A Pocket Guide to Twentieth Century Drama

by Unwin, Stephen; Woddis, Carole

• ISBN13: 9780571200146
• ISBN10: 0571200141
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-08-01
• Publisher: Faber & Faber

Summary

Are you searching for an overview of the most significant plays? Are you looking for a snapshot analysis? Do you want to know the social and theatrical context? A Pocket Guide to 20th Century Drama gives all this and much, much more. It provides a short introduction to a dramatic century; puts each play into historical and theatrical context; gives the storyline and an analysis of each play, and provides details of major productions around the world. And, finally, there's a chronology of one thousand twentieth-century plays.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
The fifty greatest plays?	xvii
La Ronde	1	(5)
Arthur Schnitzler
The Dance of Death	6	(5)
August Strindberg
The Cherry Orchard	11	(6)
Anton Chekhov
The Voysey Inheritance	17	(6)
Harley Granville Barker
The Playboy of the Western World	23	(6)
J. M. Synge
Rutherford and Son	29	(5)
Githa Sowerby
The Daughter-in-Law	34	(4)
D. H. Lawrence
Heartbreak House	38	(6)
George Bernard Shaw
Six Characters in Search of an Author	44	(6)
Luigi Pirandello
Juno and the Paycock	50	(5)
Sean O'Casey
Journey's End	55	(6)
R. C. Sherriff
The Front Page	61	(5)
Ben Hecht
Charles MacArthur
Private Lives	66	(6)
Noel Coward
Tales from the Vienna Woods	72	(5)
Odon von Horvath
Blood Wedding	77	(6)
Federico Garcia Lorca
Murder in the Cathedral	83	(5)
T. S. Eliot
Mother Courage and her Children	88	(5)
Bertolt Brecht
Long Day's Journey into Night	93	(6)
Eugene O'Neill
An Inspector Calls	99	(6)
J. B. Priestley
Men Should Weep	105	(5)
Ena Lamont Stewart
The Maids	110	(5)
Jean Genet
Waiting for Godot	115	(6)
Samuel Beckett
Death of a Salesman	121	(6)
Arthur Miller
The Deep Blue Sea	127	(6)
Terence Rattigan
The Chairs	133	(6)
Eugene Ionesco
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof	139	(5)
Tennessee Williams
The Visit	144	(5)
Friedrich Durrenmatt
Look Back in Anger	149	(6)
John Osborne
A Raisin in the Sun	155	(6)
Lorraine Hansberry
The Caretaker	161	(6)
Harold Pinter
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?	167	(5)
Edward Albee
Oh What a Lovely War	172	(5)
Theatre Workshop
Saved	177	(5)
Edward Bond
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead	182	(5)
Tom Stoppard
What the Butler Saw	187	(4)
Joe Orton
Sizwe Bansi is Dead	191	(5)
Athol Fugard
John Kani
Winston Ntshona
Absurd Person Singular	196	(5)
Alan Ayckbourn
American Buffalo	201	(5)
David Mamet
Plenty	206	(6)
David Hare
Translations	212	(5)
Brian Friel
Top Girls	217	(6)
Caryl Churchill
Fool for Love	223	(5)
Sam Shepard
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme	228	(5)
Frank McGuinness
Fences	233	(5)
August Wilson
Our Country's Good	238	(5)
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Angels in America	243	(5)
Tony Kushner
Blasted	248	(5)
Sarah Kane
The Weir	253	(5)
Conor McPherson
Closer	258	(5)
Patrick Marber
Copenbagen	263	(6)
Michael Frayn
A Chronology of a Thousand Plays of the Twentieth Century	269

Excerpts

Introduction

If great drama flourishes in a changing world, the twentieth century may prove itself the most dramatically fruitful ever. The briefest historical sketch shows a century of quite extraordinary upheaval. The great achievement of its drama was that it managed to reflect those changes with courage, vision and artistry.

A Dramatic Century

The twentieth century started remarkably peacefully. Britain got a bloody nose in its war against the Boers, and Imperial Russia was shocked to be defeated by Japan, but `the long Edwardian summer' completed forty years of peace and prosperity in Europe. August 1914, however, brought the First World War (1914-18) and mechanized slaughter, triggering a long struggle for dominance in Europe which was only resolved by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It also brought a questioning of the social order which led to both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the widespread nationalist, pacifist and socialist ideals which had such a decisive influence on the course of the century.

    The energy of Germany's Weimar Republic sprang from the chaos of war, as did the great advances made by women in the 1920s. While American industrial might marched onwards, in Europe the struggle between labour and capital was brought home to Britain in the General Strike of 1926. Meanwhile, the new Soviet Union was consumed by the practical consequences of its revolution and in Stalin found a leader whose purges and persecutions took terror to unprecedented heights. The Great Crash of 1929, and the Depression which followed, unleashed Fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain, as well as timidity in the West, which initially failed to challenge this new barbarism. The impact of the Second difficult: we have used the date of first performance throughout, except when there is a significant gap between writing and premiere.

Stephen Unwin, Carole Woddis

Chapter One

La Ronde

(Reigen)

Arthur Schnitzler

1900, first performed 1920

> Historical and theatrical context

Turn-of-the-century Vienna attracted geniuses of all kinds. As capital of the vast but decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was the seed-bed for one of the great flowerings of European culture. In music, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were at their height and the young Arnold Schoenberg was exploring the atonality which was to characterize the Second Viennese School. Painting was dominated by artists such as Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha, while literary circles included Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Hermann Broch, Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus. In 1900, Sigmund Freud published his seminal The Interpretation of Dreams .

    Viennese culture drew on the great achievements of nineteenth-century France, but carried its own distinct tone: erotic and morbid, scientific and voyeuristic, interested in the subconscious and critical of the status quo . It is one of the ironies of history that the person who did more than anyone else to destroy this flowering -- Adolf Hitler -- applied (twice) to study as an art student in Vienna and resorted to painting postcards when he was turned down.

    Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931) came from a comfortable Jewish medical family, and -- like his almost exact contemporary Anton Chekhov -- trained as a doctor. His more than twenty plays, which are often described as `boulevard' pieces -- light, well constructed and effortlessly erotic -- include Anatol (1892), Playing with Love (1895), The Green Cockatoo (1899), The Legacy (1899) and Professor Bernhardi (1912). He also wrote numerous short stories and novels.

> About the play

The title of Schnitzler's masterpiece is hard to translate. ` Reigen ' means a `round' in a dance, but a `round' has other connotations in English, and so the French title La Ronde is usually adopted. The central action is a sexual dance, in which partner is handed on to partner, across the classes and throughout society: it is a ` ronde ' which connects each character to the next and eventually circles round on itself.

    The play is written in ten scenes and features ten characters: five men and five women. In the short first scene we see a Viennese prostitute picking up a private soldier near the river. The tone is rough and their motives are simple. In the next scene we see the same soldier meet a working-class housemaid in the Prater on a Sunday evening. They hardly know each other's names but soon go off and have sex in the park. Afterwards he smokes a cigar and she wants to know if he is fond of her. Grudgingly, he agrees to walk her home, but slopes off to meet a blonde. In the third scene the housemaid is seduced (almost raped) by a young gentleman when he is left alone with her in the house. He in turn is visited by a middle-class married woman, who arrives thickly veiled, full of anxiety, saying that he had promised `to be good', uttering all the clichés of the tempted wife. But once they share a glazed pear she is seduced. He begs for her love and behaves like a little boy. Despite her initial caution, he soon declares `so I'm having an affair with a respectable woman'.

    By the fifth scene the `respectable woman' is in her bedroom with her husband, who protests that he still loves her and declares that one of their periods of `platonic friendship ... is about to end'. Young women like her, he says, have a `clearer conception of the true nature of love'. But she wants to know about the whores he has had sex with in the past, and wonders whether married women ever sell themselves. Having made love, he recalls their first night together in Venice, secure in the (false) knowledge of her innocence and fidelity. But soon he is having dinner in a private room with a ` süße Mäddel ' -- one of those lower-middle-class `sweet young things' who are such a Viennese speciality. She is flirtatious and bubbly, innocent and provocative. She swoons -- declaring that someone must have drugged her wine -- and they have sex. She is desperate to know if he loves her, but it is time for her to go home to her mother.

    In the seventh scene the `sweet young thing' visits a poet's room. It is dark but he refuses to light the lamps. He says he loves her (`it's wonderful when girls are stupid') and wants to know if she loves him in return. After having sex, he says that he is a famous playwright called Biebitz, but then admits he is only a shop assistant who plays the piano in a bar. In the next scene, the poet (who actually is Biebitz) is with a famous actress in an inn `two hours from Vienna'. Amazingly, it transpires that she is both religious and sexually forward, and there is a tremendous comic sequence leading up to their coupling, with memories of her past lover Fritz all too present.

    The last two scenes of the play see the actress being visited in her bedroom by a rather awkward young count, an amateur philosopher who has an aversion to sex before breakfast. But she soon seduces him and can twist him round her little finger. In the final scene, the count finds himself in the squalid room of the prostitute from the first scene. He is appalled, but when she wakes up he asks her about her `revolting life'. Suddenly he sees something in her eyes that reminds him of someone from his past, and as he leaves, he says to himself:

Wouldn't it have been beautiful if I had only kissed her eyes? That would have been an adventure. It was not to be.

Morning is breaking over Vienna, and the ` ronde ' has come full circle.

    Although brutally erotic in its effect (sexual activity is marked in the script by a row of dashes, when the curtain is meant to be lowered and music played), La Ronde is not mere pornography. It is characterized above all by Schnitzler's attempt at a kind of documentary realism, full of the everyday details of Viennese life, which lays bare the duplicity and cruelty of Vienna's class system. Schnitzler's point is that different levels of society behave in different ways, but that sex, like death, is the great leveller. The young gentleman expresses the profound (if also banal) truth which lies so sweetly at the heart of the play:

Life is so empty -- so meaningless -- and then -- so short -- so terribly short! -- There is only one joy ... to find a human being who loves one.

One of the key psychological changes in the twentieth century (especially in Europe and America) was in attitudes to sexuality: from repression at the beginning, to unprecedented freedom at the end. While it is impossible to give a specific reason for this change, psychoanalytic explorations and the tone of fin de siècle Viennese art were key catalysts. Sigmund Freud himself came to acknowledge the depth of Schnitzler's insight into the psychology of sexual desire, and praised him as his ` alter ego ': Schnitzler's plays -- and La Ronde in particular -- go to the dark heart of heterosexual relations, and do so with consummate skill.

> In performance

La Ronde was published privately in 1900, `to be read among friends'. In a letter, Schnitzler said he had written scenes which were `totally unprintable, of no great literary value, but if disinterred after a couple of hundred years, may illuminate in a unique way aspects of our culture'.

    The play was not premièred until 1920 in Berlin, in the more liberal atmosphere following the First World War. But it caused a furore and was used as a target for anti-Semitism by right-wing extremists. In 1921, the play's cast and management were prosecuted for causing a public nuisance and participating in obscene acts. Although they were eventually acquitted, the row led to the fifty-nine-year-old Schnitzler insisting that the play should never be performed again.

    La Ronde was first performed in London in 1923 in a private house belonging to members of the liberal-minded Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf wrote that `the audience felt simply as if a real copulation were going on in the room and tried to talk to drown the very realistic groans ...' It was condemned by the Nazis as Jewish and decadent. In post-war Europe, productions were rare until the 1970s.

    Thereafter the play was staged regularly, sometimes with just two performers, and often with great success. With the appearance of AIDS, the play regained some of its vivid power. David Hare `freely adapted' it in 1998 under the title The Blue Room . This modern-dress version was performed with the film star Nicole Kidman at the Donmar Warehouse in London.

    In 1950, the play was made into a remarkable film by Max Ophüls, with Gérard Philipe, Jean-Louis Barrault and Simone Signoret.

Quotations from Arthur Schnitzler, La Ronde , tr. Frank and Jacqueline Marcus, Methuen, 1982

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Pocket Guide to Twentieth Century Drama by Stephen Unwin with Carole Woddis. Copyright © 2001 by Stephen Unwin with Carole Woddis. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.