OUTLINE HISTORY OF ENGLISH DRAMA (PART IV) – TWENTIETH CENTURY

 

Irish Theatre

While Wilde and Shaw were spearheading the resurgence of drama in England during the 1890s, a similar attempt was underway in Ireland. Three artists, Lady Gregory, William Butler Yeats, and Edward Martin, conceived in 1898 a plan for setting up an Irish theatre that exclusively staged plays by Irish playwrights as an attempt to win recognition for Irish dramatists. The idea eventually materialised the following year in 1899 when the Irish Literary Theatre was set up. The theatre which remained professionally alive for three years focused on staging plays by Irish artists giving expression to the unique Irish literary flavour, artistry, folklore and the legendary past of the country. The avowed objective of these plays was to lay the foundations for setting in motion a distinct Irish dramatic tradition, whose identity was not confused with or subsumed into that of the English. In 1901 however the theatre folded, primarily owing to lack of funds, but this provided an opportunity for the founding members to make some key changes to its mode of operation. For instance during its run from 1899 till 1901, the Irish Literary Theatre basically enacted plays with actors who were either English or if Irish were nevertheless trained in England. So when the Irish National Theatre Society was started in 1902 as a successor to the now defunct Irish Literary Theatre, not only the plays but also the actors were exclusively Irish, trained in Ireland itself by the Fay brothers, Frank and William. The formation of the Irish National Theatre Society marked a new phase in Irish dramatic history in that it represented the first time ever that Irish plays produced as a part of the Irish artists attempt to reinforce a distinct literary identity for themselves, were also performed in London. This not only gained a wider recognition for the plays and the playwrights, but also won them the much needed funding that constantly kept the company at the brink of closure. The funding came from one Annie Horniman who not only procured the company’s own theatre in Abbey Street, Dublin, to stage their plays, but also left it with a generous subsidy so as to sustain the expenses incurred. With the company now in possession of its own place for performance, the Irish National Theatre Society starting from the year 1904, embarked on a path of staging more plays than ever by Irish dramatists. The company also now came to be more popularly alluded to as Abbey Theatre, denoting the place where its headquarters were now established. The Abbey Theatre was eventually made into a state sponsored institution in 1924, when Yeats and Lady Gregory gifted it to the Irish Free State. From this point onwards till present times, the theatre has continued to remain a national institution in Ireland, emerging in the process as the oldest state sponsored Theatre Company in Europe. Three playwrights could be cited as having played a vital role in establishing the artistic foundations of Abbey theatre during its early phase of development. These are W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Sean O’ Casey. Each of these men added a distinctively new dimension to the dramatic face of the theatre. Yeats for instance was stubbornly against the naturalistic form of social theatre popularised in Europe during the 19^th century by the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen. He therefore pioneered a more poetic form of dramatic production, which focused on exhibiting the legendary past and folklore of Ireland in an idealised form, drawing his inspiration from such artistic traditions as Japanese Noh theatre. Synge who also preferred the poetic vein of drama writing, was nevertheless different from Yeats in that he concentrated more on highlighting concrete issues, specifically the plight suffered by the Irish rural communities. He also opted to fashion his dialogues not in regular English but in Hiberno, a dialect of English spoken in Ireland. O’Casey who was a political activist an ardent sympathiser of the revolutionary nationalist cause, wrote plays that were tellingly different from those of Yeats and Synge. His works are typically realistic, directly dealing with Dublin working class and its troubles, with no attempt made at being poetical or idealistic.

 

Poetic Drama

The revival of drama in England initiated by Wilde and carried on by Shaw, was notably prose in medium. This of course was only following the natural order of things. After all, ever since the 16^th century and the great Elizabethans, drama was steadily and increasingly becoming a work of prose, to the extent that by the 19^th century it had pretty much established itself in the general imagination as essentially a prose phenomenon. The attitude however began to slowly change at the start of the 20^th century, when the public gradually began to take note of the inadequacies of prose drama. By the 1920s this attitude had grown into something substantial to reckon with, evidenced by the efforts taken by many writers to bring back verse play or poetic drama into vogue. Significant names to note in this regard include John Masefield, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, and Christopher Frye, but the most important of all was by far T. S. Eliot. Eliot success as a poetic dramatists lies in the fact that he did not plunge into writing verse dramas blindly like most others. He started playwriting quite late in his career, and when he took it up he had a clear idea as to how to make it work. He was in short not just someone who wrote poetic plays but also theorized it. Some of the key ideas as proposed by him could be set forth as follows. Firstly, Eliot insisted that the theme of a verse drama must not be the same as that of a prose play. He felt verse plays must not deal with social issues which is more suited for treatment by the medium of prose. His idea was that poetic dramas must deal with subjects that are more elemental or passionate in scope, with imaginative atmosphere and symbolic characters. Secondly, Eliot maintained that the dialogues in a poetic drama must resemble that of normal speech as closely as possible. During the 16^th century, blank verse served the purpose, but due to over usage and the many social changes that had taken place since, it had become glaringly redundant. He therefore created his own neutral vein of poetic dialogues in which he frequently made use of everyday idioms and phrases to make it sound as identical to real talk as possible. Thirdly, Eliot stubbornly emphasized that poetry in a poetic play must not be just a decoration drawing attention to itself. It must be a practical medium possessing a functional value. He specifically meant three things by this. It should reveal the personality patterns of the characters, work out the theme of the play, and provide a description of the scenic setting. Fourth and finally, he refuted the idea of intermingling prose and poetry in the same play, making the characters belonging to the upper class speak in the latter and those belonging to the ordinary in the former. He believed the play must be written throughout in poetry, thereby mobilizing in effect a catalyst that reorients the attitude of the audience. What T. S. Eliot did in the modern era is thus not just come up with an equation for making poetic plays relevant, but also expand its scope. In this way, he made verse plays work practically, something the success of his dramas most amply illustrate.

Theatre of the Absurd

Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by the critic Martin Esslin to refer to certain plays written during the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, in the 1950s and 60s. Plays authored by four playwrights were originally identified by Esslin as falling under the banner of Absurd Theatre. These are Samuel Becket, Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. Later he added the name of the British playwright Harold Pinter to this exclusive club. The word absurd as used in the term Absurd Theatre basically derives its meaning from the idea of the absurd developed by the French philosopher Albert Camus in his work The Myth of Sisyphus. In this work, Camus defines the absurd as characterizing the essential condition of human life, more specifically, the meaningless and futility that underlies the human situation. So plays of the Absurd Theatre represent in essence works that articulate a vision of life that is devoid of any purpose, point or logic. There are particularly two factors in this regard that must be considered closely as causal elements that brought such a view of life to the forefront of human thought. The first of this is of course the Second World War. When the First World War took place in the early part of the 20^th century, it triggered a wide spread feeling of disillusionment in traditional institutions and values, and the sense of certainty they epitomized. However, despite this pervasive sense of disenchantment, there did remain an undercurrent of hope that humanity would eventually be able to reclaim the lost feeling of security and certainty. This faith however was indelibly shattered by the Second World War, which wreaked a scale of damage and violence far worse than the first. The upshot was that the sense of uncertainty already initiated became perpetuated, promulgating a conviction that human life was deprived of any definitive purpose or meaning. This feeling was aggravated by the gaining popularity at the time of the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s brand of existential thought, which constitutes the second factor to reckon with. Sartre in his existential doctrine argued that life is in essence fundamentally bereft of any inherent destiny or purpose, positing that it is existence encapsulated in the individual’s conscious self that takes precedence over everything. Humanity as theorized by Sartre was thus condemned to live in what for all purpose and meaning typified a vacuum, stripped of any illusions in the form of traditional institutions or value systems. As plays enacting the futility and pointlessness of the human existence, dramas of the Absurd Theatre exhibited certain peculiar features, all of which directly opposed those that informed what is generally dubbed a well-made play. There are three quintessential features to contend with in this respect. Firstly, in a well-made play, the plot would be conceived in terms of a unified whole, consisting of a beginning, middle and an end. In an Absurd play however the plot is essentially cyclic, ensuing arbitrarily and concluding in the same vein, involving no perceivable pattern or logical sequence of development. Secondly, characters in a well-made play epitomize rational beings, whose actions have a convincing motive behind them. Characters in an Absurd play however are so thoroughly attenuated that they showcase no apparent purpose or motive for their actions. Thirdly, in a well-made play dialogues represent rational constructions that tend to be both logically sound and enchantingly witty. Dialogues in an absurd play on the contrary tend to be meaningless dribble, utterly illogical conveying no apparent impression of any perceivable meaning or purpose. Absurd plays thus are fashioned to communicate the basic idea of life’s absurdity both in their content and form, underscoring the point that there is no hierarchical or perceptible disparity between the form and content of a work.

 

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter is by far the most celebrated British playwright of the post-war era, and possibly represents one of the most complex dramatist to categorise in terms of literary tags. Included by Esslin among the pantheon of playwrights formally constituting the Absurd Theatre, it is noteworthy that Pinter is frequently also dubbed a writer of comedy of menace. Focusing on the latter label, the term was coined by the critic Irving Wardle, who derived it from the subtitle of a play by the playwright David Campton called The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace. The term actually represents a word play on the type of comic plays written during the restoration era in England, which are popularly referred to as comedy of manners. As the very term indicates, the play essentially implies a contradiction of sorts. The word comedy signifies a performance that provokes laughter, the word menace on the contrary refers to something threatening. So comedy of menace denote plays that though apparently seem ridiculous, simultaneously exude an unmistakable undercurrent of an impending danger that is looming large in the background. Typical features of this kind of play include a setting that is tellingly claustrophobic, characters speaking and acting in a manner that is puzzlingly scary, plots centering around a scenario that is apparently abstract and without any obvious purpose or significance attached to them, inexplicable pauses in dialogues that augment a sense of menace by foregrounding phases of stretched out silence, all of which in the ultimate analysis combine to impart an experience to the audience that is concurrently comical yet disturbing.