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TH
19
LATE
CENTURY
THEATRE
Realism
And
Naturalism
• Towards the end of the of the nineteenth
century, audiences grew tired of the exaggerated
forms of Romanticism and Melodrama
• There was a movement towards the opposite –
realism and naturalism
• Audiences wanted to see real life characters in
real life situations portrayed on stage
Realism
• Scientific and technological breakthroughs were
changing the world
• More emphasis was placed on seeing reality in a
scientific, factual manner
• The Romantics based their ideals on the
emotional and spiritual
• The Realists emphasised ideas and proof,
especially through observation
• Psychology and psychiatry – the study of human
behaviour was gaining recognition
• People were starting to seek scientific answers to
questions about what motivates our actions, or
why we do things
• Realism can be traced back to 1850
• By 1850 people began to study the influence of
the environment on the person (including family
background, work, culture, etc)
Playwrights
• More interested in observing people
• Wrote plays focusing on characters
• Wrote plays focusing on contemporary society –
or the real world
• Playwrights believed they could change the
world for the better if they could draw attention
to the injustices of life
The Plays
• No longer dealt with dramatised myths or
historical events
• New plays dealt with harsh realities of life
• Represented on stage the problems in the world
at the time
Plays were about:
• Poverty
• Homelessness
• Prostitution
• Other contemporary problems
Some audience members were shocked. They
preferred escapism and happily ever after
melodramas.
Henrick Ibsen
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•
•
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1828 – 1906
Norwegian playwright
Best represents realism in drama
Ibsen’s plays had a profound effect on the future of
theatre
• His plays were controversial
• No happy endings
• Sometimes bad things happen to good people and vice
versa
An Older Ibsen
Ibsen’s Plays
• Themes – divorce, unhappiness, diseases, role of
women, depression, social problems
• Characters were complex
• Characters faced deep frustrations and struggles
• Plays offered insights into the human mind and
heart that were real and genuine, rather than
what society wanted to hear
Ibsen’s Most Famous Plays
• A Doll’s House
• Hedda Gabler
• Ghosts
Hedda Gabler
Hedda Gabler
Cate Blanchett as Hedda Gabler
Acting in Ibsen’s Plays
• Given the nature of his plays, the style of acting
had to change drastically from the previous
melodramatic style
• Characters in Ibsen’s plays spoke realistic
dialogue, and all action on stage was believable
A Doll’s House
Naturalism of ‘A Slice of Life’
• Naturalism started in 1870s
• Followers of Naturalism believed that realism
did not go far enough
• Playwright, Emile Zola (1840 – 1902), believed
that a play on stage should be exactly as life of
stage
• The audience should see ‘a slice of life’
Naturalistic acting style
• Acting became more life like
• Storylines did not need to be fully developed
because the audience was just seeing into real
life episodes
Famous naturalistic Playwrights
• Henri Becque
• August Strindberg
• Maxim Gorky
• Anton Checkov
August Strindberg
Strindberg – playwright & performer
Stagecraft
• Naturalistic plays created a need for a new breed
of actors, designers and directors
• Many individual practitioners set out to do their
own thing
• Andre Antoine founded Theatre Libre in Paris
• He led the way in acting and staging these plays
• Gordon Craig and Vsevolold Meyerhold created
new styles of staging and lighting design
• Europe was swept by pockets of small but
innovative theatrical activity
• In Russia, a collaboration between a director and
theatre company would profoundly influence
modern theatre and acting
Konstantin Stanislavski
• Was director of the Moscow Art Theatre
• Developed an acting method with his partner,
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko
• This method acting system enabled actors to
more fully enter the world of the characters they
were playing on stage
• The emphasis was on a totally believable
performance
Stanislavski
A thoughtful but older Stanislavski
• Speech and movement had to be as life like as
possible
• The way to understand character was through:
research, observation, and empathizing with the
character
• Empathy meant imagining as fully as possible
what it would be like to be in the character’s
shoes
• In the past actors had performed in a
stereotyped, rigid manner
• Stanislavski’s system recognised that every
individual is unique and worth understanding
Acting Style
Anton Chekov
Three Sisters by Chekov
And so we see the birth of the
common actor training system
known as
Method Acting.