REALISM -- THE FIRST PHASE
The theoretical, technological, and social changes that
affected the nineteenth-century theatre led to an unprecedented outpouring of
dramatic creativity across the continent of Europe. Henrik Ibsen, generally
considered the first modern playwright, wrote in Norwegian; August Strindberg,
Ibsen's rival and contemporary, wrote in Swedish. Anton Chekhov, perhaps the
most influential of early modern playwrights, wrote in Russian. Despite the
linguistic and cultural diversity of this disparate group of writers, in the
aggregate they forged a new theatrical world.
The Father of the Modern Drama: Henrik Ibsen
Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. During his early
childhood, his family lived well, but when he was eight years old, his father
was disgraced in a business scandal and went bankrupt. Embittered by their loss
of status, the young Ibsen felt estranged from his distraught parents and
isolated himself. By the time he reached the age of twenty, he left home, never
to return. As a child, Ibsen withdrew from these domestic tensions by playing
with his toy theatre; thus the theatre may first have attracted him because it
offered an escape from "real life." Yet his mature work may be read
as an effort to come to terms with reality, the reality of his early life and
the reality of society as a whole.
When the adult Ibsen began to write, his first performed
play won him a contract to write for the theatre company of Bergen, a Norwegian
town. Before beginning this job, however, he was sent abroad to Denmark and
Germany, to gain some practical theatrical experience. In the l850s and '60s,
he was responsible for producing plays, many of them by the popular French
playwright Eugène Scribe, for several provincial Norwegian companies. Since
these well-made plays of modern life seemed shallow, Ibsen persisted in writing
historical and romantic verse drama,(1)
thinking that only such heroic subjects would allow him to address serious
subjects. However, the work that made his name demonstrates that he had
absorbed thoroughly the technical methods of the Boulevard drama he deplored.
Ibsen is perhaps best known for eight plays he wrote in Italy
and Germany between 1877 and 1890. By separating himself physically from his
homeland, he gained the freedom and perspective to criticize it. Dissatisfied
with the heroic and mythic poetic dramas he had been writing, Ibsen embarked on
a series of realistic prose plays exposing contemporary problems in
contemporary Norwegian settings. Concentrating directly on bourgeois Norwegian
society, he nevertheless addressed universal concerns, for the social problems
that provide the context for these plays -- among them the question of women's
rights in A Doll House (1879), hereditary syphilis inGhosts (1881),
and municipal corruption in An Enemy of the People (1882) --
were instantly recognizable to audiences throughout Western Europe and America.
Realism in the Modern Theatre
The early modern dramatists, including Strindberg, Chekhov,
and George Bernard Shaw, knew Ibsen's work intimately and acknowledged its
significance in their own development. One of the great practitioners of
psychological realism, the American-born novelist Henry James, commented on the
first London production of Hedda Gabler in 1891, scarcely one
year after its original Norwegian production. James explains the power of
Ibsen's theatrical realism by pointing out that "the ugly interior on which
his curtain inexorably rises" provides a visual equivalent of "the
pervasive air of small interests and standards, the signs of limited local
life." (2)
In Ibsen's realistic drama, detailed and specific props and scenery were not
devices to sweep the audience away to exotic foreign locations or distant
historical eras; instead, they encouraged viewers to contemplate the petty
possessions, the furniture and bric-a-brac, which an acquisitive middle class
accumulated in order to stake its claim in the modern world.
Ibsen's realistic plays take place in three-dimensional
rooms, rather than against flat painted or architectural backdrops. What James
(whose own practice as a novelist in some ways resembled Ibsen's in drama) and
others perceived was how Ibsen manipulated this realistic stagecraft to create
a new species of poetic symbolism. The French plays that Ibsen studied in his
apprenticeship used decor as window dressing; in the intricately written stage
directions of Ibsen's texts, however, decor becomes symbol. When a second-act
curtain rises on an altered stage picture -- a piano has been removed in Hedda
Gabler, for example, and a Christmas tree stripped of its ornaments
in A Doll House -- the audience must read the significance of
such alterations, for the Heddas and the Noras of the modern world reveal
through their belongings the motives and passions which they have been taught
to repress in their speech and actions. The genius of realism, in the novel as
well as on the stage, is not merely to mirror faithfully the "real
world," but also to demand that we scrutinize and judge the details that
we often ignore because of their surface familiarity.
The great plays of the past tend toward generalized
settings, although the psychological implications of place were not
unimportant. In a Shakespearean play, for instance, a change in scene often
reflects a change in mood; the forest typically creates a special mental
freedom that is not available in the court. But Ibsen and his colleagues rarely
set their characters free in any undefined territory. On the contrary, their
modern insight told them that human beings are never free. Indeed, it is
significant that most early modern drama is played out in domestic sets. The
smaller size to which the modern world seems to reduce its inhabitants dictates
that crucial actions occur in enclosed architectural limits. In Strindberg's
Preface to Miss Julie, written in 1888, he complained of
flimsy old-fashioned canvas-painted sets still in use that prevented audience
involvement. A one-act play of searing intensity, daringly staged not in the
drawing room but the kitchen of an aristocratic home, Miss Julie demanded
authentic production. Strindberg insisted that "there is nothing so hard
to find on the stage as an interior set that comes close to looking as a
room should look. . . . There are so many other conventions on
the stage that strain our imagination; certainly we might be freed from
overexerting ourselves in an effort to believe that pots and pans painted on
the scenery are real."(3)
Yet modern dramatists knew that realism in the theatre
transcends set design and involves more than real pots and pans. Ibsen's
mid-career decision to abandon poetry for prose signals his conviction that the
key to characterization lay in authentic speech. By replacing brilliant
soliloquies with the conversational rhythms of everyday expression, Ibsen began
to write in a way that audiences accept as "true to life." Although
dramatic dialogue is always artificial, nevertheless, every important
playwright and every theatrical era must find a strategy for tailoring that
artifice to seem as real as possible. Early modern drama, it should be
remembered, was written while Sigmund Freud was developing a psychoanalytic
treatment that asked patients to speak in their own everyday voices until
unwittingly they revealed their unconscious feelings. Ibsen and his
contemporaries exploited a similar insight. They created dramatic characters
whose routine-sounding dialogue divulged the truth about themselves as surely
as and more "realistically" than an explicitly self-revealing
soliloquy. Every hesitation, every slip of the tongue, every euphemism, for
Ibsen and for Chekhov, as for Freud, has profound meaning. Moreover, the modern
writer saw that the prose of daily life can be as shrewdly manipulated as the
verse of Aeschylus or Shakespeare to yield a consistent structure of imagery.
In A Doll House, for example, every apparently random
reference to an audit contributes to a tightly structured plot and builds a
convincing poetry from the commonplace. If where we choose to place a desk in a
sitting room may betray our unconscious desires, how much more may the words we
choose reveal about our character.
Thus ordinary speech and mundane settings, originally
manipulated by the likes of Scribe and Sardou to serve a facile melodrama,
provide realistic instruments to probe psychological and social truths in the
work of the early modern dramatists.
Similarly, the underlying structure of
"Sardoodledom," as George Bernard Shaw called the well-made play, was
transformed by Ibsen into an almost Sophoclean device. As Oedipus interviews
messengers who possess pieces of an old puzzle that he painstakingly fits
together, so the hidden secrets of Ibsen's realistic drama gradually come to
light through coincidences, lost letters found, and old love affairs unveiled.
All of these devices, finally, rest on a belief that the
past predetermines the present. In the late nineteenth century, as narrative
artists already had, dramatists trained the lens of realism on human behavior,
viewing it under the influence of the materialist legacies of Darwin and of
Marx as the sum of genetic and financial inheritances. Most important, perhaps,
the early modern drama provides intellectual satisfaction, as does Freudian
analysis, by promising that once the crucial genetic, financial, and emotional
clues are unearthed, the process of understanding human experience can begin.
Modern Drama after Ibsen: Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov
Oddly enough, the biographical circumstances of all these
early modern dramatists inclined them to criticize and challenge society. The
plots of Ibsen's best known plays revolve around buried shame that must be
uncovered to release the true self. It may be more than coincidental that Ibsen
struggled to separate himself from his own parents' shame. Not only Ibsen, but
also Strindberg, Chekhov, and Shaw in early childhood experienced the
humiliation of watching their fathers sink into financial failure. Ibsen and
Shaw wanted so much to distance themselves from paternal disgrace that each
entertained fantasies of illegitimacy, refusing to believe themselves the sons
of their nominal fathers. Perhaps we may fairly conclude that their childhood
disillusion with authority contributed to the force of the dramas they publicly
displayed when they became adults, exposés of collapsing social structures
undermined by false pretense.
Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov each found a different
dramatic model potential in the realistic mode evolved by Ibsen. Of the three,
the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) most fully acknowledged his debt
to Ibsen. The author of one of the earliest appreciations of Ibsen, The
Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), Shaw believed that Ibsen fundamentally
had transformed the theatrical formula drawn from the French Boulevard plays by
incorporating a new intellectual vigor in them. "Now the serious
playwright recognizes in the discussion . . . the real centre of his play's
interest," Shaw observed. Shaw's own witty plays explore the possibilities
ofdiscussion, as he calls it, and today seem a bit dated because
the social problems that he attacked often have less significance for us than
for his own audience.
For August Strindberg (1849-1912), the social questions
raised in plays like A Doll House were only of superficial
interest. A neurotic and troubled person, Strindberg responded more to the
emotional tangles in which Ibsen's characters struggle, and in his own drama,
probed the disfigurations of family life even more scathingly than did the man
he regarded as his rival. In his domestic plots, a category that includes Miss
Julie and The Dance of Death (1901), the
thrice-married Strindberg, son of a debased aristocrat and a servant woman,
showed men and women trapped in cruel and all-consuming sexual relationships.
These plays, more naturalistic than realistic in their depiction of the
unrelenting pressure of heredity and physical impulse, leave little room for
the possibility of remaking the self to which Ibsen's characters at least could
aspire. In other works, like A Dream Play (1902) and The
Road To Damascus (1898, 1904), Strindberg experimented with a
phantasmagoric style that may have influenced Ibsen in his final, less
realistic plays, a style that pointed to the theatrical expressionism that the
next generation of modern dramatists was to explore.
Despite his early death, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) left a
major body of short stories and plays, and in both forms continued to examine
the minutiae of everyday experience. Less schooled than Ibsen in the
conventions of nineteenth-century French theatre and less morbid than
Strindberg, Chekhov used realism more delicately than they did. The characters
in his four great plays -- The Seagull (1896), Uncle
Vanya (1897), The Three Sisters (1900), and The
Cherry Orchard (1904) -- rarely experience definitive revelations of
truth. However dreadful the events encompassed in his plays, including lovers
separated and families dispossessed, and death by duel and by suicide, Chekhov
maintains so fine an emotional balance that his characters are simultaneously
tragic and comic, pathetic and ridiculous.
In a way, Chekhov's achievement brought the early modern
drama to an impasse. Like Ibsen, Shaw, and Strindberg, he identified a series
of social and personal problems that defined a seemingly worldwide collapse of
central authority as the twentieth century evolved. His work, however, proposes
neither a rationale nor a resolution for that collapse. In fact, the short stories
and plays of Chekhov convince us that, no matter how intimately we may probe
character, the human condition remains mysterious. To that sense of mystery,
lovingly and realistically examined yet unexplained, only one word can be
assigned: "Chekhovian."
The Stage Director Par Excellence--Stanislavsky
Chekhov's plays, scrupulously observed depictions of
ineffectual lives endured in dreary provincial towns, were produced in
extraordinarily detailed sets by one of the most important acting ensembles of
modern times, The Moscow Art Theatre. Under the direction of Konstantin
Stanislavsky (1863-1938), this group introduced a new acting method(4)
that confirmed the real source of energy in nineteenth-century realism.
Although Stanislavsky did not stint on stage reproductions of reality, he knew
that external realistic portrayal in and of itself lacked value. The true
subject of the great realists was the human soul. Convinced that the
brilliantly artificial acting styles required by high poetic drama did not fit
the differently scaled speeches of unheroic dramatic characters, Stanislavsky
resolved to re-train his company. Stanislavsky-influenced rehearsals require
that cast members focus on emotional exercises designed to arouse within them
personal feelings that replicate the characters'. The goal of theatre was no
longer, as Aristotle had described it long ago, to imitate an action but
literally to enact it. Ultimately, the development of theatre in the twentieth
century reveals that in the very success of Stanislavsky's method lay the seeds
of its rejection. As with every art form, once theatrical realism totally
fulfilled its mission, the genre began to seem obsolete, and gradually gave way
to a new phase of modern theatre.
Footnotes
(1)
Notable among Ibsen's early poetic dramas are Brand (1865)
and Peer Gynt (1867), and almost cinematic fantasy
very highly regarded today, proved difficult to stage when new. Dissatisfied,
Ibsen gave up this mode of playwriting as a dead end; in his final plays,
however, he muted the realistic detail of his middle style n favor of more
overtly symbolic textures.
(2)
"On the Occasion of Hedda Gabler (1891)," The Scenic Art:
Notes on Acting and the Drama: 1872-1901 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1948), p. 249.
(3)
Trans. Arvid Paulson, Seven Plays by August Strindberg (New
York: Bantam Books, 1960), p.73.
(4)
In the United States, a "method actor" owes some debt to this
Stanislavskian creed.
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