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READING 3.

Dictionary of the theatre.

Read through this brief overview of some of the major theatrical schools and movements of the 20^th century which looks at their origins, nature and ideas and the key personalities associated with them.

a) Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich (1865-1938) Russian director, actor and teacher, one of the most important theorists of the 20^th century theatre. From the first Stanislavsky strove in his productions for an easy, realistic style of acting and a careful naturalism in sets and costumes, rejecting the histrionic style of acting in vogue in Russia at the time. In 1898 he founded the Moscow Art Theatre in partneship with Nemirovich-Danchenko. His greatest triumphs as a director were his productions of Chekhov’s plays, starting with “The Seagull” in 1898. Chekhov’s writing matching Stanislavsky’s chosen style of production perfectly, calling as it does for a detailed realistic production which yet has glints of poetry, depending more for its effect on atmosphere and psychological suggestion than on detailed literal re-creation. In fact, during the 1900s Stanislavsky came to place less emphasis on the naturalistic externals, and more on the actor’s development of character. Stanislavsky had a great influence on the theatre outside Russia, especially in America. The emphasis of his teachings has been partly misunderstood, because only “An Actor Prepares”, in which he concentrates mainly on the psychology of acting rather than on technique, was easily available. His later books correct this with a powerful insistence on the importance of style, and of matching the style to the role and fitting the role into the production as a whole.

b) American adaptation of Stanislavsky’s teachings (“Method”) was stressing mainly the building of the role rather than the technical side of its presentation. The leading idea here is the complete losing of the actor in the role. The chief exponents of the Method (Lee Strasberg and others) place great emphasis on improvisation and exercises to improve the actor’s gifts of empathy, and the usual criticism of Method-trained actors is that they neglect diction and are limited to naturalistic acting.

c) Meyerhold, Vsevolod (1874-1940), Russian actor and director of primarily experimental interests. He was elaborating and putting into practice his own version of Gordon Craig’s ideas, which reduced the role of the actor to a mere cog in the wheel of the director’s vehicle, to a sort of director’s puppet. During the 1920s he had his own theatre, where he developed Bio-mechanics, a system of dramatic training which involved a considerable amount of almost acrobatic physical exercise and a detailed study of all the body’s mimetic possibilities. His most brilliant productions at this time were two later plays by Mayakovsky, ‘The Bed Bug’ and ‘The Bath House”. In the 30s, with the institution of socialist realism as the official style of Soviet theatre, he fell increasingly out of favour and his theatre as closed in 1938.

d) Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956), German dramatist, poet, director and theoretician. Brecht’s importance made itself felt in two ways: through the production of his plays’ and through the increasing influence of his theories about the theatre. His plays can be divided into four periods – romantic-nostalgic, didactic, more generally humanist, and again didactic – though in fact all the elements are present to a greater or lesser extent at all periods of his career. It seems safe to say that all the works by which he will survive as a dramatist date from the third period. Characters like Mother Courage, the indomitable survivor of the Thirty years War, or Galileo, or Shen Teh, the good-hearted woman of Setzuan, and the ruthless alter ego she has to create in order to survive in a capitalist world, are so fully imagined, so felt as intricate and contradictory human beings, that they escape all rigid formulations of their social and political significance.

As a theorist Brecht’s most telling influence has been counterbalancing Stanislavsky as misunderstood by his American Method disciples. Instead of the complete absorption of the actor in his role Brecht demanded the retention of a critical distance: the actor should not attempt just to be the character, to present it entirely from the inside, but, while understanding psychological workings, to present it in such a way as to imply an attitude towards it. Thus the audience, instead of identifying with characters in the drama, are encouraged to remain sufficiently outside what is happening on the stage to judge it critically to Brecht “the essential point of the epic theatre is that it appeals less to the spectator’s feelings than to his reason”. One of the principal ideas in Brecht’s “theory” of drama, is this “Alienation effect”, which requires the audience and actors to retain a degree of critical detachment from play and performance.

e) Beckett, Samuel (1906-1989), Irish dramatist and novelist, most of whose later works were written originally in French. It was his plays initially which established his international reputation. “Waiting for Godot”, first performed in Paris in 1953, was rapidly performed all over the world and became unexpectedly a great popular success. It is an elusive tragic farce about two tramps forever awaiting the arrival of the mysterious Godot, who will in some unexplained way make everything different but who never comes. Exemplifying as it does the existential absurdity of man’s situation, the play became one of the cornerstones of the Theatre of the Absurd. The term applied to a group of dramatists in the 1950s who did not regard themselves as a school but who all seemed to share certain attitudes towards the predicament of man in the universe: essentially those summarized by Albert Camus in his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”. This diagnoses humanity’s plight as purposelessness in an existence out of harmony with its surroundings (absurd literally means out of harmony). Awareness of this lack of purpose in all we do-Sisyphus, for ever rolling a stone up a hill, for ever aware that it will never reach the top, is the perfect type-figure here – produces a state of metaphysical anguish which is the central theme of the writers in the Theatre of the Absurd, most notably Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Jenet, Arthur Adamov. The ideas are allowed to shape the form as well as the content: all semblance of logical construction, of the rational linking of ideas with idea in an intellectually viable argument, is abandoned, and instead the irrationality of experience is transferred to the stage. Beckett’s play “Happy Days” seemed to represent the farthest refinement possible in his dramatic method, being virtually a monologue for a woman who is progressively buried alive till in the last act only her head is visible. But in “Play”, first performed in 1963, even such remote concession to theatrical conventions disappear: here there are three characters, heads protruding from urns, and each speaks only when a shaft of light hits his or her face, the whole text being played through twice in twenty minutes. “Come and go” (1965) also has three characters (female), a minimum of action, and indeed a minimum of everything else, running for only three minutes and containing only 121 words of dialogue.