“But…people don’t do such things!”Wednesday, 1/29

Between Melodrama and Naturalism: The “Well-Made Play”• During the second half of the 19th

Century, the Well-Made Play (from the French pièce bien faite) became as popular with the middle and upper classes as melodrama was with the working classes.

• Whereas melodrama emphasized “sensation,” the Well-Made Play emphasized complex, meticulously orchestrated plots.

• Well-Made Plays introduce a conflict in the first act, which develops through a series of increasingly elaborate complications and comes to a head is the scène à faire—the scene in which the conflicting characters finally confront each other and everything is resolved.

Eugene Scribe (1791-1861), popularizer of the Well-Made Play, who wrote 350 plays using his plotting formula.

The Saxe-Meiningen Company

Georg Brandes, “Inaugural Lecture” (1871)“The main principles of the previous century were freedom of research in science and the unimpeded development of humanity in literature. Whatever does not hold with this current flows down into decadence and takes the way to Byzantium.”

“For it is not so much our laws that need changing as it is our whole conception of society. The younger generation must plough it up and replant it before a new literature can bloom and flourish. Their chief task will be to channel into our country those currents that have their origin in the revolution and in the belief in progress, and to halt the reaction at all points where its historica mission has been fulfilled.”

Émile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre” (1881)

“The natural sciences date from the end of the last century; chemistry and physics are less than a hundred years old; history and criticism have been renovated, virtually recreated since the revolution; an entire world has arisen; it has sent us back to the study of documents, to experience, made us realize that to start afresh we must first take things to the beginning, become familiar with man and nature, verify what it is.”

“Environment, the study of which has transformed science and literature, will have to take a large role in the theatre.”

André Antoine

The Moscow Art Theatre

Naturalism, Modernism, Idealism“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

-John Keats, final lines of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

“Supposing truth is a woman—what then?”-Friedrich Nietzsche, first sentence of Beyond Good and Evil

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”-Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Ibsen’s Playwriting CareerThe Viking Phase (1849-1863)

The Prophetic Phase(1866-1873)

The Naturalist Phase (1877-1886)

The Late Plays (1890-1899)

-Catiline

-The Burial Mound

-The Feast at Solhaug

-The Vikings of Helgeland

-Love’s Comedy

-The Pretenders

-Brand

-Peer Gynt

-The League of Youth

-Emperor and Galilean

-Pillars of Society

-A Doll’s House

-Ghosts

-An Enemy of the People

-The Wild Duck

-Rosmerholm

-The Lady from the Sea

-Hedda Gabler

-The Master Builder

-Little Eyolf

-John Gabriel Borkmann

-When We Dead Awaken

Ibsen and the Women’s Movement• “My life passes uselessly and without importance,

suffocated by the eternal question of whether this is really the kind of existence to which I am destined. It awakens me suddenly at night, I arise with it in the morning, and when I put on my night-cap in the evening and contemplate what I have done the whole day since I took if off I am saddened and ask myself why I dress at all, why I do not always wear it, for that would be most appropriate to such a night-cap life.”

• -from the diary of Camilla Collett, early Norwegian women’s rights advocate and important influence on Ibsen

Betty Hennings • The first actress to play

many of Ibsen’s female leads.

Janet Achurch• The first English Nora and the

second English Hedda.• Became manager of the

Novelty Theatre in 1889 and performed A Doll’s House there that year.

• Achurch’s production of A Doll’s House was later remembered as a major moment in the history of the British women’s movement and in the development of theatrical realism in England.

• Was also one of Shaw’s favorite actresses.

Vera Kommisarzhevskaya• Owned and ran her own

theatre in Saint Petersburg, where several key works of Modernist and avant-garde drama had their Russian premieres.

• Her production of Hedda Gabler in 1906 was directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold—a protégée of Stanislavski who would become Russia’s most important experimental director.

Helena Modjeska• Polish-American

actress, responsible for the first American stagings of Ibsen.

• Briefly lived on a ranch in California, trying to create a utopian community with other Polish émigrés.

• Played Nora in Louisville, KY in 1883.

Elizabeth Robins• Played the title role in the first English

production of Hedda Gabler in 1891, which she produced and co-directed with Marion Lea, who played Thea.

• Also a playwright, novelist, and activist, her best-known work being the play Votes for Women! and its novelization, The Convert (both 1907).

• Her performance as Hedda was described by Ibsen himself as “sympathetically unsympathetic,” and it made her an instant celebrity.

• In 1911, she helped organize a Women’s Suffrage parade and pageant to coincide with Edward VII’s coronation—the parade was led by an actress in horseback dressed as Hedda Gabler.