Chapter 1

Realism, naturalism, and symbolism

The two decades from 1880–1900 are astonishing not just for the new ideas about drama and the radical changes in theatre practice and playwriting, but for the pace of those developments. More changes and upheavals are packed into these twenty years than perhaps any other period of modern drama.

Very few people originally saw some of the plays we now consider worth studying, like Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses, which exposed the problem of slum landlords in London. In 1892, the play was given its premiere by the Independent Theatre (formed in part to get around stage censorship) before a tiny audience. In the same year Charley’s Aunt, an entertaining romp that hardly anyone now reads or sees, enjoyed a run of nearly 1,500 performances. To put this in perspective, one hundred performances is about the length of a respectable run. In a short introduction to modern drama, it is impossible to give equal attention to both kinds of plays, and such histories tend to favour the progressive and subversive over the popular and ‘merely’ entertaining. But it is worth bearing in mind that for each play under discussion, there were dozens of plays like Charley’s Aunt.

One of the unique features of modern drama is that some of the key performances took place in inauspicious or ephemeral circumstances; ‘great reckonings in small rooms’, as director and scholar Herbert Blau reminds us, that have taken on canonical status. Playwright and actress Elizabeth Robins recalled seeing the ‘poverty-struck’ premiere of A Doll’s House in London in 1889 with its little-known actors in a ‘pokey, dingy theatre’ and ‘sparse, rather dingy audience’. For her, this made it ‘less like a play than like a personal meeting—with people and issues that seized us and held us, and wouldn’t let us go’. It is a paradox of theatre history that many of the plays we now regard as pioneering were at first fleeting and precarious affairs, and that in many cases performance precedes text.

Yet even as this new style of playwriting and production that Robins is describing—realism—was taking hold, many playwrights were seeking ways of staving off the inevitable passivity that an invisible audience would fall prey to, sitting quietly in the dark and watching events unfold. Laurence Senelick writes that because of censorship across Europe and the ‘self-protective nature of theatre managements, the stage, as was its mandate, tended to endorse community values and reinforce the audience in its prejudices’. Modern drama emerges through its attempts to shock the bourgeoisie, to provoke and outrage it, to prod it out of that passive and self-contented state. Yet the ‘spectator as stooge’ motif had to be constantly renegotiated, as bourgeois audiences became hip to the attacks playwrights levied at them and, deftly absorbing each new shock, could very quickly grow bored.

Precedents

There were in fact earlier works for the stage well before this period that signal a startlingly modern theatricality yet don’t fit into a too-neat timeline of modern drama that would have it start in 1880. One such example is Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1837). This unfinished fragment of a play, later to inspire the opera by Alban Berg, concerns a man driven to murdering his wife partly through jealousy and partly through his extreme psychological state brought about by being the subject of a mad doctor’s experiment in which he can only eat peas. The episodic nature of the play—consisting of discrete episodes rather than causally connected, organically linked scenes—as well as its naturalistic qualities of character and setting (suggesting the struggle between humans and their environment as well as their often ungovernable and violent impulses) are often invoked as proto-modernist; the play seems sixty years ahead of its time. Similarly, Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (1867) seems presciently modern with its episodic structure and vivid anti-hero searching for (and shirking) the concept of selfhood. ‘Be thyself—enough!’ proclaim the trolls who lure Peer into their subterranean world, and the rest of the play charts his adventures as he tries to come to terms with what it means to be oneself fully.

Peer Gynt is written in verse, as were so many plays of the period. But in the 1870s Ibsen permanently changed the nature of drama by renouncing poetry in favour of prose. He felt that writing in verse was out of sync with a modern literature that ‘submitted problems to debate’, as the influential Danish literary critic Georg Brandes put it. Ibsen went against the idealism then dominating art and announced that what inspired him was ‘the opposite … the dregs and sediment of one’s own nature’ (what Yeats would call ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart’). Modern playwrights have followed suit, challenging or entirely reconfiguring the idea of the hero or heroine, blurring neat distinctions between good and bad and suggesting that ordinary people contain the stuff of heroism and, conversely, that the aristocrat is no more worthy of representation than the butcher.

Ibsen and the drama of everyday life

To convey ‘the dregs and sediment’ of human nature, Ibsen turned not just to prose but the prosaic, the ordinary. From The Pillars of Society (1877) onwards he used everyday language to create dialogue that sounds ordinary but contains deep psychological nuances. Characters hesitate, interrupt one another, fail to finish their thoughts, and rarely use long speeches or soliloquies, but they are profound and fully fleshed out in ways that belie the superficial simplicity of their language. ‘Mrs Alving, you are a very guilty mother’, says Pastor Manders in Act I of Ghosts. After a silence, she replies (‘slowly, and with control’, according to the stage directions):

mrs alving: You have had your say, Pastor Manders. And tomorrow you will make a speech in my husband’s memory. I shall not speak tomorrow. But now I’m going to talk to you just as you have talked to me.

Manders: Of course, you want to make excuses for what you did …

mrs alving: No. I just want to tell you something.

Manders: Well?

She proceeds to tell him that he knows nothing about what really happened to her in the past, that he abandoned her to her miserable marriage instead of helping her as he could have done, that he—a man of the cloth—is a coward and a hypocrite.

This is a central moment, rendered in deceptively simple language: Mrs Alving is finding her voice, speaking her mind, right in front of the audience. The stripped-back quality of such dialogue shone through in the 2013 production of Ghosts directed by Stephen Unwin that toured England (and that brilliantly recreated the sets designed by Edvard Munch for a 1906 production of the play by Max Reinhardt), in a version that underscored how this speech is one of many in the play that show Mrs Alving searching for a voice as she repeatedly insists ‘let me speak … I want to say … ’, all the while surrounded by forceful male figures who threaten to drown her out.

And the language fits the situation. Ibsen depicted domestic interactions and social problems that every audience recognized: shallow, unhappy marriages; unfulfilled wives; financial struggles and bankruptcy; pollution and ecological damage due to modern industry; political corruption and cover-up. But he gave these everyday settings and characters depth and context, and in so doing challenged assumptions about right and wrong. In A Doll’s House (1879), Nora discusses her secrets with Mrs Linde, telling her how she had to forge her dying father’s signature to borrow the money needed to take her husband to Italy for his health, a trip that saved his life. She sees nothing wrong with her forgery since it had a happy outcome and harmed no one. And we have to take her word for it. All this has happened years before the play begins; Ibsen picks up where most dramatists would have ended, focusing on the aftermath of events rather than the events themselves, and the audience needs to pay close attention to this complex exposition scene and reconstruct the past as bits of it are gradually revealed. A woman at thirty is much more interesting than her newlywed self, Ibsen seems to be saying, and likewise plays that end with marriage are much less interesting than plays that show what happens after it.

Yet far from being an exercise in objective realism, there is a theatrical and performative undertone to A Doll’s House (whose title in English translation hardly captures the pointed strangeness of the original Dano-Norwegian ‘et dukkehjem’, which translates as ‘a doll home’; where, Ibsen asks, are women ‘at home’ in a world of double standards?). The play suggests that identity is an artificial construct: we watch Nora watching herself acting, creating (and recreating) a role for herself. If it can be created, it can also be destroyed and made anew, with better ingredients. This is another reason why those dramatic events are not shown but recounted by Nora; the audience sees them through her eyes, constructs action and character through her verbal cues. The play riffs on this idea of performance of self, and by the end gender roles are reversed: in their final discussion scene Nora speaks calmly and ‘imperturbably’ while Torvald ‘jumps up’ and ‘struggles to keep his composure’. She takes control and acts decisively, he breaks down, pleads, and nearly becomes hysterical. In a series of brief but devastating exchanges (Torvald: ‘No man sacrifices his honour for the one he loves’. Nora: ‘Millions of women have done so’) Ibsen gives us only, in Emile Zola’s term, ‘strictly useful words’.

Naturalism in the theatre

Zola insisted that modern theatre should take its inspiration from the increasingly scientific context of late 19th-century Europe. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and, especially, The Descent of Man (1871) opened up new possibilities for art to explore the relationship of humans to their environment as well as to each other. How far are we shaped by our environment (which we can usually do something about), and how far is it heredity that determines who we are (and which we can’t do anything about)? Today we would call this debate ‘nature versus nurture’.

Zola urged dramatists to foreground this scientific thinking in their plays. ‘Nothing is stable in society,’ he wrote, ‘everything is carried along by sustained motion.’ Darwinian natural selection showed that species change over time rather than remaining fixed, and this in turn called into question the notion of an overall design or plan in nature. No one was directing nature’s development; it was all down to randomness and blind chance. The one thing that was certain was that things changed; and this essential quality of life is also at the heart of most dramas, which reveal the processes of change in people’s circumstances, stories, and character. Zola wanted to see people of ‘flesh and bones on the stage … scientifically analyzed’. He aligned himself with ‘anatomists, analysts … [and] compilers of human data’.

Some playwrights, although attracted to this idea, were uneasy about the implication that theatre was merely a vehicle for a scientifically exact rendering of life. Strindberg—whose career, like Ibsen’s, went through several distinct phases and who was himself deeply attracted to science—hailed Zola’s words and produced Miss Julie (1888), proclaiming a new kind of drama that distinguished between the kind of ‘misunderstood naturalism’ that ‘photographs everything but actually reveals nothing’ and the ‘great naturalism’ that depicts the ‘great battles’ and delights in the conflict between powerful human forces. Above all, he urged dramatists to view reality subjectively, rather than attempt neutrally to reflect it; for instance, Miss Julie’s exploration of the inescapable forces that shape and drive us, and the pressures of the environment on the individual, are strongly informed by a misogyny that attributes Julie’s erring behaviour to her mother’s feminism, as a result of which Julie is ‘half woman, half man’.

Miss Julie shows the devastating outcome of sexual attraction between the aristocratic Julie and her servant Jean. Their sexual encounter is not shown, of course—that would not be feasible on the stage—but occurs offstage during a dance held by the peasants on the estate. We see the dance, and we can imagine what is going on in the next room. When the couple re-emerges, Jean denounces his conquest and punctures her desperate dream of their escape to start a new life elsewhere: ‘Menial’s whore, lackey’s harlot, shut your mouth and get out of here! Are you the one to lecture me for being coarse?’ he says to her. Seeing that he does not care for her, and knowing that there is no future for her now that she has ‘fallen’ both sexually and in terms of class, Julie commits suicide.

Fallen women were everywhere in plays and in fiction, truly a 19th-century type, and they invariably committed suicide, met with some fatal accident, or died of disease, restoring moral order to the world they had disrupted while briefly titillating audiences with their overt sexuality. Miss Julie follows this pattern; so does Henry Arthur Jones’s The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894) and Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), which caused a sensation for its sympathetic treatment of the fallen woman, portrayed by the leading actress, Mrs Patrick Campell. The difference between this play and Wilde’s contemporaneous A Woman of No Importance is illuminating: both feature fallen women, yet where Paula Tanqueray dies of shame, Wilde’s Mrs Arbuthnot defiantly declares that it was worth it—if she had to do it all again she would. ‘Child of my shame, be still the child of my shame!’ Far from dying, by the end of the play she dismisses her seducer as ‘a man of no importance’.

Old forms, new voices

The plays I have discussed so far as examples of the new realism actually contain elements of two important 19th-century theatrical forms: melodrama and the well-made play. Melodramas involved stock characters such as the young ingénue, the hero, the villain, and a great deal of suspense as well as breathtaking stage scenery that included full-scale train crashes, waterfalls, burning forests, and watery caves. In the early 1850s, stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sensationally depicted Eva’s escape across the ice floes pursued by Legree and his yapping hounds.

But as entertaining as these melodramatic spectacles were, audiences wanted more substance. Already in the 1860s, T.W. Robertson in England introduced greater realism on stage through his ‘cup and saucer’ domestic dramas. Characters conversed in natural language and discussed familiar topics like marriage and courtship. Even scenes set in foreign lands, as in the Crimean War hut setting of Ours (1866), were domesticated: a wooing young couple makes a roly-poly pudding on stage, turning the exotic into the cosily English. Although the characters are not psychologically well developed and the plays can verge on sentimentality, Robertson brought natural, everyday dialogue to his dramas. But the course he seemed to be carving out for the theatre was diverted by the overwhelming popularity of the well-made play, a French import whose key exponents were Sardou, Dumas fils, and Scribe.

The pièce bien faite, which came to dominate European theatre in the latter half of the 19th century, involved a complicated plot, recognizable character types, a plethora of items (jewellery, handkerchiefs, letters) discovered at key moments leading to identities revealed, risqué situations, and fallen women (think of the high-class courtesan in La Dame aux Camélias). Wilde’s society dramas consistently send up such devices (‘What is this?’ cries Mabel Chiltern in An Ideal Husband, ‘Someone has dropped a diamond brooch!’) as well as challenging the condemnation of the fallen woman. The well-made play typically followed a trajectory of exposition, climax, and dénouement (a satisfying resolution wrapping up the final scenes of exciting action). This is what Zola contemptuously dismissed as the ‘theatre of fabrication’, which he hoped to be replaced one day by a ‘stage of observation’. Although the term ‘well-made’ sounds like it should be a compliment, it is in fact quite the opposite.

Ibsen recrafted this type of drama so that rather than ending with a climax and resolution, his plays ended with a discussion scene that analysed the problem that the play had laid bare but did not resolve it. As the curtain comes down on Ghosts, an agonized Mrs Alving stands undecided as to whether to administer the fatal dose of morphine to her son; the burden is on the audience to imagine what she does next. At the end of A Doll’s House, Nora simply walks out, presumably for good, and there is no indication of what she would—or indeed could—do next, since as she has just explained she has no proper education, no skills, and no money; how could she even do the one acceptable job for a genteel woman at the time (governess)? Stage and prose sequels proliferated, including one by Shaw, imagining what happened to Nora after the curtain had come down, and at least one German production changed the ending so that Nora sank to the floor at Torvald’s feet in abject recognition that if she left she would be failing in her duties as a mother (a scene Ibsen himself had to provide, due to inadequate copyright protection for dramatic authors at the time).

In short, Ibsen’s plays showed the kinds of people and problems that his bourgeois audiences recognized as their own. One critic at the time imagined married couples going home after A Doll’s House sitting silently at opposite sides of their carriages, in shock at seeing a play that mirrored—and dissected—their own unsatisfactory relationships. Ibsen’s characters collapsed the distinctions between good and bad that had helped to define melodrama. Krogstad and Torvald are both sympathetic in their own ways, and they too learn truths about themselves and their socially conditioned expectations. Ibsen shows that we are all victims of societal conventions and false ideals. Yet he was equally capable of questioning his own zeal to expose the lies at the foundation of social structures. In The Wild Duck (1884), the truth about a couple’s relationship, and a girl’s true parentage, is revealed, but only to the despair of the child, who commits suicide. The play asks: what good did the revelation of truth do? People need their sustaining life-lies.

Comic relief

Oscar Wilde’s theatre, transmuting Ibsen’s ideas to the modes of comedy and farce, likewise champions the lie, the mask, the innocuous deception, as in the ‘bunburying’ of The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He skewers bourgeois notions of earnestness, good conduct, and morality. A man’s name matters more to his future wife than his character, and that name must be Ernest or nothing. A young woman fabricates her engagement to a man she has just met, producing letters, diary entries, and an engagement ring to prove their courtship. The warm friendship that two young women profess for each other when they have only just met turns in an instant to animosity when they discover (erroneously, it turns out) that they are rivals for the same man. An aristocratic and imposing mother sizes her future son-in-law up: ‘Do you smoke?’ ‘Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.’ ‘I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.’

George Bernard Shaw admired Wilde’s verbal fireworks, and made wit one of his own dramatic weapons, the sugar that coats his bitter pills. He began as a music and theatre critic but, on encountering Ibsen’s works, turned his hand to playwriting in the mid-1890s, launching a career that spanned over five decades, producing dozens of original plays, and bringing lasting innovations to theatrical practice (see the discussion of the Court Theatre in Chapter 2). His Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), which depicts prostitution as if it were just like any other job, was banned by the Lord Chamberlain and had to wait until 1925 for its first public performance in London (see Box 1).

Box 1 Censorship

Theatrical censorship in Britain lasted from 1737 till 1968. Playwrights had to submit their scripts to the Lord Chamberlain, who would then decide whether the play should be granted a licence for performance. Very often he would require changes to the script before it could be performed, usually removing political, sexual, or otherwise morally suspect material. Sometimes he would refuse to license a play, as in the case of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893).

Shaw protested, like so many others, against theatrical censorship and got around it by working with independent theatre companies, staging new European dramas as well as his own plays in private venues and by subscription. Others, like Wilde, ingeniously evaded censorship by burying their sharp social criticism beneath a shimmering surface wit and seemingly innocuous situations that seemed to follow the formula of the well-made play while subtly undermining it.

Wilde’s epigrams, hinging on deliciously witty paradox—such as ‘Nothing succeeds like excess’—disarmed audiences and disguised his exposure of hypocrisy and skewering of Puritanical values such as duty and virtue. Wilde shows that comedy could just as effectively ‘submit problems to debate’ as serious drama. Clotilde Graves’ hit play A Mother of Three (1896) likewise uses farce to suggest that women can successfully take on men’s roles in life as well as on the stage. The play’s ‘sustained jocularity’ had the audience laughing ‘pretty continuously’, wrote Shaw in his review.

Shaw (like Wilde) was especially taken with Ibsen’s liberating dramatic treatment of women. ‘There is one law for men and another for women’, wrote Ibsen in his prefatory notes to A Doll’s House, a play that he dubbed ‘the modern tragedy’. A critic noted that Ghosts was ‘essentially a woman’s play, a woman’s story addressed to women’.

Ibsen’s choice to focus on a female as the main character of the drama is part of his revolutionary approach to playwriting. From Nora and Mrs Alving, to Ellida in The Lady from the Sea and Hedda and Thea in Hedda Gabler, to the precocious Hilde Wangel of The Master Builder, to the sex-starved Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf and beyond, Ibsen plumbed the female condition and increasingly challenged what was acceptable feminine behaviour on stage. He was one of the first dramatists to recognize the plight of women as the stuff of modern drama, as a key element of what theatre scholar John Gassner called the ‘mental climate’ of plays. The New Woman, a term first used in 1894, rapidly took hold in the theatre. While some playwrights satirized her, others mined the new possibilities for character and situation that she opened up.

Shock, controversy, and retreat

One of these was the American actress, playwright, and novelist Elizabeth Robins who worked in London during the 1890s and appeared in some of the first performances of Ibsen’s plays, at one point forming her own theatre company with the actress Marion Lea in order to put them on.

In 1893 Robins and her close friend Florence Bell anonymously adapted a Swedish short story for the stage that they called Alan’s Wife. The play showed a woman killing her disfigured infant in an act that she refuses to explain, adopting silence throughout her trial and leaving everyone, including the audience, guessing: was it euthanasia? Was it an extreme, distorted manifestation of maternal love? Was it post-partum depression, or grief at her husband’s death shortly before the child was born? Infanticide had been seen on the London stage, but not with such disturbing ambivalence. Likewise, the Finnish playwright Minna Canth’s Anna Liisa (1895) scandalized audiences in Helsinki with its sympathetic heroine who had killed her child and was haunted by the act. Only Tolstoy’s five-act tragedy The Power of Darkness (1886) has a more harrowing depiction of baby-killing.

From infanticide to syphilis (depicted in Ibsen’s Ghosts, and in Brieux’s Damaged Goods), from breastfeeding to prostitution and suicide and women rebelling against their narrowly prescribed roles, drama was beginning to show more and more controversial subject matter.

Yet arguably none of this would have been possible without the simultaneous revolutions that occurred in all areas of theatre—stagecraft, acting, publishing, and so on—which contributed to the new kind of drama being written. Without the flexibility created by electric lighting (replacing the dangerous gaslight still in use), without the introduction of the box set and more sophisticated scenery and stage design, and without new copyright laws to protect dramatic authors (such as the 1887 Berne Convention), the more subtle and deep dialogue Ibsen, Robins, Strindberg, Shaw, and others were pioneering could not have been heard, and the psychological nuances of character would have been lost.

The way these developments are intertwined can be seen in the integration of staging into the texts of plays, with stage directions describing interiors in detail as well as giving insight into character. André Antoine, director of the Théâtre Libre in Paris, which premiered several of Ibsen’s plays and spearheaded theatrical naturalism, took radical steps like turning his back on the audience and speaking in a whisper. He could only do this because the audience was ‘invisible’, quiet, listening in the dark due to the new use of electric lighting. We take them for granted now, but such moves infuriated conservative critics like Francisque Sarcey. In other words, dramatic innovation and technological advances go hand in hand.

How groups behave on stage also came under radical rethinking and became a key element of the new theatrical realism. ‘There are no small parts, only small actors’—the mantra often quoted to aspiring actors—originates in such practices as the German-based Meiningen Court theatre troupe’s giving ‘character’ to each actor’s role, no matter how insignificant, and making crowds dynamic rather than static and superficial. Yet even as these developments were changing the very nature of the theatrical experience, in some quarters there was increasing dissatisfaction with the mundaneness and banality of realistic topics and settings. Frustrated by the materiality of the stage and the physical reality of the actor’s body, theatre was already starting off in new directions, such as symbolism and avant-garde experiments that attempted to make plays more suggestive, abstract, and metaphysical—less grounded in real and tangible everyday life.

What Yeats called the ‘Savage God’ found theatrical expression in the play Ubu Roi (1896) by Alfred Jarry, which caused a scandal for its subject matter, its staging, and its scatological language (the first word of the play is ‘Merdre!’—an obvious allusion to ‘merde’, or ‘shit’). The play was a pastiche of Macbeth and Jarry’s schoolboy writings depicting one of his teachers as an obese, bumbling tyrant with a target painted on his belly and a toilet brush for a sceptre (Figure 1). Jarry had his artist friends, an avant-garde group called the Nabis that included Sérusier, Vuillard, and Toulouse-Lautrec, paint a continuous backdrop that incongruously juxtaposed (in Jarry’s words) ‘doors opening onto snow-covered plains under blue skies, mantelpieces with clocks on them swinging open to turn into doorways, and palm trees flourishing at the foot of beds so that little elephants perching on bookshelves can graze on them’.

1. ‘Merdre!’ Alfred Jarry’s woodcut of his cartoonish and scatological King Ubu, wielding a toilet brush in place of a sceptre; for his 1896 play Ubu Roi at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre, Paris.

Ubu Roi made a mockery of both realistic theatre and Wagner’s concept of a ‘total’ theatre, the ideal of a synthesis of all the ingredients of drama and performance (music, text, scenery, lighting) into a Gesamtkunstwerk. And it was produced in the same theatre in Paris that gave birth to symbolist drama, which is based on this concept. Wagner’s lasting legacy for drama is the emphasis on theatricality. But it is in the reaction against ‘total art’ that theatre truly innovates—when it begins to distrust this harmonious aesthetic as just as ‘fake’ as realism. Theatre historians Alan Ackerman and Martin Puchner suggest that modern drama’s constant oscillation between ‘the concrete detail of realism and a poetics of abstraction’ is one of its most constructive qualities. They argue that modern drama is characterized by a creative destructiveness, theatrical forms and conventions destroyed in order to be remade, even—in the case of avant-garde theatre—capable of attacking and annihilating itself.

Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck developed symbolist theatre in the 1890s in an effort to slough off the naturalistic chains binding the drama to the prosaic, material, and corporeal realities of everyday life at the expense of the abstract, metaphysical, and poetic dimensions. He found his inspiration not just in symbolist poets like Baudelaire and Mallarmé but in Ibsen’s late plays from The Master Builder (1892) through When We Dead Awaken (1900), with their ‘dialogue of the second degree’—underneath the very ordinary speech in which characters are speaking, they are carrying on another dialogue communicating their inner selves.

Maeterlinck’s The Intruder and The Blind emulate these models but go even further in their rejection of realism in favour of abstraction and mystery, creating a theatre of stasis. Characters simply wait in the darkness, listening to the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, talking of some mysterious event that is expected to happen yet never does. There is a direct line between these plays and the theatrical work of Samuel Beckett in the late 20th century.

Tragic-comedy as the modern mode

Modern drama breaks down distinct categories such as the tragic and the comic, and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov was one of the pioneers in this regard. Plays like The Seagull (which parodies symbolist drama) and Uncle Vanya, written in the late 1890s, blur the line between comedy and tragedy and challenge the basic stuff of drama, replacing action for the most part with talk. ‘My dear, don’t leave me alone with Vanya,’ Serebryakov implores his wife, ‘he’ll talk my head off.’

Chekhov reintroduces the monologue into the drama and reinvents it, packing in even more ‘talk’ in this way but not necessarily ‘saying’ anything obviously revelatory with these long speeches. Because his characters talk so much but do little and can seem languid and enervated, he was called the ‘dramatist of inaction’—though beside Maeterlinck’s static dramas Chekhov’s positively teem with incident. The hints of deep inner conflicts and emotions, desires, and passions are all there in Chekhov’s dialogue, as the Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavski showed in his staging of Chekhov’s plays at the newly formed Moscow Art Theatre, beginning with The Seagull in 1898 and inaugurating a revolution in acting that permanently changed how actors prepare their roles. His organic, holistic system involves the whole body and mind of the actor, tapping his/her own emotions and histories for subtext, drawing on ‘emotion memory’ and the ‘magic if’ (imagining oneself as the character, not adopting an existing ‘type’).

The period 1880–1900 thus culminates in the launch of a powerful new method that would come to dominate acting and the theatre even while strong reactions to it were brewing and were about to generate some of the stage’s most ‘creative destructions’.

Questioning realism

It is easy to forget how revolutionary the new realistic drama was at the time. ‘Naturalism and realism were the first dramatic modes to consider themselves not as expressions of the dominant political and ideological order,’ writes theatre scholar W.B. Worthen, ‘but as criticizing the values and institutions of middle-class society.’ The problem is that nothing can be changed by a realistic representation; even if it is critical of modern society, ‘realistic drama tacitly accepts the world and its values as an unchanging, and unchangeable, environment in which the characters live out their lives’. This is directly opposed to the dynamics of change suggested by Zola’s embrace of Darwin, as discussed earlier in this chapter.

Not surprisingly, a reaction against realism begins in the 1890s and the desire to ‘unmake mimesis’, as theatre scholar Elin Diamond so aptly puts it, becomes the driving force of much subsequent drama, right through to the present day. The concept of ‘realism’ is inherently impossible and problematic. How do you represent everyone’s reality? It will be different if you are black, female, non-European, and so on. Theatre cannot work like a mirror held up to nature, because there will always be someone holding that mirror, directing its point of view, and choosing which part of life it should reflect.

The striking thing about these two decades—the thing that makes this period of drama unique—is that so many radically different, and often directly opposite, tendencies were being explored. Theatre encompassed so many modes; this is what makes it problematic to try to define and characterize what is happening in ‘theatre’ as a unified, coherent whole. Yet there are some common features running through all these different threads: experiment, innovation, and language. Widening the horizon of theatre, and its audience’s expectations, through new forms and ideas lies at the heart of many of these seemingly competing developments (realism, symbolism). Likewise, the desire to make theatre, as critic John Gassner put it, ‘rich in language’ is a unifying motive.

At the same time, one cannot understate the importance of the material side—how the visual and physical dimensions of theatre in this period were drastically changing. Technological developments meant that to go to the theatre and to see a play was never the same again. These caused the spectrum of theatrical presentation and styles to widen considerably, enabling both modest, fleeting, yet groundbreaking performances like Alan’s Wife and, at the other extreme, the founding of national theatres across Europe—spaces of spectacular scale and opulence. Theatre was arguably at the peak of its dominance as a cultural form—even as, already towards the end of the century, the rise of cinema, the cheap novel, and the proliferation of competing entertainments would threaten to push it to the margins of culture.