Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook

Richard Drain, Richard Drain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134864744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Darstellende Kunst

Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook is an inspired handbook of ideas and arguments on theatre. Richard Drain gathers together a uniquely wide-ranging selection of original writings on theatre by its most creative practitioners - directors, playwrights, performers and designers, from Jarry to Grotowski and Craig. These key texts span the twentieth century, from the onset of modernism to the present, providing direct access to the thinking behind much of the most stimulating theatre the century has had to offer, as well as guidelines to its present most adventurous developments.
Setting theory beside practice, these writings bring alive a number of vital and continuing concerns, each of which is given full scope in five sections which explore the Modernist, Political, Inner and Global dimensions of twentieth century theatre.
Twentieth Century Theatre: A Sourcebook provides illuminationg perspectives on past history, and throws fresh light on the sources and development of theatre today. This sourcebook is not only an essential and versatile collection for students at all levels, but also directed numerous devised shows which have toured to theatres, schools, community centres and prisons.

Part I
THE MODERNIST DIMENSION

May naturalism in the theatre die!

Evgeny Vakbtangov

INTRODUCTION

1

The remarks of André Antoine that preface this selection, dating from 1890, signal the effective initiation of modern theatre; and propose lines of development for it which his own work in Paris with the Théâtre Libre did much to establish. They follow up Zola’s advocacy of a stage reformed on naturalistic principles, vigorously elaborated ten years before. Antoine’s aim was to realise such ideas in practice, and so enable theatre, in effect, to catch up with literature, where realism and its offspring naturalism were deeply established. Indeed, readers of Balzac and Flaubert might have said that the achievement of Antoine and his few fellow-spirits elsewhere was at last to drag theatre into the nineteenth century, some ten years before it ended.

Antoine’s proposed reforms were gradually implemented. This meant not just changes in staging methods and the training of actors, but acceptance of the concept and practice of ensemble work. This was vital to the development both of a living inter-relationship of characters on stage, and of what Antoine calls ‘composition’—the relation of things to a total effect. Ensemble work in its turn required a breakdown of hierarchy, a diminishing of the power of the ‘great’ actor, or actor-manager. Technically, Antoine was an actor-manager. But his innovations pointed the way to a shift in power from the actor to the director—that shift whose most eloquent advocate was Gordon Craig. In all this, a new concept was being born: of the director as artist, and theatre as an art form. But a ‘composition’ does not have to be in the realist manner, and an ensemble can be orchestrated in many styles. Fine art was developing from Manet to Matisse. Why should theatre not do likewise? So it is that hardly had the stage discovered how to become lifelike than it grew impatient of being so. By the start of the twentieth century, with Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard not yet written and the full implementation of realism in the theatre only beginning to be achieved, advanced ideas were turning their back on the whole project, urging theatre in quite other directions.

These ideas at first owed much to symbolism. The symbolists saw theatre as a potential crucible in which the arts of poetry, painting, music and dance might be harmoniously fused. Then it might manifest the dreams andyearnings of human life, freed from Its mere material conditions. Such ideas predate modernism proper, and are largely reserved for Part IV of this volume. But the vital part played by this early movement in establishing the artistic credentials of theatre cannot be entirely passed over here; for this is the base from which much theatrical modernism operates. Hence the inclusion here of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig. Appia is a crucial pioneer, seeking a theatre sensitive to ‘the spirit of music’, and a stage that could offer equivalent qualities of rhythm, tone and harmony in the unfolding movement of its actors in a space architecturally conceived, the whole freely moulded and accented by the play of variegated lighting. Such considerations were not only foreign to theatres of the time, but impossible to realise without a wholesale rethinking of current stage practice, and indeed equipment. Appia carried this through, preparing the way for Craig and others, and implicitly introducing the stage to the concept of abstract form.

But modernism is an umbrella term covering a number of tendencies, and some have a very different character. In the world of the arts, many were keen to clear the air of what Tristan Tzara called ‘the fumes of symbolism’,¹ which for them were as musty and redolent of the previous age as naturalism. Delighting in parody and outrage, and championing the ‘lowest’ forms of popular entertainment, they fought a guerilla war against bourgeois culture, seeing it as a pervasive mess of reactionary values and nauseating sentiments. The first twentieth-century wave of this onslaught comes with the futurists; and is soon followed by Dada. But the great pioneer of these tactics is Alfred Jarry. Before the nineteenth century was out, Jarry had succeeded in achieving a succès de scandals with his scabrous and grotesque creation, Ubu, and the crude puppet-like staging of his subShakespearean adventures. Much more than a jape, as Jarry’s article here shows, Ubu and the toilet brush he brandished were a rude signal of things to come.

The futurist movement was launched a decade later in 1909, and initiated on many fronts the impact of modernist ideas on the arts. The futurists aimed to jerk the buried heads of all concerned out of the sands of establishment ‘culture’, uproot the arts from their pre-industrial past, and connect them to the age of the dynamo and the combustion engine. Significantly their ideas flourished best in two countries still at the time deeply agrarian—Italy and Russia. In Italy, where the movement began, the machine spelt dramatic advance—exemplified for F.T.Marinetti, its best-known spokesman, in Italy’s thriving car industry with its new internationally competitive racing models.²

While futurism sought to revolutionise all the arts, Marinetti was particularly concerned with theatre. His withering analysis of its current forms is coupled with provocative suggestions for hijacking and rerouting it. Other futurists moved into theatre work from painting and the visual arts—notably Fortunato Depero and Enrico Prampolini. Their revolutionary scenographic concepts may have taken their start from Gordon Craig, who was already based in Italy, exploring the idea of a theatre of mobile architectural forms. Prampolini and Depero outreached him, liberating scenography from the dramatic text, and devising spectacles geared to a musical or sound score, composed of moving shapes and changing light. They open a road which branches out to the constructivists, Tadeusz Kantor, 1960s’ happenings, Robert Wilson, and other developments in performance art. The futurists’ playwriting ventures point another way. A series of cabaret squibs or staged jokes, they ridicule the conventions of both society and stage. With their chopped-up or derailed parody of social behaviour and dramatic histrionics, they initiate many aspects of what is now known as absurdism.

This spirit flourished further with the anarchic intervention of Dada—represented here by Tristan Tzara. Dada was launched in Zurich in 1916: in the middle of the First World War, and yet outside it, for Switzerland remained neutral. From there, the mass slaughter of a generation that was taking place across the border in France was seen to make a bitter or farcical mockery of European values—hitherto seen as the values of civilisation. In Dada, bitterness and farce are mixed. Tzara and its other founders strongly opposed the war. But rational protest from the safe haven of Switzerland was condemned in advance to an inevitable futility. The lasting and sobering significance of Dada was that it first faced up to the ineffectually of the artist and the intellectual, and of all that till then had prided itself on constituting ‘culture’. It put Art with a capital letter under a lasting question mark.³ It did so partly by offering no answers, deliberately contradicting its own assertions and abolishing itself before they could be codified.

Dada denied its own modernism, and no doubt would have objected to its inclusion here.⁴ Dada preferred non-Western cultures to ‘modern’ culture; and was against all-isms, including modernism, seeing them as symptoms of dogmatic programme, or worse, academic classification. Dada favoured spontaneity and a cabaret environment—which it proceeded to create by setting up its Cabaret Voltaire. Its first ‘grande soirée’ included poems (read simultaneously in two or three languages), dialogues, songs, dance, cubist paintings and cacophonous music. The cabaret format reflects the continuing endorsement by artists and writers of a whole field of performance outside the formalities of straight theatre. This is heralded in painting by Lautrec, by Wedekind’s enthusiasm for circus and cabaret, and by Jarry’s taste for guignol—the French equivalent of our Punch and Judy. It is witnessed by Picasso’s early clowns and acrobats, and cheered on by Marinetti in his manifesto, ‘The Variety Theatre’. The ‘modernist’ stage emerged out of this background. It quits the drawing room and raids the kitchen, stocking up with common fare including custard pies. Much modernist theatre is the offspring of the cross-over. It weds its advancedaesthetics with the popular.

This realm is too large to be adequately represented here, but will be explored further in Part III.

Tzara acknowledged Jarry as a main precursor of Dada, suggesting a double connection: ‘the will to scandalise’, and ‘auto-mockery’.⁵ Jarry, writes Tzara, ‘opens the way to the new spirit of Apollinaire’, to the new world from which ‘all the fumes of Symbolism have been swept’.⁶ Guillaume Apollinaire knew and admired Jarry. In the prologue to his play, he repeats Jarry’s attack on ‘the stupidity of trompe l’œil; and in a preface coins the term ‘surrealist’ to describe what he is doing. The word is adopted by Yvan Goll in the preface to his play Methusalem, whose factory-owning protagonist is a grotesque blood brother of Ubu. The surrealist ‘movement’ under Breton’s leadership begins soon after. Its members too admired Jarry, not least Artaud, whose earlier ventures went under the name of the ‘Alfred Jarry Theatre’. While the rich possibilities of a surrealist theatre were resisted by Breton, who expelled Artaud from the movement, a line of surrealist plays followed, leading down to lonesco’s.

Next to this Dada might not seem more than a cabaret diversion, lacking the status of legitimate theatre; but Dada strews tintacks on the highway of Art, and both legitimacy and status end up badly punctured. It points an alternative way, across open country, where disruptive activities become theatre, and theatre becomes a disruptive activity. Its reverberations run through the twentieth century, to Artaud, Arrabal, Kantor, the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s, and much else.

2

Dada took root also in Germany, but in a different context; for there the stage was powerfully affected by expressionism. Like their symbolist predecessors, the expressionists sought a theatre which might speak via non-naturalistic forms direct to the human spirit. But in a country at war first with the allied powers and then with itself, the forms it developed were, not surprisingly, conflicting or tormented rather than harmonious. Expressionist drama, while rejecting naturalism, had no wish to renounce naturalism’s drive to lay bare unpalatable truths. In this it was faithful to its two most influential predecessors, Strindberg and Wedekind.

Though the movement began before 1914, the large extension of expressionism into theatre comes in the war years. It is represented here by Walter Hasenclever and Ivan Goll (who, coming from Alsace, had roots in both French and German culture). Hasenclever’s The Son, written in 1914, was not the first expressionist play, but was the first to make its mark with a wide public. Its expressionist features include its subjective rendering of characters, who are portrayed as seen by the protagonist; and a theme involving, in Hasenclever’s words, ‘the struggle of the spirit against reality’. His essay here explaining his ideas calls upon Einstein’s theory of relativity. Relativity isa key modernist notion, invoked also by Tzara and the futurists. It is used to deflate the status of ‘objective’ truth, license multiple viewpoints, and release them from the judgement of a final authority. In that sense it backs the rebellion of sons against the father, the subject of Hasenclever’s play. His denial that a play must be understandable, and his wish that his audience ‘may lose the logic of their century’, echoes Dada, as does the ‘alogic’ proposed by Ivan Goll. More widely, his hope that they feel in their heart ‘the magic chain of love, hate, fury, greed, power, money and lies’ bridges the way from Strindberg and Wedekind to Artaud.

The fullest fruition of modernist ideas in the theatre is seen in Germany and Russia in the 1920s. In Germany it continued up to the accession of Hitler in the 1930s, when modernist work was suppressed. Increasingly from the mid-1920s it took political forms, notably in Piscator and Brecht. In Russia the same is true, though there revolutionary élan and futurist audacity combine to give it a more celebratory character. These developments are traced largely in Parts II and III; but passages by El Lissitsky and Sergei Radlov are included here to register the impulse towards more abstract forms that flourished in stage design and movement.

Also included is a manifesto of the remarkable but short-lived Oberiu group, of Leningrad. The Oberiu, together with Stanislas Ignacy Witkiewicz, introduce us to the powerful absurdist work of eastern Europe, disturbing and premonitory. Witkiewicz was artist as well as writer; and his ‘Introduction to the Theatre of Pure Form’ of 1920 is a reminder that the contribution of art to theatre has not been confined to providing it with sets and costumes. It has also been a rich source of ideas. In Witkiewicz, the idea of ‘pure form’ drawn from art is carried over into theatre, and applied to characters and action. This prises them away from consistency and likelihood, into the free world of ‘autonomous’ theatre—a word that looks back to the ‘Synthetic Theatre’ manifesto of the futurists, and forward to his Polish compatriot, Tadeusz Kantor. The word applies well too to the two remarkable plays produced by the Oberiu, whose principles as expounded by Daniil Kharms are very much in line with Witkiewicz’s ideas.

These ideas mark a significant step in modernist thinking. Hitherto modernism had been opposed to realism largely on the grounds that it fails to cope with twentieth-century reality. For the expressionists, it cannot articulate its distortions and anguish. For the futurists it cannot convey the kinetic energies that animate it, nor the swift montage of sights and sounds that are everyday urban experience. Witkiewicz’s theory of ‘pure form’ cuts this connection with the real. Theatre is envisaged as an alternative world, guided by laws relating only to itself, like the forms and colours in a Picasso painting. In contrast, under Piscator and Brecht the same decade sees the start of a major attempt to bring modernist ideas into relation with realism. Both ventures have their risks. A modernism wedded to ‘realism’ risks recuperation; while a modernism which seeks no inspiration in modern reality risks becoming an introverted exercise. None the less, from then on modernist theory tends to be split between these two faiths, the defenders of one unwilling to give a hearing to the other.

3

This parting of the ways is left hanging as European modernism of either kind undergoes the double assault of fascism and Stalinism. Its surviving practitioners are reduced to refugee status in countries whose theatres, if not cultures, are broadly alien to it. Their energies are consumed in trying to tak...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• PROLOGUE
• PART I: THE MODERNIST DIMENSION
• PART II: THE POLITICAL DIMENSION
• PART III: THE POPULAR DIMENSION
• Part IV: THE INNER DIMENSION
• PART V: THE GLOBAL DIMENSION
• SOURCES AND FURTHER WRITINGS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS