizes frivolous and
fraudulent London high society.
Romanticism
(mainly in German theatre):
• need for historical consistency (no
precision, though) for imaginative &
plausible presentation (realism)
• mid-19th c. France: return to the tradition
of middle class dramas
• good acting: move with the natural
elegance of gentry
• touring companies disappear
Victorian Drama
The Theatre Act of 1843
broke the monopoly of London drama granted to Covent
Garden and Drury Lane by the Act of 1737
expansion to a popular clientele, lower middle class and
some of the working classes
Victorian stage provided for them melodrama
Victorian Drama
Plays were characterized by
• suspenseful plot (characterization was
subordinated to it)
• pseudo-realism (contemporary setting, persuasive
realism, elegant splendour)
• stereotyped figures (valiant seamen, virtuous
shopgirls, cruel mortgage holders, etc.)
• sentimentalism
• naive moral concepts (the virtuous are rewarded)
Stagecraft: electric lighting was first introduced in the
Savoy Theatre in1881
Oscar Wilde
(1856-1900)
well-made play - neatly and economically constructed play
which works with mechanical efficiency
restored the sparkling comedy of manners (Sheridan)
the dialogues move forward by rapid exchanges of witty
statements
The Importance of Being Ernest (1895) – Wilde termed it “A
Trivial Comedy for Serious People”
Oscar Wilde and photographs from the
first production of the play
Twentieth-Century Drama
Strongly individualistic as opposed to the
epochs of previous drama
Emphasized sociological problems
Comedy of Ideas
A term loosely applied to plays which tend to debate, in
a witty and humorous fashion, ideas and theories.
George Bernard Shaw is an outstanding exponent in
Man and Superman (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma
(1906) and other plays.
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)
Comedy of Ideas - plays which tend to debate, in
a witty and humorous fashion, ideas and theories
Man and Superman (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma
(1906)
to make people think by compelling them to laugh
key technique - turning everything topsy-turvy and
forcing the audience to see the other half of the truth
lengthy speeches and prolonged stage conversations
G. B.Shaw
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Written in 1894, produced in 1902, privately. The censor
put ban on the play that was not lifted until 1924.
The satiric play is a dramatic representation of the Marxist
contention that virtue is impossible in a capitalistic society.
Vivie Warren, a modern independent girl is distressed
when she understands that her mother had escaped from
poverty by prostitution. She insists that her mother retire
from her position as the head of an international chain
of brothels, financed by a respectable gentleman, Sir
George Crofts. Mrs. Warren refuses, and Vivie renounces
her mother to live by honest work in London.
Verse Drama
a drama written as verse to be spoken
(another possible term is poetic drama)
during the late 19th and 20th centuries verse drama fell
out of fashion
T. S. Eliots Murder in the Cathedral (1935) brought a
revival of the form.
a postmodernist example is Serious Money (1987) by
Caryl Churchill
Post-War Theatre
Reaction against the realist conventions dominating the
stage. (The opening of the curtain seemed to remove the
fourth wall of a fully furnished middle-class or upper
middle-class sitting-room.) The dialogues had to seem
realistic.
The English stage was ruled by the commercial theatre,
management fulfilled their task of providing
entertainment which had a proven saleability. There was
no place for plays of questionably commercial values
regardless of their artistic merits.
By the mid-50s0 it seemed inevitable that English theatre
was about to be transformed.
Post-War Theatre
It was the English Stage Company at the Royal Court
Theatre that finally created opportunity for fresh
talent and experimental performances.
John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was a
breakthrough, and the theatre added to their
repertoire plays by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter,
and others.
http://youtu.be/vxBS2GKRt9A
Angry Young Man Movement
Kitchen-Sink Drama
Middle and late 1950s trend
Main exponent on stage was John Osborne (1929-1994)
Look Back in Anger (1956) spoke for a generation of
discontented young men often with working-class
background, who were opposed to the establishment and
disillusioned by post-second world war social situation.
Jimmy Porter represents the anti-hero.
Look Back in Anger 1989 performance by the
Renaissance Theatre Company with Emma Thompson
and Kenneth Branagh, directed by Judy Dench
John Osborne
Kitchen-Sink Comedy
A term which became popular in Great Britain in the
middle and late 1950s. Often used derogatorily, it applied
to plays which, in a realistic fashion, showed aspects of
working-class life at the time. The implication was that the
play centred, metaphorically (or psychologically) and in
some cases literally, on the kitchen sink. The works of John
Osborne, Arnold Wesker were all so described. It is
doubtful if the term derives in any way from Wesker's play
The Kitchen because this was first presented in a
production without décor in 1958, and not given a full
production until 1961.
(Cuddon)
Comedy of Menace
A term denoting a kind of lay in which one or more
characters feel that they are threatened by some
obscure and frightening force, power, personality.
The fear and menace become a source of comdey,
albeit grim or black.
Harold Pinter exploited the possibilities of such
situation in his early plays.
Harold Pinter
(1930–2008)
Harold Pinter
Comedy of Menace / Memory Plays
Pinter's career as a playwright began with a production
of The Room in 1957. His early works, such as The
Birthday Part (1958), The Dumb Waiter (1959), and The
Caretaker (1959) were described by critics as "comedy
of menace".
Later plays such as No Man's Land (1975) and Betrayal
(1978) became known as "memory plays".
Memory Plays
(1968–1982)
From the late 1960s through the early 1980s, Pinter
wrote a series of plays and sketches that explore
complex ambiguities, elegiac mysteries, comic
vagaries, and other "quicksand-like" characteristics of
memory.
The Theatre of the Absurd
A term applied to many of the works of a group of
dramatists who were active in the 1950s: Samuel
Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet
and others.
The phrase 'theatre of the absurd' was probably
coined by Martin Esslin, who wrote The Theatre of the
Absurd (1961).
The Theatre of the Absurd
The origins of this form of drama are obscure, but it
would be reasonable to suppose that its lineage is
traceable from Roman mime plays, through to aspects
of comic business and technique in medieval and
Renaissance drama and commedia dell'arte, and
thence to the dramatic works of Alfred Jarry, August
Strindberg and Bertolt Brecht.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
The work of Jarry is vital and the possibilities of a
theatre of the absurd are already apparent in Ubu Roi
(1896). Almost certainly dadaism and surrealism
influenced the development of the theatre of the
absurd, and so have Antonin Artaud's theories on the
theatre of cruelty.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
An awareness of the essential absurdity of much
human behaviour has been inherent in the work of
many writers from Aristophanes to Cervantes to Swift
to Dickens.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
However, the concept of homo absurdas has acquired
a rather more specific meaning in the last hundred
years or so. This is partly, no doubt, owing to the need
to provide an explanation of man's apparently
purposeless role and position in a universe which is
popularly imagined to have no discernible reason for
existence.
Mathematically, a surd is that which cannot be
expressed in finite terms of ordinary numbers or
quantities. Hence irrational rather than ridiculous.
(Cuddon)
The Theatre of the Absurd
The collection of essays The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
by Albert Camus and the existentialist philosophies of
the mid-20th century not independent of the two world
wars gave an impetus to the vision of human life as a
struggle with the irrationality of experience.
The Theatre of the Absurd
The plays themselves lack a formal logic and
conventional structure, so that both form and
content support (while emphasizing the difficulty of
communicating) the representation of what may be
called the absurd predicament.
(Cuddon)
Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989)
Samuel Beckett
Plays of the Middle Period
After World War II, Beckett used the French language
as a vehicle.
During the 15 years following the second world war
years Beckett produced four major full-length stage
plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting
for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame),
Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961).
These deal in a very blackly humorous way with
the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of
that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and
incomprehensible world.
http://youtu.be/BMz1-Kgz_DI
Late Plays
In the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's dramatic
works exhibited an increasing tendency towards
compactness. He reduced his plays to the utmost
essentials. These works are often described as
minimalist. The extreme example of this Breath (1969)
which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no
characters.
Postmodernist Drama
Tom Stoppard (1937)
main features of his theatre
• (1) brilliant language: verbal contests, verbal
punning
• (2) weird theatrical ideas: e.g. play around the action
of another play (Hamlet in Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern), double plot in Arcadia, the present
researching the past
• (3) an intellectual frame of reference: Wittgenstein
language philosophy, Chaos theory, Newton’s
physics, thermodynamics, both intellectually
entertaining and with serious moral considerations
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966)
The reverse of the play within the play scene in William
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Stoppard’s play is a play
around a play. Stoppard places two miner characters
from Hamlet into central position.
Ros and Guil are no heroes, not even separate
personalities. Taking two characters from a play, and
testing their actions against a plot we all know well,
Stoppard explores questions of predictability, i.e.
determinism and free will. Also, explores questions of
self-identity and possibilities of communication via
language.
Tom Stoppard
Arcadia (1993) brings together two time periods,
1809/12 and the present. The setting is Sidley Park, a
large country house owned by the Coverly family. The
scenes alternate until the very last one where the two
time periods appear simultaneously on a divided stage.
The present group of characters is doing research on
the past group of characters and their activities, but
their assumptions turn out to be almost wholly
mistaken.