Forms of Modern Drama

Abstract

play is projected and inevitably transmuted by the performance and how the audience responds to it. In considering changes in dramatic style and form-and sensibility is obviously involved in such changesthe total experience is of paramount importance, and this is to be derived from the theater rather than from the printed plays alone. Concerning that experience, so immense in its totality that even the detailed chronicles of the stage barely do it justice, we may generalize only to a limited extent. We may observe, first of all, that the relationship of the modern drama and the theater has been a fluctuating one. Sometimes, as in the case of Becque, Ibsen, and Tolstoy when he composed The Power of Darkness in 1886, the playwright was in advance of the theater, which failed to realize his intentions. The Comedie Frangaise, for example, clung to an antiquated tradition of romantic posturing when it gave its first production of Becque's realistic masterpiece, La Parisienne, as late as 1890; and The Sea-Gull was staged so disastrously in 1896 before the advent of the Moscow Art Theatre that Chekhov intended to give up playwriting. And Strindberg wrote expressionist drama at least a dozen years before there was any expressionist theater anywhere in Europe. Sometimes, on the contrary, the real pioneers have been the stage directors and designers; Antoine, Stanislavsky, and Gordon Craig were at first well in advance of most of the playwrights of their time. Still, an adjustment between the drama and the stage occurred soon enough in most instances for us to discuss changes in perspective as though they affected playwriting and play production more or less equally and simultaneously. Notice may also be taken of the relativity of public response. Different audiences in different countries reacted with different degrees of interest and antipathy to such works as A Doll's House and Ghosts; and the same public that considered plays such as these too venturesome was likely to find them too staid within a decade or two. Even so, however, distinctions can be validly drawn between dominant public attitudes