Introduction to Modern Theatre - Essay Example

Running Head: Introduction to Modern Theatre Introduction to Modern Theatre of the of the Introduction to Modern Theatre The evolutionist historiography is fond f landmarks. Such landmarks are often described as 'reforms' which inaugurate that process f rescuing British theatre from its unrespectable past (and its lower-class patrons in particular), thereby making possible the rise f a leisured, genteel social institution and the gradual emergence into professional respectability f both the actor and the playwright. Eliza Vestris' innovative period as lessee f the Olympic theatre during the early 1830s (during which she introduced magnificent stage properties including candlelabra and Axminster carpets, as well as abolishing playbill puffing and excluding the demimonde from her green room), like Marie Bancroft's introduction f rose-bud chintz and lace antimacassars at the Prince f Wales' theatre three decades later, thus become the first, longed-for glimpses f a middle-class theatrical dawn. By the same token, evolutionist historians have also privileged those plays which most nearly conform to this overarching narrative about the demise f melodrama and the all-conquering triumph f realism. Tom Robertson's cup-and-saucer dramas and the cordial 'goodheartedness' (Jenkins 1991) f Arthur Wing Pinero's farcical protagonists, for example, represent two important staging posts on this Whiggish journey. In passing, it's interesting to note an unacknowledged separation f theatrical spheres in these arguments. Although it is women who are usually portrayed as the heroes f managerial reform, slowly transforming dirty, communal playhouses into elegant, comfortable, quasidomestic arenas, the credit for dramatic reform has invariably been attributed to male playwrights. Several consequences arise from this evolutionist history. First, the 'rise f realism' thesis portrays the theatre f the late 1880s and 1890s as a beacon f dramatic light, at the end f the dark tunnel f institutional decadence and theatrical unrespectability. Not only does this entail a strategic and rather narrow selection f the theatrical record, but, at least as importantly, fin-de-siecle drama and theatrical institutions have acquired the status f self-fulfilling prophecies. In other words, the theatre f the 1890s tends to be valued in direct proportion to its difference from -- and satirical critiques of-Victorian drama rather than in terms f its intricate and complex relationships to earlier conventions and dramatic traditions. Michael Baker's The Rise f the Victorian Actor (1978) and Anthony Jenkins' history, The Making f Victorian Drama (1991) are two influential and distinguished examples f this evolutionist approach. Baker's work traces the gradual emergence f acting as a profession in the nineteenth century. In general, he writes, 'the actor f 1830 was a social and artistic outcast and the theatre an outlawed sector f private enterprise'; (Baker 1978) by the 1880s, however, the actor had finally 'arrived' in Victorian society. The rise f journalism and the new status f the man f letters contributed to the creation f new middlebrow audiences, whilst the emergence f a mass market leisure industry helped to provide a solid framework for the gentrification f the acting profession. For Anthony Jenkins, Victorian theatre can be construed in terms f the eventual liberation f drama from the tyranny f a popular, unthinking public. 'The attempt to rescue British Drama from the theatre's rowdy spectacle', he declares at the opening f his first chapter (pointedly entitled, 'Breaking through the darkness'), 'began a few months before Princess Victoria became Queen'. In Victoria's reign, Jenkins locates the gradual emergence f a 'serious' drama whose genealogy can be traced in the plays f Edward Bulwer Lytton, Tom Robertson, William Gilbert, and Henry Arthur Jones; its apex is represented by George Bernard Shaw's final conversion f the Victorian theatre's 'sideshow' into a momentous 'sacred pulpit'. The standard text on Victorian playwriting is John Russell Stephens' monograph, The Profession f the Playwright: British Theatre 1800-1900 (1992). Stephens' knowledge f the period is both deep and wide, and his account effortlessly weaves together the theatrical careers f hack dramatists like Edward Fitzball and gentleman playwrights such as Arthur Wing Pinero. The Profession f the Playwright is persuasive on the economics f Victorian playwriting and makes perfect sense f the convoluted history which is nineteenth-century dramatic copyright. This is a good point to observe that theatre economics (whether in relation to management, playwriting or spectatorship) is another important aspect f nineteenth-century performance history about which we know perilously little; it is tempting for theatre historians -- and here I plead as guilty as anyone else -- to regard numbers f all kinds (from the capital invested in building, converting and maintaining a theatre, to the wages paid to scene designers, musicians and supernumeraries, let alone the intricate economic relations between theatres, charities and local business) as tedious details to be swept off into historical oblivion wherever possible. But the economics f copyright, to take one example, profoundly shaped the nature f modern theatre in Europe. Only in 1886 did the Berne Convention introduce reciprocal copyright protection in fourteen European countries; the Convention also gave authors rights f translation in their plays for ten years after publication, a measure which effectively prohibited the highly profitable trade in adapting French plays for the British stage. As Tracy Davis has recently pointed out, the Berne Convention 'offers a chance to fundamentally recalibrate our understanding f the impulses f the Independent Theatre Movement and the dissemination f theatrical modernism on nationalistic lines'. (Davis 1996) Following on from Davis' argument about the causal relationship between copyright legislation and the economics f theatrical modernism, it is worth pointing out that translation and adaptation for the nineteenth-century theatre represent important cultural practices currently ripe for investigation. For decades, theatre historians have simply echoed the conviction f many nineteenth-century commentators that translation is a derivative cultural activity, the ubiquity f which only serves to confirm the degraded character f the Victorian stage. Such a fallacy, however, has blinded us to the significant role played by European dramatists such as Pixerecourt and Kotzebue in the generic ferment which characterised British drama during the 1790s and early 1800s. (Hays 1996) We have neglected too the controversies which surrounded the production in London f French plays by writers such as Alexandre Dumas and Charles Lecocq during the 1860s and 1870s. (Stephens 1980) Moreover, adaptation and translation also became crucial forms by which women represented themselves, albeit equivocally, as dramatic authors. The position f Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne Plumptre as translators f Kotzebue, and, at the end f the century, the leading role f women such as Catherine Ray and Frances Lord in the cultural transmission f Ibsen's plays, raises interesting and, as yet, unanswered questions about the intricate relationships between translation, gender and definitions f dramatic authorship. (Moody 2000) Women playwrights are not quite invisible in The Profession f the Playwright, but the scope f Stephens' book does tend by default to exclude women. For the frame f reference here is the professional playwright, by which Stephens means someone who earns (his) living by playwriting. 'After 1850', the author declares, 'there was no shortage f female dramatic authors, but the majority were amateurs and few achieved any special distinction. Many wrote only one play, or were known only in the provinces, and those who made it to London usually advanced no further than the afternoon matinee'. (Stephens 1992) In its own terms, this argument is fair enough. But the problem with Stephens' definitions is that his criteria for success ignore the various obstacles (social, economic, institutional) which stood in the way f women entering the professional arena and earning their living as playwrights. No wonder, then, that Kerry Powell's monograph, Women and Victorian Theatre (1997) includes a chapter tellingly entitled 'The impossibility f women playwrights'. Powell writes especially well about the representation f maternity in Victorian plays by women including such writers as Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, Aimee Beringer and Dorothy Leighton. His study is also important for the connections it reveals between women's writing for the stage, and novels about the theatre written by women (some f whom were also playwrights and/or actresses) such as Geraldine Jewsbury. Throughout this period, Women and Victorian Theatre argues, the theatre was 'a battleground for competing ideologies f gender'. (Powell 1997) Actresses felt intoxicated by the power they could exert over men as performers; the masculine response to the actress' relative independence and agency, however, was to circumscribe and nullify its threat by interpreting female performers in terms f prostitution, madness and disease. The myth f the actress as prostitute, then, represents an attempt to destroy her power, or at least to relocate that power within the boundaries f male fantasy. The first book-length study devoted to women's theatrical writing is the groundbreaking collection f essays, Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth Century Britain, edited by Tracy Davis and Ellen Donkin (1999). Women and Playwriting refutes, both implicitly and explicitly, an evolutionist history f the Victorian stage. The volume also demonstrates that the history f British women playwrights in Britain cannot be assimilated into that feminist narrative about the rebellion f women writers against a masculine literary tradition. In the introduction, the editors present the contributors' interests as defined by the reasons for a 'widespread amnesia about women's playwriting activity and the ways that this amnesia touches other types f women's theatrical work, writing work, and official participation in nineteenth-century culture'. (Davis 1999) Sociability is the concept which underpins this re-viewing f women's position as writers in nineteenth-century British theatre. Rather than narrowly interpreting this contribution in terms f women's visibility and commercial success on the West End professional stage, Women and Playwriting broadens the scope f inquiry to include women writing for East End playhouses like the Britannia (see the essay by Heidi Holder) and Sappho plays written for the closet (Denise A. Walen). Women and Playwriting also includes essays on Catherine Gore, winner f the Haymarket's competition for a five-act comedy f modern life in 1844 with her modern satire, Quid Pro Quo (Katherine Newey's essay charts the relationships between the work f women playwrights and definitions f the 'national drama'), the hybrid character f genre in women's playwriting (Susan Bennett), and the reception f women playwrights in the dramatic press (Gay Gibson Cima). (Newey 1823-1844) Several f these pieces (see especially Jacky Bratton's essay on Jane Scott, the writer manager at the Sans Pareil theatre, and Jim Davis' account f Sara Lane, joint manager at the Britannia during the 1840s), also prompt us to consider in quite radical ways how we define what theatrical authorship entails, especially in relation to the making f plays by women. The longest consideration, Cesare Cases's essay, criticized Szondi for failing to distinguish between first-rate works, such as plays by Ibsen and Strindberg that were genuinely avant-garde, and later works, such as the plays f Arthur Miller and Thornton W'fider, in which innovations had become cliches. And recently Steve Giles has published an essay on the book's logical flaws. But Theorie des modemen Dramas has had little impact on the way the history f modern drama has been told since 1956 or on the interpretation f individual dramatists or their works. One f the best examples f how Szondi might be used in a purely historical manner occurs at the beginning f an essay by Kjerstin Noren on the plays f Lars Noren. Arguing against interpretations f Lars Noren's work that see it as a throwback to naturalism, Kjerstin Noren uses Theorie des modemen Dramas in order to situate his plays in a tradition f modern drama that shows the increasing dissolution f bourgeois forms f communication: Noren's plays represent a further development f non-naturalist tendencies present in Strindberg in that they suggest the dissolution f any kind f unifying subjectivity, whether it be construed as a lyric or an epic "I." Kjerstin Noren's perceptive use f Szondi nevertheless has the drawback f detaching the historical from the theoretical aspect f his work. Szondi presents Ibsen and Strindberg, as well as other" dramatists f crisis" such as Hauptmann, Maeterlinck, and Chekhov, in relation to this notion f absolute drama, so that the origins f modern drama appear to be a failure, rather than a creation f something new, either ex nihilo or out f the tortured psyche f a late-nineteenth-century man. He argues that Ibsen's plays are marked, flawed, by an attempt to use old or inappropriate forms to present new material, an argument that many critics have made about A Doll House or Ghosts in relation to the well-made play. Szondi, however, turns to two late plays, Rosmersholm (1886) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896), which he compares to Sophocles's Oedipus, in order to argue that Ibsen's dramas were fundamentally novelistic. In contrast to Greek tragedies, which make present a single aspect f a well-known story, Ibsen's plays represent the past in the present: like realistic novels, they evoke an absence, the invisible passage f time or the social world as a totality that can never be experienced directly, only imagined. What Szondi is suggesting in his elliptical argument is that Ibsen's plays already point to an allegorical conception f drama in which the stage represents the ghosts f the past--Ibsen's Ghosts clearly haunts Szondi's own argument--as well as a psychological process. References Jenkins, Anthony, The Making f Victorian Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 6. Baker, Michael, The Rise f the Victorian Actor (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 18. Davis, review editorial in Nineteenth Century Theatre 24.1 (Summer 1996), 37. Hays, Michael and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, eds, Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence f a Genre (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996), 83101. Cf. J.R. Stephens' excellent survey, The Censorship f English Drama 1824-1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), chapter 5. Moody, Jane, 'Suicide and Translation: The Dramaturgy f Elizabeth Inchbald and Anne Plumptre', in Catherine B. Burroughs, ed., Uncloseting Women in British Romantic Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2000). Stephens, John Russell, The Profession f the Playwright: British Theatre, 1800-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3-4. Powell, Kerry, Women and Victorian Theatre (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997). Davis, Tracy C. and Ellen Donkin, eds, Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3-4. Newey, Katherine, '"From a female pen": The Proper Lady as Playwright in the West End Theatre, 1823-1844', in Davis and Donkin, Women and Playwriting, 193-211. Read More