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MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 45
prelegerea,
conversaţia euristică,
explicaţia,
dezbaterea,
studiul de caz,
problematizarea,
metode de lucru în grup, individual şi frontal,
metode de dezvoltare a gândirii critice,
portofoliul,
studiul bibliografiei.
CHAPTER 1 – ELEMENTS OF
DRAMATIC DISCOURSE
Drama: a play written in prose or verse that tells a story through dialogue and
actions performed by actors impersonating the characters of the story.
Theatre:
b) drama as an art form, including the written text and the concrete
performance.
SETTING: the time and place in which the action occurs; the
backdrop and set onstage that suggest to the audience the
surrounding in which a play’s action takes place.
Émile Zola (1840-1902): French novelist and critic, the founder of the
Naturalist movement in literature. Zola redefined Naturalism as
"Nature seen through a temperament." Among Zola's most important
works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which
included such novels as L'ASSOMMOIR (1877), about the suffering of
the Parisian working-class, NANA (1880), dealing with prostitution,
and GERMINAL (1885), depicting the mining industry. In his theatre
criticism he outlined the following:
• Theatre should be the “honest soldier of truth”, serving the
inquiring mind by analysing and reporting on man and society.
• Characters: ordinary people in their natural setting;
• Stage scenery: vivid background and environment;
• Setting, costumes, dialogue: life-like (appropriate to the given
situation and the character’s individuality)
Characteristics:
• Theatre had become a fashionable and respectable institution.
• Main audience: upper-middle class.
• The commercial stage: dominated by actor-managers.
• It aimed at projecting an idealised vision of upper-middle class
decorum, suavity, respectability
Society drama:
• A type of play whose subject-matter was socially restricted to the
lives of the upper middle-class.
• It demonstrated and endorsed a non-objectionable subject-matter
and morality.
• As such, it was conservative in matters of social conduct and
sexual morality.
The links with Shaw’s drama of ideas is most obvious in the work of
contemporaries like Harley Granville-Barker and John Galsworthy, but
it also serves as a reference point for the plays written by John
Osborne in the second half of the twentieth-century. The political cast
of his theatre, seen as having a direct social function, may be seen to
reverberate in the realistic emphasis of “kitchen-sink” playwrights like
D.H. Lawrence or Arnold Wesker, intent on reforming society by
depicting its evils in naturalistic detail.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
Wagner’s parallel interests in both music and drama had resulted not
only in the production of his major operas such as Tristan and Isolde (1865)
or Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876), but also in an impressive body of
theoretical writings - The Art Work of the Future (1849), Opera and Drama
(1851), and The Purpose of the Opera (1871) -on the form and nature of
what he considered to be the performing art of the future, the so-called
“music-drama”, where language could be extended by sound in order to
create a fuller emotional statement. This Gesamtkunswerk (or “total art form”)
was to give a vital expression of the instinctive life, drawing upon archetype
and myth, dream and the supernatural.
In his turn, Nietzsche had justified Wagner’s ideas in his own account
on The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), where the origins of
Greek tragedy were identified with the moment in which the ritual
celebrations of Dionysus (representing all that was emotional and irrational in
man) expressed into the song of the dithyramb 1, had found the embodiment
1
Form of hymn or choral lyric in which Dionysus was honoured.
Main Trends in Modern British Drama 21
Chapter 3 – Symbolism and the British Stage
of dance which had imposed an Apollinian form upon them (characterized by
lucidity, reasonableness and harmony.) Thus, the duality and tension
between the instinctive and the rational, music and dance, which had led to
the birth of tragedy, could only be recuperated in Wagner’s “music-drama”,
which Nietszche considered to exercise a Dionysian influence in the modern
rational world.
The contemporary dramatist with whom both Appia and Craig shared
most was the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949).
Maeterlinck was fascinated by dimensions that make life elusive, such as
mysterious forces and blindness. Only though contemplation, absolute
silence and inactivity could these be made visible. As such, his plays are
characterized by their lack of action, or conflict, and by their suggestive force.
His early plays, like Les Aveugles (1890) or L’Intruse (1891), are one-act
dramas of silences, shadowy characters, and an immovable scene, where
the disconnected, allusive and repetitive prose dialogue is broken by long
pauses. Pelléas and Mélisande (1893) is typical of his next series of
metaphysical tragedies. Set in an indeterminate medieval world of dream and
fantasy, the play is an atmospheric, fairy tale allegory in which Love combats
Death and loses and where the scenes exist to present symbols as much as
to develop the simple plot, in which the main characters accidentally meet,
fall in love and have to account for it with their lives, but only after they have
kissed each other in joy and defiance of death. Thresholds, gates, fountains,
forest, or castle communicate a powerful sense of mystery and the opera
Debussy created out of it in 1902 asserted the continuing power of musical
and scenic non-naturalist tradition.
Another strong advocate of the movement was the French symbolist
actor and director, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poe (1869-1940), who is also
responsible for the break-through to public recognition of the religious plays
of the French diplomat Paul Claudel (1868-1955). A friend and disciple of
Mallarmé, and strongly influenced by Rimbaud, Claudel wrote a series of
plays, like Partage de midi (1905), L’Annonce Faite à Marie (1905) and
L’Otage (1909), which dramatized his Catholic faith and repeated, in a variety
of ways, the theme of human love transformed into the spiritual and the
divine. Their style and tone is symbolist, lyrical and ritualistic, with little action
and much poetry, as they rely for their power partly on Claudel’s peculiar
verse. Written for declamation, Caudel’s lines nevertheless have a variety
and subtlety that can fairly be compared with the Shakespearean blank
verse.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
In Britain, Expressionism was felt over a period of time within the work of
individual and very different artists, especially those of European structure.
Thus, in D.H. Lawrence’s later novels one can detect a move towards the
exploration of extreme states, the deeper, rawer realms of the psyche. For
example, in Women in Love (1920) the landscapes, without losing their
naturalism , reflect the intense psychological states of his characters. But
After the Second World War such kind of drama fostered in the 1930s
became the province of radio where the direct appeal to the ear and the
imagination made this medium an appropriate one for its subjective lyricism,
freeing the plays from the physical limitations of the stage and the crudity of
visual symbolism.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
11. Expressionist devices in Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie.
Although Brecht’s plays had first appeared on the English stage in the 1930s
in private club productions, in was only in the 1950s that his plays and
theories made a powerful impact, following the outstanding visit that the
“Berliner Ensemble” (the acting company founded by the German director in
1948) paid to London in 1956, the same year with Osborne’s premiere of
Look Back in Anger.
Vividly contrasting with the naturalistic approach that had dominated
the British stage since Shaw, the productions of Brechtian plays like Mother
Courage or The Caucasian Circle offered an anti-illusionistic model that
proved a revelation for audiences, critics and playwrights themselves.
Nevertheless, since his theoretical writing were not available in translation,
the politics of Brecht’s theatre was obscured, his subsequent influence on the
British stage remaining to a great extent restricted to production values and
ways of acting, i.e. the purely stylistic aspect of the epic theatre.
Thus, a wide range of superficially Brechtian drama appeared on the
English stage in the 1960s and 1970s. This tended to severe epic techniques
from Brecht’s political analysis that the plays were designed to express, and
its effects may be best seen in the directorial output of the time.
Apart from such directorial ventures, other new plays of the 1960s
flirted with fashion and adopted a superficially epic form. Such is the case
with Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960), which put forward Sir
Thomas Moore as a man of great conscience, prepared to risk everything
42 Main Trends in Modern British Drama
Chapter 5 – Epic Theatre and British Variants
against the despotism of the king. But, unlike Mother Courage, or Galileo,
Moore was too much master of his fate to provide much of a commentary on
society, and the episodic scenes, linked by the commentary of a Common
Man, were uninformed by Brecht’s ambiguities. John Osborne’s Luther
(1961) echoed Galileo in style and intention, enhanced by the play using an
episodic structure and ‘gestic’ tableaux like the grouping of peasants with a
cart and a dead body. But the complexity of the central figure, which
simultaneously linked an Oedipus complex with a terrible problem of
digestion, put the emphasis more on the man, and less on his historical
context, such as epic theatre demanded. Arnold Wesker’s Chips with
Everything (1962) also assumed an episodic structure which concentrated on
the ironies of life in the Air Force, while Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of
the Sun (1964), which dealt spectacularly with Pizzaro’s conquest of the Inca
of Peru used a formal epic structure to mask the symbolical and allegorical
thrust of the play.
Task:
Choose one of the following topics to develop into a 4000-word essay of the
argumentative type:
MINIMAL BIBLIOGRAPHY