Discuss the emergence of realism in theatre at the turn of the 20th century and how you think it influenced playwrights like Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw. Miriana Borg Second year Group: 2A Discuss the emergence of realism in theatre at the turn of the 20th century and how you think it influenced playwrights like Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw. Realism in the theatre was a general movement in the later 19th century that steered theatrical texts and performances toward greater fidelity to real life.
The realist dramatists Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg in Scandinavia and Anton Chekhov in Russia, and George Bernard Shaw, rejected the complex and artificial plotting of the well-made play and instead treated themes and conflicts belonging to a real, contemporary society. Henrik Ibsen was born in Norway in 1828. His mature work may be read as an effort to come to terms with reality, the reality of his early life and the reality of society as a whole. Ibsen is perhaps best known for eight plays he wrote in Italy and Germany. By separating himself physically from his homeland, he gained the freedom and perspective to criticize it.
Ibsen embarked on a series of realistic prose plays exposing contemporary problems in contemporary Norwegian settings. Concentrating directly on Norwegian society, he addressed universal concerns, for the social problems that provide the context for these plays were instantly recognizable to audiences. Among them the question of women’s rights in ‘A Doll House’ (1879), hereditary syphilis in ‘Ghosts’ (1881), and municipal corruption in ‘An Enemy of the People’ (1882).
The Essay on Hedda Gabler 2 Ibsen Social Play
Hedda Gabler is not an easy character to get to know. At first reading she seems a bitter personality portrayed in an old-fashioned script set in an out-outmoded and foreign society. How could a woman in 102-year-old play possibly be understandable or relevant to the late-twentieth-century student However, upon further examination, Hedda Gabler's fictional reality not only offers us the ...
Ibsen’s realistic plays take place in three-dimensional rooms, rather than against flat painted or architectural backdrops.
Shaw, Strindberg, and Chekhov each found a different dramatic model potential in the realistic mode evolved by Ibsen. Of the three, the Irish-born George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) most fully acknowledged his debt to Ibsen. Shaw believed that Ibsen fundamentally had transformed the theatrical formula drawn from the French Boulevard plays by incorporating a new intellectual vigor in them. George Bernard Shaw was born in 1856 and he was know for his witty humor. He made fun of societes notion using for the purpose of educating and changing. His plays tended to show the accepted attitude, then demolished attitude while showing his own solutions.
Some of his works include ‘Arms and the Man’ (1894) which is about love and war and honor and ‘Pygmalion’ (1913) which shows the transforming of a flower girl into a society woman, and exposes the phoniness of society. Chekhov is known more for poetic expiration and symbolism, compelling psychological reality, people trapped in social situations, hope in hopeless situations. He claimed that he wrote comedies; others think they are sad and tragic. Characters in Chekhov’s plays seem to have a fate that is a direct result of what they are. His plays have an illusion of plotlessness.
His work include the ‘Three Sisters’ (1900) and ‘The Cherry Orchard’ (1902).
Again, his realism has affected other Playwrights, as did his symbolic meanings in the texts of his plays and in the titles of his plays. They dispensed with poetic language and extravagant diction, instead using action and dialogue that looked and sounded like everyday behaviour and speech. Realism had no use for the declamatory delivery and the overblown virtuosity of past acting and replaced this style with one demanding natural movements, gestures, and speech. Realist drama also used stage settings that accurately reproduced ordinary surroundings.
