Notes on “Modern European Drama: Origins and Patterns” by John Fletcher and James McFarlane

Notes on “Modern European Drama: Origins and Patterns” by John Fletcher and James McFarlane
Philo-Lit

· The modern theatre movement began in the eighties and nineties according to Eric Bentley, with the success of Henri Becque's plays Les Corbeaux (The Vultures) and La Parisienne (Woman of Paris) and Ibsen's Ghosts. Also, along with Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre expressly for the performance of naturalist plays.

· The success of the new movements was the success of naturalism.

· The changes in the drama was on two coordinates-
(a) Substantive and thematic
(b) Formal and Linguistic

Ibsen was one author who brought out charges in theme as well as form in drama. Ibsen wrote problem plays (thus, he brought changes in theme) and in case of form, he wrote in prose.

· For long years, his achievement remained in large measure domestic to Scandinavia, but in the nineties he burst upon the European scene with all its fury. The new wave of independent theatres produced Ibsen's Ghosts in Berlin, Paris and London between 1889 and 1891, and created the first example of a phenomenon that has grown increasingly common in recent years. Ibsen's plays were published in Europe and America, and were played in many cities. Hedda Gabler was published in Scandinavia in 1890 and was translated into several languages.

· Regarding the theme- The 'problem' element which so preoccupied Ibsen's contemporaries was in one sense very much a thing of its own day. The Ibsenist problems still have ' relevance', still have the power to disturb the society.

· With regard to language- Ibsen gave himself strenuously and unremittingly to the task of exploiting the resources of language in ways never before attempted or even suspected. He claimed that the dialogue in a play ought to have a different timbre if it was meant to be spoken in the morning from what it would be at night. He was praised as the writer’s writer, dramatist’s dramatist. The authors were fascinated by the subtle undertones of Ibsen’s dramatic dialogue. His language embraced the the naturalist drama of Germany, the works of Shaw, early absurdist dramatist in France, Italian Futurist plays.

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· If Ibsen is the origin and impetus of modern drama, Strindberg is its astonishing prefiguration..

· Although Strindberg's life and work seem against all expectation to constitute an essence of an age that transcends even his own lifetime, he was possessed of an extraordinary delicacy of mind and sensitivity of spirit.

· He is compared to Leonardo and Goethe because of his genius.

· When looked at his personal life, he has experienced a nervous breakdown, and he has experienced poverty in his life. He has experienced three unsuccessful marriages as well. This has reflected in his writings as well.

· Some of his early works like Master Olof seemed as if having an unconscious mimicry of the Norwegian writer Ibsen. But the works which were written by Strinberg after the personal inferno in his life, were the most impressive evidence of his experimentalism.

· We can also see the influence of Nietzche in his writings. (the concept of God can be seen similar to Nietzche) The year 1899 was an important year in his life as it saw the publication of 4 historical dramas.

· Some of his important works are Crimes and Crimes (1899), Easter (1900), etc which had the element of intense existential realism. His existential realism has been compared to J.P Satre.

· Some of his works like The Dream Play (1902) had elements of Surrealism.

· Thus We can see clearly that Strindberg has contributed to European Drama of the twentieth century.



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When analysing these works (written by Ibsen and Strindberg), we can conclude that the concept of Meta theatre is important in the field of Modern Drama. Modernism raises the issue of meta-theatre- concept by Lionel Abel- which is based on two basic postulates: (1) the world is a stage (Theatrum Mundi) ; and (2) life is a dream. Neither of these notions originated in the late nineteenth century, of course. These two concepts were not new. The first one, is a cliché statement that you hear from the time of Shakespeare and the second concept is a translation of the title of the play , Calderon (1635).

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In modern theatre we have :

Ø Secular way of seeing the relationship between actors and viewers : In earlier times , Critic Elizabeth Burns observes that the audience were seen as a God. Just like God is seen as a sole spectator of human life, the spectator were give a God’s eye.

Ø In Modern theatre, real is juxtaposed with illusionary elements.

Ø In Modern theatre, smile is juxtaposed with tears (tragicomedy)

Two examples can be discussed here- The Wild Duck and Waiting for Godot. (Example, in the play Waiting for Godot, we can find clownish intellectuals doing things without any sense even when they are sad. Two men have just botched an attempt at suicide, and the rope that was supposed to hang them also serves as the belt holding up Estragon's trousers. )

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· Another characteristic of modern drama is the element of silence. Modernist dramaturgy is characterized by the fragmentary, the low-key, the inarticulate, even the incoherent and the frankly non-verbal tendencies of theatrical intercourse. The silences in Strindberg, Pinter or Beckett are justified within the play, but they also serve as a reflection upon it.

Even if there is silence in Beckett, Beckett’s plays are very literate. The speakers and scholars quote from the works. But in Harold Pinter’s works, things are different.

Pinter's work deals with the fear of communication, not the impossibility of communication, and how people take refuge in evasions rather than run the risk of having to articulate what is really bothering them. Ionesco's The Lesson is a perfect exposition of how to conceal fantasies of rape and murder under a comically parodic form of academic discourse. But Ibsen does it superbly in Hedda Gahler and Little Eyolf, and so does Strindberg in Miss Julie. There is a difference in setting, of course, between Pinter's characters and Chekhov's, but both are authentic locales o f their respective periods, and both will still be probing the resources of speech to find loopholes through which to escape from their truths.

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· Within this characteristically Modernist concept of meta-theatre, the 'life is a dream' motif is of unifying importance, and is derived from Strindberg's Dream Play (1901).There is a mixing up of reality with fiction. Another work is Arthur Adamovi's Professor Taranne (1951), one of the most perfect works thrown up in the post-1950 renaissance of Modernism. Professor Taranne starts slowly to take his clothes off as the curtain falls, and the audience is unsure if he is conforming to the nightmare or confirming its truth. Modernism is adept at posing questions, undermining our categories and destroying our confidence in familiar things.

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· Modernist drama radically revised the dimensions and perimeter of theatrical space, and Ibsen frequently exploited the illusion that the audience was eavesdropping. The actors needed to concentrate hard on the situation, and any hint of a gesture to the gallery would destroy the illusion. Bertolt Brecht sought to abolish the illusion of realist drama, symbolized by a darkened and hushed auditorium opposite a brightly-lit and busy stage. However, this would have created another illusion, just as totalitarian, of the world within the theatre walls.

· The Brechtian rejection of theatrical illusion marks one of the truly original innovations in the entire history of drama. It opened the way to much else that is vital in contemporary theatre, not least the works o f Samuel Beckett, which self-consciously play ' across* the footlights.



· A world in a room is hymnic where the one above is ironic, and frenzied where the first pretends to a control o f the anarchistic impulse. Jean Genet is the greatest exponent of this tendency. The violence and crudity of the manifesto was more than matched by what was enacted under its aegis in the playhouse. The Living Theatre and La Mama exalt irrationality and the flouting o f social and cultural taboos, and repudiate ' good acting'.



· The film is a reflection of stage drama, with disjunctions in characterization, dialogue, and plotting. A great film-director like Ingmar Bergman owes a real debt to Strindberg, but equally a playwright like Pinter can learn from the art of a cineast like Hitchcock. Theatre and cinema are subject to the same Zeitgeist, and some practitioners have shifted from cinema into metacinema. The same forces operate universally, fanning out widely beyond the frontiers of drama as traditionally understood.

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Please Note: This is the summarized note on the essay by John Feltcher and James McFarlane. The author of this note does not hold any opinions on Ibsen or Strindberg. The author has not included any extra inoformation. The intention of this is  only to make the reading of the essay easy.

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