Realism is a literary technique that attempts to create the appearance of life as it is actually experienced. Characters in modern realistic plays (written during and after the last quarter of the nineteenth century) speak dialogue that we might hear in our daily lives. These characters are not larger than life but representative of it; they seem to speak the way we do rather than in highly poetic language, formal declarations, asides, or soliloquies. It is impossible to imagine a heroic figure such as Oedipus inhabiting a comfortably furnished living room and chatting about his wife’s household budget the way Torvald Helmer does in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Realism brings into focus commonplace, everyday life rather than the extraordinary kinds of events that make up Sophocles’ Oedipus the King or Shakespeare’s Othello.
Realistic characters can certainly be heroic, but like Nora Helmer, they find that their strength and courage are tested in the context of events ordinary people might experience. Work, love, marriage, children, and death are often the focus of realistic dramas. These subjects can also constitute much of the material in nonrealistic plays, but modern realistic dramas present such material in the realm of the probable. Conflicts in realistic plays are likely to reflect problems in our own lives. Making ends meet takes precedence over saving a kingdom; middle- and lower-class individuals take center stage as primary characters in main plots rather than being secondary characters in subplots. Thus, we can see why the nineteenth-century movement toward realism paralleled the rise of a middle class eagerly seeking representations of its concerns in the theater.
Before the end of the nineteenth century, however, few attempts were made in the theater to present life as it is actually lived. The chorus’s role in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, the allegorical figures in morality plays, the remarkable mistaken identities in Shakespeare’s comedies, or the rhymed couplets spoken in seventeenth-century plays such as Molière’s Tartuffe represent theatrical conventions rather than life. Theatergoers have understood and appreciated these conventions for centuries — and still do — but in the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States social, political, and industrial revolutions helped create an atmosphere in which some playwrights found it necessary to create works that more directly reflected their audiences’ lives.
Playwrights such as Ibsen and Anton Chekhov refused to join the ranks of their romantic contemporaries, who they felt falsely idealized life. The most popular plays immediately preceding the works of these realistic writers consisted primarily of love stories and action-packed plots. Such melodramas offer audiences thrills and chills as well as happy endings. They typically include a virtuous individual struggling under the tyranny of a wicked oppressor, who is defeated only at the last moment. Suspense is reinforced by a series of pursuits, captures, and escapes that move the plot quickly and de-emphasize character or theme. These representations of extreme conflicts enjoyed wide popularity in the nineteenth century — indeed, they still do — because their formula was varied enough to be entertaining yet their outcomes were always comforting to the audience’s sense of justice. From the realists’ perspective, melodramas were merely escape fantasies that distorted life by refusing to examine the real world closely and objectively. But an indication of the popularity of such happy endings can be seen in Chekhov’s farcical comedies, such as The Proposal, a one-act play filled with exaggerated characters and action. Despite his realist’s values, Chekhov was also sometimes eager to please audiences.
Realists attempted to open their audiences’ eyes; to their minds, the only genuine comfort was in knowing the truth. Many of their plays concern controversial issues of the day and focus on people who fall prey to indifferent societal institutions. English dramatist John Galsworthy (1867–1933) examined social values in Strife (1909) and Justice (1910), two plays whose titles broadly suggest the nature of his concerns. Irish-born playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) often used comedy and irony as a means of awakening his audiences to contemporary problems: Arms and the Man (1894) satirizes romantic attitudes toward war, and Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1898) indicts a social and economic system that drives a woman to prostitution. Chekhov’s major plays are populated by characters frustrated by their social situations and their own sensibilities; they are ordinary people who long for happiness but become entangled in everyday circumstances that limit their lives. Ibsen also took a close look at his characters’ daily lives. His plays attack social conventions and challenge popular attitudes toward marriage; he stunned audiences by dramatizing the suffering of a man dying of syphilis.
With these kinds of materials, Ibsen and his contemporaries popularized the problem play, a drama that represents a social issue in order to awaken the audience to it. These plays usually reject romantic plots in favor of holding up a mirror that reflects not simply what audiences want to see but what the playwright sees in them. Nineteenth-century realistic theater was no refuge from the social, economic, and psychological problems that melodrama ignored or sentimentalized.