Fate Drama

Fate Drama is otherwise known as 'schicksaltragodie' and became a popular theatrical genre in Germany in the early 19th century. Its key ingredient was the downfall of the protagonist as a result of destiny.

Tragedy

Tragedy, like comedy, first began in ancient Greece at play festivals in honour of the god Dionysus. The origin of the word has been disputed through the ages, but is probably from the Greek word tragoidia, meaning ‘goat-song’.

Common to all works of the genre was a protagonist at the centre of the drama, known as the hero. In the 5th Century BC, subject matter for dramatic pieces was sourced from history and myth, popular among them the contents of Homer’s the Odyssey and the Iliad. A tragic work from this period is known as Classical Tragedy. The hero is usually flawed with one or more weaknesses. Throughout the course of the drama, the hero struggles to achieve his objectives, which involves overcoming obstacles placed in his path. The hero is normally defeated and as a result of this, the play ends in unfortunate circumstances. The great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece were Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all time was Sophocles’ Oedipus The King (otherwise known as Oedipus Rex or King Oedipus).

Greek tragedies usually followed a well-known formula set down by the philosopher Aristotle in his work The Poetics (330 BC). Aristotle demanded the tragedy must be formal, complete with resolution at the end of the play and be of great moral significance for the people of Greece. He insisted all the action of the tragedy occurs within a single day in the plot. Conflict was also to be an essential ingredient. Aristotle saw tragedy in drama as an important benefit to society, as was catharsis, the release of human emotions that occurs when witnessing such action on stage.

Following the Greeks were the Romans, who tried in vein to emulate the great Greek tragedies. The best Roman tragedian was Seneca, who wrote nine plays. Whilst much Roman drama copied the Greeks without the same degree of quality, Seneca’s works did influence Renaissance playwrights William Shakespeare and John Webster when writing revenge tragedies.

Hundreds of years passed before tragedies of any significant merit were revived in playwriting. It was not until the time of Queen Elizabeth I in the 1500’s that tragic works were once again written on a similar scale to the Greeks. The tragic hero became a popular figure with Shakespeare in famous plays such as Romeo and Juliet (1597). Some of Shakespeare’s best tragedies were first published in the Jacobean period, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. During this time, history witnessed the masterpieces Hamlet (1603), King Lear (1608), Othello (1622) and Macbeth (1623). Many theatre historians argue tragedies of this standard have never been equalled since.

*Dates in ( ) are 'first published' dates and in the case of Macbeth, up to two decades after the play was written.

Satire

Satire essentially means send-up. It is traditionally a form of comedy, but can sometimes be found at the heart of more serious drama. Satire will often ridicule an individual, but the target can also be a group of people or an institution. The aim of satire is to mock the weaknesses or similar characteristics of another.

Like stand-up comedy, satire can also be quite severe and through humour, be very robust in its attack on the subject. The punch is made even more powerful when the topic of much satire are individuals in society well known to the audience. Someone or something usually has to be the butt of most comedy in order for it to be humorous, so effective satire takes full advantage of this and really makes a mockery of particular people and events. Satire can therefore be viewed as either offensive to some, or quite harmless to others.

At the heart of effective satire lies the ability to bring to the audience's attention the weaknesses of others. These are usually physical traits or qualities. Comedians intent on making society aware that certain people have peculiar physical characteristics, ridicule public figures every day. Part of the humour lies in how ‘public’ the person is. The more famous the person, the funnier the satire may be. There’s something about society expecting public figures to be physically perfect and beautiful, that leaves these very people wide open to comic attack via satire.

Satire is closely linked to parody and can often discredit an individual of their public worth or value. This is where political satire is of such importance. German theatre practitioner Bertolt Brecht used satire in many of his plays for political purposes. In some ways his plays were political propaganda, highlighting aspects of the government in 1930’s Germany. A classic example is his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui in which the location is gangster-ridden 1930’s Chicago. The play focuses on a protection racket established by Ui in the local greengrocer trade. But the plot is really parodying the injustices occurring in Nazi Germany at the time, as the character Ui is in fact Adolf Hitler in a different setting. This form of satire is not necessarily humorous and is used positively in the hope of instigating change.

Historically, satire is evident in the ancient Greek satyr plays and some of the works of Shakespeare. Today, satire is all around us in society with almost every arm of the media employing it, from newspapers and magazines to television and film.

Music Hall

What was known as Vaudeville in America was called Music Hall in England. There were numerous famous actors starring in it, the most notable being the internationally renowned late 19th Century actress Sarah Bernhardt.

Music Hall began in pubs and was later confined to theatres. A typical session consisted of six to eight separate acts. Like vaudeville, Music Hall involved singing, acting, juggling, magic acts and comedians.

Music Hall eventually suffered the competition of talking films in the late 1920’s and soon died off. Nostalgically, this form of entertainment is sometimes seen today as a revue show with a variety of individual acts, one after the other.

Farce

The word farce derives from old French, meaning 'stuff' or 'stuffing' and may have originated in the comic interludes of medieval French religious plays serving as light-hearted stuffing in between more serious drama. Historically, the term meant a literary or artistic production of little merit.

Farce is a type of comedy that uses absurd and highly improbable events in the plot. Situations are humorous because of their ludicrous and often ridiculous nature. The choice of setting is a key factor in farce, as the protagonist is sometimes at odds with the environment. Often the central character in a farce does not (or should not) belong in the place of the action. The audience will only accept the situation if they follow the conventions previously established. But characters in a farce can also quite logically belong in the setting they are placed in.

Examples of farce can be found in the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the plays of Shakespeare and the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Farce in film includes the works of Charlie Chaplin, Keystone Cops and the Marx Brothers. On television, the best examples of farce surround British actor John Cleese. Ridiculous situations abound in the 1970’s television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus and later in the wonderful, but short-lived series Fawlty Towers. There are also several Monty Python films that are excellent examples of farce. Few actors possess the ability to create pure farce better than Cleese.

It is important to note that farce is both a verbal and physical humour, using deliberate character exaggeration by the actor. The Marx Brothers were renowned for using their bodies in such a way as to exaggerate the situation, thus making it even more farcical. Whether it was using on-screen props or simply their arms and legs, this famous team made farce a very physical form of comedy. Similarly, John Cleese also uses his body to extraordinary effect. By nature a very tall man, Cleese manipulates his body to create silly walks by simply extending his legs outward and exaggerating his movements for extreme comic effect.

Domestic Tragedy

Classical tragedy in most Greek and Elizabethan drama involves protagonists who are kings or members of the aristocracy in society. Their subsequent downfall is even more tragic due to their rank.

But the Elizabethan period also witnessed the birth of a new form of tragedy that saw the protagonist as the common man. These works normally had a domestic setting, probably originated out of the religious morality plays of the medieval period (the common man as the protagonist eg. Everyman) and were similar to 1950s British plays of the kitchen sink genre (domestic setting).

Over the centuries, dramatists have portrayed the tragic hero in many different ways. At the end of the 19th Century, many of the plays of Henrik Ibsen saw heroes who were everyday people, perhaps the character of Nora in A Dolls House (1879) being the most famous. Several of Ibsens dramas are considered fine examples of the domestic tragedy genre.

These famous plays are considered domestic tragedies:

• Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House and Ghosts
• William Shakepseare's Othello
• Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh
• Thomas Middleton's A Yorkshire Tragedy
  

Some thoughts on perhaps the most famous domestic tragedy of them all...

Henrik Ibsens A Dolls House is a landmark in modern playwriting. If we look back over theatre history, few plays have a woman as the protagonist (central character). Whilst some of the Greek plays contained this factor (Euripides' Medea, Sophocles' Antigone and Aristophanes' Lysistrata which has an almost all-female cast) we must not forget that only men were permitted to act in these plays when first performed. The same applies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, as it was not until after the Restoration in 1660, that women were allowed to act on the English stage for the first time. It is well known that young boys were playing such roles as Juliet in the days of Shakespeare.

So in 1879 in Copenhagen, Denmark, the world witnessed the opening of Ibsen's remarkable play A Dolls House with the protagonist Nora, being performed by a woman. The play caused a near-riot. The sensation was all to do with a wife leaving her husband, which the critics and theatre-going public considered too risque for the times. Not deterred, Ibsen soon opened the play in Berlin.

It is a little-known fact there are actually two endings to A Dolls House. At the Berlin premiere the theatre manager also found the conclusion to Ibsen's play too dangerous. The result was a re-write and Ibsen was forced to write an alternate conclusion where Nora remains with her husband and children, instead of leaving. Unhappy with the dent on his artistic integrity, Ibsen thereafter returned the play to its original ending and until this day the standard edition of A Dolls House has Nora walk out on her family in the final scene.

It is no accident Ibsen titled this play A Dolls House, as Nora is her husband Torvald's little plaything; his doll. Throughout most of the drama Nora has clearly been subservient to her dominant husband, but in this final section of the play, Nora is a strong woman, fighting to keep herself together as she decides to tell her husband she is leaving him and their small children, forever.

Allegory

An allegory occurs when the real subject matter is somewhat masked or hidden by similar circumstances presented to the reader. Allegories are fictional stories that have deeper meanings beneath the surface.

People living in the Middle Ages often thought in allegories and it is not surprising one of the best examples of an allegorical play derives from this period. The anonymous work Everyman is a play about a man’s journey through the final days of his life. It is didactic in form and was aimed at teaching Medieval people about morality – the difference between right and wrong.

Allegory Links

Whodunit

This genre of play involves a crime (usually a murder) and police detectives. Typically, the audience sees the perfect crime being committed, suspects are then wrongly accused and unexpected twists occur at the conclusion of the plot. The play is a mystery, as the audience is kept guessing as to who the murderer is (hence whodunit). A fine example of a whodunit in modern times is J B Priestley’s The Inspector Calls.

Whodunit Links

Performance Art

Performance art probably dates back to the 1970’s where American artists such as Laurie Anderson were first dabbling in the form, though some argue its origins were even earlier in the ‘60’s.

Interestingly, it is a genre normally reserved for a single performer who is not always the focus, but often the facilitator of the event. Essentially, performance art is a multimedia experience, combining technology with performance. It can involve synthesised music, computers, lighting, poetry, slide projection, verse, dialogue, sound scapes and video in a single show. Dancers and acrobats can also be a part of the action. The emphasis is on the visual elements and possibly choreographed movement. The performer is not necessarily a character with traditional spoken lines. Performance art is sometimes used for political purposes and statements.

In many ways, performance art is a total theatre experience, combining both the visual and performing arts into a hybrid art form that encompasses many different aspects of each area.

Performance Art Links

Vaudeville

The term Vaudeville dates back to the 1730’s and was originally coined after light-hearted songs that were composed in the valley of Vire, a town in northwest France.

Essentially, Vaudeville was a variety show of popular entertainment beginning in the 1890’s and consisting of pantomime, dialogue, animals, magic acts, comedians, singing, dancing, acrobatics and juggling. In a sense, it was a hybrid form of entertainment lying somewhere between a circus and a musical.

Vaudeville went through several transformations during its time, from clean variety through to more male-oriented entertainment. At its peak, it produced household American names such as the comedian W C Fields and cowboy Will Rogers.

But soon Vaudeville was competing with talking films and later television. Its official decline probably occurred in the early 1930’s, but Vaudeville more than likely dwindled slowly away until it finally died around the end of the Second World War.

Today, Vaudeville is occasionally revived from time to time, but is rarely seen.

Vaudeville Links

Pantomime

Not to be confused with mime, the pantomime (abbreviated as ‘panto’) is almost exclusively a genre associated with England, beginning in the early 18th Century and originally involving Commedia dell’Arte-type characters.

When Queen Victoria arrived on the throne in 1837, the modern pantomime was borne out of the English harlequinade and storylines centred on dramatising fairytales suitable for young audiences.

Today’s pantomimes incorporate dance, slapstick and music, and the plots are loosely based on one of several popular fairytales or stories, such as Puss in Boots, Aladdin or Cinderella. A degree of cross-dressing is evident in English pantomimes. A young woman usually performs the Principal Boy, while a large, middle-aged man normally plays the Dame. These elements are conventions familiar with the audience and part of the pantomime’s general appeal.

Pantomimes in England are normally reserved for the Christmas festive season and regularly have well-known television and media personalities performing various roles.

Pantomime Links

Fantasy

One of the primary ingredients for a fantasy play is a setting in another time or place. So plays of this genre have many aspects that do not depend on realism. Other worlds are common locations for plots and characters can be from another place or non-human.

Fantasies rely on the audience’s imagination and sometimes even involve the use of magic by characters on stage. Fantasy is more common in novels than stage plays. In the theatre it is perhaps best associated with particular musicals, such as Beauty and The Beast, which involves a prince being transformed into an ugly beast by and old witch.

Fantasy Links

Sentimental Comedy

In the 1800’s in Britain a new form of drama emerged, known as sentimental comedy.

The basic premise of all Sentimental Comedies was that man was good, but capable of being misled. So plays of this genre had characters that were noble, got into trouble, then found the road to salvation. Strangely, these comedies were more likely to bring an audience to tears than offer them laughter.

Sentimental Comedies were considered by many to be realistic depictions of everyday life and this was part of their appeal.

The best example of the genre is Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722).

Sentimental Comedy Links

Comedy

The origins of comedy appear to have begun in fertility rites associated with the ancient Greek god Dionysus. Playwrights like Aristophanes wrote works we now refer to as Old Comedy, which incorporated satire and farce. Later, Menander began writing comedies of a more literary style, today known as New Comedy.

Throughout the ages, comedy has had numerous meanings and purposes.

Medieval people considered comedy to be a literary piece that began with unfortunate circumstances and ended happily.

Shakespeare and his contemporaries in England had a similar view of comedy, writing plays that involved romances and finished with marriage. In fact, Shakespeare is widely considered the master of romantic comic playwriting. At the same time in Italy, Commedia dell’Arte troupes were fascinating audiences with a very physical style of improvised comedy. This robust comic form included stock characters whose qualities never changed. These stereotypes were highly exaggerated to suit the social status of the character.

While in England during the late 1600’s, comedy of manners plays were using a nasty blend of satire to ridicule and amuse the upper classes. The hypocritical daily customs of those in the audience were being represented in the characters on stage.

The advent of film in the 20th Century introduced a whole new meaning for comedy. Hollywood witnessed a series of hugely successful comedians from Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy to Abbot and Costello, The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges.

More recently, the invention of television saw the introduction of the sitcom (situation comedy) and a seemingly endless list of mostly American television shows of this genre that remain very popular to the present day. Individual comedians have starred, including Bill Cosby, Jerry Seinfeld, Rowan Atkinson, Billy Connolly and John Cleese, among others.

Comedy Links

Burlesque

Burlesque derives from the Italian word 'burla' and means a joke or to ridicule. In this sense, burlesque shows were similar to satirical performances in that they were send-ups mocking people and events.

Originating in England in the late 17th Century, burlesque began as dramas parodying social events. It was not until this type of comedy was introduced in the United States in the second half of the 20th Century, that it began to achieve notoriety for being a bawdy variety performance involving women wearing risqué costumes performing to a mostly male audience.

Not surprisingly, the demise of burlesque coincided in the 1960’s with the large-scale commercial success of strip clubs in America, which effectively replaced this one-time theatrical genre with a broader form of entertainment.

Burlesque Links

Slapstick

Low comedy asks for little, if any intellectual skill in the script writing. Slapstick is an excellent example of this form as it is largely a physical humour, which like farce, asks for ridiculous situations.

The origins of the word slapstick may have first begun with the Commedia dell’Arte, which flourished in Europe in the 16th to 18th Centuries. It is rumoured the Harlequin-like character Arlecchino literally used a stick to whack others in performance. The slapstick was merely a paddle – two sticks tied together at one end designed to make a loud noise. Eventually the name stuck, but the stick disappeared, so today we rarely see the slapstick itself.

Instead, modern slapstick asks for tripping on banana peels, accidentally walking into unseen objects and banging heads together. It is often a violent form of comedy, with the violence being an integral factor in its success. The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges were masters of slapstick and their films are full of outlandish physical gags and preposterous plot developments. The dumb Harpo was often the victim of much Marx Brothers entertainment. Other famous comedy teams such as Laurel and Hardy and the films of the Keystone Cops also employ hilarious use of slapstick. More recently (and less violently), the character Mr Bean effectively used simple slapstick in many episodes of the television series of the same name.

Kitchen Sink Drama

Did you know there is a theatre genre known as Kitchen Sink Drama?

Up until the 1950’s, most English theatre was concerned with middle-class dramas and society. In 1956 British playwright John Osborne introduced a different type of drama Look Back In Anger that was one of the first plays to use a working-class setting with working-class characters. The lead character Jimmy was seen by many to represent disillusioned youth, the ‘angry young man’, thus spawning a whole new breed of playwrights similar to Osborne, who became known as the Angry Young Men. Plays of the genre typically used dull settings in working-class houses and it soon earned the title of Kitchen Sink Drama. Some critics called the new drama domestic realism, where the realities of the characters and plots were not necessarily as polite as the English dramas that preceded it.

Kitchen Sink Drama Links

Snuff Puppets: Black Comedy #2

Further to yesterday's post on the genre of Black Comedy, a little bit of controversy has arisen today.

A Herald Sun newspaper article reports Snuff Puppets will soon be performing their Twin Towers Show in Melbourne.

A chronicle of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the show that many will no doubt find offensive, is nevertheless an excellent example of Black Humour (post script: after having just seen the film World Trade Center, perhaps 'brutal' example, may be closer to the mark).

At the very heart of Black Comedy is the notion that the majority of its audience will find the method in which sensitive subject matter is tackled, as inappropriate.

Black Humour is not meant to be pretty. It is often grotesque and its aim is to mock things we sometimes regard as sacred.

Black Comedy

Black comedy is otherwise known as black humour and possibly first appeared in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s in American literature. It is a dark comedy (hence black) and finds great humour in what most people regard as inappropriate subject matter. Black comedy mocks serious topics such as death and religion and makes fun out of various organised, logical aspects of our everyday existence. It is often grotesque and morbid.

Black Comedy Links

Comedy of Manners

A Comedy of Manners is a play concerned with satirising society’s manners. A manner is the method in which everyday duties are performed, conditions of society, or a way of speaking. It implies a polite and well-bred behaviour.

Comedy of Manners is known as high comedy because it involves a sophisticated wit and talent in the writing of the script. In this sense it is both intellectual and very much the opposite of slapstick, which requires little skill with the script and is largely a physical form of comedy. In a Comedy of Manners however, there is often minimal physical action and the play may involve heavy use of dialogue.

A Comedy of Manners usually employs an equal amount of both satire and farce resulting in a hilarious send-up of a particular social group. Most plays of the genre were carefully constructed to satirise the very people watching them. This was usually the middle to upper classes in society, who were normally the only people wealthy enough to afford going to the theatre to see a comedy of manners in the first place. The playwrights knew this in advance and fully intended to create characters that were sending up the daily customs of those in the audience watching the play. The satire tended to focus on their materialistic nature, never-ending desire to gossip and hypocritical existence.

Comedy of Manners has spread itself over several periods in theatre history. A theatrical genre can begin in a certain era but span many periods if the works of later playwrights successfully revive it. The most valuable material of this genre occurred during the Restoration. English theatres were officially closed between 1642 and 1660 when Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans ruled England and there was no aristocracy. In 1660 King Charles II restored the English throne and one of his first actions was to grant several key theatrical figures licences to produce plays and breathe life into the theatre once more.

Technically, the Restoration period ended with the death of Charles II in 1685, but theatre historians usually extend the period to about 1700. Along with this revival was a type of performance that became known as Comedy of Manners. Major contributors to the genre in England at the time were William Wycherley with his play The Country Wife (1675) and William Congreve with The Way of the World (1700). During this period in France, Moliere was also writing Comedy of Manners plays. Two of his most famous works include The Misanthrope (1666) and The School for Wives (1662), where he satirised aspects of 17th Century French society.

A hundred years later, Irish playwright Richard Sheridan and Englishman Oliver Goldsmith revived the Comedy of Manners genre. The best examples of their work include Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777) and Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Again, a little over a century from this date, Comedy of Manner plays were being perfected in England by famous Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, with wonderful works like The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892).

Revenge Tragedy

Tragedy in the days of Shakespeare is often referred to as Elizabethan tragedy. Few people realise this was a revivial of a form that had a long history, originating alongside the gladiators, only a handful of centuries after the birth of western theatre.

In the 1st Century AD, Roman philosopher Seneca wrote a series of plays involving characters who, during the course of the plot, sought revenge upon another character for an evil doing.

These types of plays are today referred to as Revenge Tragedies and they flourished during the 1600s in England. The plots of such plays included insanity, murder, ghosts, torture, graveyards, ambition and severed limbs.

Most Revenge Tragedies were written after the death of Queen Elizabeth I and during the reign of her successor King James I (1603-1625). Hence, they were a form largely belonging to the Jacobean (not Elizabethan) period and were therefore represented by Shakespeare only in his later works.

The greatest example of a Revenge Tragedy is Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1603), where the title character seeks revenge on his uncle Claudius for murdering Hamlet’s father. In keeping with the genre, Hamlet ends with the carnage of many characters in the final scene.

Interestingly, the difference between Seneca’s Revenge Tragedies and Shakespeare’s, was that in the Roman drama all the bloodshed occurred offstage and was usually reported via a messenger. In Jacobean tragedies however, this action happened onstage before the audience. Indeed, all the deaths at the end of Hamlet were very much a part of the play’s attraction to a 17th century audience.

Another excellent example of a Revenge Tragedy is John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623). In this play, the widowed duchess secretly remarries a man against the will of her two powerful brothers. In return, they seek revenge and arrange for her murder as punishment.

Revenge Tragedy Links

Symbolism

Adding the use of symbol in a student drama performance is a difficult task. But when symbol is weaved successfully into either classroom drama or professional theatre, it adds sophistication that places the show on a whole new level.

A symbol implies a greater meaning than the literal suggestion and is usually used to represent something other than what it is at face value. Symbolism in the theatre can be achieved via characters, colour, movement, costume and props.

Symbolism began with a group of French poets in the late 19th Century and soon spread to the visual arts and theatre, finding its peak between about 1885 and 1910. French poet Jean Moreas published the Symbolist Manifesto in 1886 that greatly influenced the entire movement in the visual and performing arts.

Symbolism in art implied a higher, more spiritual existence and aimed to express emotional experiences by visual means.

In the theatre, symbolism was considered to be a reaction against the plays that embodied naturalism and realism at the turn of the 20th Century. The dialogue and style of acting in symbolist plays was highly stylised and anti realistic/non-naturalistic.

As theatre is often a blend of the visual and performing arts working in harmony, many of the sets and props in symbolist plays were also anti realistic/non-naturalistic and were often used to symbolise emotions or values in society. A huge throne could symbolise power, a window placed in a set could symbolise freedom in the outside world or a simple action by a character could symbolise a greater ideal in the context of the play.

In 1890 French poet Paul Fort opened the Theatre d’Art where many symbolist plays were performed. The primary symbolist playwrights included Belgian Maurice Maeterlinck and Frenchmen Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam and Paul Claudel. Other playwrights who dabbled in the form included Swede August Strindberg (most closely associated with expressionism in the theatre), Irishman W.B. Yeats and American Eugene O’Neill.

Symbolism Links