English drama from the 1890s to the 1960s

Modernism in drama

• a hundred-year-long break

  • since the golden age of the comedy of manners, there was no significant drama available for stage presentation

• serious drama is confined to books in the 19th century

  • literary (poetic) drama: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Byron

  • commercial musical theater: the Savoy opera

  • the plays of the Romantic poets kinda flopped

  • the stage was kept alive by classics

• drama is brought back to the stage by Modernism

  • revolutionary views, voices and visions of the 19th century

    • philosophy (Nietzche, Marx)

    • theology (Renan)

    • psychology (Freud)

    • natural sciences (Darwin)

  • beginnings of modern drama: Ibesen and Ibsenism

    • Ibsen’s theater of revolt: social and moral criticism, crisis of values, relativism

• new forms of abstaction in place of realist and naturalist representations

• comedy of ideas: dramatic genre that combines comedy with political, philosophical and controversial attitudes —→ the aim: make an impact upon the audience’s social conscience as well as upon their emotions

• founding fathers of dramatic modernism: G.B. Shaw, Oscar Wide, Arthur Miller

1. The aesthetic movement

• its origins: French symbolism, the pre-raffaelites, secession, art movo

• phylosophy: the rejection of Victorian taste and morality, l’art pour l’art

• scope: lietarure, fine arts, theater, criticism

• forums and organs: periodicals, art galleries, saloons, theaters

• Oscar Wide, G.B Shaw

2. The Irish/ Celtic Renaissance

• W.B. Yeats

  • his aesthetic program and dramatic principles: anti-modernist, nationalism, ruralism, folklorism, symbolism

  • his plays of Gaelic, Christian and symbolistic inspiration

• J.M. Synge

  • 1907 | The Playboy of the Western World

    • genre: satirical comedy nearing farce with mock-tragic undertones

    • themes: classical and national inspiration, tragic and comic topoi (topos), the criticism of typical Irish-character-traits, the rebel as hero, fiction vs. reality

3. T.S. Eliot and poetic drama

• his aesthetic view: the importance of tradition in modernism, the role of poetry in drama

The Theater of the Absurd

• 1961 | term coined by Martin Esslin

• causes: loss of values, decline of religious faith

• dealing with the absurd nature of human existence, human purposelessness in a universe without meaning or value

• evoke the absurd by abandoning logical form, character and dialogue together with realistic illusion

• e.g.: Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot/ Waiting for Godot (1952)

• dramatic traditions, conventional features of the genre

  • rejection, rebellion, revolt, reform

  • anthropological, intellectual, moral, psychological, and social concerns

  • suffering

  • communication/ dialogue - its limits and defects

  • rituals vs. automatisms - proactive vs. mechanical action

  • diction: language and its registers, poetic charge, figuration

  • stage imagery - the visual “language” of the theater

  • coreography, movement

• dramatic inventions

  • negation vs. assertion

  • the “uncertainty principle” the “general state of relativity”

  • relational distancing, emotional indifference

  • discord, disharmony

  • devalation, degradation, diminution

  • repetition, cyclical composition

  • reduction

  • minimalization

  • deconstruction

  • modal and attitudinal “equivocatoonal”

• convention of clowning and farce to represent the impossibility of purposeful action and the paralysis of human aspiration

  • farce: a kind of comedy that inspires hilarity mixed with panic and cruelty in its audience through an increasingly rapid improbable series of confusions, physical disasters, and sexual innuendos among

• stock character: a stereotyped character easily recognized by readers or audiences from recurrent experiences in literary or folk-tradition

• stock situations: incidents or plot-elements that reoccur in fiction or in drama (e.g.: mistaken identity)

• anti-theater/ new theater: no conflict, no plot —→ just the pattern of poetic images

• no dialogues —→ only clichés, conventionalized speech, slogans

• problem of communication between people

• isolation

• anti-literary attitude: turning away from language as an instrument for the expression of the deepest level of meaning

• action is often in opposition with words

• fantasy and dream reality

• verbal nonsense

• 1947 | adaptation of Kafka’s novel, The Trial, was the first play fully representative of the theater of the absurd

Kitchen-sink drama

• before the 1950s | working class was often depicted stereotypically in Noel Coward’s Drawing Room comedies —→ kitchen-sink drama intended to change this

• new wave of realistic drama from the late 1950s —→ depicting the family lives of working-class characters

• these plays are socially and politically motivated

• attention is on the destruction of moral values caused by consumerism and the break down of community

• dealng with social alienation, claustrophobia and frustrations of provincial life on low incomes

• John Osborne: Look Back in Anger

• political views on these writers were intially labeled as radical, sometimes even anarchic

The “Angries”

• tradition of the working-class novel

• left-wing radicalism co-exists with rejection of ideological assumptions of Marx as well as Freud

• suspicion of experimenting

• rejection of Modernism and of further experimenting after WWII

• the climate became unfavorable for innovation

• the “angry generation“

  • got their names from Osborne’s Lock Back in Anger and Leslie Paul’s Angry Young Man

• not a coherent movement

• common themes: feeling ill at ease in the positions they hold in society —→ want and do achieve more suitable ones

• 1954 | Kingsley Amis’s Lucky JIm

  • the hero personifies the frustration of young generation intellectuaés

  • target satire: middle class pretentiousness and academic hypocricy

  • much low comedy, things sraightening out: Jim Dixon, the

    hero, rewarded both by love of rich girl and an lucrative job at

    the end

• 1957 | John Braine’s Room at the Top

  • frustratio as the source of anger is very directly related to class

  • The hero (Joe Lampton) with strong working-class

    consciousness is determined to achieve “the good life”

    knowingly and symbolically he betrays his class, abandons

    one woman (Alice) for the sake of another (Susan, daughter of

    rich businessman)

Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1952-55)

• first significant achievement of the theatre of the absurd in English 

  • made Beckett’s name known worldwide

  • greatest hit of the post-war era

• according to the subtitle: tragic comedy

  • may be defined as a genre-less problem play

  • or as a composition of post-modern morality play

  • genre-specific features:

    • reductions, minimalism

    • frequent use of repetitive structures

    • contrast of binary oppositions

    • communicational gaps

    • pauses, silences

    • grotesque mechanical routines of circus-performances

    • burlesque of the silent era

    • puns, often wordplays: primary sources of humour

• purposless → man is lost, all human actions become senseless, absurd, useless

• does not tell a story, and does not have a plot → explores a static situation where essentially nothing happens, nobody comes and nobody goes (~ passive Canterbury Tales)

  • action of the state: prolonged state of inactivity

  • set somewhere between the past (recorded by fragmentary memories) and the future (anticipated by empty promises)

  • preoccupation with time: the ultimate source of the anxiety that determines their existential state

• story seems meaningless or absurd

• progression is circular rather than linear

• Act II repeats the same action as Act I

  • symmetrical structure: two Acts, two messenger boys, and two sets ofcharacters, that is Vladimir and Estragon, and Pozzo and Lucky

  • structural pattern of the play is both parallel and circular: monotonous sameness, and perpetual recurrence, indicating that this cyclic pattern will continue like an unbroken circle till the end of time. ‘We are waiting for Godot’ is an endless refrain that occurs in both acts

  • the futility and the monotony of such a wait is the link that holds both Acts together → heightened by sparse stage decor

• the play ends in the middle, the characters are still waiting

• charcater motivation is unclear → actions and dialogue may seem nonsensical or surreal

  • there’s no causal sequence to observe, things happen without clear causes

• meaning is subjective and ambiguous

• Theater of the Absurd is sometimes referred to as nihilistic → it believes in nothing

• the exstentialist recognizes the meaningless but decleares it the responsibility of every human being to make our own meanings (create meanings)

• people aren’t heroic → often absurd = can be tragic and comic (tragicomedy)

• carefully crafted dialogue and meaningful speeches are too contrived

  • language is not the wonderful tool we think it is → can be the source of all our most damaging illusions (using it carelessly to say nothing or using it to oppress)

• Beckett has tried to strip away all outer contexts, everything external that might help you situate the action and the characters, anything that might give the play an obvious, intended “meaning”

• The shape of a place (set): a country road, a tree → it could be anywhere = universal

• there is hardly any sound → silences stand out more and they become the play’s theme, even seems to take on a character of its own - an inotrelable void, a nothingness the characters desperately try to fill with their chatter

• lighting: day turns rapidly to night → surreal, dreamlike effect that amplifies the theme of uncertain time

• The dilemma intensifies in Act II: the characters have a harder time passing the time

  • Gogo is more desperate to leave

  • Pozzo is more helpless

  • things are a little more absurd

• the two Acts are about the same happenings with little alternations (Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for Godot; Pozzo and Lucky arrives, although they are a little bit changed: Pozzo is blind)

1. Characters

2. their names remind us of the medieval morality plays (they tell the general identity of the characters)

• Vladimir (Russian) - seems to be more responsible and mature (the head), also addressed as Didi by Estragon

• Estragon (French) - seems to be weak, helpless and always looking for Vladimir’s protection (the body/ heart) - addressed as Gogo by Vladimir

• Pozzo (Italian) - the person who passes by the spot, where Vladimir and Estragon are waiting beside a leafless tree, becomes blind in Act II and does not remember meeting Vladimir and Estragon

• Lucky (English) - represented as slave to Pozzo, carries his bags and stool, in Act I,

  he entertains by ‘dancing’ and ‘thinking aloud’, however, in Act II he is found dumb

• messenger boy - he appears at the end of each act to inform Vladimir that

  Godot is going to come on the next day

• Godot - the man for whom Vladimir and Estragon are waiting unendingly, he never appears, his name is often thought to refer to God

2. Act I

• the two Tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a leafless tree for Godot passing time in verbal games

• the play follows two consecutive days in the lives of a pair of men who divert themselves while they wait expectantly and unsuccessfully for someone named Godot who never arrives

• they claim that they know him, but in fact they have know acquaintance with him as they admit that they would not recognise him if seen

• to engage themselves, they sing, play games, eat, talk, sleep and contemplate suicide— anything "to hold the terrible silence at bay"

• the play opens with the character Estragon struggling to remove his boot

  from his foot → gives up: "Nothing to be done." → Vladimir takes up the thought and muses on it, the implication being that nothing is a thing that has to be done

• Estragon finally succeeds in removing his boot, he looks and feels inside but finds nothing. Just prior to this, Vladimir peers into his hat → the motif recurs throughout in the play

• two characters, Pozzo and his slave Lucky arrive on the scene, where Pozzo treats his slave rather horribly

  • Pozzo and Lucky have been seen to represent a sort of double of Vladimir and Estragon, with similar roles, anxieties and incertitudes

  • Vladimir observes that they are "tied to Godot" as Lucky is tied to Pozzo

• Lucky has to ‘dance’ and ‘think aloud’ to entertain his master and the tramps

• after sometime they leave and a boy arrives, who is obviously a messenger from Godot, informs the tramps that Godot will definitely come the next day

3. Act II

• there is no change in the scene

• opens with Vladimir singing a round about a dog which serves to illustrate

  the cyclical nature of the play’s universe, and also points toward the play's debt to the carnivalesque, music hall traditions and vaudeville comedy

• a bit of realization on Vladimir's part that the world they are trapped in evinces convoluted progression (or lack thereof) of time → begins to see that although there is notional evidence of linear progression, basically he is living the same day over and over

• continuing to wait, Pozzo and Lucky enter again, but this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky is dumb

  • the rope is now much shorter and Lucky – who has acquired a new hat – leads Pozzo, rather than being driven by him

  • Pozzo has lost all notion of time, and assures them he cannot remember meeting them the day before, and that he does not expect to remember the current day’s events when they are over Lucky and Pozzo depart

• once again Pozzo and Lucky leavue, and the boy arrives with the same message

• though determined to leave, the tramps do not move

• the two again consider suicide but their rope, Estragon’s belt, breaks in two when they tug on it → his trousers fall down, but he doesn’t notice till Vladimir tells him to pull them up. They resolve to bring a more suitable piece and hang themselves the next day, if Godot fails to arrive

• only the tree has a few leaves in Act II, otherwise there is no change in the act

4. Message

• illustrates an attitude toward man's experience on earth: the poignancy, oppression, camaraderie, hope, corruption, and bewilderment of human experience that can only be reconciled in mind and art of the absurdist

• Does the human condition have meaning?

• the illusion of faith—that deeply embedded hope that Godot might come—still flickers in the minds of Vladimir and Estragon

• political: allegory of the cold war

• existentialist: broadly speaking existentialists hold there are certain questions that everyone must deal with (if they are to take human life seriously), questions such as death, the meaning of human existence and the place of God in human existence

  • hey believe that life doesn't have an "objective" or universally known value, but that the individual must create value by affirming it and living it, not by talking about it

• ultimate freedom of action, there is no omnipotent God

• we only know that we are going to die, and we live our life in a responsible way

• suicide: seems to be a free option for everyone, but according to Beckett, this is the misunderstanding of the absurd

• Godot = God ???

  • epentance, original sin (existential guilt)

  • Vladimir likes thinking about philosophical questions

  • they imagine Godot as a man with white beard and a flock of sheep (very God-like image)

  • this connection is debatable, since in French there is no linguistic correspondance between God and Godot, as God in French is Dieux (it was originally written in French, so we don’t know if Beckett’s intention with the English version was to create this link)

• the characters are rather universal figures

• no sense of identity: we know that we have identity if we can remember and

  project our consciousness into the future → a continuity of consciousness

  through time (John Locke’s narrative identity)

• change vs progress: there is change (tree), but no progress