The aim of this sourcebook is to provide documentation on one of the key movements in modern theatre. Naturalism is not only a historical style, which reached the stage in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It forms the basis for mainstream plays and performances throughout the modern period, and is still the dominant theatrical form today. Indeed, Naturalism introduced a quintessentially modern approach, and defined the qualities of modern drama. Revolutionary in its own time, it has become the standard against which all subsequent stylistic experiments have measured themselves, and therefore deserves particular attention.
One characteristic of modern theatrical movements is a close link between theory, play writing, and stage practice. Theatrical Naturalism, developed from earlier naturalistic novels and preceded by theoretical essays, initiated this trend. Other crucial elements are the serious dramatic treatment of significant contemporary social issues, and the use of ideas as the basis for action and character. Again, both these elements were introduced by Naturalism. In addition, naturalist drama is particularly important in the way it represents women, setting a strikingly contemporary tone.
As a public art, the theatre is even more closely connected to the events and social concerns of its time than other artistic forms. It also reflects technological advances in the mechanics of staging. These general qualities – very much emphasized in theatre throughout the twentieth century – became particularly central to Naturalism, and are highlighted in the documentation. Since all artistic or literary movements are defined by individual works that incorporate their principles, key plays by three of the most important and influential writers have been selected to exemplify naturalist drama. To give a sense of development, two plays have been chosen from each writer’s work: his first major naturalistic play, and one from later in his career. This enables us to see the parameters of the movement, as well as exploring specific theatrical events in depth. The documentation focuses on the dramatist’s aims with respect to each play, its first staging, and the public reception – as well as illustrating the background, the theoretical basis, and (where relevant) the work of directors or theatre companies closely identified with each.
Unlike other published collections of documents, which are either limited to a single playwright, or reprint statements by a wide range of writers, the focus on three representative playwrights facilitates comparison, while also providing detailed material on individual works. It allows wider stylistic issues to be addressed, and sets the plays in their theatrical and cultural context. The selection of playwrights is also designed to challenge preconceptions.
This sourcebook contains a wide variety of different kinds of document. There are the theoretical writings and statements of principle. There is the material surrounding the composition, original production, and reception of each play – both written and visual. There are political and social documents from the period. In addition some contemporary sociological or critical analyses have been included, to provide factual material not readily accessible in historical documents.
Like all historical data, the writings themselves vary in documentary status. At one end of the scale are what might be called primary documents: for instance essays that influenced the naturalistic writers, establishing the principles of the movement; political manifestoes; working notes made by a dramatist in composing a play; or promptbooks recording a specific production. However, even these should not be read as wholly objective evidence – promptbooks, for instance, present a single, personal interpretation of a play; and although this itself may have documentary significance (as in the case of Stanislavsky) it might still not correspond to the playwright’s concept. Similarly a playwright’s letters can clarify authorial intention, but a play may well signify more than its author’s concept and change its meaning depending on the context brought to it by spectator or reader. At the other end of the scale are reviews of performances, by definition subjective and seldom representing the general response of the audience – which still have documentary importance to the degree that they mould public opinion. In addition, an element of subjective judgement has necessarily been introduced in editing these documents to bring out the essential points of their authors as clearly as possible.
A further issue that should be taken into account is the nature of translation. Since the roots of the naturalistic movement were in France and Scandinavia, spreading to Germany and Russia, as well as England and America, a large percentage of the documents included were originally written in languages other than English. Even the best translator is likely to miss or substitute nuances. Then too, the longer the time between the original document and the translation, the more the overall tone is likely to have been updated; in general, where a choice of translations exist, the earliest has been preferred.
The nature of the visual documentation is equally variable. Visual documentation from the end of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century lacks the degree of authenticity assumed for modern photography. It was not until the mid-1920s that camera speeds were fast enough to record actors in performance, the first example being Basil Dean’s spectacular Hassan in 1924. Until then actors were required to hold a pose, motionless, for a period – in the 1880s and 1890s – of over a minute. In addition the technical quality of stage lighting made it hard to achieve sharply defined images on film which led in some cases to outlines being inked in on a photograph.
As a result, any photographs relating to early productions of Ibsen’s plays are extremely rare. The one of A Doll’s House is an exception, demonstrating the immediate impact and public importance of the play. More often at this time the only photographs are studio pictures, recording the actor in costume – as with Elizabeth Robins as Hedda Gabler – while visual evidence of the staging is limited to impressionistic (and often highly inaccurate) artists’ sketches published in illustrated journals. The increased number of photos available for productions of Chekhov, or for Shaw’s Heartbreak House, as camera technology advanced is directly reflected here. However, being posed, even the images from 1920 or 1921 cannot necessarily be taken as an accurate representation of acting style. What they do clearly document is blocking (e.g. the notorious bench across the front of stage in The Seagull), relationships between the characters/actors, costumes and setting.
The terms “Naturalism” and “Realism” are particularly ambiguous. As critical labels they are also applied both to a broad category of art in general, and to specific movements in the novel and in drama that may be related, but are by no means identical. In addition, each term tends to be used more imprecisely than other literary or artistic designations, and both have been defined in various competing, even mutually exclusive ways.
In part this is due to their derivation from common words that have themselves gathered a wide set of meanings over time. Indeed, each has one of the longer entries in dictionaries. For instance, (in English, at least) the word “natural” originally related to justice, which was “based upon innate moral feeling; instinctively felt to be right” and evolved into “operating in accordance with the ordinary course of nature”. This then acquired connotations of “in a state of nature, without spiritual enlightenment … physical existence, as opposed to what is spiritual, intellectual or fictitious … formed by nature, not artificial. …” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1973). Thus the word “nature” itself is a variable and highly loaded concept that carries a strong moralistic charge – one that was intensified by the nineteenth-century evolutionary theory of nature established by Darwin.
The focus on external physical existence, as opposed to internal or spiritual experience, is associated with scientific observation, as opposed to a poetic or visionary view. That is to say, the word “nature” – or its derivative, “Naturalism” – inherently expresses a philosophy of existence, and sets up normative assumptions.
“Naturalism” and “Realism” are frequently interpreted in the broadest sense as synonyms, referring to an objective portrayal of daily life that appears true to the spectator or reader’s actual experience. The commonly accepted criteria for a realistic work are that it deals with contemporary subjects, presented in a recognizable social context and stressing ordinary details that accurately reflect the way people of the time actually live, without editorializing or external commentary. But, like the common adjectives on which “Naturalism” and “Realism” are based, even this apparently simple formulation is inherently problematic.
The whole notion of “objectivity” in literature is questionable. It implies a statement that is impersonal, therefore generally valid, and factual. Yet all art (even communally produced art) is an individual, frequently very individualistic expression – and to the degree that artists are products of their age, expressing standards set by their social environment, their work is less likely to appear “objective” in a later period. Indeed the benchmark for “truth” – that the depiction corresponds with a public perception of what is “real” – is in fact a conditional and continually changing criterion, a point illustrated (inadvertently) by a critic of the “well-made play”:
In drama as in prose fiction, realism is wanted. Every man judges what is laid before him by his own experience. Resemblance to what he is acquainted with is the measure of excellence.
(The Era, 1871)
Qualities seen as “realistic” are also determined by conventions of communication or representation – and these too evolve. As Gordon Craig pointed out, in their own day leading actors such as the Kembles, followed by Edmund Kean, Macready, then Henry Irving, and Antoine, had each successively been hailed as “natural”, only for each to be dismissed in turn as “artificial” by the supporters of their successors. This led him to conclude that all were “examples of a new artificiality – the artificiality of naturalism” [The Art of the Theatre, 1909]. Alternatively a depiction may be “neutral” in the sense of non-judgmental (another connotation of “objective”), but this is almost always little more than a rhetorical strategy in pursuit of some specific agenda – as with an emphasis on “daily life”, which automatically challenges hierarchical views of society privileging the actions of governments and rulers (almost exclusively men).
One method of bypassing such confusions and imprecision is to substitute a more technical word, which escapes the ideological weighting of common usage, as Erich Auerbach has done in borrowing “Mimesis” to describe his study of Realism in Western literature (1946). In his argument, the whole thrust of European prose writing from the Old Testament to Edmond and Jules de Gon-court, and to Virginia Woolf, is mimetic – even if the concept of “reality” itself takes different forms in successive periods. But, however useful this term “mimesis” may be for categorizing literary types on the widest level, in terms of theatre it is unhelpful. On the stage the physical presence of actors in fictive situations automatically simulates human and social interactions, and by definition acting is imitative. Thus all theatre is “mimetic” to some degree – but what Shakespeare understood by the requirement (voiced through Hamlet) that the stage “Hold the mirror up to Nature” is very different from the aims of nineteenth-century naturalistic playwrights.
More narrowly, the terms “Naturalism” and “Realism” refer to a specific literary and theatrical movement. This emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century, reaching its high point in the 1880s and 1890s, and was overtaken by other forms in the 1920s – although the general qualities it introduced are still reflected in the dominant mode of drama today. However, even when used in this specific sense there is still a wide divergence in meanings given to the two words. Generally critics attempt to distinguish between Naturalism and Realism, using each as a label for various qualities. For instance:
Although naturalism in the arts shares the mimetic mode with realism, it takes more explicit cognizance of environment, not merely as a setting but as an element of the action of drama. In an essay on English naturalism [English Drama: Forms and Development, 1977] Raymond Williams summarizes: ‘In high naturalism the lives of the characters have soaked into their environment … Moreover, the environment has soaked into the lives’… If the key play of realism is Ibsen’s Ghosts, that of naturalism is Tolstoi’s peasant Power of Darkness, forbidden in Russia but played in Paris in 1886.
(The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, 1992)
At one extreme, Zola and his fellow naturalists saw in the teachings of science license to emphasize the sordid and mechanistic aspects of life to the exclusion of all else. Their thinking was shadowed by a somber view of life, which threw a blighting chill of determinism on all human conduct. At the opposite extreme, realists of the Spencer-Fiske persuasion saw in science a buoyantly optimistic assurance of the perfectibility of mankind.
(Theodore W. Hatlen, Orientation to the Theater, 1972)
Thus in one standard reference work Ibsen’s Ghosts is labeled a defining example of Realism – presumably because heredity is the crucial factor – in contrast to the environmental stress in Tolstoi’s Power of Darkness, which is seen as the essential quality of Naturalism. In the other the distinction is between pessimism and optimism, so that Ghosts is classified along with Tolstoi’s Power of Darkness as a classic instance of Naturalism.
Leaving aside the contradictions, the effect is to subdivide a broad movement, emphasizing a single quality at the expense of other elements. It would seem more helpful – as well as being truer to the historical facts – to understand both “Naturalism” and “Realism” as applying to the movement as a whole. At the same time, taking advantage of the subtle distinction between the two words for greater critical precision, it would be logical to use “Naturalism” to refer to the theoretical basis shared by all the dramatists who formed the movement, and their approach to representing the world. “Realism” could then apply to the intended effect, and the stage techniques associated with it. Thus the same play might be both naturalistic and realistic, with each term describing a different aspect of the work.
The primary influences on the naturalistic movement were Darwin’s evolutionary theories of biology (On the Origin of Species, 1859), Claude Bernard’s scientific observation of human physiology (Introduction à l’étude de la médecine experimentale, 1865) and Karl Marx’s economic analysis of society (Das Kapital, 1867) – plus, somewhat later, Sigmund Freud’s work on psychology (On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, with Charcot, 1893; The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900). It also reflected the emergence of materialistic capitalism and the rise of middle-class democracy. There is general agreement that the crucial factors inspiring Naturalism were the perceptions that all life, human as well as animal, is in a process of continual evolution, and that human behavior can be explained through scientific analysis. These new ideas led to the assumption that peoples’ character and personality are formed by a combination of heredity and their social environment, plus the value placed on the individual. This meant that ordinary citizens, including workers and the poor (who had traditionally played at best supporting or comic roles in literature, particularly drama) became the protagonists, and attention focussed on the family. Perhaps even more significant though less widely noted, naturalistic drama – which established itself in the 1880s and 1890s – coincided with the early women’s movement, the struggle for legal equality and voting rights. It also coincided with a new sense of national identity in Scandinavia, and with the liberation of the serfs in Russia. All this was directly reflected in naturalistic plays.
Although this democratization of literary subject in itself was not new, Naturalism represented a significant change in treatment. From its first development, the novel had dealt with characters drawn from the common population: e.g. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Richardson’s Pamela. There had also been isolated examples on the eighteenth-century stage – George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731), or in Germany Gotthold Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and in France Denis Diderot’s The Natural Son (1757, first performed 1771). But the characters in these earlier works are either picaresque (Defoe’s prostitute-protagonist; Fielding’s virtuous servant, who turns out to be nobly born), sentimental idealizations (Richardson’s virginal heroine) and moral exemplars (the “domestic tragedy” of Lillo, Lessing, or Diderot). By contrast, the naturalistic approach is overtly scientific, presenting characters as case studies in human behavior or social problems.
These precursors were followed by others in the first half of the nineteenth century, who gradually built up the technical basis for naturalist drama. Diderot’s theories in particular remained influential throughout the period. Attacking the rigid neo-classical division between tragedy and comedy, he called for a “serious genre”, which would mix tears and laughter and deal with the conditions of ordinary life. Situations and characters with which the audience could identify would touch their sentiments, creating a moral effect. On a practical level, the development of the “well-made play” by Eugène Scribe was equally significant. His structural principles for introducing and developing interlinked dramatic situations, with a denouement that leads into the next situation, until all strands of the plot are neatly resolved in the conclusion, created an impression of logical coherence. Theatrically effective, this structuring rapidly became codified. It allowed Scribe to produce over 350 plays between 1813 and his death in 1861 – ranging from one-act vaudevilles to a new form of historical/political comedy. This explored the idea that great events can be the result of the most trivial incidents, which had the effect of bringing major social issues down to a human scale. Such a perspective was realistic, at least in intention, and his structure offered a basis for early naturalistic dramaturgy.
The story usually turned upon some secret, of which the audience was aware, but of which the hero knew nothing until the truth was conveniently revealed at the critical moment (not unlike the Greek anagnorisis or recognition). In the judgement of the critic Francisque Sarcey, this was the scene à faire, or obligatory scene … Indeed, in his preface to La Haine [Hatred] Sardou confessed that he invented the scene à faire first, and then worked out his plot backwards. It is little wonder that characters and situations looked much the same from play to play. Yet it was an immensely successful arrangement, and well into the twentieth century the aspiring playwright could still have found rules for writing a well-made play as laid down by William Archer in his Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship (1912) or, in America, by George Pierce Baker, director of the famous workshop at Harvard, in his Dramatic Technique (1919).
(J. L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice I, 1981)
Scribe’s “well-made” techniques were widely imitated during the mid-nineteenth century. His plays were staged – and copied – throughout Europe, from England to Norway, where Ibsen staged several Scribean pieces during his early career as artistic director of the Norwegian Theatre in Christiana. The result was to substitute technique for substance. As one contemporary observer commented, describing the most popularly successful play on the French stage in 1875, Ferréol by Victorien Sardou, Scribe’s most direct successor:
The charm with M. Sardou is not of a very high quality; he makes a play very much as he would a pudding; he has his well-tested recipes and his little stores of sugar and spice, from which he extracts with an unimpassioned hand exactly the proper quantity of each. The pudding is capital, but I can think of no writer of equal talent who puts so little of himself into his writing. Search M. Sardou’s plays through and you will not find a trace of personal conviction, of a moral emotion, of an intellectual temperament, of anything that makes the ‘atmosphere’ of a work. They seem to have been produced in a moral vacuum.
(Henry James, “The Parisian Stage”, New York Tribune, 29 January 1876)
Two years before Ibsen’s first naturalistic play, The Pillars of Society, this standardized fare epitomizes the style of drama that the naturalists were reacting against. Indeed, on one level Naturalism was as much an aesthetic revolt as a moral or social revolution. In the words of the most influential naturalistic director, Konstantin Stanislavsky:
The founding of our new Moscow Art and Popular Theatre was in the nature of a revolution. We protested against the customary manner of acting, against theatricality, against bathos, against overacting, against the bad manner of production, against the habitual scenery, against the star system which spoiled the ensemble, against the light and farcical repertoire which was being cultivated on the Russian stage at that time.
(My Life in Art, 1926)
However, even among Scribe’s followers in France, there were some who also paved the way for change. The most significant of these were Emile Augier, whose exposure of bourgeois hypocrisy and the false moral values of French society in the middle decades of the century was grounded in an extremely detailed depiction of social minutiae; and Dumas fits, who focussed on the Demi-Monde: the title for one of his plays produced in 1855. Augier wrote his final play – a condemnation of marriages arranged for monetary reasons – in 1878, while Dumas’ last important play – which explored marital infidelity – appeared in 1876. Each added elements that were picked up in naturalistic drama, specifically the method of building up a social context for the characters, and the use of social outcasts to condemn a moralistic Establishment.
In addition, in 1873 Émile Zola’s play Thérèse Raquin (an adaptation of his novel) reached the stage. It traces the adulterous passion of a housewife, which drives her to drown her invalid husband – then, consumed by guilt for the murder, she persuades her lover to join her in a suicide pact. Thérèse is presented as a victim of her background: trapped not only by an unsatisfying, repressive marriage and an impoverished lower middle-class existence, but also by her physical desires and rigid moral principles. However, structurally it still follows the mechanics of the well-made play; and the characters’ emotions are portrayed melodramatically, as in the stage direction describing Thérèse’s paroxysm of self-accusation for being a murderess:
She is seized by spasms, totters towards the bed, tries to drag herself up by one of the curtains which she tears away, and comes to rest momentarily leaning against the wall, gasping and dreadful.
Despite these stylistic flaws – which were exacerbated by exaggerated traditional acting of the original performance – Thérèse Raquin served as a model for naturalistic playwrights. The play failed on the stage. But its focus on a woman who destroys herself under the pressures of society, and its detailed treatment of psychological struggle become standard features of plays by Ibsen, Strindberg, or Brieux.
In terms of stage presentation a further element was contributed by an English playwright, who had served a long apprenticeship as actor and stage manager: T. W. Robertson. Though in structure his work was also influenced by Scribe, Robertson’s own productions of his plays provided meticulously detailed reproductions of Victorian social habits, which won them the label of “cup-and-saucer drama”. The most significant of these were Society in 1865 and Caste in 1867 – titles that embody his characteristic subject, the class system, as well as indicating a proto-naturalistic emphasis on the social group rather than a single protagonist. Robertson’s choice of the most ordinary details as dramatic material, in place of overtly theatrical action and the grand gestures of Romantic acting, also helped to lay the groundwork for naturalism. It is well illustrated in the closing act of Caste, where the stage directions show precisely why such plays were designated “cup-and-saucer drama”:
POLLY sets tea things …
SAM motions approbation to POLLY, not wanting HAWTREE to remain … SAM cuts enormous slice of bread, and hands it on point of knife to HAWTREE. Cuts small lump of butter, and hands it on point of knife to HAWTREE, who looks at it through eye-glass, then takes it. SAM then helps himself. POLLY meantime has poured out tea in two cups, and one saucer for SAM, sugars them, and then hands cup and saucer to HAWTREE, who has both hands full. He takes it awkwardly, and places it on table. POLLY, having only one spoon, tastes SAM’S tea, then stirs HAWTREE’S, attracting his attention by doing so. He looks into his tea cup. POLLY stirs her own tea, and drops spoon into HAWTREE’s cup, causing it to spurt in his eye. He drops eye-glass and wipes his eyes …
SAM takes tea and sits facing fire.
In addition, over the course of the nineteenth century stage scenery gradually developed from the painted backcloths of Restoration drama to three-dimensional reproductions of interiors and elaborate impressions of natural effects. Initially these were used purely for spectacle: as in Philip de Louther-bourg’s staging of a naval review for Alfred in 1773, or his transformation scenes and exotic light effects to represent romantic panoramas for Wonders of Derbyshire (1779). The first box set was introduced in London around 1830; and by the time of Robertson such scenic possibilities had become sufficiently familiar not to attract exclusive attention to themselves, and were being used to create a credible physical context for dramatic characters.
The next step was taken by the court theatre of the small German state of Saxe-Meiningen, under the artistic direction of its duke whose enthusiasm for Charles Kean’s historically accurate stagings of Shakespeare in the 1850s led him to develop an ensemble dedicated to archeologically authentic productions. To reinforce the detailed reproduction of real places – classical Rome for Julius Caesar (with the assassination moved from Shakespeare’s setting of the Capitol to its actual historic location at the Curia of Pompey); Domrémy for Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans – any symmetry was avoided in the placing of his actors, and all supernumeraries in crowd scenes were individualized. Each production was prepared in meticulous detail and extensively rehearsed (in costume and with full sets in order to make the performers so familiar with their dramatic environment that they would appear to “live” in it); and the Meiningen Company gained an instant reputation with its first German tour in 1874. They also toured widely through Europe up to 1890, creating new standards of authenticity for the stage – even if this was largely limited to pictorial effect. Their productions were seen by Ibsen in Berlin – when they performed his early heroic play The Pretenders in 1876 – and by Shaw in London in 1881. Antoine was deeply impressed by the Meiningen handling of crowd scenes and rehearsal techniques, spending time with the Company in Brussels in 1888. Stanislavsky saw their productions in St. Petersburg in 1885 and Moscow in 1890, trained with the Company for a year, and was particularly influenced by their archeological accuracy in staging historical plays.
Over the same period stage lighting, which had been limited solely to candles and oil lamps since the earliest indoor theatres, changed radically – from gas lights (demonstrated in 1803, and first introduced in Philadelphia in 1816 and in London in 1817), to limelight (invented in 1826, and initially used for a Covent Garden pantomime in 1837), and then electric lighting in 1881. With gas light, as with candles, the lighting was general, although it could to some extent be focussed by reflectors, most effectively in footlights along the front edge of the stage. But with gas the light was whiter, approximating more closely to natural daylight, and could be regulated for gradations of brightness. Limelight – using a block of quicklime heated by an oxygen flame – created an intense source of brightness that made it possible to use as a spotlight, and allowed differently colored light to be produced by shining it through a transparent colored plate. In place of the unnatural shadows thrown by lighting from floor level with footlights, light could now be projected from above and used to represent different times of day, or even seasons, as well as the passage of time. Henry Irving, who took control of the London Lyceum Theatre in 1878, was one of the earliest to experiment with contrasts of light and shade – as one anecdote illustrates. Running through the duel scene in a rehearsal for The Corsican Brothers (one of the standard Lyceum melodramas), the actor fighting Irving found himself in deep shadow, while Irving’s figure was brightly lit, and complained “Don’t you think, Guv’nor, a few rays of the moon might fall on me? It shines equally on the just and the unjust” – and in this instance Irving agreed to share the limelight a little. Although these effects were primarily devoted to productions of Shakespeare or melodrama, Irving’s lighting deeply impressed André Antoine, who introduced the works of Ibsen into France.
It is worth noting that Henrik Ibsen’s first significant naturalistic play, A Doll’s House, appeared in 1879, six years after Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and just one year after Augier ceased writing for the stage. It was also twelve years after Robertson’s Caste, and less than a year after Irving took over the Lyceum. Living at that point in Rome, in 1879 Ibsen would hardly have been aware of Irving’s work. But having been stage director at the Bergen Theatre, and from 1857 to 1862 manager of the Norwegian Theatre in Christiana (now Oslo), where Scribe’s were among the plays produced, he had practical experience of both the changes in dramatic construction and the new scenic and lighting techniques. In addition Ibsen’s involvement with the Meiningen Company in 1876 had exposed him to the possibilities for using authentic detail in the setting. All these inform the sequence of plays initiated by A Doll’s House. It is hardly coincidental that Ibsen’s turn to Naturalism coincided with a significant change in stage practices – a difference that can be measured by the contrast in preparation for two early productions of his naturalistic plays. Following the standard practice for Romantic or Scribean drama, the Royal Theatre in Stockholm allowed just two rehearsals for blocking, eight general rehearsals and one dress rehearsal for A Doll’s House in 1879. Four years later, in 1883 at the same theatre, An Enemy of the People was given a total of 32 rehearsals, twelve of which (reflecting Meiningen practice) were devoted solely to the crowd scene in Act IV.
For Ibsen’s naturalistic plays to achieve their full dimension on stage, a new form of acting was required, as well as the integration of all these technical elements into a unified aesthetic. For most of the nineteenth century – particularly in continental Europe – the standard style of acting was histrionic, using codified gestures to display heightened emotion; and the naturalistic rejection of this traditional stage-expression is well-represented by Stanislavky:
Some of these established cliches have become traditional, and are passed down from generation to generation; as for instance spreading your hand over your heart to express love, or opening your mouth wide to give the idea of death …
There are special ways of reciting a role, methods of diction and speech. (For instance, exaggeratedly high or low tones at critical moments in the role, done with specifically theatrical ‘tremolo’, or with special declamatory vocal embellishments.) There are also methods of physical movement (mechanical actors do not walk, they ‘progress’ on the stage), for gestures and for action, for plastic motion. There are methods for expressing all human feelings and passions (showing your teeth and rolling your eyes when you are jealous, or covering up the eyes and face with the hands instead of weeping; tearing your hair when in despair)…
According to the mechanical actor the object of theatrical speech and plastic movements – as exaggerated sweetness in lyric moments, dull monotone in reading epic poetry, hissing sounds to express hatred, false tears in the voice to represent grief-is to enhance voice, diction and movements, to make actors more beautiful and give more power to their theatrical effectiveness.
Unfortunately … in place of nobility a sort of showiness has been created, prettiness in place of beauty, theatrical effect in place of expressiveness.
(An Actor Prepares, 1926)
However suited to the Romantic drama of Victor Hugo or Schiller, this was incongruous for naturalistic plays representing the common lives of ordinary people expressed in deliberately unrhetorical dialogue against a detailed and recognizable contemporary background mirroring the middle-class homes of the audience. Indeed, it was the traditional staging and conventional Romantic acting that caused the failure of one early naturalistic piece, Henry Becque’s strongly socialistic Les Corbeaux (The Crows, 1882), and may have contributed to the failure of Zola’s Thérèse Raquin.
As August Strindberg pointed out in his well-known preface to Miss Julie, the way in which the new dramatists perceived people was the opposite of the type of figure expressed in traditional acting:
In real life an action – this, by the way, is a somewhat new discovery – is generally caused by a whole series of motives … I see Miss Julie’s tragic fate to be the result of many circumstances …
I have made my people somewhat ‘characterless’ for the following reason. In the course of time the word character has assumed manifold meanings. It must have originally signified the dominating trait of the soul complex, and this was confused with temperament. Later it became the middle-class term for the automaton, one whose nature had become fixed or who had adapted himself to a particular role in life … while one continuing to develop was called characterless, in a derogatory sense, of course, because he was so hard to catch, classify and keep track of…
Because they are modern characters, living in a period of transition more feverishly hysterical than its predecessor at least, I have drawn my figures vacillating, disintegrated, a blend of old and new.
(1888)
Where plot was the dominant element in both melodrama and the well-made plays (which Strindberg and Zola intended to supersede), characterization is the basis of Naturalism – and the ambiguity of motive asserted by Strindberg is also in deliberate contrast to the singular passionate temperament of the earlier Romantic protagonists. This ambiguity is combined with a complex treatment of central figures. Although naturalistic drama may contain explicit moral messages (for instance, Brieux’s plays campaigning for birth control, or dealing with the evils of prostitution) and strong social criticism (as in several of Ibsen’s plays, including A Doll’s House or Ghosts), the way the characters are portrayed precludes moral judgements. Strindberg is thus typical in describing his theme as “neither exclusively physiological nor psychological. I have not put the blame wholly on the inheritance from her mother, nor on her physical condition at the time, nor on immorality. I have not even preached a moral sermon. …” [Preface, Miss Julie, 1888].
In fact the primacy of character is one of the defining aspects of Naturalism. From the initial concept to the focus of the audience, naturalistic drama centres on highly individualized and completely realized people. As Ibsen stated:
Before I write a single word, I have to have each character in mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul. I always proceed from the individual; everything else – the stage setting, the dramatic ensemble – comes naturally and does not cause me any worry, as soon as I am certain of the individual in every aspect of his humanity. But I also have to have his exterior in mind down to the last button: how he stands and walks, how he behaves, what his voice sounds like. Then I do not let him go until his fate is fulfilled.
(cit. Rudolph Lothar, Henrik Ibsen, 1902)
It was André Antoine, the founder of the Théãtre Libre (Free Theatre) in 1887, who created a theatrical context for such characters, by turning all the earlier scenic developments into the basis for naturalistic staging. Although Antoine was an eclectic director, who also experimented with commedia dell’arte and symbolism, in his first piece he set the tone that was to become identified with Naturalism. This was an adaptation of a short story by Zola, Jacques Damour. The (at the time) striking elements of his production were a deliberate simplicity in scenery and, like Robertson, a careful attention to props such as coffee cups and wineglasses. The furniture – borrowed for this first production from his mother’s house – was worn with use and solid. This became a guiding principle for his subsequent productions: to transport real-life surroundings onto the stage that would create a recognizable and accurately reproduced environment, as a literal embodiment for the deterministic effect of environment on character. The effect of actuality was enhanced by the intimacy of the tiny theatres in which Antoine staged his Théãtre Libre productions. With an audience right on top of the actors there could be no exaggeration or gloss. Anything conventionally “theatrical” struck false.
Initially this scenic simplicity was the result of Antoine’s lack of funding. But it became a model for the whole Independent Theatre movement (so-called because a subscription audience freed these theatres to produce “unpopular” or “scandalous” plays) which became the platform for the new naturalistic drama. The Théãtre Libre was followed in Germany by Otto Brahm’s Freie Bühne (an exact translation of Antoine’s Free Theatre), and in Sweden by August Strindberg’s Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, both founded in 1889; John Grein’s Independent Theatre in Britain, which opened in 1891 and performed Shaw’s first plays; the Irish Literary Theatre (1897) and the Irish Players in Dublin; and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. It was also the model for the Little Theatre movement in America, which began around 1909, and included the Provincetown Players (1914) associated with Eugene O’Neill’s early naturalistic plays. The output of the Théãtre Libre and its successor, the Théãtre Antoine, from 1897 to 1906 was typical of the Little Theatre movement as a whole. It included productions of Ibsen’s Ghosts (1890) and The Wild Duck (1891), Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers (both 1893) – all of which remained in Antoine’s repertoire until 1908 – as well as Tolstoi’s Power of Darkness (produced in 1878), plays by Eugène Brieux (such as Maternité, banned in 1901), and adaptations of Zola, such as La Terre (1902).
It is no accident that Antoine’s repertory included adaptations of works by Zola and other French novelists, such as the Goncourts. These nineteenth-century developments in the democratization of character, dramatic structuring, and representational staging, were accompanied by advances in the novel that influenced the thematic approach taken by naturalistic playwrights. Just as eighteenth-century novels predated theatre in extending the range of literature to the common people, so Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, and in particular Zola first developed the principles of Naturalism in their novels. Zola also began to develop the theoretical basis for the theatrical movement, through his reviews as a drama critic from 1876–1880. Zola’s writings directly influenced Antoine. Zola’s reviews were published as two volumes in 1881, with the first being titled Naturalism in the Theatre; and it is no coincidence that just over a year later Ibsen wrote renouncing poetic drama in favor of “the straightforward, plain language spoken in real life”:
The stage is for dramatic art alone; and declamation is not a dramatic art…
Verse has been most injurious to the art of the drama. A true artist of the stage, whose repertoire is the contemporary drama, should not be willing to let a single verse cross her lips. It is improbable that that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the drama of the future since the aims of the dramatists of the future are almost certain to be incompatible with it. Consequently it is doomed. For art forms become extinct, just as the preposterous animal forms of prehistoric time became extinct when their day was over….
(Letter to Lucie Wolf, 1883)
The above discussion raises important questions of dramatic convention, and historical perspective. These have to be taken into account in order to evaluate naturalistic drama effectively. It also brings in gender-based issues, which are still more significant because it is here that Naturalism was most revolutionary.
As Ibsen’s typically naturalistic evolutionary metaphor in his letter to Lucie Wolf implies, stylistic norms can change radically between one literary period and the next. All art, of course, is based on conventions: rules for representing one thing in terms of another, which are imaginatively accepted by the spectator or reader. For instance an observed landscape or person may be rendered in colored pigment on a flat canvas; and the painting will then be translated by a viewer back into something approximating its original. In general the more mimetic the painting, the closer the shared experience between artist and audience will be – although then any non-mimetic element in the representation is likely to detract from identification, whereas in a more stylized or abstract work subjective distortion is expected and adds to the effect. In other words, the rules vary depending on the artist’s aims and choice of style, but the essential quality in any style is internal consistency. However the correspondence between concept and reception is never exact, depending as it does on the individual experience of the spectator.
At the same time, these rules governing representation are continually changing, generally in response to technological or social changes – a classic example being the introduction of perspective in painting during the late Middle Ages. This replaced hierarchical values expressed in making socially or religiously important figures larger in scale, whatever their position within the pictorial frame. However “unnatural” to a later viewer, trained to accept perspective principles, this would have appeared “realistic” to medieval eyes.
Theatrical performance, in which the basis of representation is the human body, has always been to a large degree mimetic. Yet it is still highly conventionalized. At its most fundamental level performance relies on an unstated contract, where the flat and strictiy limited area of the stage (with or without visual aids such as scenic backdrops and furnishings) is accepted as an expandable imaginative space standing for a variety of physical locations, and the actors are credited as being people other than themselves. Even such fundamental conventions are culturally specific, and learned – not universal – as Peter Brook discovered when he toured Africa with a group of actors in the 1970s, performing to tribes that had no exposure to Western theatre. Superimposed on these, are other conventions of a stylistic kind. These might include the use of masks, specific types of gesture and facial expression to express the emotional state or moral nature of a character, and (as Ibsen emphasized) dialogue in verse or prose. In each case, however apparently artificial the conventions employed, the key factor is that they are unnoticed by the audience. As techniques of communication, to the extent they draw attention to themselves they distract from what is being communicated, and highlight the artifice of performance. This occurs particularly when the values embodied in particular conventions appear outdated – as with the use of verse, expressing an elevated and idealistic conception of life, which was clearly at odds with the scientific and materialist views of the naturalists.
It becomes easy to see the conventionalized nature of plays from the past. Classical Greek theatre is so clearly stylized that, even in comedy, it is difficult to identify the characters with ordinary people. Shakespeare’s drama now appears far more overtly theatrical than it would have done to his Elizabethan audience. By contrast, since Naturalism is still the dominant mode of staging today its conventions are accepted as norms. There are, of course, other contrasting styles that have become common in twentieth-century theatre – most notably Expressionism and the epic theatre pioneered by Bertolt Brecht – which emphasize the artifice of performance. But these gain at least part of their effect from challenging Naturalism. As a norm, naturalistic conventions are in practice invisible. Yet indeed Naturalism is no less “conventional” than any other form of theatre. However close to everyday conversation it may sound, “the straightforward, plain language spoken in real life” is highly structured in any dramatic dialogue. The more closely a stage setting replicates a real place, the more it becomes a fake – and the further it moves away from the actual nature of theatrical performance. Even the most ordinary chair, borrowed from the home of people in exactly the same socioeconomic group as the characters (like the furniture in Antoine’s early Théãtre Libre productions), automatically acquires a different signification on the stage, becoming emblematic in being a focus of attention. The familiar irony of the phrase “the illusion of reality” is particularly applicable to naturalistic theatre, since the nearer it approximates reality the more illusory it in fact is.
Theatrical conventions are perhaps less changeable than those of other art forms, because of the economics of performance, which generally require a mass audience and so exert a normative pressure. To some extent this may explain the continued presence of Naturalism on the stage, despite the rapidity of political and technological change in the last decades. However, the lifestyle and social concerns represented in the defining works of Naturalism – the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, or Shaw – are now almost as distant from us in time as Restoration comedy was for the early naturalists. This presents the issue of historical perspective in an acute, but frequendy unrecognized way.
From today’s perspective, the key plays of Naturalism are in almost every sense historical. Social circumstances are no longer the same as those they reflect. The burning legal or moral topics that preoccupy their characters have little in common with current concerns. The fashions of clothing they wear are strongly associated with the past – yet, unlike plays from most other eras, they are hardly ever performed in modern-dress productions. In a very real sense, while many have been adapted by modern playwrights or completely rewritten as contemporary versions – for instance Nora Helmer, a television version of A Doll’s House (Werner Fassbinder, 1974), or the film of Vanya on 42nd Street (adapted by David Mamet and directed by Louis Malle, 1994) – naturalistic plays do not seem to offer suitable material for updating. This is largely due to the central importance of the relationship between characters and their environment, together with the highly specific details of that social context built into the action. These plays not only have the status of modern classics, they are literally period pieces.
At the same time they are specifically modern in their approach and tone. The language their characters speak (albeit for most naturalist plays in translation) is still so close to contemporary usage that it sounds “normal”. The way their dramatic action is structured continues to be used, particularly by Broadway and West End playwrights. While we may perhaps not share the characters’ specific concerns, the general subjects explored in many of the plays – such as the position of women in the family, social inequality and economic exploitation, the destructive effect of rigid morality – are still being debated, even if in different terms. The mainly nineteenth-century or Edwardian society and its attitudes, depicted by the naturalists, may appear archaic; but the people who inhabit it are recognizably our near relatives. And this sense of familiarity is heightened by the fact that the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw are still being staged today, almost as frequently as Shakespeare’s plays.
It is this double vision through which turn-of-the-century Naturalists are perceived – as simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary – that creates problems of historical evaluation. To the extent that these plays are indeed based on accurate observation of society at the time, they can be treated as historical documents. However, there is a fundamental difference between them and the type of “documentary drama” developed by the German director Erwin Piscator and others from the late 1920s to the 1950s. Dealing directly with recent events, docu-drama relies on an impression of total factuality in the material presented, combining filmed scenes with stage action, and actors made up to resemble precisely well-known political figures (as in Piscator’s 1927 Rasputin, the Romanoffs, the War and the People, Who Rose Up Against Them), or uses unaltered transcripts for dramatic scripts (as with The Investigation by Peter Weiss in 1965). Docu-drama is a derivative of Naturalism, extending its environmental principles to make society itself or historical processes the active agent, and reducing individuals to cyphers. By contrast, in naturalistic plays the focus is on a conflict between an individual and his or – more frequendy – her environment. And as with the main figures of A Doll’s House or Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession, these individuals have at least a chance of emerging from this conflict with a conditional victory, liberating themselves from some destructive aspects of their environment. The level of factual reference is equally different. Clearly by the standard of docu-drama both the characters and plots of Ibsen or Chekhov are invented – although some of Shaw’s figures are loosely based on composites of real people (as with the “merchant of death”, Undershaft, in Major Barbara, who contains aspects of the leading arms manufacturers and salesmen in 1905: Nobel, Zaharoff and Krupp). Indeed, both Ibsen and Chekhov emphasized the existence of an underlying poetic vision in their naturalistic plays, while Shaw referred to the “mystic” qualities of Heartbreak House – qualities which are the antithesis of docu-drama.
What gives naturalistic plays historical status is, in fact, their position in the history of ideas; and paradoxically, it is on this level that they are most contemporary. The challenge to social orthodoxies, which naturalistic playwrights introduced into the theatre, is a characteristic feature of much twentieth-century art and thought. The avoidance of stereotype characters and moral categories – as Shaw put it, “The conflict is not between clear right and wrong; in fact the question which makes [modern drama] interesting is which is the villain and which the hero” – corresponds with the relativistic morality of today. In particular the treatment of women in their plays strikes a modern chord.
From Thérèse Raquin on, the number of naturalistic plays with women as their title figures or central characters is striking. These include, most notably: Nora in A Doll’s House, the title figures of Hedda Gabler, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, Nina who identifies herself with The Seagull, Blanche in Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren and her daughter, as well as Candida and Major Barbara, the daughters and fashion models of Granville Barker’s The Madras House – also Becque’s La Parisienne, Brieux’s Blanchette, The Three Daughters of M. Dupont and Maternity, plus D.H. Lawrence’s The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd and The Daughter-in-Law. The theatrical franchise also extends to female children: Hedvig, the young girl who is the most obvious analogue to The Wild Duck, or Galsworthy’s teenage title character in Joy. Of course there are examples of major female characters in classical and pre-naturalistic drama, from Medea to Lady Macbeth, or Racine’s Andromaque, Bérénice and Phèdre, even Scribe’s L’Héritière(The Heiress) or Adrienne Lecouvreur, up to Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray and The Notorious Mrs. Ebbsmith. However, these are a distinct minority, and are almost all presented as evil, immoral, or as tragic victims – implicitly condemned, or punished for playing an active male role or for achieving a prominence at odds with the traditional ideals of submissive and self-effacing women. An exception is Restoration comedy (Wycherley’s The Country Wife, or the three contrasting wives of Edward Ravens-croft’s The London Cuckolds – but even there the female figures are all (apart from Hellena in Aphra Behn’s The Rover) type-characters. The naturalistic emphasis on women is something decisively new in theatre. Indeed, it could be seen as even more crucial than the other elements, such as the focus on environment and heredity, or the objective techniques, which Naturalism introduced.
The factor that makes this new is not the number, or even the centrality of female characters, but the way female experience is presented. Their views are given equal weight to those of the men in the plays. Indeed, since in general the women assert themselves in opposition to the male-dominated society ranked against them, their voice predominates. This is doubly significant, given that all the major plays in the naturalist movement were written by men. There are only a bare handful of plays by women over the whole period: Alan’s Wife (1893) by Florence Bell and Elizabeth Robins, an actress particularly associated with Ibsen’s plays including Hedda Gabler, which she performed in 1891; Constance Fletcher’s Mrs Lessingham (1894); Dorothy Leighton’s Thyrza Fleming (also 1894); Mrs Daintree’s Daughter (1895) by Janet Achurch, the actress who first performed A Doll’s House in England; Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! (1906) – and these, mainly unpublished and forgotten, are never revived on the stage. The fact that it was largely male playwrights who voiced female concerns and created the figure of the “new woman” not only reflects the reality of gender inequity in the period, even ironically as an illustration that men felt it right to speak for and define women. It also indicates the intrinsic connection between Naturalism and the movement for female emancipation.
This was obvious to critics at the time, since the outcry when naturalistic drama (particularly Ibsen) first appeared on the stage was as much directed against the “new woman” as against the attack on established morality (of which, indeed, women were the primary victims) . However, the significance, and even the newness of this treatment of gender has subsequendy become all too easy to overlook. The specific causes for which the playwrights fought and their female characters suffered have been long won. Indeed the first steps predated A Doll’s House. In Norway, for example, laws had already been passed giving women equal inheritance rights (1854) and – for unmarried women – independence from male guardians (1863), and the right to work in any trade or profession (1866). It was only much later, after naturalist drama had become the standard form of mainstream theatre, that women were granted the right to vote: 1913 in Norway, 1918 in England. To put this in context it is necessary to remember that until shordy before this working-class men too had been denied voting rights, and that general male suffrage (for men over the age of 25) had only been introduced in Norway in 1898. The five-year gap between Norway and England can also perhaps be seen as a measure of literary influence – with A Doll’s House only reaching the English stage in 1889, ten years after its first performance in Norway. It is now over 70 years since women gained full legal emancipation in England (1928); and with the batdes having moved on to other areas of sexual and economic equality, the naturalist treatment of gender may now seem dated.
However, the 1890s image of the new woman has striking similarities with contemporary feminist concepts. As a recent commentary sums it up:
She was not so much a person, or even group of people, as a constructed category which expressed metonymically some of the historic challenges being brought to bear in the 1890s on traditional ideas of women, in particular, and gender as a whole. Individuals did not often identify themselves as New Women; and when they were so identified by others, the term seems usually to have been freighted with disparaging meanings, although these meanings were different, or contradictory, even while cohering as a symbol of ‘disorder and rebellion’ … One version of the New Woman defied traditional codes of female beauty, smoking cigarettes and dressing in simple and ‘manly’ fashion which seemed to complement her discontented mouth and a nose ‘too large for feminine beauty’ but indicative of intelligence [H. S. Scott and E. Hall, Cornhill, 1894]. New Women were often perceived to be masculine in other ways too, sometimes devoting themselves to a profession or business in preference to the bearing and bringing up of children. This abrogation of a woman’s supposed highest duty was perhaps the chief illustration of what one writer described as the New Woman’s ‘restlessness and discontent with the existing order of things’ [H. M. Stutfield, Blackwoods, 1895]. Sometimes the New Woman was perceived to be freer in her dealings with men than custom allowed, and at other times a cold and ‘apparently sexless’ creature who rejected out of hand all relations with men [Stutfield, Blackwoods, 1897].
(Kerry Powell, in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, 1998)
This figure of the new woman was particularly promoted on the stage, although she also appeared in the novels of Sarah Grand and others. The challenge to gender stereotypes, as well as provocative statements on women’s rights, and attacks on sexual inequality are a fundamental basis of theatrical Naturalism. Indeed, the defining moment of naturalistic drama is the slamming of the door, as Nora leaves her husband at the end of A Doll’s House.
The literary “canon” usually refers to “great works”. These have usually gained such a designation through custom (in the sense that they have retained their appeal to a broad readership or audience over the generations), or because they are held to be superior in vision or technique. A work might also enter the canon because it represents a historical period particularly well, or if it epitomizes a specific style. In all cases canonization reflects critical opinion, which has become entrenched through educational practice. Plays or novels designated as great works are selected for studying, which in turn confirms their importance; and the effect is to obscure other works outside the canon. It is a normative process, which in the past has tended to marginalize writing by women or expressing non-European sensibilities. And since most of the critics who set the criteria have been European males, this has recentiy led to attacks on the canon and the process of canon formation – in particular by feminists and Black American writers. Batde has been joined in the cause of “multiplicity” and “inclusiveness” versus “aesthetic quality” and “standards”. Right or wrong, the challenge is useful in forcing us to question conventional criteria and re-evaluate our approach to literature.
The same process of selection also occurs on a more specialized level. Critical labels (such as Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism) refer to ways of seeing the world, or styles of representing what is seen; and literary movements are defined and delimited by the correspondence of particular works to the way these labels have been interpreted. These too then become a canon against which other works are measured, and canon formation is intrinsically exclusive. No matter whether the artist might have seen his own work as part of a movement, if it does not appear to fit the way a category has subsequently become defined, then it is omitted. At the same time, where works that are indeed considered part of the movement contain Other elements, then these tend to be ignored. The effect is doubly distorting. It both narrows down the usage of a critical label, and obscures the real nature of the works it is used to describe.
This is as true of theatrical Naturalism as it is of the overarching literary canon. Ibsen’s plays from The Pillars of Society in 1887 and A Doll’s House in 1879 through Ghosts and An Enemy of the People to The Wild Duck in 1884 and Rosmersholm in 1886 are accepted as major texts of Naturalism (with some critical reservations about the last two). However, his later drama – sometimes including Hedda Gabler – is excluded due to its perceived “non-naturalistic” elements. Just two of Strindberg’s plays are held to qualify: The Father and Miss Julie (1881 and 1888). Similarly only Chekhov’s last four plays, from The Seagull (1896) to The Cherry Orchard (1904) are generally seen as true examples of Naturalism – a perspective largely determined by their interpretation in Stanislavsky’s productions. The other major figure in the canon of Naturalism is the German dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. A number of Hauptmann’s plays from Before Dawn (his first play in 1889) to Rose Bernd in 1903 are clearly influenced by Zola’s theoretical writings and follow directly in Ibsen’s footsteps – although much of his work is eclectic, including neo-Romantic allegory and poetic fantasy. Other single plays by various dramatists are also generally identified with Naturalism. These include Zola’s proto-naturalistic Thérèse Raquin (1873), Tolstoi’s The Power of Darkness (written in 1886, and banned in Russia until 1895), Maksim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902), and D.H. Lawrence’s working-class plays (1906–12, though none were performed until 20 years later), as well as O’Neill’s early, semi-autobiographical sea-plays such as Bound East for Cardiff (1915–18). The dates of such plays, covering 45 years over the turn of the century, are usually taken as the limits of the movement proper, with its high point between 1881 and 1904 – although there are numerous later examples indicating the continuing influence of Naturalism, for instance O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–41).
One of the best ways of defining a literary movement is through shared sources and influences; and these are particularly clear with Naturalism. In addition to the directors and actors who (as already mentioned) were influenced by Antoine, connections among the dramatists are equally direct, leading back to Zola, whose writings also determined Antoine’s theatrical approach, and to Ibsen. Chekhov’s major connections were through naturalistic novelists such as Flaubert and Maupassant. However, he was certainly aware of Zola’s theories, and one of his letters refers to Thérèse Raquin as “not a bad play”, while one of his later letters paid distinctive tribute to Ibsen:
As I am soon coming to Moscow, please keep a ticket for me for ‘The Pillars of Society’. I want to see the marvellous Norwegian acting, and I will even pay for my seat. You know Ibsen is my favorite writer….
(7 November 1903)
Indeed the new approach pioneered by Ibsen directly influenced the change in Chekhov’s drama marked by The Seagull (which was initially attacked for its “Ibsen-ism”), and having read Strindberg’s Miss Julie some years earlier, he enthusiastically sent a new Russian translation of the play to Gorky in 1899. Strindberg, who specifically claimed to be following Zola, wrote his naturalistic plays in conscious opposition to Ibsen; and it was O’Neill’s reading of Strindberg that (as he stated in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) “first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me to write for the theatre myself’. In addition O’Neill’s late play, The Iceman Cometh (1939) is an obvious rewriting of Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902), which in turn derived from one of Chekhov’s early censored one-act plays, On the High Road (1885). Shaw too was explicidy influenced by Ibsen, following the dramatic principles he had analyzed in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1890 and 1891), while Hauptman’s Lonely Lives (1891) is obviously inspired by Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.
The connections are equally clear in the work of directors associated with Naturalism. It was Otto Brahm’s enthusiasm for Ibsen’s plays that led him to found the Freie Bühne in Berlin, where his repertoire between 1899 and 1904 focussed specifically on Ibsen and Hauptmann, as well as including plays by Shaw. Over exactly the same five-year period Stanislavsky focussed on productions of Ibsen, as well as Chekhov and Gorky – who corresponded with Chekhov and used his plays as a model – and both Chekhov and Gorky remained in the Moscow Art Theatre repertoire until 1917.
However, limiting Naturalism to the era before 1920 gives an inaccurate picture. Naturalism is not simply an historical phenomenon. Although today there are competing forms of theatre (as indeed there were during the period from 1873 to 1906 when melodrama continued to hold the stage, and the Symbolist movement was also at its height with poetic mood plays by Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal and W.B. Yeats), on a more general level the influence of Naturalism still pervades Western theatre. Arthur Miller, for instance, modeled his first play, All My Sons (1947), on Ibsen, and adapted An Enemy of the People (1950) as part of the preparatory work for The Crucible. Ibsen’s techniques of dramatic construction, together with naturalistic settings that reproduce a physical environment in careful detail form the standard for mainstream plays and productions. And perhaps the most dominant theory of acting is still Stanislavsky’s system, which he expounded in An Actor Prepares (first translated into English, 1936). This was promoted in particular by the Actor’s Studio in New York under Lee Strasberg, who joined the Studio in 1949 and as its artistic director from 1951 to 1982 direcdy influenced several generations of leading actors. The Stanislavsky system gave rise to the whole school of “Method acting”, epitomized by Marlon Brando, which has been called the quintessential American style.
If the generally accepted historical boundaries of the naturalistic movement are questionable, the usual canonical selection of playwrights is no less tendentious. The playwrights whose work is presented as representative of Naturalism are primarily the trio of Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. Yet only a small fraction of Strindberg’s work is in any way naturalistic: just two plays; and those rely heavily on non-naturalistic elements. Conversely, although one of his early plays, Mrs Warren’s Profession, may be occasionally listed as “naturalistic”, Bernard Shaw – the other major playwright of the period – is always excluded. Rather than being taken as evidence that Shaw is in the same camp as Ibsen, The Quintessence of Ibsenism tends to be seen as idiosyncratic (though in fact it is far less so than Strindberg’s interpretation of Zola) to the point that it revises Ibsen into the basis for a very different form of – specifically Shavian – drama. At the same time Shaw’s characteristic comic tone seems, according to conventional definitions of Naturalism, the antithesis of the naturalistic approach. So too does the intellectual articulacy and musical structure of his dialogue, as well as his use of paradox, and his preference for emphatic acting, all of which have overtones of artificiality. In addition, Shaw’s output – like Hauptmann’s – is eclectic. It would certainly be difficult to classify his 1903 Man and Superman as naturalistic, with its central act being a dream sequence set in Hell and involving symbolic figures; and after 1920 his later work alternates between historical chronicles and fantasy.
Yet Shaw was directly involved in the naturalistic movement. Together with the critic William Archer (who collaborated on Shaw’s first play, Widowers’ Houses) he was instrumental in introducing Ibsen to the English stage. Like Zola, in his profession as a drama reviewer during the 1890s Shaw promoted the new naturalistic plays, and attacked traditional drama for its romantic idealization and conventionalized morality. He admired Brieux, and wrote a preface for a collection of Brieux’s plays. He subtided one of his plays, Heartbreak House, as “in the Russian manner” – in other words, following Chekhov. In fact his expanded lecture on The Quintessence of Ibsenism offers remarkably acute insights into Ibsen’s dramatic methods: the substitution of discussion for a traditionally melodramatic climax; the successive undercutting of false moral positions within a play; the social radicalism and the presence of a “definite thesis” in Ibsens’ work. It is certainly true that in this extended essay Shaw is also highlighting qualities that became his own dramatic principles – but the very extent to which this is so underlines that his aims were essentially naturalistic. It is easy to find passages in his writings where he seems to reject some of the defining qualities of Naturalism. For instance:
For [William Archer] there is illusion in the theatre: for me there is none. I can make imaginary assumptions readily enough; but for me the play is not the thing, but its thought, its purpose, its feeling and its execution … In these criticisms by Mr Archer… he still makes the congruity of the artist’s performance with the illusion of the story his criterion of excellence in the acting… To him acting, like scene-painting, is merely a means to an end, that end being to enable him to make believe. To me a play is only the means, the end being the expression of feeling by the arts of the actor, the poet, the musician.
(Our Theatres in the Nineties, 1895)
Or his rejection of verisimilitude (the accurate reproduction of actual social conditions) in favor of veracity (philosophical truth):
It is the business of the stage to make its figures more intelligible to themselves than they would be in real life; for by no other means can they be made intelligible to the audience … All I claim is that by this inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude I have secured in the only possible way sufficient veracity to justify me in claiming that as far as I can gather from the available documentation, and from such powers of divination as I possess, the things I represent these … exponents of the drama as saying are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they were really doing.
(Preface to Saint Joan, 1924)
Yet over half the full-length plays Shaw wrote between 1892 and 1919 – 14 out of 25 – were placed in recognizable contemporary settings, while others set in the past were historically accurate. Indeed Stanislavsky, generally considered an epitome of Naturalism, made exacdy the same distinction between authenticity and verisimilitude:
Like all revolutionaries we broke the old and exaggerated the value of the new…
Those who think that we sought for naturalism on the stage are mistaken. We never leaned towards such a principle. Always, then as well as now, we sought for inner truth, for the truth of feeling and experience, but as spiritual technique was only in its embryo stage among the actors of our company, we … fell now and then into an outward and coarse naturalism.
(My Life in Art, 1926)
Shaw’s plays do indeed have an overdy theatrical quality. They frequentiy build on the most conventional types of nineteenth-century drama, such as the military melodrama (Arms and the Man; Caesar and Cleopatra) or domestic and romantic comedy (Candida; Pygmalion), although they reverse the model in order to discredit its underlying assumptions about human behavior. His emphasis is indeed comic, which means that the action is structured by literary, rather than realistic needs. There is a clearly discernible thesis in his plays, which of course means that his approach cannot be completely neutral or objective. The underpinning – and even, in Heartbreak House, the surface tone – is usually symbolic.
None of these qualities (at least in theory) are “naturalistic”. However, ruling them out has effectively distorted Naturalism. In addition to imposing arbitrary limits on the movement, it disguises central elements in the plays that are assigned to the naturalistic canon.
Like Shaw, some of Ibsen’s plays copy traditional dramatic models to reject them – most obviously A Doll’s House, which incorporates clear elements of Scribean domestic melodrama. Chekhov specifically subtitled both The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as “comedy”; and there are extensively comic, even farcical, sequences in both these and his other plays – although (as Chekhov complained) Stanislavsky’s stricdy limited view of Naturalism turned them into tragic expressions of “blank despondency”. There are clearly discernable theses about society and sexual relations in Strindberg’s naturalistic plays (as well as in Ibsen). In addition, almost all naturalistic dramatists in fact use symbolic elements as key devices to communicate wider meanings.
Given its poetic basis, implying an idealized and interior depiction of human activity, symbolism is generally seen as the opposite of Naturalism. However – more obviously even than in Shaw – the major plays of the naturalistic canon are structured around symbols, and their central importance is demonstrated by the frequency with which these controlling symbols appear in the titles. Examples are Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which also includes a highly symbolic dance, the tarantella; The Wild Duck, in which extreme near-sightedness also becomes deeply symbolic; and Ghosts, with its symbolic use of light (the burning orphanage, dawn) and darkness – or Chekhov’s The Seagull:; and The Cherry Orchard, which also introduces heavily symbolic sounds (a breaking string, the thud of axes). Symbolism is equally prominent, even plays where the title is naturalistically neutral, referring to the name of the major character. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and Strindberg’s Miss Julie both revolve around heavily loaded objects, which take on symbolic significance: for instance, the General’s portrait and pistols, the Count’s boots and razor. Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya includes a Helen of Troy figure and a “wood demon” (the title for an earlier version of the play).
At best, viewing these plays through the lens of strict naturalistic theory downplays such elements. At worst, it distorts the plays by ignoring them. The way the theory of Naturalism has been generally applied creates equal difficulties for more sensitive commentators, who recognize the presence of these elements but are unable to categorize them. In these cases even key plays in the canon tend to be excluded from the movement; and the reception of Chekhov is a particularly good example:
W.H. Bruford defined the Chekhovian method as ‘psychological naturalism’ [Anton Chekhov: Yale, 1957]. Francis Fergusson, however, came to a different conclusion; analyzing The Cherry Orchard he said that ‘Chekhov’s poetry … is behind the naturalistic surfaces; but the form of the play as a whole is “nothing but” poetry in the widest sense….’ [The Idea of a Theatre: Double-day, 1949] … Maurice Valency diverged even further. He saw The Three Sisters as ‘the flower of impressionism in the drama’ [The Breaking String: Oxford, 1966]. Even earlier a synthesis of sorts that lumped together symbolism, realism and naturalism was attempted by John Gassner; yet his statement that ‘if Maeterlinck’s plays are mood pieces, so are the plays of Chekhov, who is considered a supreme realist or naturalist’ [Directions in Modern Theatre and Drama: Holt, Reinhart, 1966], was also readily disputed by N. Efros who categorically proclaimed that ‘Chekhov is an artistic realist; no other definition can be applied to him’ [in Literary and Theatrical Reminiscences, ed. S.S. Koteliansky: New York, 1927].
(Nicholas Moravcevich, in Comparative Drama, 1970)
Clearly the theory of Naturalism, and the canon created to exemplify it need revision.
Even for theatre artists of the time who explicitly labeled themselves as part of the movement, “Naturalism” was understood very differently in terms of practice. For instance there were clear divergences in the concept of naturalistic acting – although the style of performing might seem fundamental to portraying natural-istically conceived characters. Thus Antoine’s actors physically “lived” their roles, reproducing mannerism and gesture based on close observation of the type or class of person represented, and moving with a sense of spontaneity. But a letter by Frank Fay, the lead actor of the Irish Players and an admirer of Antoine, reveals a widely divergent view.
I saw Antoine twice and was somewhat disappointed. Curiously Archer’s comments in this week’s World agree with mine. He says Antoine had no facial expression, of that I could not judge being too far away. I could not see anything vitally different in his method for the others, except that once or twice he spoke more quietly than the others with little or no regard for the necessities of a theatre and though the effect was very ‘natural’ in an everyday sense it was, I think, the sort of naturalness that, like the Duse’s Italian company is of doubtful value. His intonation (a vital thing after all) did not strike me, whereas I think Réjane’s tones would strike anyone from anywhere as being absolutely real. Antoine is very restless, moves about and fidgets with his tie and collar.
(Letter to Maire Garvey, 30 June 1904)
Shaw made a similar comment on seeing Antoine’s production of The Wild Duck.
The garret scene was admirable; but there would not be room for it at the Court. It was played at great speed and raced to the end of every act to get to a curtain. Gregers described by Relling as an expectorator of phrases, went full steam ahead all through. There was no character in Gina or old Ekdal [acted by Antoine] – indeed there was no character in the acting at all as we understand it, but it was a bustling piece of work … Stage management ad lib.; Gregers and his father walked ten miles in the first act if they walked a foot.
(Letter to Granville Barker, 7 May 1906)
To some extent (as both commentaries acknowledge) this critical reaction may have been due to the size of theatre in which Antoine was now staging his productions, compared to the small-scale intimacy of the early Théãtre Libre. However, the unanimity of these responses indicates a significant contrast between the style of acting Antoine had developed, and the type of performance seen as naturalistic in Britain that took the intrinsic artificiality of theatre into account. This emphasized achieving a convincingly realistic effect translated through orchestrated and histrionic means, while in France actors and directors focussed on transferring real-life behavior direcdy to the stage.
Both should be seen as aspects of the same movement, marking two extremes in a spectrum of Naturalism. Expanding the concept of Naturalism in this way includes Shaw as one of the major examples. It also makes it easier to recognize the true qualities of playwrights previously established in the canon, such as Ibsen and Chekhov.