A Sourcebook on Naturalist Theatre Read online

  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.

  Acting and character

  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)

  Conventions and perspectives

  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.